Searching for the Sound: Mike Gordon on Phil Lesh

searching-for-the-sound:-mike-gordon-on-phil-lesh

Photo credit: Jay Blakesberg

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In the December issue of Relix we celebrate of the pioneering bass icon’s life and career, with reflections from his friends and collaborators (as well as a previously unpublished interview), all of which we will share over the days to come. (Click here to read Jimmy Herring’s thoughts.)

Phish bass player Mike Gordon first saw Phil Lesh perform with the Grateful Dead at the Boston Garden in 1982 and immediately was transfixed. “I don’t think I’ve even scratched the surface of what he was able to conjure up,” Gordon says. “How it blossomed for him with all of the power and all of the melody.”

You recently referred to Bob Dylan’s essay on “Truckin’” in his book The Philosophy of Modern Song. Dylan writes that Phil “is one of the most skilled bassists you’ll ever hear in subtlety and invention.” How do you interpret that praise?

There’s a lot of different ways to think about subtlety, but what I picture is Phil had this way that he’d ease up into a groove softly and gently. I think that sets the tone for subtlety. So it builds up not by hammering you over the head as a listener, but by easing into the bass playing. Then that same kind of gentle approach comes back later in the same song, the same jam.

That works together with invention in the way that other bass players hammer out the root notes and the first beat—the one. By not doing that or not doing it as much, Phil left himself room to dance around the possible notes in each bar of music. That is subtlety too. It’s a finer look at the approach to bass playing. It requires subtlety to get there and delve into that mindset.

Conversely, with a lot of bass players, there’s so much riding on their shoulders to hold together the rhythm and the harmony—to be the backbone of the band— that there’s an inclination when you have a sense of confidence and some power in your playing, to just hammer it out right from the beginning.

But anything in life that we hammer out doesn’t have subtlety as compared with taking a deep breath and being mindful—slowing it down and backing off. I think there is subtlety in the way the notes flow, the way the rhythms flow, the way the attack flows. You can do a lot more by starting with a lot less.

Invention is a good word too. Where other bass players, including myself, will do one or two bar patterns, Phil once said to me that instead of looking at those four beats, he would look at 30 seconds or a minute and just see it as a big flow. There’s a lot more room for invention when you’re not just repeating the same pattern over and over again.

I got to play with Mickey, Billy, Bobby and others for the Nancy Pelosi Inaugural Ball. Later, when I saw Phil at Terrapin, I was talking about the experience because I had practiced a lot of Dead songs and his basslines. At one point, he said to me: “Really, I just go up and down scales.” He was kind of being humble about it, making it sound like he’s a noodler, which I don’t think he is. It’s tricky because to improvise and discover the unknown in each passing moment, you’re searching and not always finding. But to me, what makes something noodling is when it’s oblivious to everything around it, like a group of people playing in a music store at different stations.

The word invention is good because with Phil, it doesn’t sound oblivious. It’s the opposite. He had huge ears. I had lunch with him in ‘99, when Trey and Page did those shows with him at the Warfield. He was talking about Jerry, and the first thing he said was, “Jerry had huge ears.” Well, they all did—and Phil especially. He listened so hard to what was going on with the other players in the band and probably catching the whole room’s vibe and the universal spirit, but not being oblivious at all.

By listening, that’s where the sense of invention comes in. He got inspired in all the passing moments to craft what he was doing with intentionality. So it’ll go up, it’ll go down. It’ll sometimes allude to a melody, but not the melody of the song or the hook, it’ll be some new melody. That’s definitely a sense of invention because he’s taking a dozen steps past what’s called for in all of the bass books I studied when I first started playing. He’s saying, “Well, that’s all good and fine, but I’m going to make this into a beautiful painting, not just a little doodle.”

You’ve said that when Phish decided to perform “Box of Rain” to honor Phil it was a bit more challenging than everyone had thought because Phil didn’t like to repeat his forms. Can you talk about that aspect of his songwriting?

Let me start with “Unbroken Chain,” which has always been such a special song and piece of music for me emotionally—just the way it sounds, kind of hovering in the air. The parts of the song are not very predictable, and each verse of the song has a different chord progression, which I know Phil’s band members were a bit frustrated with because it made it harder to learn.

There was a time I sat in with Phil when he was playing in the restaurant at Terrapin. I said, “I really like ‘Unbroken Chain,’” and he was like, “Oh, let’s play it.” I had to tell him, “Well, I didn’t learn it, and that’s one you really have to learn. So next time, I’ll get it.”

Then, when his son hosted a tribute with a lot of different musicians a couple of years ago, I said, “OK, I’m going to do the deep dive.” Often I will use the studio version to learn something and that one’s very eloquent.

But not only did I learn it, I crafted some counterpoints to what he was doing. Also, to challenge my ears, I had Jared Slomoff craft some counterpoints. Then I took the best of what Jared came up with, the best of what I came up with and I tried to make it not sound haphazard.

Phil said, “Oh, I like the lines you’re coming up with. That was something different.” But it took a lot of prep.

With “Box of Rain,” it’s not just that his basslines are ever-varying, the way that the song is structured is ever-varying as well. So when you’re in the heat of the moment and not wanting to think too hard, it can be more difficult to remember all the changes when they’re changing throughout the whole thing.

Repetition in music is really important because it’s a tool. You can’t really surprise someone until you’ve repeated something a few times. Then you can defy their expectations.

It’s not that Phil altogether avoids repetition, but it’s so refreshing when someone starts playing an instrument where there’s often a ton of repetition and says, “Sorry, we’re not going to do that”—both in terms of how the songs are structured and how the bass is played.

Most people who would set out to that— to just keep varying things—would end up noodling in some way, and the song would end up losing its cohesiveness. That doesn’t happen with Phil.

He also had such a broad range of influences. Phil was the one who took them to see John Coltrane. He was the one who brought Debussy, Stravinsky and Mahler to the band.

Then he would bring all this into his bass playing and say, “I’m not just going to let that compost while I play the same boring thing over and over again. I’m going to be really inspired and I’m going to let the bass be more of an invention” in the sense of a fugue being an invention.

There was a time between ‘93-‘95 when I saw their shows and they put me on stage with a monitor mixer. They used to do this thing where you could put on headphones and there were seven buttons on a box. So you could hear what each one of them was hearing in their in-ear monitors and, with the seventh one, you could solo one instrument and just listen to that.

Well, guess what I chose for my seventh button? I remember they were playing “Here Comes Sunshine” and the bass was very powerful, even in the headphones, and very melodic. They played “Eyes of the World,” and I was thinking that while there was repetition, what varied was so beautiful. So I guess that just became another tool in the toolbox of his inventiveness.

After seeing Phil perform live on a given occasion, can you recall something specific that recalibrated your conception of what a bass player could do in that kind of environment?

It happened almost every time in different ways, just being blown away again and again. It comes back to the same things. I think conjurer is my word of the day— someone who sets out to elicit something magical in what they’re doing instead of hammering you over the head with a known part. Then this beauty and this power blossom from that.

The way it came together was almost unfathomable. I was texting earlier this year with Brian Rashap, who was Phil’s bass tech. Brian would sometimes play acoustic guitar in the restaurant and stand next to the bass amp. These were small bass amps appropriate for a restaurant, and what would come out was a mountain of sound. Brian was saying, “Yeah, I would stand there and I couldn’t believe how much vibration was coming out of those speakers.” It wasn’t how powerful the speakers were, because they were not that powerful.

There were a couple times when I asked Phil: “Can I play your bass through your rig?” He said “Yes,” and I realized instantly that none of that sound was there when I was playing. The sound 100% diverted to Mike, which is a good thing because people want to be themselves.

This volcano of sounds and beautiful melodies all came together entirely in his mind and his fingers. Almost 0% was the bass and the gear. Yet at the same time, more than almost every other bass player I know, he was searching for the sound—looking for the right strings and pick and pickups and bass and wood and preamp and amp and speakers, and all those things.

There were times when we were both playing in the restaurant at Terrapin, and I’d be next to him or a couple people away, and I would think, “Oh, my God, when the set is over and everyone’s taking a break, I’m going to walk over to his bass amp and I’m going to look at his EQ settings. Maybe that will teach me something.” But it wasn’t there. It was in the person and the soul and the background and the influences and the vision and the future vision. What goes into creating a musician at that level is hard to put into words, and it’s hard for even the person themselves to fathom it.

Phil knew every frequency by name. He could say, “Turn up 55 Hz from the sound system” because that’s A. So there was a huge amount of dedication to all that stuff. His sonic vision and melodic vision made it so that when he set out to do whatever he was going to do—even in a restaurant—he had the right forum and context to do it in. But it wasn’t in the gear, it was in the him.

Link to the source article – https://relix.com/articles/detail/searching-for-the-sound-mike-gordon-on-phil-lesh/

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