The deeper you go down the wormhole with Phil Lesh, bass player and co-founder of Haight-Ashbury’s first and foremost band, The Grateful Dead—the more you understand: His bass technique was a pure reflection on how they played music: listening intently to each other, trying things on the fly, and for the most part, never repeating themselves.
Lesh, who was born in Berkeley, and started as a violin player with a classical music background, passed away on October 25 at the age of 84.
If Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist, was the grizzled avatar of the band, Lesh’s presence, sound before sight, an identifiable judder, was the slippery backbone. His spry attack, working around arrangements, playing everything except what’s expected, eliminating doltish vanilla tones, Omit The Logic (to quote a Richard Pryor documentary title), and unleash gobs of unfiltered life throughout those adventurously loopy workouts. Lesh was the active counterpoint to Garcia’s folky yarns. Refusing to be a timekeeper; he played the role of a frisky conductor who never required a baton.
On a great mystical evening, the Dead only needed landing gear. If Phil was on, shining up that “Dark Star”, and drying off that “Box of Rain” then so was Garcia, guitarist Bob Weir, drummer Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann, and, during the collective’s first incarnation, the inviting organ work of Ron McKernan, lovingly referred to as Pigpen.
As Phil went, so did the entire adventure.
That adversarial approach? He picked it up from the masters and it defined the ethos of the band: Putting on a magic show every night. Lesh played other instruments before learning to play the bass, utilizing a guitarist’s derring-do—and that slant, with a whole bunch of other stuff, kept that Dead Spaceship, a 30-plus-year successful experiment, strange on every occasion.
As for those masters: “The basic inspiration for The Grateful Dead was the Miles [Davis] Quartet with Coltrane or Trane’s quartet from the early Sixties. So that was pretty much the inspiration for the way we approach our music,” Lesh told Forbes Magazine, from February 2022.
“It was the careful exuberant freedom that they had, the way they listen to one another and how everybody is improvising all at the same time, there’s nothing that’s fixed. I heard a performance of Trane’s Quintet in ’62, in San Francisco,” Lesh said. “It transformed my life and my view of music because it just kept evolving. It just kept changing and evolving and yet you always were aware of wherever you were coming from. It was the finest thing I’d ever heard. And I grew up in the classic music scene, so I didn’t know how deeply improvised music could go and how powerful it could be and that opened my eyes, my ears, my heart.”
What’s striking about this revelation is just how obvious it is in the Dead’s music. Listen, I’m not a Deadhead, but I’ve had plenty of them in my life. During my first year living in San Francisco, sharing a three-bedroom, second-floor, cold-water flat in The Mission with four other housemates, we counted over 70 people who crashed on our living room floor in one year—a good portion of those visits were Dead-oriented.
I’m quite familiar, solicited or not, with the fans’ laments. “Damn, they were off tonight” or “Shit, they were for sure spinning.” That collective hearing, onstage brain trust, and a belief in everyone is such a fragile thing. It either works, or it doesn’t. Who can predict human chemistry, especially when there is other chemistry involved, ya know?
Hence the intense taping community around The Dead, because everyone knew—musicians, Deadheads, music archival experts—well, nobody knew what’s going to happen, but it won’t be like the night before.
And that, whether it be the original Grateful Dead, or the onslaught of off-shoot bands that followed after Jerry Garcia’s passing, that originality remains the standard.
But that Phil Lesh ethos, the bass player as lead, an approach taken famously by the late Bernard Edwards of Chic and the late James Jamerson, an uncredited bassist on most of the Motown Records hits in the ’60s and early ’70s, whose genius is displayed on the Marvin Gaye hit “What’s Going On”, runs through a new crop of bands.
Not of the Phish orientation, no disrespect, but new jacks, moving fluidly through that improvisatory component. Just like Lesh pulled inspiration from Miles and Trane but did not play like them, these bands embrace Lesh’s philosophy, the Dead’s philosophy, that the bass doesn’t need to be the lame timekeeper. Like The Headhunters wrote: “God Made Me Funky”
So let that bass slap. Phil would want it that way. Sail on, Frisky Conductor.
KHRUANGBIN
This little power trio out of Houston, pronounced KRUNG-bin (the word for “airplane” in Thai), has in 10 years gone from outsider Texas-based arty exercise into a festival headlining darling. They have not changed, it’s the audience that caught up by opening their ears. The band uses dub, elements of surf music, and psychedelia to spread a contemporary version of instrumental global music. Thai funk, Middle Eastern-styled vamps, or disco to strut; all interwoven components in their rhythmic assault. There is a timelessness that hypnotizes folks.
Mark Speer’s presence on guitar, even when going for it aggressively, comes off as serenading. Lyrical, not over-embellished. No shredding. Call them ESG on shrooms… it’s a fair assessment. Ace bassist Laura Lee, and drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson (he played in the gospel band at St. John’s United Methodist Church in downtown Houston, the home church of Beyoncé, Solange, and the rest of the Knowles family) round things off, collectively serving up eccentric DJ selections onstage. Their set?
Wu-Tang hits, Gregory Isaacs’ “Night Nurse,” and funky Texas twang, among a discography that keeps digital platforms inundated with spins. But the live show remains the sizzle and the steak.
LOS BITCHOS
The London-based, pan-continental, female instrumental four-piece is a riff-tastic outfit that stretches groove-based revelry from genres all over. It’s a crossed-up novel design; picture a wilding-out Van Halen girl gang, high-off mezcal, spaghetti westerns, and Tarantino flicks. Grinding up ‘70s Anatolian rock with instrumental retro-futuristic blends of Peruvian chicha, Argentine cumbia, Turkish psych, and surf guitars. It’s a Venn diagram fanbase that can’t be algorithmically constructed or trolled. Los Bitchos remains authentic as a mug and puts a little bit of mischievous delight right back into the world.
I witnessed all the things live at The Chapel here in Ess Eff a couple of years back; That energy stayed up. Such a fun boost, an uplifting band that Uncle Phil would tip his hat to.
BALTHVS
Some like to complain that Khruangbin has become a genre template; I believe there is always room at the table if you bring your own forks and spoons. Seeing BALTHVS, Bogotá, Colombia’s finest power trio, sell out the Rickshaw this past summer assured patrons, head-scratching critics, and official Outside Lands bookers that this template, or whatever you want to call it, remains globally healthy.
This surf-rock amalgamation band, fusing dub with Middle Eastern melodies laid out over cumbia, brought a unique prism to the burgeoning movement; Dick Dale musicality dropped into a world music context, and buddy, does it ever work.
BALTHVS, who is chasing some type of “Dead mysticism,” can for sure deal.
YEOBO
Described as a blended version of Khruangbin meets The Mermen, Yeobo, the Korean word for “affection for a loved one,” is the name of a local power trio. Formed in Seaside, California, in 2024, it consists of guitarist-songwriter Kee Hyon Higgins, drummer-keyboardist Jenn Cain, and bassist-songwriter Glenn Bell.
Higgins heard Khruangbin on NPR, and the idea was set in motion. That idea, embodied in Berkeley in Lesh, in the 1960s, flew around the world for decades and came right back to California, to revamp something which started so long ago, speaks to Uncle Phil’s unrelenting sphere of influence and eternal return.
