A Conversation With Phil Lesh : Rolling Stone

Phil Lesh's long strange trip veered into darkness last year, when he found he needed a liver transplant after contracting Hepatitis C more than a decade ago. Last December, the former Grateful Dead bassist had life-saving surgery and learned some profound lessons about himself and what was important to him: Namely, being with his family, continuing to play music and becoming more active in his Unbroken Chain Foundation, which he and his wife Jill founded in 1997. Lesh is continuing the thirty-year-long tradition of community service that the Grateful Dead started with their Rex Foundation, and has recently extended his giving to include other people who need organ transplants.

Lesh spoke candidly about his illness, and recovery -- a recovery that was so remarkable, even his doctors were astonished. He is certain that his miraculous recovery had everything to do with "Five Minutes for Phil," a world-wide prayer circle that Deadheads organized on the Sunday before Lesh was to undergo surgery. Lesh also revealed what it was like to play with Phish, who many consider the "new Grateful Dead." And if you're wondering what his plans are for this New Year's Eve, here's a hint: He won't be at the Pyramids, no matter what you've heard.

Doing Grateful Dead songs with other players, after playing them for so many years with the Dead, are you approaching them differently? Is there a different relationship between you and those songs?

Absolutely. First of all, I'm singing songs Jerry used to sing. Just that by itself is a whole new slant on it, because I really have to consider the meaning of the words, and how to project what it is that I mean to myself when I'm singing them. Then, of course, there's the unusual -- for me -- situation of having to play the bass and sing at the same time, which is not easy, and I never had to do that much in the Grateful Dead. When I did, I was singing harmonies and not leads, except for one or two songs. So, it's been an education for me to train myself to do that with some degree of confidence and dexterity.

It seems very natural. You're certainly communicating to the audience.

That's certainly what I'm trying to do, and to that end I have been taking voice lessons. It's very, very helpful. I actually found myself using things that I had heard. Gee, it's working.

Can you talk a little about the "Let Phil Sing" campaign?

That was a running joke between the Deadheads and the band. They'd bring signs that said "Let Phil Sing," and I would always respond, "What do you mean, it's 'Make Phil Sing.'"

How did you choose Phish to play with you? The rumor was while you were recuperating from your liver transplant surgery someone brought you one of their tapes, and you listened from your hospital bed.

Actually, there was a tape that was given to me last summer before I actually got really sick. I was declining because of the liver problem, but we go to the Trinity Alps [in Northern California] every summer for two weeks. It's a resort scene where families have been coming for forty years. It's a neat place, but every so often we'll be there and some Deadheads will show up. This one guy said to me, "Oh man, I want you to listen to this tape of Phish live." That was sort of the start of this. I didn't really know much of their music before that, and so I started listening to that tape. And we were casting around for musicians who would play at my first Phil and Friends gig after the surgery. We really wanted someone who was incredibly first rate. So I began listening more seriously to their CDs and tapes. I found some more live tapes from people in our [Unbroken Chain] foundation, and I was just bowled over. I thought, "Jeez, I would play with these guys in a minute." Their music really speaks for itself. They're very inventive, and fluent, and also they love Grateful Dead music. It was a made-to-order combination.

The ironic thing is what great lengths they would go to distance themselves from any Dead comparisons -- avoiding playing Dead songs in their shows -- despite the fact they were huge fans, only to end up performing with you.

That never affected me because I wasn't even aware of that. I can understand them wanting to do that, because I understand they started out as a Dead cover band. But anyway, when I first talked to Trey [Anastasio] we hit it off pretty well on the telephone, and he started coming up with these Dead tunes that he said he'd love to do. I mean the great ones: "Help On the Way/Slip Knot!/Franklin's Tower," "Scarlet Fire," "Viola Lee Blues," one of my all time favorites that we didn't play much after 1970. So it was like a marriage made in heaven. What I need is a directory for every band that started out as a Dead cover band [for future Phil and Friends shows]. Hey, I'll suck them all in.

What about the comparisons between Phish and the Dead. Did you see the young Dead in them?

They're different. They have their own characteristic. They're more together than we were. I don't think they're so much the ragged hippies as we were. But, I mean, their musical sensibilities are refined in a certain direction, that ours never were. Our stuff was more rootsy because most of the guys, with the exception of myself, came from roots music. I was a jazz and classical musician.

Are they carrying on the Dead's legacy?

The Phish guys? They are in a way, but they're doing it in their way. String Cheese Incident is doing it in their way, Leftover Salmon is doing it in their way, and moe. is doing it in theirs. I think that's wonderful that the idea [of collective improvisation] that we got from jazz bands . . . that there's so many bands that feel that's the way they want to go. I'm just proud to be apart of it. It's a whole movement now.

And that sense of community is intact as well.

Our goal has always been to mesh. Blesh. Blend and mesh, if you will, with the audience. Because they give us what we need to give something back to them.

It's good to hear you say that, because the audience really isn't aware of their effect on a band.

Even like last weekend, in the quiet moments, actually there were several moments when we were playing so quiet -- and normally you'd hear somebody yell "rock and roll!" -- but it was quiet. I was looking at the audience, when I could take the time to look up from my fingers -- it was a challenge to play with those guys -- I would look out during those quiet moments and see mouths agape. Ears straining for the finest detail.

What was really touching is that Trey had his mouth agape. It was so apparent that he is such a big fan.

It was mutual, because I was so stoked by some of the stuff that he and Page [McConnell, keyboards] were doing on our tunes, and then we did their stuff, that was really great too. We did "Down With Disease," "Chalk Dust Torture," and "Prince Caspian."

How did you prepare yourself for these shows, considering that you only had transplant surgery four months ago?
I did a lot of vocal practice, and I learned a lot of songs, even though I had to have my music stand there with some lyrics on it to refresh my memory. I practiced at home a little bit on the bass, but Steve [Kimock, guitar] and I would get together three times a week and we'd go over stuff. We had some other people come in: Prairie Prince came in, Merle Sanders came in, and we just jammed a little. One night Jorma Kaukonen was in town and he came in and hung out. Pete Sears came in and hung out. We'd just goof, and play some stuff. Later Steve and I would work up the songs, so we'd know how to go through them, although honestly at the shows I said to myself, "I need to practice a little more."

But the good news is you can practice with Kimock.

That boy is a monster, they call him the "little toaster." I'm not sure exactly why. When I first heard him [Steve Kimock] I said, this guy sounds an awful lot like Jerry, but then I started listening closely, I realized it's only very superficially that he sounds like Jerry. He can sound like a lot of people, but he he's made sounds and played things that I can't even imagine coming out a guitar. He plays stuff that sounds like it's being played on a flute or a saxophone.

What were the criteria for the songs you selected to perform?

I wanted them to be songs we could open up, also ones that Trey and Page knew and wanted to do. I made up a list and they made up a list, and when we put the two lists together we found out we agreed pretty much that we could get away with doing all these songs, and open them up and stretch them out pretty well. There is only a few that didn't have that much space in them. So we were in pretty close agreement. Five or six days before they were to come out, Trey called and said, "Listen could we add some songs to this?" I said, "Sure. What do you think." "Oh, 'Bertha,' 'Tennessee Jed.'" -- all kinds of songs that I hadn't thought about doing. He added about five or six songs to the list. "Crazy Fingers," which we didn't end up doing, and then there was one that wasn't on the list that we worked up during soundcheck. "Casey Jones," that was a big crowd-pleaser.

Do you look at having your successful liver transplant surgery as giving you a second chance? How has it changed your life, your priorities?

I decided to live. What you find out when you get really sick is you don't have a future, you don't have a past. You only have the moment. So after going through that, it was kind of like being in limbo, living a day at a time, and in a sense waiting for something to happen in the future, except you're not sure when it's going to happen. The only thing you can look back to in the past is a point where you weren't sick. Because you don't want to dwell on being sick. At that time [waiting for a liver], I was doing the best I could to maintain some kind of physical well being, with diet and exercise, and so on. But I would get tired and I'd have to nap in the daytime. But after the operation, I mean, I woke up full of beans, as they say. I stayed in the intensive care unit for six hours and within twelve hours of the operation they had me up and walking. And they let me go home after six days, to a rental house that we had in Florida. I was able to come back to California in three weeks. Everything moved so quickly, and my recovery has been so rapid, and I attribute a lot of that, if not all of that, to the healing prayer that was sent in my direction by many people. By a lot of Deadheads, my family, and friends, and thousands of people I never met.

So you're a living testament to the power of prayer.

They decided to have "Five minutes for Phil," at noon Pacific time on the Sunday before I was went to Florida. Jill and I sat out on the porch in the sun and it just got warmer. A person emailed me about his experience that day, and he said he saw in a clairvoyant vision the brightest cocoon of light around me that he had ever seen. Like you said, I am living proof.

I guess what's so compelling to me is that you have a clue to the mystery of life, and we all want that.

But that's not true. Everybody has that clue. You have to be still, you can't be running around in your mind.

Were you always so aware of your own power, to heal, or whatever?

There were pieces of it. Wordsworth called them "spots of time," where your vision can expand and you can be still enough for what Mary Baker Eddy used to call "the still small voice." But we're human and we live in the world, we have families and obligations and get up every morning and make sure the kids go to school. But if you can, take the time to get in touch with the quiet. When you're sick, sometimes it's forced upon you. That's one of the things that happened to me.

The silver lining...

Oh yeah, and of course the rest of the silver lining is first of all I have a life, and I'm not in severe decline or end game liver diseases. I'm going to be able to rear my children and go to Little League games. Now, I can also, through music, give something back. Which is something we've always tried to do. Now it's more important than ever before.

What was your impulse to start [Unbroken Chain]?

We just wanted to do some good work and, quite frankly, the Rex Foundation, the organ that the Grateful Dead had to deal with that sort of thing, was pretty much in limbo -- mainly because the Grateful Dead was defunct as a touring organization. And since ninety percent of our income came from touring, what we had done in the past was just to take three, four or five shows a year, and funnel that money directly to the Rex Foundation. The board of the Rex Foundation, of which some of us were members, would decide where it would go. But after that income stopped coming in, the Foundation found it difficult to figure out ways to earn some funds so they could continue that giving. So my wife Jill and I decided to start our own foundation, which isn't that hard to do.

What about the rest of the Phil and Friends series? You have a few other shows planned, right?

We have some offers, but we haven't been able to pin down dates and personnel yet.

I understand you're working on a symphonic treatment of Dead songs?

I was invited up to a record company in New York -- I won't name it, because it's only one of several who are interested in this. Somebody suggested that I do something along the lines of "Symphonic Dead," and I just shot it down right away. But later, I started thinking about how it could really be done in an interesting way, rather than just orchestrating the arrangements that are on the records already. But what I've decided to do is take the melodies and the rhythmic riffs and chord sequences from about twenty-nine Grateful Dead songs and weave them all together into this vast tapestry. It will have seven movements and will be about forty-five minutes long. And I'm right in the middle of it right now. I have sketches for all seven movements and I'm really looking forward to getting back into writing the whole thing down. It's a compliment to everything that's happened so far. In a way, it's another form of closure with Grateful Dead music.

Are you writing new stuff?

This whole preparation for these three shows was delving into the Grateful Dead material that I could sing, and that would be performable. Because over a series of three shows, I wanted to be like we were able to be, how the Grateful Dead was. I want to be able to play three shows without repeating ourselves because I think that's tremendously important. That's how we got people coming back. But, yes, I hope to have some new material. It comes slowly. If I had a year before I had another performance, maybe I could have enough new stuff so we could do three or four new songs every night. That would be exciting. But I don't have that much time, and also I don't have that many lyrics. I'm going to have to write some of my own lyrics I think. Which isn't that hard. I'll just have to knuckle down.

Will you continue to play Dead songs?

Oh sure. Oh yeah, as long as I'm playing. First of all, it's our material, and we own it as much as anybody. And second of all, the songs that Jerry used to sing are of such a quality that they deserve to be performed. And I don't think that any of them are too sacred to be performed.

Are there any that you could never perform?

None. Absolutely not. Nothing is too sacred.

Any plans for New Year's Eve 1999?

Well, I could tell you one thing, if I do something on New Year's Eve, it will probably be right here in Marin [Calif.], where I can walk home.

JAAN UHELSZKI
(May 14, 1999)

Read a review of the Workingman's Dead Reissue

Read a review of Dick's Picks, Vol. 1-13