“A super live-wire”: the Grateful Dead member Jerry Garcia was “worlds apart” from
Before there was the Grateful Dead, there was The Warlocks, their first iteration puzzle-pieced together from a jug band and a bluegrass band, driven by Jerry Garcia’s banjo.
The Warlocks found one of their final puzzle pieces in Phil Lesh, then a radio station engineer at KFPA in Berkeley, California, with a secret, brilliant ear for music. “When I met Phil, he was a lunatic, classical composer,” Garcia recalled, appearing at MTV Studios in 1983. “He had a little place in Berkeley [and] a card table that had orchestra scoring paper… and he was writing this thing for four orchestras – no piano or anything. He had perfect pitch [and] just pulled the notes out of his head.”
The two musicians first crossed paths a few years before the Grateful Dead even formed as a proper group, seeing each other among the same social circles in California. “We were friends; we weren’t musically involved with each other,” Garcia said. “But then, I ran into him again when The Warlocks had started, and there was my old pal, Phil. Now, he was driving a truck for the post office and a hippie!”
Remembering Lesh as “the most knowledgeable guy I’ve ever known,” when it came to music, Garcia was immediately intrigued. “Super live-wire, Phil was, when I first met him,” he described. “So, we hit it off like sparks.” Garcia performed on the radio station’s Midnight Special show, at Lesh’s invitation, and in turn, Lesh began to frequent The Warlocks’ early gigs, travelling within the San Francisco Bay Area.
“At the time, that was my folkie period, so he liked the music I was playing, my little blues tunes and folk songs and stuff,” Garcia remembered. “So, he engineered this hour-long program I did for that radio show. And that was kind of our first musical connection, ‘cause we were worlds apart, musically.”
Then, Garcia turned an invitation towards Lesh, noticing the potential harnessed within the bassist’s extensive knowledge, with a question of, “Hey, man, how would you like to play bass in the band?”
“I knew that with Phil, he had so much talent and he knew everything there was to know about music, so the structure of rock ‘n’ roll was certainly no problem for him,” Garcia explained. “All I had to do was tell him how the bass was tuned, and two weeks later, he played his first gig. Basically, he’s invented the instrument as he’s gone along.”
Lesh’s lack of “formal” training on the bass was a blessing in disguise: the bass was a clean canvas for Lesh to work with, and rather than pulling inspiration from the traditions of rock ‘n’ roll, he favoured Bach’s counterpoint, while looking to two Jacks – Casady, of Jefferson Airplane, and Bruce, of Cream – as contemporary pillars. Lesh had also extensively trained in composition, which gave him a classical training that yielded a reinvention of the bass entirely.
“I wanted to play in a way that heightened the beats by omission, as it were, by playing around them, in a way that added harmonic motion,” Lesh wrote in his 2005 memoir, Searching for the Sound. “In other words, to contrast and complement.”
“I mean, he’s a guy who’s invented a way to play it, and in fact, now he’s got a six-string instrument, which is his own invention, and it’s completely unique,” Garcia enthused, referencing Lesh’s famous adoption of a six-string bass, much ahead of his time.
Lesh’s talents were so undeniable that they immediately caught the attention of the Grateful Dead’s cult-like following, the Deadheads, who unofficially began designating the area directly in front of Lesh’s bass amps as the so-called “Phil Zone” at their live shows, allowing them to be fully immersed in the sonic vibrations. Lesh and Garcia may have been “worlds apart,” in Garcia’s mind, but their talents coalesced in a way that changed the definition of live music forever.
