WORDS FROM THE PHILZONE
By Isaac Josephson
JamBase - Published July 1, 2001

When I spoke with Phil Lesh this past March for an upcoming issue of Down Beat , it was a high point in the crusade we began at the magazine more than a year ago to better integrate the worlds of jazz and jam band. Through articles on Phish, MMW, Ratdog, moe., String Cheese Incident and others, we've tried to link the two in the great tradition of improvisational music. Although they may differ in technique and/or complexity, both have things to offer each other. Jazz fans (and musicians) can benefit from the vitality and fresh ideas coming out of the jam band scene, and jam band folks get the context and the continuity, not to mention catching up on some pretty sick jams kicked out by jazz musicians over the last 75 years. As a longtime student of music, jazz lover and pioneer of group improvisation in the rock realm, Lesh straddles the fence between the two worlds more than any other musician today. And, as if he's not content with his already esteemed place in the musical tradtion, the 61-year-old bassist continues to innovate. With this new iteration of Phil and Friends, Lesh is developing the notion of rock as improvisatory repertoire and taking that repertoire into bold, new territories. It's new, it's breathtakingly beautiful, and man, is it fun - for the audience as well as for Lesh. Below, and exclusive to JamBase, are some unpublished (well, the article's not going to be published until mid-August, but you know what I mean) excerpts from my conversation with Lesh.

There's an old adage that says, to be a good musician, you either have to study hard or live hard. Which path have you taken? I studied hard until I was about 25, and then I started living hard [chuckles]. I started at age 8 on violin, and switched to trumpet at age 14. Then, in high school and in college, I studied the theory of composition. I took a graduate level composition course with Luciano Berio at Mills College. I wanted to be a composer.

But, then you got sidetracked by the Grateful Dead? I don't know to this day if I was sidetracked, or it was the next logical step. After I left school, I kept composing, and I was kind of in a vacuum. I walked away from it until my friend Jerry invited me to join a band. I thought, "Wow, what a left turn my life is making!" I jumped on that right away. It was an opportunity to make music in a totally different way that I'd ever imagined.

What part of the Grateful Dead made it seem like the next logical step? Well, I had played mostly in symphony orchestras (2 or three around the Bay Area) and big bands prior to joining the Grateful Dead. So, I was accustomed to intense communication between musicians. The opportunities for intimate communication with the Grateful Dead were so great, though the material was considerably simpler - a lot of diatonic, triad chord structures, which was good, since I was just learning how to play the bass at that time.

Was there any hesitation in assuming bass duties when you'd never played it before? Not really. My feeling is that musicians can pick up lots of different instruments if they feel like they want to try it. Although, it's funny - I had a good friend who was an upright bass player, and I asked him once when we were both first years in college if he would teach me the bass as a second instrument. He said, "I would NEVER teach anyone the bass as a SECOND instrument!" That was how seriously he took the bass, and that kind of informed me how serious an instrument it was.

So, what about the "Living Hard" part of the equation? You're in a rock and roll band. You're 25 years old. Everything is available to you. It's pretty much a question of accepting it all. Music really reflects life, and the more you can live, the more you can put into your music. It's not a question of doing that consciously. It's just embracing life as it comes along For me, it was very liberating on many levels.

While most of the other members of the band were active with side projects from the 1970s on, you stuck pretty much solely with the Grateful Dead, and are only recently delving in to other musical projects. Why? When the Grateful Dead was still alive, that was the band that I was in. I didn't really have a lot of interest in being in another band. I kind of wish now that I'd taken some time to compose other kinds of music and create other kinds of things on the side. But it just didn't happen that way. Life has a funny way of deferring what you want to do until it's right for you.

What sparked your initial vision behind Phil and Friends? The real genesis of Phil and Friends came when David Gans invited me to come over and sit in for a benefit for the Ashkenaz. When I walked in the door, there was a band already playing, and I was going to sit in with them for a couple of songs. So, I walked in, and I heard these guys playing Grateful Dead music. It really amazed me because it sounded almost as good as the real thing. And that was really important because it gave me a sense of (a) Grateful Dead music could be treated a repertoire, and different musicians could play it, and (b) there was a pool of musicians that loved it, wanted to play it and did it pretty well. So I played a couple of gigs with David Gans and his rotating cast of musicians, and then I decided I wanted to do it for myself.

In its many iterations, Phil and Friends has had both veterans of Grateful Dead music and musicians who might have played the music before, but had never really had any direct contact with the band. Seems like you prefer the latter... Well, the point of Phil and Friends is to bring in all of these diverse, wildly different approaches to Grateful Dead music, to make it interpretive. I think that the perspectives of the older guys who had previously had a lot of contact with the Grateful Dead were carved in stone. I hesitate to pick out Bruce, but he does have a definitive opinion about Grateful Dead music, and what it is. He does it beautifully, but it's kind of rigid.

Let's talk about the current lineup. It sounds like everything has fallen into place. It's almost magical the way you guys click. Yes, there's definitely a magic to it! Last fall, I got the band together that I'm hoping to keep. That is Jimmy Herring, Warren Haynes, Rob Barraco and John Molo. From the very beginning, I saw that these guys had a willingness to go beyond their comfort zones.

Quite frankly, I like what you guys are doing with some of the songs better than I liked the Grateful Dead treatments in those last few years. They sound... fresh again. I agree. I get the feeling that a lot of these tunes with this band sound a lot more alive than when the Grateful Dead did them in the last five years. I don't know if it's a stylistic thing, or if it's that these guys are new to this. It's so intense. This music is like a living organism. It wants to be alive. It wants to manifest itself in new ways. Every performance raises the bar for us. Every other band I've had has a kind of sine wave where the performances will move up and then it will sag a little. This band is a steady upward incline. We haven't even plateaued yet, much less peaked.

How did Rob Barraco come to be a part of the band, and what does he bring to the mix? In 1999, I wanted to get a band together for some gigs at the Warfield. So I was looking for some musicians, and someone gave me a Zen Tricksters album, and I really enjoyed their music. I thought their tunes were beautifully constructed. I especially like Jeff (the guitar player) and Rob. Rob knows the Grateful Dead music better than I do. I've actually had to ask him about details that I had forgotten about some of the older songs. He brings a kind of jazzier background to the mix. I really wanted that because I wanted a keyboardist who could do tunes that weren't songs, per se, but rather vehicles for improvisation.

Speaking of jazz, you guys do a few straight-up jazz tunes. In fact, we do. One that we frequently do is "Milestones." We're probably going to do "So What" one of these days. Also, "All Blues" from Kind of Blue.

So, if you could grab a trumpet player to play "All Blues," who would it be? Clifford Brown [laughs]. (ed. note: Brown passed away in a tragic car accident in 1956.) Try again [laughs]. I don't know. I don't really know who could do that one justice these days.

What about Jimmy Herring? What does he bring to Phil and Friends? We call him Sunshine, and that's the aura that he puts out. I don't know if you've ever seen the Shroud of Turin, but Jimmy looks like the figure on the Shroud of Turin when he has a certain statement on his face. Jimmy is more comfortable playing outside of what he's already played than just about anybody I know. He played with Col. Bruce Hampton, and he refers to Bruce as the kind of guy that encouraged that. He would say, that Bruce used to say that tuning was for sissies. "Detune your guitar, then play!" All right, that's one way to get outside yourself [chuckles].

And Warren Haynes? Everyone saw that as a huge win for Phil and Friends when Warren started playing with you guys. Warren brings a depth, a weight. I first realized it when I heard him doing "Afro Blue" on one of his live records. Jimmy, Warren and Derek Trucks were all playing on this tune, and I couldn't tell who was who. All of their guitar styles were fused together, and it wasn't southern rock. It was something else. And then there's Warren's singing. His voice is a glory of American music. And the way he sings some of the old Garcia ballads really touches my heart. And the songs that he's written that we do, I wanna do more of them.

Last, but not least, John Molo? He's been with you longer than any of the others, right? John Molo has been the backbone of most of what I've done ever since 1996 when I sat in with Bruce Hornsby's band and John was a part of it. This was only 8 months after Jerry's death, and I wasn't sure I'd ever perform again. Bobby went down to San Francisco to sit in with Bruce's band, and Bobby asked me to come on down. And so I said, "All right, I'll come on down." But I didn't bring an instrument. ARU was there, and Oteil Burbridge, who I'd never met said, "Oh man, you gotta sit in. You gotta play my bass, man." And he had an instrument exactly like mine. And he's such a sweet guy, and was like, "Here take my instrument." So, I sat in and started playing with Molo. And it was an eye opener. The range of styles of music he's fluent in is amazing. Not to mention when he fuses those styles together into a rhythmic chain reaction.

The way you guys do Grateful Dead material is rhythmically different than the way you did it in the Grateful Dead. Is that difficult for you? Do you sometimes find your hands playing it the old way? No, it's really exciting! We do "Ship of Fools" with a rock groove instead of a shuffle. "Terrapin Station" we do with kind of a Latin/African train thing - almost like high life. That's a direct consequence of Molo's ability to fuse genres. I wanted to have the band double timing while the chord changes and the melody were the same. So, the band double timing creates tension, and then it slams into the fanfare thing at the end with so much momentum and energy that it will keep it going through the fanfare passage. Another thing we do is opening up the center of the Terrapin sequence. The first part is "Lady With a Fan." The second part is "Terrapin Station." In between there, the Grateful Dead would do a jam and then there'd be a little vocal tag: Since the end is never told/ We pay the teller off in gold/In hopes he will come back/ But he can not be bought or sold. And then it drops a half step, and goes straight into "Terrapin Station." I sort of changed the riff in there from a major scale to a minor scale - almost a flamenco scale. It's a Neapolitan relationship. "Lady with a Fan" begins and ends in F, and it drops own a half step to E. Only we're doing E F E F E instead of just E with a major 9th on it." And then we started putting "Stella Blue" in the middle of that.

Who sings "Stella Blue?" Warren sings Stella Blue. It's gorgeous. Some of Jerry's songs are not suitable for my voice, and that's one of them. And Warren sings it. And it's different from Jerry. It's equally as moving, though, and it's cool that it's different, because it's a repertoire.

And you guys are doing more than interpreting a repertoire. You're also writing originals. Yeah, I've actually been writing my own lyrics. "Mirror of Thalassa" was the first one. Thalassa is Greek. That's from the Anabasis by Xenophon. I won't go into it, but it's a long story about the Greeks being defeated by the Persians and trying to make it to the sea to build ships to try to go home. And they finally make it, to make a long story short. Then, I pulled out some old music I written for another purpose, and I edited that a little bit, and it started coming out, and I made up another song called "Midnight Train" that I wrote the lyrics for. There's also an old one from the Grateful Dead era called "Childhood's End," and then four other songs that I worked on with Robert Hunter.

Being the bandleader is a new role for you. Is there anything specific to that role that you'd say you do? Well, I have a little footswitch that cuts my microphone out of the PA and leaves it in the monitors. Every so often, if I feel like we've been in the same place for too long, I'll hit the footswitch and say, 'Breakdown!' And on my count, we'll have a breakdown and the texture, the meter, the dynamic will change completely, and we go into an entirely different realm. It's like a jump cut in a movie -- a butt splice, where the tape is square, as opposed to a normal slice, where the tape is diagonal. That's the extent of the direction I do, other than the usual signals for dynamics.

How does assuming the role of bandleader differ from your role with the Grateful Dead? It's like night and day from my role in the Grateful Dead. I was just the bass player. There were no signals. Everything was what you heard. Of course, even after ten years, Bobby or Jerry would play a certain chord with a certain sound and everybody knew what song it would be. In fact, the audience knew what song it was going to be.

That doesn't seem like too much fun... Yeah. After all that time playing with the Grateful Dead, everyone sort of settled into their roles and got a little comfortable there. At the end, it had become a formula. The shows were always the same. The first set was always songs without too much jamming between them. The second set would be a jam set with drums and space in the middle, with the big ballad and the big rocker at the end. So, I did want to get away from that with this band.

Did you ever think of walking away when the Grateful Dead got into that rut? No, because I always had faith that it was going to turn around. And it could! At any one Grateful Dead show, the potential was always there. During the last few years, it didn't manifest itself all that often, but it still did. But the music never really did turn around definitively. Now it has, though. Bobby's out there doing Grateful Dead material with his band. I'm out there doing it with my band, and they sound TOTALLY different, and I love that. Now, we're just two different musicians interpreting a repertoire.

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