Phil Lesh Interviews

1979

Phil Lesh...a slight, likable man whose intellectual curiosity was not satisfied by a formal education in music and composition, nor by a couple seasons of dropping acid in the Haight, and who enrolled in the Dead as a kind of protracted graduate study in both of the previous disciplines. . . . 

Phil Lesh lives in a small house in the Marin County hamlet of Fairfax, with a red Lotus and a large library of classical records (Bruckner is on the turntable when I arrive). Lesh, who studied composition with Luciano Berio before he started hanging out at the fringes of Ken Kesey's Stanford acid scene with Garcia, was a prolific songwriter for the Dead during the Aoxomoxoa-American Beauty period - arguably the height of their musical creativity. He has had several formal music projects on hold for the past few years.

"I have a project in the back of my head. A symphonic poem. You're familiar with the form? Invented by Liszt in the nineteenth century. Mine is based on Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan.' You know the poem? An opium dream, or so they say. It's for percussion, synthesizer and voices. That's one project, and there are others, but the rehearsal time for all the players is so expensive... Right now I'm just playing the bass. I'm kind of bored with trying to write for the Grateful Dead, because I tend to write some pretty dense shit, and it's almost antithetical to rock 'n' roll skill. It's hard to get them to play it. That period around Live/Dead, when the music was a little more complex - that was the peak for me. Now we've gotten into a format. 

"But I don't get bored with being in the Grateful Dead. To me, the Grateful Dead is life - the life of the spirit, and the life of the mind, as opposed to standing in line and marking time in the twentieth century. I went through the Acid Tests with the Grateful Dead, and all I can say is, you had to be there. That was the baptismo del fuego. When you're up there and your face is falling off and you've still got to play, and you do this over and over again, spilling your guts in front of thousands of people...you develop a certain flip attitude, even toward performing. You begin to believe that you could go out there naked and nobody'd notice, as long as you played loud enough." 

Over dinner, Lesh talks about the Dead's trip to Egypt in September of 1978 for a series of concerts at the pyramids. "It sort of became my project, because I was one of the first people in the band who was on the trip of playing at places of power. You know, power that's been preserved from the ancient world. The pyramids are like the obvious number-one choice, because no matter what anyone thinks they might be, there is definitely some kind of mojo about the pyramids. And when you get there, you find out that there is power. The same kind of power you get from the audience, only there's more of it, because it's older and because of what was built into it. 

"Ever since the Acid Tests, we've been into that power. That's what powered the Acid Tests, behind the acid, and it later became apparent that you didn't need drugs if you had the enthusiasm. It was a rawer order of energy, less information riding on that raw carrier wave of power, but the power was always there. It was a matter of awareness...feeling...intuition...anything but rational thinking. I wonder sometimes if the audience is as aware of that as we are. Obviously, if it's not there, you stroke it and get it up. In that sense it's a traditional show-biz trip: Stroke the audience and get 'em up. Build it up to the point where it's self-sustaining. This is true of all performers, yes? But for some reason especially true of the Grateful Dead. There's a special lock-in with the audience that can occur - it's totally random in a lot of ways, but I do know that we've never been able to really do it two nights in a row, including Egypt. I don't know if we really did it in Egypt or not, musically, but to be there was so deep and so dense and so thick and so impressive that it was almost... I don't know, it changed my life, it was the high point of my life to date. But it still wasn't good enough." [ . . . ] 

And the Egyptian Booking of the Dead relieved some of the boredom...? 

"It was handy as hell. I'd have been real bored if I had to stay at home during that period..." 

"But you still have musical ideas and impulses that aren't satisfied by the Grateful Dead?" 

"Yeah," he says quietly and a little wanly. "There's just things in heaven and earth, Horatio, that are undreamt of by the Grateful Dead. And things that are impossible for the Grateful Dead as a unit, or as a Gestalt..." 

"Like what?" 

"Anything with more than four chords! Ha ha ha ha ha! Just had to slip that in. Ha. No, there's no way to make it all come out even. When I started with the Dead in 1966, I said, 'Look, guys, I don't want to be doing this when I'm 30.' Well, I'm 38 now, and I'm gonna be doing it when I'm 40. It may turn out that I'll just go gentle into that good night, you know? I may just become a country squire and forget my musical ambition...because I've seen what musical ambition can lead to for people who are incapable of handling success, or failure, or frustration, or whatever. Loneliness. I would love to be able to contribute something to the culture. I don't know whether I can at this point. It remains to be seen. Let's not get too serious..."

(excerpt from "Still Grateful After All These Years," by Charlie Haas, New West, Dec 17, 1979)

* * * 

1979

Lesh rarely gives interviews, but Relix's Karen Kohberger, with the assistance of Sunburst Studios in Chicago and a pack of Heinekens, managed to spend some time with Lesh and Dead manager Rock Scully while the band was in the Windy City for a set of shows at the Uptown Theater. Their conversation took place late last year and began with a discussion of the then-unfinished new Grateful Dead album. [ . . . ] 

PL: [Alabama Getaway] is a typical Hunter lyric; there's just enough obscurity in it so you're not really sure what it means. 

Scully: But it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. That's sort of neat, like "Box of Rain." 

PL: That's a great one, even if I did write the music myself. 

Scully: Notice the longevity that song has. It's still a popular song on the radio. It's something that means a lot to different people. 

PL: Yeah, it meant a lot to me. My dad was dying when I co-wrote that song. When I used to visit him, I would sing the words and it would really get to me. 

Relix: What's the reason you don't sing any more? 

PL: Because I lost my voice and I refuse to have an operation. Bob thinks acupuncture might work. 

Relix: Will the Dead ever play at the Pyramids in Egypt again? 

PL: Thing about Egypt that made it cool for us, morally, was that we didn't go in there and take any money out of the country. They're poor; they're fucking starving. But the other thing is that playing the Pyramids ended up costing us half a million dollars. That was worth it, but we can't afford to do it again. The way it was set up, the tickets went to two different Egyptian charities. Even if we had made a record...well, we won't unfortunately, because the performances weren't that good. The chance of a lifetime and we blew it. You can never push a button and say it's going to come out right. 

Relix: There's a rumor that starting in 1980, the Dead are going to play shows that are only one set.

PL: Lies! It's possible that we might change our format, though. We've been locked into this damn format for quite a while now. I think we're the only band that plays as long as we do; correct me if I'm wrong. But that's what the Dead Heads want. One thing is that we haven't even touched on half our material. Since Brent joined the band, we've only had a certain amount of time to rehearse. And what we needed to do was rehearse the most frequently played stuff, the stuff in our standard repertoire. We try never to repeat. We almost never do a song two nights in a row.

Relix: Will the Dead ever play acoustic sets again? 

PL: It would be better to ask Jerry that question. I understand that he was asked that question and he said probably not, because of the differences in touch between the acoustic guitar and the electric guitar. One makes you useless on the other. And Jerry has to play electric all the time. I wonder if he ever picks up an acoustic guitar, except for just fucking around. 

Relix: Do you ever play trumpet anymore? 

PL: Not since 1968. I played eight bars in the middle of "Born Cross Eyed." 

Relix: Do you listen to other music besides rock and roll? 

PL: Oh yeah, I was brought up on classical music. 

Relix: Have you ever composed symphonies? 

PL: Sort of. I have a few projects that I have on hold, waiting for the Grateful Dead to die down a little. The only time I have to myself, I'm not much interested in doing work. Sometimes I like to sit around and read science fiction, and watch TV. 

Relix: If you could sum up your feelings about music, what it all means to you, how would you? 

PL: I don't know how to sum up fifteen years of what it all means. Jerry is better at that than I am. He could give it all to you in three sentences. Music is life enhancing. It makes your life worth living a little more, even if you're doing alright, even if you're feeling good. And if you're not, it makes you feel a little better. Music itself is a question.

(excerpt from "The Relix Interview: Phil Lesh," by Karen Kohberger, Relix 7.2, 1980)

* * * 

1990

COLD DEAD HANDS

The following is the transcript of an interview with Phil Lesh conducted in Berlin 27.10.90 by Andrew Brown of the Independant. Thanks are extended to Andrew and to Elspeth Cusack who made the interview available to us. 

It starts with me telling him a story, about how he was riding with a friend of mine through New York in 1967 or thereabouts, after the band had played their first concert there, and Matt asked him what he made of the city. He replied: "They're really weird people here. It could take as long as a week to turn this town on!" So we laughed at this, and then went on: 

PL: Actually, it took rather more than that, but we do have a big following in NY now.

AB: But is that what you're still trying to do? 

PL: Yeah, yeah, essentially that's the motivation: to try and open a new eye, to open another mind here, a new mind there.

AB: Do you think you're succeeding? 

PL: Yes and no. On the basic level of comradeship and membership in a group, and gaining an identity by being a Deadhead, yes we're succeeding. But on a higher level, not always, because we don't always perform as well as I'd like. I'm sure the other guys in the band would agree. From time to time we do get it on to communicate on a level when we can all say "Yeah, we did something." But maybe because of the way we approach music, or the way we approach our performances, it's built in that we can't always do it that well. 

AB: Listening to a lot of your tapes, preparing for this, it does seem...clearly the band has got a lot more competent over the last 20 years. Is it possible that by losing a lot of the lows, you've lost some of the highs? 

PL: Yes it is possible. But we like to think more in a realm of...that we've just raised our floor, so the ceiling is correspondingly higher than it was before. There's different kinds of energy that you can draw upon in different stages of your life, I think. And when we were all in our twenties, we had enough energy to ride roughshod over the inadequacies and limitations of our musical or our instrumental technique, and so on. Again. that was not always as successful...or not always successful. But I think we, just because of our youthful enthusiasm, we didn't know it couldn't be done every night, so we did it more often than not. And of course, the mind-set of people in those days was in fact, I believe, more open than it is now. It hasn't been the sa...it hasn't been like that since about 1970, 1969. It hasn't been the way I remember it being when we started. The fine tuning of it, if you will, has been lost. 

As time goes on, your energy...it decreases, perhaps, but it also changes. In the sixties, there was a sense, perhaps of the fine detail getting across to people, because they were so open, and so in tune together that it was like playing to one person. And some time in that period, in the early "seventies" that sort of faded. It was like hearing loss. The high frequencies went away, and you were left with more like ????

AB: What did it? 

PL: I've no idea. Everyone grew older, or...I can't put my finger on it. But perhaps we weren't taking as many, ahem, psychedelics as we had been during the provisional, early period; but in contrast to that, I feel now that it's possible that on a good night we're actually getting across some of that which was lost. That's why I say that we've raised our floor.

AB: It looked at the time...you were there at the time...in the psychedelic thing: there would be a great release or expansion of energy and at the end, things would be really...there was a genuine gain, but it seemed a once-for-all discharge of energy, and at the end of it, people seemed to have used an awful lot of their originality up and never got it back.

PL: I think that's the way it is in nature, or in human endeavour generally. It's like the cycle of growth, decline, and fall. The classic situation. It's...I don't know...it seems common enough that that does happen. Perhaps the further you are from the centre of the original impulse, the weaker the message is. But at the same time, many many people in the original scene ended up in business. In fact we're in business now. We employ 50 people at the moment. We're responsible for those people. If anything happened to us, they'd all be out of a job. In a way, it's an inescapable consequence of staying together and continuing to develop. For us, it's been a series of cycles. 

AB: Why do you keep going? Why does the band keep going? You might want to go on playing music and all that.

PL: Well, there's the real gut-level down in the dirt reason of we don't want to have to go out and get jobs. 

AB: Would you ever need to work again if you didn't get a job? 

PL: Oh yeah, yeah. We never made any amount of money that goes beyond, that was anything more than survival, just paying the rent, until 1987, 1988 actually, if you want to think of the year the money started coming in. So it's not like we've been making big money that long, and have got enough dough in the bank to buy a couple of small countries. It's not like the Rolling Stones who get, what is it, 15 million each in their pocket before they even start. Not like that at all. So there's that level. I don't particularly want to go out to work, get another job, and the other guys in the band feel pretty much that way. 

But then there's the...the main sense of it is that we're not finished yet. We're not finished yet; we haven't done it: we haven't played everything we could play, we haven't explored the material that we have, deeply enough; we haven't created the material that's going to take us over the top. We know that we can do that if we just keep at it long enough. Or we hope that we can do it if we keep at it long enough. We're not going to quit until they take the guitars from our cold dead hands. 

AB: Why does the band as a whole write so few songs? 

PL: Writing songs is hard. Songs are a particular area of music which is one of the most difficult to deal with, mostly because of words. 

AB: But you have two full-time lyricists? 

PL: This is true. This is true. And not everything they write is suitable to be sung. My particular problem is that I have a lot of trouble with singing anything that doesn't mean something to me, although I will sing certain Rock 'n' Roll songs or something like that for fun. I sing Tom Thumb's Blues because I've always loved that song. But if I'm going to write a song, if I have to sing a song that's by me, that's not somebody else's song, then I really have to be...it has to be in my bones, and there's very little that gets there. I'm just that difficult. I'm a difficult man. As for the other guys...I know that songwriting is not something that anyone just tosses off. Nobody does that. I can only conclude that everyone feels the same as I do: that it's bloody hard, and you've really got to mean it. The ones that we do have we're still working on trying to break them open: to tear them down and put them together in another way, so...that's one of the things we do.

AB: You really feel you can still do that with a song like the Scarlet Begonias-Fire On The Mountain thing that you did last night? 

PL: Well, if we're performing well, we can break it open right in the middle of it, and we do that. But it has to start right, and it has to go right up until that point. And even then it might not happen. But then it might, if somebody has the right idea; if someone is, dare I say it, inspired.

AB: There are out there, those people taping it: you could probably put together, out of the tapes in free circulation, about 5 or 6 stupefyingly good Grateful Dead records. 

PL: Yeah. We're going to do that, as a matter of fact. We've got all those tapes at home as well. It's not just the people out there who have them. So we are planning to do something of that nature in the very near future.

AB: Why haven't you done it? Is it a deliberate decision? Is it part of the aesthetic of splintering things up? 

PL: Yes and no. Because, as long as we let the people tape it, it's out there anyway. It's the matter of an editorial decision on our part, to decide what's good and what isn't, and no one's been willing to take the time, until now, to sit back and listen to all that shit. 

Because we, essentially, feel that once we've played it, it's out there. If we're like recording multi-track for a live album, that's a different situation. But we're planning to go through our archives, either in collaboration with our record company or through our own merchandising arm. We aim to release some of that material. 

AB: I seem to have run out of sensible questions. (laughter) As you know better than me, interviews are a complete waste of time, unless there's some degree of spontaneity. They sell records, but that's not really the business that I'm in, or you're in.

PL: I know that's not why you're here, either.

AB: The question that I've always wanted to get an answer to...do you really think that there's a different aesthetic that you're operating to. (This sounds desperately pretentious.) Are you doing something genuinely new, or do you see yourselves as about the same sort of business as musicians before you? 

PL: Music has a certain continuity to it, throughout the history of western music, anyway. It started out as church music; and I believe, in the sense that we...one of our original sayings was "every place we play is church." And in that sense, we feel a kind of continuity with that tradition: music is raising consciousness, as well, of course, as being entertainment. That, to me, is the core of the timeless tradition. That's what makes it the good stuff. In terms of the way we're approaching that, the way we're trying to do it, yes, we feel that we're always trying to do something new. 

AB: Yes, but is it the same thing you think you're trying to do? 

PL: Yes, as musicians for the millenia. 

AB: Well, not all: there are people who would draw a line and say: With Bach, he was doing it for the glory of God, and with Wagner, for self-expression. 

PL: But that has nothing to do with the way it's received by the listener. 

AB: Doesn't it? 

PL: Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn't. I can listen to Bach, and feel part of his, part of that spirit, to the glory of God. I also feel the same thing in Wagner, because even though it's a well-known fact that Wagner was the biggest ego that ever lived, the nature of music itself allows that to be transcended. 

AB: Oh yes...he may have got to the right place by the wrong route!

PL: But who are we to care? Why should we care? The result is what counts.

AB: As listeners, I don't think we should care. As practitioners, you ought to know what the right route is.

PL: Well, the right route for us is not the same as...if Wagner hadn't been such an egoist, I don't think he could have created, almost single-handedly, modern music.

(by Andrew Brown, from Spiral Light 25, Feb 1992)

More interviews - on the site: 

Grateful Dead Sources: May 1970: Phil Lesh Interview ("Dead On Arrival," Melody Maker) 

Grateful Dead Sources: Spring 1971: Phil Lesh Interview (from Hank Harrison, The Dead Book) 

Grateful Dead Sources: September 1974: Phil Lesh Interview ("Conversation with Phil Lesh," ZigZag) 

Grateful Dead Sources: March 1981: Phil Lesh Interview ("Reddy Kilowatt Speaks!", Comstock Lode)

- & in print: 

David Gans, "Phil Lesh: Still Searching For 'It'" & "The Pre-Dead Days In Phil's Own Words," Golden Road 2, Spring 1984 - drawn from 1981-82 interviews, reprinted in different form in Conversations with the Dead (along with 1983 followups) *

Blair Jackson, "We Want Phil!", Golden Road 23, Summer 1990 - reprinted in Goin' Down the Road

Blair Jackson, "In Phil We Trust," Dupree's Diamond News 28, Spring 1994 - reprinted in The Grateful Dead Reader

* APPENDIX

The '81/82 interviews with Gans were printed in a different order in Golden Road & Conversations with the Dead. Some bits were only used in Golden Road and were left out of the book, so I'll post the "outtakes" here.

Gans: "Our talk had to do with...Phil's interests in 20th century classical music, jazz, and Beethoven. This conversation was punctuated with remarks like, 'To hear concrete examples of this music we're talking about, you really ought to come up to the house some time.' I did...and Lesh played selections by Varese, Schoenberg, Beethoven, Coltrane - and the Grateful Dead... Aside from an occasional audition of a Grateful Dead live tape - usually to resolve an argument or illustrate a point - there's only one recording of rock music I've ever heard among the Miles Davis, Wagner and Berio in my visits to Phil's: Layla... 

"Lesh is a strong-willed, opinionated sumbitch, but on the whole good-natured and outgoing. His enthusiasm for music - and for the Grateful Dead - is catching, and he's proved to be a good teacher."

On Phil's peak experiences:

"The only two things I've found that are like the Grateful Dead were Formula I Grand Prix racing...watching it as a spectator. The other one was the launch of a spaceship. I went to the last Apollo launch, in Florida. I bugged out on a Blues for Allah mix and went to the launch. Those are the three things that have impressed me the most in my entire life, with the possible exception of the Brahms First when I was four years old."

[This was probably the Apollo launch on 7/15/75.]

On playing in the '60s: 

"It's even a testament to Bill Graham. He gave us the gigs, an awful lot of gigs. For a while we played one weekend for Chet Helms and one weekend for Bill [back and forth]... If you look at the programs for some of those gigs...how would you feel having to follow Miles Davis? And that was one of Miles' hottest bands, too. There were some amazing bills, man, and the good shit did come to town: Count Basie played the Fillmore Auditorium, Bill Graham Presents. Anyway, that was then."

On not playing well:  

"It depends on the context, and the context can include everything from the astrological lineup to what I ate before the gig, or what so-and-so ate before the gig, or whether Mickey, for instance, over-exercised that day. There are so many variables." 

Gans: I don't think I've ever seen it where you were totally into it and the band wasn't, but there have been times when you were not riding on it but the rest of the band would be - 

"Would have been if I'd been there?" 

Gans: Well, if you had been, it would have kicked it up to the next level. 

"What can I say?"

Gans: Garcia has said, 'When Phil's happening, the band's happening.' 

"He's always said that. He's never deviated from that... I've felt for a long time that there is a particular link between me and Jerry, and that sort of was borne out when I played with the Garcia Band." 

Gans: How did you like that? 

"I had a great time. I couldn't believe how much fun I had, because I got a chance to see Jerry in a context that was completely different.

"But in terms of that responsibility...I feel that I've come back a long way from where I was at the worst. I was only capable of knowing that I wasn't playing well, and that it was my own problems that were causing that. For me, it's a long, slow, and painful process. I don't know about that for anybody else. But I don't think that I've abdicated my responsibility in the slightest... I don't feel that I've slacked off - since that point, let's say..."

[Lesh played with the Garcia Band a few times in summer 1981. 1982 is often judged to be Phil's lowpoint with the Dead, so I wonder what earlier worst point he was thinking of.]

On trying to make 'it' happen when nothing's working onstage: 

"It's like a test pilot when his aircraft is out of control and screaming toward the desert floor at 1000 MPH: 'I've tried A! I've tried B! I've tried C! I've tried D! What do I do now?'"

But: "When 'it' is happening, I don't have to think about what I'm playing. I can't put a finger in the wrong place - can't do it. Of course, I could try, but I won't."

On playing small local theaters: 

"I love it! My dream is never to have to tour again. My dream is to play in a small hall in a situation where you can play quietly and not have somebody whistle a piercing whistle in the most tender and intimate part of the music. The bottom line is how loud the crowd is."

On out-of-control audiences: 

"What can I say? That's part of the Acid Test heritage. We carry that as baggage, or should I say a handicap like in Vonnegut. (Laughs) So many people are turned off by the audience, people who would ordinarily be able to dig the music if they could. They're turned off - some guy's puking over the seat next to him..."

On "time-warp" comments about the fans from critics: 

"The surface of things is always going to be real obvious to anybody who's looking only at the surface. So it's okay - I understand why people say 'time warp.' I also understand why the young kids who come to our shows, the younger siblings or children of the original Deadheads, feel like...this is one way to get into it, probably the way to get into it without feeling weird. It's a normal thing, when you're going to get into the mode of whatever consciousness everybody is into. And I'll bet that the kids, when they first come to a Grateful Dead show - like they get dragged in and somebody shoves some acid down their throat - they don't come in their tie-dyed t-shirts, necessarily. I see a lot of kids in the audience with button-down shirts. I don't think it matters, really... I think that some people will come to the Grateful Dead show and if they dig it, they'll be high enough to understand that they don't necessarily have to wear tie-dyed t-shirts and act like hippies."