Phil Lesh, founding bass player for the Grateful Dead, has died, according to the band’s official Instagram page. He was 84.
Lesh “passed away peacefully this morning,” the band wrote Friday. “He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.”
A cause of death was not given. Lesh underwent a liver transplant in 1998, successfully beat prostate cancer in 2006, underwent successful bladder cancer treatment in 2015 and needed back surgery in 2019. But by all appearances, Lesh was healthy, spry and actively playing with the Terrapin Family Band as recently as early 2024.
Lesh was no ordinary bassist. As a Bay Area college student in the early 1960s, he keenly studied avant-garde classical and free jazz music, putting his violin and trumpet skills to work as a composer. While volunteering at a radio station, he met a young bluegrass musician named Jerry Garcia, and the two struck up a friendship.
Though he had never played the bass guitar, Lesh was talked into trying out for Garcia’s new electric rock band (still called The Warlocks) in 1964. Already a proficient musician, he learned on the job – and a cornerstone of the band’s sound was firmly laid.
Lesh brought vastly different musical sensibilities to the merry band of psychedelic counterculture kids from the Haight-Ashbury scene, developing a fireworks show of sonic underbelly for Garcia & Co. to dance upon that helped make the Grateful Dead the greatest live band that ever was.
Lesh’s bass lines were bouncy, inquisitive, filled with both darkness and mirth, and played through the band’s cutting-edge equipment developed by sound engineering mad scientist (and unparalleled LSD chef) Owsley Stanley.
Stanley’s creations included the infamous “Wall of Sound,” a monstrously huge and wildly sophisticated speaker stack used exclusively in 1973 and 1974 that Lesh once likened to “the voice of God.” Some Deadheads were so keen on soaking up as much of Lesh’s vibrations as possible that they flocked to his side of the stage, dubbed “The Phil Zone.”
The long, strange history of the Dead – and its cultural impact that still flourishes 60 years later – is exquisitely documented, and Lesh was there for it all.
When the band closed what was to be its last show at Chicago’s Soldier Field in 1995 before Garcia’s untimely death, Lesh called for an unprecedented triple-encore song, forcefully launching the band into “Box of Rain” – one of the rare songs on which he sang lead – because he felt “Black Muddy River” was too morose to close that summer’s tour.
Not knowing Garcia would be dead a month later, Lesh sang the final line that the fully constituted, bona fide Grateful Dead would ever play: “Such a long, long time to be gone – and a short time to be there.”
Lesh participated in subsequent Dead-DNA bands like The Other Ones, Furthur and The Dead, and joined the “Fare Thee Well” reunion shows’ lineup in 2015, which played exclusively in the Bay Area and Soldier Field. It was the last time the “core four” remaining members of Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart would ever take the stage together.
While the other three members went on to re-form as the touring juggernaut Dead & Co. with John Mayer on lead guitar, Lesh declined – he just didn’t want to weather the rigors of the road anymore – opting instead to play with his family band and other Dead tribute projects like Phil Lesh and Friends in recent years.
He is survived by wife Jill and their sons Grahame and Brian, both members of Terrapin Family Band.
