Phil Lesh Continues To Reach For Transcendance
By:  Brian Q. Newcomb
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Published Nov 8, 2001

Phil Lesh, longtime bass player with the Grateful Dead, is glad to be here. Speaking by cell phone while driving along the northern California coast up to the Bay area, he talked about surviving Hepatitis C and a liver transplant. To borrow an old George Burns joke, he sounds happy to be anywhere.

At the end of the Phil Lesh & Friends concert at Riverport Amphitheatre this summer, Lesh stepped up to invite folks to consider becoming organ donors, to give blood and share the gift of life whenever possible.

"Without that transplant, I wouldn't be alive today," Lesh says. "So I try to share with my audiences the importance of life and the gift that is possible when you become a donor. I always say, you'll save the life of someone you've never met."

Often, Lesh is happy to sign the back of a person's drivers license as a witness when they sign as organ donors - talk about an autograph with staying power.

No less miraculous, though, is the return of Lesh, now 61, to music about six years after the death of Jerry Garcia ended the long, strange trip that was the Grateful Dead. Supported by guitarists Warren Haynes and Jimmy Herring, who both also play with the Allman Brothers Band, and keyboardist Rob Barraco and former Bruce Hornsby drummer John Molo, Phil Lesh is still "Doin' That Rag," much to the delight of Deadheads everywhere.

Since re-entering musical life as a touring entity, Lesh & Friends have shared the stage with Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and with fellow-Dead veteran Bob Weir's band Rat Dog, which opened the Riverport gig this summer. With Haynes and Herring come the obvious comparisons to the Allmans, as well as with previous groups of Friends.

"I'm really happy with this band," says the bass player-turned-bandleader. "This is the one that I want to keep, definitely. I was really lucky to have the Grateful Dead to play with for thirty years. This is different, but it's just as stimulating for me as anything I've ever done.

"For me, these guys are so much more than Southern rock players. In my band, I encourage them to step outside themselves. In fact, I invite everyone who plays with me to do that. On a superficial level, you've got two guys that have played with the Allman Brothers, and they do that double lead guitar thing very well, but if you listen, I don't think it sounds anything at all like that."

While this Allmanization of Dead music remains debatable, longtime fans of the Grateful Dead catalog consider Phil Lesh & Friends a return to original potency and purpose of the music, something that came into question during the Dead's rather uneven performances in the late '80s and the '90s.

Lesh is not uncomfortable with the label jam band, simply because that title is a legacy of his own three-decade journey down "The Golden Road" with Garcia and Weir and company. The key to this music is improvisation, which Lesh believes requires more from a musician than any other form.

"The jam band phenomenon is a pretty diverse take on all of American music at its ground, whether that be bluegrass, jazz, blues or rock," he says. "All these genres will surface in the improvisational process, as an almost pan-American primal influence. It puts all those different musical styles in a pot and mixes it up."

This requires that players have a knowledge of the technical aspects of these forms and of their instruments and then be able "to extend the music, to be prepared to seize the moments that the music suggests," Lesh says.

Ultimately, it's a cosmic thing.

"We'll go into it knowing that we're going to start in a certain key, or that we'll use this groove, that we'll start with this song and then see where it can take us," Lesh says. "At this time, it's real important that the music and songs work together to tell a story, to take the listener and musicians on a journey. It's an open door to that eternal music that is always going on somewhere out there in the universe, it's an opportunity to tap into that
sense of ultimacy."

Transcendence for the price of a concert ticket has always been part of the promise of the Grateful Dead, and Phil Lesh & Friends are still making it up as they make their way down that golden road.

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