With a little help ...
Phil Lesh relying heavily on friends these days
By Mark Brown, News Popular Music Critic
Rocky Mountain News
April 5, 2002
When Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh decided to carry on with touring,
he settled on the name "Phil Lesh and Friends" for a good reason. While
he'd always had great input into the Dead's music, he's had to adjust
to the role of bandleader. "It's more like being a politician," he says.
"I just try to set the tone and the direction. The guys in the band --
their input is as important as mine on every level."
For years he used a revolving set of musicians that gravitated toward
him in the San Francisco music scene. But with guitarists Warren Haynes
and Jimmy Herring, along with keyboard player Rob Barraco and drummer
John Molo, he's found a permanent lineup.
Indeed, fans will find this a rich time. Not only is he doing another
series of Colorado shows (including Denver tonight and Vail over the weekend),
but There and Back Again comes out May 21.
There and Back Again is Lesh's first solo studio album (his 1999 release
was a live disc) and his first extended time in a recording studio since
the Grateful Dead's aborted attempt at a new album in 1995, before guitarist
Jerry Garcia died. In the past, Lesh has found inspiration and new directions
from playing off of other musicians, but he'd pretty much stuck to bass
and keyboards for performing and writing. He'd tried some rudimentary
acoustic guitar, but he just didn't have an affinity for it.
"But then I got myself a good electric guitar for a birthday present"
and everything changed, he says. On a whim he picked up the '63 Stratocaster
and suddenly found himself enraptured with its sound.
"I'm just in love with it. It's such a great-sounding instrument and so
easy to play," he says. "I just started writing music about a year ago,
and it just started coming out. It just gave me ideas. It's the first
time I've picked up an instrument and had the facility on it to be able
to learn from it."
Suddenly he found himself with the structures for a half-dozen songs mapped
out, "and one of them just kinda sat up and said to me 'I am a Robert
Hunter song.' I just called Bob and said, 'I've got this song, and it's
telling me that I want you to write lyrics for it.' "
Being a leader was a natural role onstage, but in the studio, Lesh knew
that the free-form jams had to be made into more economical messages.
"We're trying to focus everything down to the arrangement -- to make a
composition out of a song that has a beginning, middle and end and some
kind of story structure," he says. "My goal is to tell a story in a single
gesture, with no hiccups, no gaps."
And once in the studio, that began to take shape quickly. The song Celebration,
for example, had stretched out to 11 minutes onstage. "Now we focused
it down and it's 4 minutes, 40 seconds long," Lesh says. "It's a jewel.
It tells the whole story in a single gesture, but with all this detail
in it."
Interestingly, what made the process work for him was Pro Tools. The studio
editing software is often the focus of derision in the music industry,
as it's the core of the studio wizardry that can make "singers" out of
the likes of Britney Spears and *NSYNC.
But in the hands of real musicians, it can be a strong tool for real music,
Lesh says. He recalls Grateful Dead sessions where there would be endless,
fruitless takes of music, laborious attempts to come up with the proper
arrangements of songs. With Pro Tools, "we were able to go in there and
do a song a day," he says.
They'd lay down the track live, the way they'd do it onstage, then sit
down with producer Don Gehman and edit, rearrange and reshape it using
Pro Tools.
"We were actually able to use it as a compositional tool by editing segments
... in a certain way and saying, 'OK, that'll work -- let's do it that
way,' " Lesh says.
The band would then go and play the song in the new arrangement and nail
it, he says. He emphasizes that Pro Tools wasn't used for pitch shifting,
song editing or any other studio trickery -- just as a way to sketch and
stretch their ideas.
"All the arrangements you hear on the record were performed that way,"
he says. Onstage, the setlists consist of everything from Grateful Dead
chestnuts to Beatles covers to unreleased new songs, but one thing is
constant: It's different every night.
"The general tenor and tone and story that's trying to be told pretty
much has to do with the moment, the position of the stars or planets or
my biorhythms at the time," he says. "I try to do every set and every
show as if it tells a story at the time. The material is rich enough that
it can be strung together in many different ways."
Lesh and other members of the Grateful Dead had a well-publicized split
several years ago about the handling of the band's vast vault of recorded
live music, but things have been patched up to a degree. Lesh has played
regularly with Bob Weir's Ratdog, and all surviving members of the Dead
played music together last New Year's Eve, he says.
"We're speaking to each other now," he says with a chuckle. "We're slowly
regaining our unity. Everything is looking better in that world. I'm trying
to communicate with those guys on an artistic level and not so much on
the business."
