This previous Friday, the bassist of The Grateful Useless, Phil Lesh, handed away at age 84. Virtually immediately the tributes poured in, most recognizing that Lesh wasn’t your ordinary bassist. As Jon Pareles wrote within the New York Occasions, Phil Lesh held songs “aloft.” His “bass strains hopped and bubbled and constantly conversed with the guitars of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. His tone was sphericaled and unassertive whereas he eased his means into the counterlevel, virtually as if he had been supposeing aloud. [His] playing was essential to the Useless’s particular gravity-defying lilt, sharing a collective mode of rock momentum that was teasing and probing, never bluntly coercive.”
My first encounter with the Grateful Useless got here once I was 16 years outdated. I vividly remember the man who performed bongos on my good friend’s head once we arrived on the present. I additionally remember the spinners journeyping on acid, dancing down the halls and short-circuiting my little thoughts. However the concert itself stays solely a hazy memory. And certainly the artistry of Lesh, Garcia, Weir, and the drummers was misplaced on me. Solely years later, did all of it begin to click on. That’s once I dialed into the Barton Corridor concert at Cornell (Might 8, 1977) and encountered Lesh’s bass strains at first of “Scarlet Begonias.” When you hear them, they’re arduous to shake. The video above zooms into that performance, exploring the development of Lesh’s bass playing by means ofout the spring of ’77. The subsequent video down helps you to hear the complete Barton Corridor performance of “Scarlet Begonias” in all of its glory.
When others attempt to capture what made Phil, Phil, they’ll feature another beloved present–Veneta, OR (6/27/72). Beneath, you possibly can hear isolated tracks of Phil’s bass work on “Bertha” and “China Cat Solarflower/I Know You Rider.” (Click on the hyperlinks within the prior sentence to listen to Lesh and the band perkinding the songs collectively–so you possibly can hear how the bass ties in.) Educated in free jazz and avant-garde classical music, Lesh infused rock with the influences of Coltrane, Mingus, and Stravinsky–to not malestion others. And, with that, the bass was never the identical.
For anyone needing to get further into the Phil Zone, learn his excellent memoir Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Useless.
Bertha
China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider
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