Phil Lesh :
All in the Music
We live in a time that experiences historical watersheds with startling rapidity. For instance, it is not quite half a century ago when the shackles of American Puritanism were, if not broken, loosened. Don't believe me? I invite any inter-racial couple to walk down any street in the 1950's. There are parts of our nation where the Constitution was considered voluntary until the National Guard stopped by. Teachers had to sign loyalty oaths.
Is it possible to argue that music changed the world? Maybe not, but it certainly provided the rallying point for the most significant period of American social evolution and discourse. In small pockets around the nation, people began to appear who thought that exercising freedom was as important as dying for it. The Haight - Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco was one of these. For whatever reason the attention given to that place at that time provided a global audience for the ideas formulating there- ideas imbedded in music. The Grateful Dead was aware that an entire psychic landscape could be invoked by music. Indeed, they felt it was their duty to try to sonically blast their way out of the straightjacket of the vacuous post-war era; a time that banned author Henry Miller identified as the "air conditioned nightmare".
Break out they did, with a vengeance. Touring more or less constantly for 30 years, they served as ambassadors of the counter culture even in the hostile territory of the Reagan Years, thereby preserving a world-view that almost certainly would have been crushed otherwise. They also became the most popular touring band in the history of the world.
You get a sense of talking to a participant of history when you talk to Phil Lesh, though he is very much in the present. It is evident from the moment he opens his mouth that his primary goal in life, even to this day, is to share significance and good vibes through music. This is equally obvious in the way he manages his current project, Phil Lesh and Friends. He will find a way to coax people who should be headlining their own tours onto his bus. They will not regret joining his quest for the ultimate sound.
TP: You've always been a champion of avant-garde music. Was it ironic to find yourself in an immensely popular band?
PL: There was a taste of that, yes. Although the good part was that we were able to incorporate some of our avant-garde technique and approach into rock music, which was one of the most attractive features of what the Grateful Dead were doing. Everybody in the band was open to that.
TP: You can't say that it was mainstream either, because what it did was suck an entire generation out of the mainstream.
PL: That was our fondest hope. Mainstream is what it is. It can get very predictable because of its broad appeal and there are so many more limitations on it, really, on this so-called "mainstream" art.
TP: Do you ever see a time when an entire generation is going to get sucked out of the harness again?
PL: That's something that's been on my mind a lot lately because I see a lot of similarities between this period of time that we're living in right now and the early '60s. I don't think there's as much desire to find an alternative as before. People, especially young people, I hate to say it, are resigned to the "business as usual part." I don't think there's really the drive or a demand for any kind of expanded spiritual experience that there was back then.
TP: Do you see class system enforcement kind of facilitating that?
PL: I suppose you could look at it that way, in the sense that the privileged are interested in maintaining that status and the way to do that is to go to the good school, get the good job, fall right into the mainstream progression of life, which is a little bit rewarding in it's own way. It's disappointing that its' like, "let's make a lot of money, and I've got mine."
TP: Now in your book-and I was impressed the way you did this- you very casually drew a straight line from the romantic poets through the beats and into contemporary counter-culture. There is a contemporary counter-culture, but it almost looks like it's the descendants of the initial member's counter-culture. We're seeing a lot of second-generation hippies these days.
PL: Yes, I see a lot of that at my shows. It's very gratifying to see that there are young people who see the vacuum at the heart of our culture and are searching for an alternative path. But I don't see that as a movement. I see that as individuals who are striking out essentially on their own and they are finding community at concerts and other places, I guess. But it's just not the same. That doesn't seem to embrace a wide consensus. Someone else was asking me, "what happened to the values of that time?" My feeling is that they live on in individual hearts and individual consciousness all over. There's sprinkled all over like pepper and salt. There doesn't seem to be a desire to band together and stick your head up in the line of fire, you know what I mean?
TP: The Grateful Dead was in large part responsible for keeping as much of that vibe that is still around alive.
PL: I won't deny that. In fact, I'm kind of part of it.
TP: What do you think went into preserving that aura, that sort of sacred space?
PL: People need community and they need a little bit of danger. They need a little bit of adventure and excitement. The Grateful Dead were able to provide that in a setting which was essentially a closed loop, and it was on the whole a very safe environment to explore certain areas of consciousness and being together in a group that you had never met before, and being taken on a journey, an artistic journey where the outcome is not predictable. Or rather, the details of the journey and the actual points of repose or of access are not predictable, but the outcome is generally positive. Joseph Campbell likened it to a Dionysian ritual. And it also resembles the journey of the hero.
TP: He also postulated some sort of yin-yang of Apollonian/Dionysian cultures. It must be strange to be one of the key representatives of the twentieth century genesis of Dionysian thought.
PL: It was kind of like a rebirth in the '60s, wasn't it?
TP: Exactly.
PL: Because there wasn't really a lot of it, at least not in the west. Before '65, say. So yeah, it's definitely the minority viewpoint in this time. I don't know if there's ever been balance, culturally. It's usually either one way or the other the pendulum usually swings back and forth.
TP: It's almost like the Dionysian influence only emerges when fascism reaches a critical mass.
PL: Exactly. I really feel that strongly. In other words, the cold, clear-eyed rationality; look where it's got us? The polar bears are becoming extinct. The planet is starting to boil. Humans are not going to survive this if we don't turn it around. That kind of thinking has painted us into a corner, and the thing about it is, that's really served to isolate us not only from nature and from our roots in the cosmos, but from each other, which is the worst thing that could possibly happen. If we can't work together to change things, we're well and truly screwed. That's one of the things about the Grateful Dead, and generally the rock music phenomenon no matter who was playing it. This was the message: "Look what you can do when you cooperate on a very high creative level without worrying about who gets the credit or who makes the money."
TP: That's the key, right there.
PL: I agree, yeah.
TP: I think the Grateful Dead is the only band who ever consciously attempted to induce altered states of consciousness through sound.
PL: Yes, it's true that we did do that deliberately. I can't say that no one else ever did it, but whether it was subconscious or accidental; I mean, for sure there have been lots of great musicians who have altered consciousness through the ages. You can look back and look at Bach, say, and his church music. His music was very consciously designed to alter consciousness in very specific ways relating to the sermon of the week.
TP: All the way back there appears to be a tradition that ended in the nineteenth century, I'm guessing, of using music for almost Gnostic purposes.
PL: Well, what is it's purpose, you know? That's the question. For me, it's a way of knowledge. It's a way to communicate with the infinite. To me, music is my religion.
TP: The act of creation itself emulates divinity.
PL: Yes, it does, but only if it's produced in a selfless way.
TP: The ego is not necessarily a good companion for creativity.
PL: Not necessarily, I agree. That's why I've always felt that the highest achievement that we were able to be part of, and still can do today, is when the magic is really happening on stage or even in the studio, there's nobody there. There are no humans, no personalities or egos involved, it's only the music.
TP: The lineup changes on Phil and Friends periodically. Does it get harder or easier at times to induce the collective consciousness?
PL: It varies. It varied in the Grateful Dead, even with the same personnel. Basically when I change a lineup, it sort of involves going back to the beginning. Stripping it down just to the songs. "Okay, this is the song, this is how the song goes. This is like the abstract template for the song. Now what are we going to do with it? How are we going to elaborate this abstraction and bring it into collective consciousness in a new way?" That's one of the reasons I do mix it up, it's so that I can bring different perspectives into this music. That being said, however, the plan is to keep this band together for at least a year so that we can develop this thing.
TP: Your fans, you've always been a lot closer to them than perhaps the vast majority of people who become really ubiquitous. Most immensely popular bands start to see their fan as "other." That didn't happen with you.
PL: No, no, the audience and the community, that's us. That came out of out of that first flush of wonder and amazement, that realizing that there were so many people who were essentially us. They were just like us, they had the same dreams and hopes and desires, and it turned out we were all living together in the same small area of San Francisco. When we would go out to play for free in the park, and for dancing in the middle of a beautiful sunny day, it was so organic, it was just what we did. We weren't playing a concert; we weren't playing a "gig." We were going to church. And with the Grateful Dead, and now my band, traveling around and going to various places and setting up and playing music, it's like the old camp meetings that used to happen in the nineteenth century where people from a town or a city would go out into the country and camp together, and they would cook together, and they would leave all of their class stratifications behind, they would leave all of their wealth and poverty behind and they would be together in a different situation. They would leave their lives behind in order to be together and seek some kind of community. Basically it had a religious component to it. To us, to me, every place we play is church, is what I said.
TP: Wow, that is awesome. You're doing some work on 60's culture.
PL: I was teaching a class about the '60s in San Francisco at my son's high school. That was last year. I'm involved in producing and creating a, get this, a TV show about a fictional band that I'm creating with collaborators. I'm going to create the whole back catalogue of the band and their whole history and take them into our times in a kind of dramatic, comedic situation. There's going to be lots of music and I'm going to write all the soundtrack music for the show. It's actually starting to come together. That's a really exciting way for me to put more music out in the world that doesn't have to go through the recording industry.
TP: That's an exciting project.
Your specific method of playing bass, you're one of the three bass players that actually took the bass as an authentic instrument back when rock 'n roll was still being codified. You must see a lot of your influence around you.
PL: Yes and no. I think the influence I see is more general. It stems more from the Grateful Dead than from me particularly, in the whole jam band scene. It's kind of funny; it started really flowering after Jerry's death. It's really gratifying to see. You can't really imitate or derive things from the actual music that's played but what is so satisfying to me is that the whole jam-band phenomenon has evolved beyond musicians, picking up on the concept and the approach, the way of improvised music that was brought to rock 'n roll by the Grateful Dead and applying that to their own music. I see that everywhere from the newest jam bands to major artists actually applying this in their performances. That being said, the Grateful Dead did not originate this. We simply took was jazz musicians did and applied to rock 'n roll.
TP: True enough, but I see a certain elliptical style of bass playing that was not introduced into contemporary music until you did that.
PL: Yeah, I have to agree with that, but that's more a function of my consciousness or my way of looking at music than almost anything else. I never want to do anything in the standard way because that's already been done. So when I started playing with the band, at first of course it was very stratified and very rigid and kind of wooden because I was just sort of feeling my way. But musicians have a way of getting into the nuts and bolts of how music is made and refreshing it from time to time. I wanted to play the bass in a melodic way, in a contrapuntal way, which derives ultimately from Bach.
TP: I was going to say, Bach, Telemann.
PL: I had been a trumpet player before and a violin player before that and I just didn't want to plan. The only thing you could do would be to imitate McCartney or James Jamerson at that time. But of course, that being said, I was inspired greatly by masters like Scott LaFaro, and also Mingus.
TP: That's a completely different world.
PL: Yes, it is, but it's just the approach, you know? Mingus had that down-home, gutsy approach, and Scotty LaFaro had that high-flying melodic, oblongata approach. To hear him keep the groove going when he was playing some amazing melody behind the soloist, that was a revelation and so, like I said, we owe it all to jazz musicians.
TP: What are you hearing right now that's commanding your attention?
PL: I listen to a lot of jazz and classical music still. My man Jackie Greene is still rocking me out, and he's part of the band now.
TP: That's one thing I've noticed about Phil and Friends is, you go out and find people that really blow you away.
PL: What else is there?
TP: A lot of people, when they're putting their band together don't want to be blown away.
PL: Yeah, I know, because it's all about them. But in this case it's all about the music. Who can come in and serve the music, make it new? Make it something that had never been before?
TP: What kind of material do you have for this tour that will be particularly exciting for people who are checking you out?
PL: Well, we build everything on the Grateful Dead classics. First of all because that's what people want to hear. We can pull them in by doing the classic Grateful Dead material. Jackie's songs, for instance, are so beautiful and melodic and they fit so well in sequences with Grateful Dead material that we're going to be doing a lot of Jackie solos. We'll be doing a lot of covers. You know, some Dylans, the usual suspects, stuff that we like. We're doing a lot of band songs. And also, we're writing new material that we're hoping to bring into the repertoire as soon as we can. That's a new departure for PLF is that we're actually working on new material.
TP: In traditional style you're going to fine-tune it on the road, I'm assuming?
PL: Absolutely. I mean there's never enough rehearsal time. Everybody has a schedule and a life and a career of their own, so it's just gratifying that these great musicians are interested in playing this music and interested in playing this music and interested in taking it further. That's always what I've wanted to try to do was take it to another level each time. It's interesting because it's like branches on a tree. Every time we start up a new band, like I was saying earlier, we kind of go back to the trunk, then we grow some new branches. The new branches can go in any direction and that's mostly determined by the people who are now in the band.
TP: One thing I've noticed about Phil and Friends is that there are a lot of people out there covering the Dead. Some of them are amazing. But specifically, Phil and Friends has a way of retaining that authentic looseness that was hallmark to the way the Dead did things. Not sloppiness, but a sort of consistent looseness that let the sound flow outward rather than line up like ducks.
PL: That's a good way to describe it. That gets right to the core of what we want to do because the most significant magic happens in the moment when we'll be playing along and somebody throws out a little idea. It doesn't have to be a big shredding solo or anything. More often it's just some little rhythmic or melodic or textual idea. When that happens and the stars are in the right position, the whole band can pounce on this all of sudden it's like these doors open. It's like you're blasted into orbit and you see everything in a new perspective. The whole music just takes a left turn and goes off in another direction. To me that's exhilarating, and it's really the reason for living are those moments. What we try to do is create an atmosphere where those moments can happen. That's the core of what the Grateful Dead were doing and that's the thing that I took from the Grateful Dead and I try to expand really.
TP: You're certainly doing it.
TP: I expect there's going to be a lot of very happy people from this tour.
PL: I hope so because I'm looking forward to it. I'm going to have a great time.
