Phil Lesh, founder of the Grateful Dead and influential bassist, dies at the age of 84

Lesh’s death was announced on his Instagram account. Lesh was the oldest and one of the longest-living members of the band that defined the sound of acid rock emerging from San Francisco in the 1960s.

Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed away peacefully this morning. He was surrounded by family and full of love. “Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and left a legacy of music and love,” a statement on Instagram read in part.

The statement did not provide a specific cause of death, and attempts to contact officials for additional details were not immediately successful. Lesh had previously survived bouts with prostate cancer, bladder cancer and a liver transplant in 1998, brought on by the debilitating effects of a hepatitis C infection and years of heavy drinking.

Lesh’s death comes two days after MusicCares named the Grateful Dead Person of the Year. MusicCares, which helps music professionals in need of financial and other assistance, listed the Leshs Unbroken Chain Foundation among its other philanthropic initiatives. The Dead will be honored in January at a pre-Grammy benefit gala in Los Angeles.

Although he kept a relatively low profile in the public eye, rarely giving interviews or speaking to audiences, fans and other band members recognized Lesh as a key member of the Grateful Dead, whose thunderous parts on six-string electric bass provided a great counterpoint to the lead guitarist. Thrilling solos from Jerry Garcia and anchoring the band’s famous marathon performances.

“When Phil happens, the band happens,” Garcia once said.

Drummer Mickey Hart called him the group’s intellectual who brought the thinking and skills of a classical composer to a five-chord rock ‘n’ roll band.

Lesh credits Garcia with teaching him to play bass in the unconventional lead guitar style for which he became famous, mixing thunderous arpeggios with snippets of spontaneously composed orchestral passages.

Fellow bassist Rob Wasserman once said that Lesh’s style set him apart from all the other bassists he knew. While most others were content to carve out time and perform the occasional solo, Wasserman found that Lesh was good enough and confident enough to lead the other musicians through the melody of the song.

He happens to play bass, but he’s more like a horn player, doing all these arpeggios and playing counterpoint all the time, he said.

Lesh began his long musical odyssey as a classically trained violinist, beginning with lessons in third grade. He began playing the trumpet at the age of 14, and as a teenager he became second principal of the California Symphony Orchestra in Oakland.

However, he largely put both instruments aside and drove a mail truck and worked as an audio engineer at a small radio station in 1965, when Garcia recruited him to play bass in the fledgling rock band The Warlocks.

When Lesh told Garcia he didn’t play bass, the musician asked, “Didn’t you play the violin?” When he agreed, Garcia told him: You’re welcome, man.

Armed with a cheap four-string instrument that his girlfriend had bought him, Lesh sat down for a seven-hour lesson with Garcia, following his advice to tune the strings of his instrument an octave lower than the bottom four strings of Garcia’s guitar. Garcia then released him into the wild, allowing him to develop a spontaneous playing style that would follow him for the rest of his life.

Lesh and Garcia frequently swapped leads, often spontaneously, while the band as a whole often engaged in long experimental jazz-influenced jams during live shows. As a result, even well-known Grateful Dead songs like Truckin’ and Sugar Magnolia rarely sounded the same for two shows in a row, inspiring loyal fans to go to show after show.

“It’s always fluid, we just figure it out as we go,” Lesh said with a laugh during a rare interview with The Associated Press in 2009. You can’t carve these things in stone in a rehearsal room.

Phillip Chapman Lesh was born on March 15, 1940, in Berkeley, California, the only child of Frank Lesh, an office equipment mechanic, and his wife, Barbara.

In later years, he said that his love for music arose from listening to the New York Philharmonic on his grandmother’s radio. One of his earliest memories was hearing the great German composer Bruno Walter conduct this orchestra during Brahms’ First Symphony.

The musical influences he often cited were not rock musicians, but composers such as Bach and Edgard Varese, as well as jazz greats such as John Coltrane and Miles Davis.