Lesh finds life after Dead
By: Paul Robicheau
Boston Metro
Published: Nov 23, 2001

Once the fluid anchor of the Grateful Dead, bassist Phil Lesh got a new lease on life after a 1998 liver transplant, revisiting the material of his former band, and building Phil Lesh & Friends into a formidable new improvising unit.

"After my operation, it seemed there was still work that I had to do, and there wasn't going to be any closure," said Lesh, who finishes a three-night Orpheum stand with his band Friday and Saturday. "This music needs to be reinterpreted constantly."

Lesh began with a rotating band, spanning musicians from Phish to Little Feat. But he has settled on guitar foils Jimmy Herring and Gov't Mule slide ace Warren Haynes (longtime friends both groomed in the Allman Brothers Band), Zen Tricksters keyboardist Rob Barraco and drummer John Molo, who worked with Lesh in the post -Dead outfit The Other Ones. Haynes, Barraco, and the much -improved Lesh, split the lead vocals.

"When we first started rehearsing, in the first 30 minutes, everybody knew that it was really something special," Lesh, 61, said by phone earlier this week, on the way to a Connecticut concert. "It was beyond chemistry. Everybody in this band is adventurous enough to play outside themselves, and forget about what they know, and deal with the context of what's happening at the moment."

The group has worked to expand, and shuffle, the Dead songbook, from "Dark Star" to the recent breakouts of "Loose Lucy," and "Liberty." And Lesh has written five new songs with ex Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. "One day I was working on this piece that I'd been working on a while," he said. "I changed the groove on it, just spontaneously, and it sat right up and said to me, 'I am a Robert Hunter song.'"

Lesh also invited ex-Dead mate Bob Weir's Ratdog to share some summer bills-a sign of thawing tensions in the Dead camp over distribution of archives.

"We're not really involved in business at this point, but I always thought that the relationship should really stand or fall on a different level," said Lesh, who offers free downloads of selected concerts by his band at www.phillesh.net in addition to letting fans tape every night.

Reason?

"You can't buy word of mouth."

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