Chords, Vibes and Permission: Dave Schools on Phil Lesh

Photo: Jay Blakesberg

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In the December issue of Relix we celebrate the life and career of pioneering bass icon Phil Lesh through reflections from his friends and collaborators (as well as a previously unpublished interview). We will share these over the days to come, including reminiscences from Jimmy Herring, Mike Gordon and Jason Crosby.

The Widespread Panic bass player is a longtime Deadhead. He recalls, “The first time I went to San Francisco, my mind exploded even though it was 1985. The Dead weren’t the last vestiges, they were the torchbearers. They were like the fife and drum corps walking through the Revolutionary War battlefield— still marching forward, still playing and grabbing up whoever wanted to get in line behind them and enjoy what they were doing.”

I’ve long been struck by the big ideas that animated Phil’s creative work. The two of you discussed some of those in your 2009 Relix interview. Can you talk about the social and cultural environment that helped inform his music?

As a ‘70s kid, some of these concepts, like cultural revolution and musical revolution, were abstract. Then, when I became lucky enough as a musician to work with the guys in the Dead, I discovered that everything about freedom, improvisation and the universe rotating around and allowing the stuff to happen was real. They were still living it all those years later.

It led me to think how many parts of the universe had to align to create a situation where a lot of experimentation was allowed. There was a shift in consciousness happening with drugs like LSD. There was a youthquake happening because of the chasm between the World War II generation and the early boomers moving into their teen years. There was an actual war that people were against for real. Things were dire. There was a need to escape.

When all that happened, there were people like Phil and Garcia and Mickey and Billy in the Bay Area, who were willing to turn conventional music wisdom on its head. Sure, they started as a jug band. Sure, they were into folk music forms. But it all took off from there.

There’s been a clip floating around with Jerry on MTV talking to Nina Blackwood about when he first met Phil—he called him a classical music lunatic. That lends itself to what you sometimes hear in the roles of the instruments the way the Grateful Dead approached them. The example I tend to use is “China Cat Sunflower,” where Garcia is playing a bassline, Phil is dancing around, Bob Weir is playing a left-hand piano sort of motif, drums are amorphous and weird, and the lyrics are some psychedelic stuff from Hunter.

That’s during a time when all those things are shifting, everything is in flux. Young people are putting their energy into changing things. Could you flip the roles of the musical instruments and get away with that in such a way? I would imagine that Phil is not the only lunatic in that group of people. I think they all really benefited from the chaos and change that was happening. I think Phil was a big part of the architecture of that, bringing his classical knowledge, this deep harmonic understanding, and applying it.

It’s like, “Hey, why don’t you guys play in 10 and we’ll play in 11, and then when we get to 110, we’ll all come back together again.” They would try anything, and that is a rare thing.

The fact that they succeeded so wildly by turning convention on its head over and over again, that they reinvented themselves over and over again, is a big message to any artist to continue to change and follow your heart— to be open to the universe and how it wants to speak through you.

When Phil joined the band, he hadn’t previously played bass. Maybe it’s a chicken-and-egg thing, but he’s finding and defining his space at a time when the group as a whole is doing the same. From your perspective as a bassist, what do you hear as you listen back to this new musical organism as it’s coalescing?

I’ve put a lot of thought into this. How did they get away with what they did? I blame the universe. I cite the things I mentioned before, just all the cultural shifting and changing. There’s a concept that the musicians who played with Bruce Hampton talk about. If you talk to Oteil, Jimmy or Jeff Sipe, they will say that Bruce granted them permission to put their ego aside and discover the musician within them.

The key word here is permission. To answer your question, the Grateful Dead didn’t need permission. I don’t think permission was needed in that era, but at the same time, they gave each other permission.

So yeah, Jerry hands Phil an instrument he’s never played before, but he understands harmony and bass is pretty darn easy. Traditionally, it’s a blockhead instrument, but Phil is not a blockhead. Phil is not into repetitive things unless they serve a strange point, like as a part of a polyrhythm. But I think there was a permission and an actual need artistically and perhaps in the universal subconscious of the era and the youth of the era. Anyone who was an artist or wanted to think creatively or artistically had permission to find their own niche within the collective. Everybody gives a little, everybody fills a little space and it’s allowed to evolve. That’s why it’s so great.

The songs were allowed to evolve. The band evolved from a really weird, psychedelic band and then a prototypical Americana country band. I had Skull Fuck [aka Skull & Roses] on an 8-track tape that I picked up at a white elephant sale at my local high school. Somehow on that same record, there’s a song like “The Other One” sandwiched between “Bertha” and “Not Fade Away.”

There’s also “Wharf Rat” on there and “Playing in the Band”—the shortest version ever—which is this excursion basically being led by Phil. That’s the first time I actually pondered a bass that wasn’t Paul McCartney, John Entwistle or John Paul Jones. “What is this? I thought these guys were a country band.” I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I’d heard “Sugar Magnolia,” “Casey Jones” and “Truckin’,” which was a shuffle. But on things like “Dark Star,” “The Other One” or any of the ‘72-era jams, the permission that everybody is giving everybody else is gorgeous. The listening and the following of your muse, somehow it was all tangled up and it worked. On nights when it really worked, it was transportive.

I got that Grateful Dead 8-track at the same time I picked up Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick and Led Zeppelin Physical Graffiti. I thought the Grateful Dead thing looked cool. It had a skull on it. I popped it in and I was like, “Oh, this ‘Bertha,’ what a boppy little song.” Then, “Great, some country covers.”

Then, “What the fuck is this? It’s a five minute drum solo.” Then the sky rips open with this bass riff, and I don’t even know what they’re doing. It literally ceased to be something that I listened to with my ears. It evoked imagery, it transported me, it took me on a ride.

On that particular Skull Fuck version of “The Other One,” it’s like Phil took my hand and led me through an unknown galaxy. It was a revelatory, mind-blowing experience. I had a lot of those with the Dead, but that was the big one.

Then there was another one at the Hampton Coliseum, at a show in 1981 where they achieved the thing, the Big X factor, what the Allman Brothers called hittin’ the note—that symbiosis between the band and the audience. I was there in the middle of it going, “What is happening here? I’ve never ever felt anything like this.” It was that kind of a revelation.

These guys kind of dressed like my French teacher. There was no laser light show like Blue Öyster Cult. There was no f laming gong like Led Zeppelin. These guys were dressed in normal clothes and I was like, “Wait a minute, what are they doing? What are they doing to me? Holy shit, they’re doing it to everyone!”

I think Phil was a big part of that. You could talk to someone who is far more music-theory adept than me, like Jimmy Herring, Jason Crosby or Trey Anastasio, and understand the depth of the listening and the fact that the band could be broken into two trios, a five-piece band with a soloist, a duet and a four-piece band or a six piece band. Conflations of notes create vibes and chords, and they float by and they’re allowed to happen, and the crowd picks up on it, and it never happens again. That’s why people want to relive that memory. But it’s random on the best nights. It’s allowed to happen. The permission is given to utilize every tool that they have, and Phil had an immense harmonic knowledge.

Jimmy Herring once told me that Phil was the most harmonically advanced musician he’d ever played with, and I take him at his word.

As Phil invited new musicians to perform with him, he was trying to preserve something bigger than himself.

It wasn’t about Phil himself, although he was involved and he enjoyed it. It wasn’t just about the music, it was about the intent behind it. So the very idea of copping licks from Phil Lesh—sure you can do that, but it f lies in the face of everything he stood for.

When Phil would put these disparate groups of people together for a couple of gigs at Terrapin, they’d rehearse all week and Phil would allow them to be themselves. That’s why Stanley Jordan, Cody Dickinson or Neal Casal could come play. Chimenti, Jimmy Herring, Warren Haynes, Molo, all these amazing musicians would be there.

What Phil really wanted to do was be a part of something that was always evolving. The songs, they’re just basic frameworks. It’s like Zappa says, “I can write the sheet music, but you guys got to put the eyebrows on it.”

So if you’re looking for the guardrails of what Phil’s doing, it’s the song. But I’ve seen him mess with song forms—changing melodies or leaving a bunch of different bar lengths between lines in the verse. You can’t say that he’s doing it wrong because there are no wrong notes. It’s truly collaborative and improvisational. They are just different colors. It’s somebody expressing themselves, and it’s an angular thing.

The line in that interview where Phil really surprised me was when he said, “Work me, Lord”—let me be a vessel for what you have to say. It doesn’t necessarily mean God. It means whatever the fountainhead of consciousness is that we can tap into when we’re lucky enough to have these shared experiences.

There were things he didn’t like. If you talk to Alex Koford, who came in with Grahame and Brian and grew up at what Jimmy Herring called PLU—Phil Lesh University—Phil would be like, “Don’t play ‘Shakedown Street’ four on the floor.” If Alex said, “But it’s a disco song,” Phil would respond, “It doesn’t have to be.” They all really believed this ethos and some of the greatest musical learning that I ever did was watching this happen and hearing them talk about allowing it to happen.

It’s a difficult thing because what it does is it takes all of the safety nets and life rafts that used to give you confidence and now they’re gone. When true improvisation is happening, time stands still. For me, if I actually have a chance to think about how I feel, it’s like my feet aren’t touching the floor of the ocean. I’m drowning and I can’t even see where land is. That’s the thing that we’re supposed to enjoy and allow to work through us.

They all embody that and Phil probably more than any of them because he took an instrument that is traditionally like a railroad track of dependability and turned it into something way beyond what anyone else could have imagined the bass guitar could be.

When you first listened to that 8-track, were you a bass player yet?

I had just started playing. I think I was in fifth or sixth grade when I acquired it. I can remember trying to play along with stuff and I was like, “What am I doing?” I was taking bass lessons, the guy was teaching me rudiments, and he’d say, “Here, learn ‘Ob La-Di, Ob-La-Da.’ Learn how to play Paul McCartney’s bassline.” Then I’d come back and I wouldn’t have done my homework, and being a good teacher he’d be like, “You didn’t do it at all. Is there something else you’d rather learn how to play?”

So I said, “Yeah, I’d like to learn how to play ‘Dark Star’ by the Grateful Dead.” He stopped for a second, looked at me right in the eyes and said, “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be taking piano lessons?” This guy was a great bass player and a great bass teacher. He knew what Phil did, and to him it was like playing the piano. He’s a lead instrument, a melody instrument, and he’s got a left hand that sometimes plays low notes. It’s a conundrum. Phil’s a Rubik’s Cube.