Phil Lesh Dies: Grateful Dead Bassist Was 84

Phil Lesh, the bassist and founding member of the ultimate San Francisco jam band The Grateful Dead, died today. He was 84.

His death was announced on his official Instagram page.

“Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed peacefully this morning,” the Instagram statement reads. “He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.”

Born Philip Chapman Lesh on March 15, 1940, in Berkeley, California, Lesh played the bass for the Dead from the band’s launching in 1965 through its break-up in 1995. He continued playing and touring with his own project, Phil Lesh and Friends, and in 2009 embarked on a five-year musical venture called Furthur with his former Dead bandmate Bob Weir.

Though Lesh hadn’t been touring as exhaustively in recent years, he continued to perform with family members as late as this year.

Lesh was attending – briefly – the University of California, Berkeley in 1961 when he met the future Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten, and soon enough met a young banjo player named Jerry Garcia. By 1964 Lesh was recruited by Garcia to join his new band The Warlocks, which was in need of a bass player. Despite the fact that Lesh played violin and trumpet, he signed on and would remain so until the Dead’s dissolution following Garcia’s death in 1995.

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The Dead instantly became one of the leading bands of the burgeoning San Francisco Psychedelic Music scene, along with The Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish and The Charlatans. The bands and the San Francisco sound would reach international fame with the success of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. 

The Dead, in particular, would go on to have a fiercely devoted and long-lived fandom, even as the band didn’t enjoy the radio success of the Airplane or Big Brother until 1987’s surprise hit Touch of Grey.

Still, fueled by Lesh’s bass lines and, at least in the early years of the group, his high vocal harmonies, the Dead would develop a large repertoire of fan favorites like “Friend of the Devil,” “Ripple,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Casey Jones,” “Sugar Magnolia,” and, with Lesh on lead vocals, “Unbroken Chain.” Lesh co-wrote some of the band’s most beloved and enduring songs, “Truckin’,” “Box of Rain,” “Dark Star” and “Cumberland Blues.”

In its most celebrated ’60s line-up, the band featured Lesh on bass, Garcia on lead guitar, Bob Weir on rhythm guitar, Bill Kreutzmann (and later Mickey Hart) on drums and, until 1972, keyboard player Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. With McKernan’s departure (he died the following year), keyboard duties were assumed by Lesh’s old college friend Constanten.

The Dead was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

After the Grateful Dead broke up, Lesh participated in various related bands including The Dead and The Other Ones, as well as his own band Phil Lesh and Friends. He often performed with his sons Grahame and Brian in a group he called the Terrapin Family Band.

In 2005, Lesh published his memoir Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead.

Lesh had suffered ill health over the years, including Hepatitis C and, in 2006, prostate cancer. In more recent years he was treated for bladder cancer and underwent back surgery.

Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.