PHIL LESH DISCOVERS A 'HEIGHTENED DEGREE OF AWARENESS' PLAYING WITH HIS NEW BAND

By Scott Cooper for The San Diego Union-Tribune
May 23, 2002

After years of making music only on stage, former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh recently returned to the studio to craft his new album, "There and Back Again." Lesh's first solo release is an extension of the music he made with the Dead, but stretches the parameters with jazzy playing balanced with a harder rock edge.

Months after the fact, the 62-year-old Lesh remains enthusiastic about the experience, which in some ways was radically different from all the studio recordings he made with the Dead.

"It was a totally different experience," he says. "After you haven't been in the studio really seriously for 13 years, the technology is bound to change, but I had no idea. I knew digital recording was a big deal, but the last time I heard about it, it was digital audio tape on big machines.

"Now it's hard drive-based and it's native applications in the computers that are doing the processing. We weren't sure we wanted to use that at first, but we tried it. We laid down a track and we put the vocals on it, we put the guitars on it, we put the keyboards on it, and at the end of the day, it sounded like a record. It was an amazing experience of learning how to do vertical recording rather than horizontal."

Lesh has been performing for a couple years with his current band (guitarists Warren Haynes and Jimmy Herring, drummer John Molo and keyboardist Rob Barraco), but how they would interact in the confines of a studio was an unanswered question. After all, Lesh was used to recording with Jerry Garcia and company for the previous 30 years, and a new group of people could easily spring some surprises.

It turns out the surprise was that the personal approaches weren't that dissimilar. The equipment and technology may have evolved, but the human element hasn't.

"Any studio situation is pretty much the same," Lesh says, "regardless of how long you've played together. It's kind of a pressure-cooker. The demands on you are different and, in some ways, greater than they are in live performances because you are going to be able to listen back to every note you played very carefully. Everybody's in there trying to get the best possible track."

The similarities and differences between his new band and his old band aren't only in the studio realm, but in live performances as well. In some respects, Lesh says he feels a sense of liberation now.

"This band, and the bands that I've had, are really open to what I really want to do with music. Also, I just have more ideas now. In the sense that I set the tone, it's more or less my concept of how we play the music, how we approach it."

He may have more ideas, but Lesh isn't the only one in the band with ideas, and consequently not the only one to convey them. "In the beginning, I was teaching them all these tunes that are the backbone of the Grateful Dead repertoire. But actually ... a lot of them knew the Grateful Dead material. In a way, I was just as much looking to them to show me different slants, different approaches, to the Grateful Dead material. So it's a two-way street."

In the seven years since Garcia's passing, Lesh has continued to attract vagabond-like Deadheads with his band, Phil Lesh & Friends. The band has gone through more incarnations than a perfect Hindu, with a revolving list of guitarists including Robben Ford, Paul Barrere, Steve Kimock, Derek Trucks and Jorma Kaukonen. After working his way through such talent, he finally settled on the current lineup before recording "There and Back Again."

"We sort of settled on each other," he points out. "Everybody in the band had played with me before in a different combination. The first 30 minutes we played together, we achieved liftoff. ... It worked out really well because everybody brings a whole different sensibility. Kind of like Grateful Dead, in a way. It's the mix of roots that makes music really interesting.

"What I'm enjoying now is really a heightened degree of awareness of the different places that music can go in a given context and in a split second. That's what this band of guys is doing for me."

Lesh says the Dead also achieved a similar effect in the early days. "The best thing about the Grateful Dead was the point in time where we were living together and playing together every day and the music was just erupting, in the late '60s. Inevitably in human relationships, these things change. Everybody grew up a little more, moved out, kind of like a family splitting up. We never quite had that same intimacy again, although we were able to recapture it in our music. That's the thing I guess that I miss about Grateful Dead."

Lesh's current band features two lead guitarists in Haynes and Herring, as opposed to the Dead, where Garcia played lead and Bob Weir provided rhythm guitar. Yet, Lesh sees beyond such distinctions. "Frequently there's a lead voice in the collective improvisation, but my goal is to have everybody making important contributions so that anybody can change the direction of the music at any time. To me, that's the most exhilarating and the most satisfying and the most cosmic kind of musical experience."

Scott Cooper is a free-lance writer.
Copyright 2002 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.