Phil Lesh: Ya gotta have friends

Sidewalk: So, how you feeling?

Phil Lesh: I'm feeling great, thanks. Everything's moving smoothly, flowing perfectly well, yes.

SW: It seems kind of ironic that the Furthur Festival was scuttled because you might not have been well enough to make it, yet now you're the one going out on the road.

PL: As a matter of fact, I was planning on being up to it. Some people go back to work in six weeks. I took four months. It's not unusual at all. I just wanted to wait and see what the best situation could be.

SW: So on the "Phil Lesh and Friends" shows, do you hand-pick the bands?

PL: It's generally what I do; I look around and listen to people I haven't heard. So far it's been 
mostly kinda jam-band family members, as it were. That's one of the reasons I'm joining the summersessions tour. All those other bands – Gov't Mule, Galactic, String Cheese, moe — are all part of that jam-band subculture. It just seemed like a good fit, a good mix.

SW: The media take on the Dead's music has been "This is over." Yet you look at the numbers these bands and festivals can pull, and it's clearly not over.

PL: I guess that's what we were all hoping — that the goodwill we'd built up over the years and the strength of the material would allow us to elaborate on that and interpret the material in new ways and generally continue to put out the music. The numbers of people coming to see these shows is just frosting on a cake, the bonus.

SW: You've nearly sold out the two nights here at Red Rocks, which is a pretty big deal…

PL: "Yeah, I'm looking forward to that very much. Red Rocks is one of my favorite venues on earth. In fact, it's my favorite outdoor venue, next to the pyramids."

SW: Did you feel there wasn't a place for you in music? Was it a matter of confidence or direction? Is that why you didn't tour for a while?
 

PL: For one thing, I was grateful I didn't have to tour anymore for a while, so I could spend some time at home with my family. And then I just wanted to make some music, and I didn't really care if I toured or not. I still don't, to be perfectly honest with you; I can take it or leave it, as long as I can make music occasionally with the right people and do it well."

SW: Is life easier with the breakup of the band?

PL: In some ways, yes.

SW: Is it more of a normal life, more of a real life?

PL: I always tried to keep my real life right there with me. Especially after I had kids. My kids would come out on the road with us, so my family was there most of the time.

SW: Are you surprised by the strong support fans have given you?
 

PL: What Deadheads are is a community. What they do when they support us is support each other. They become closer together, and that's what they're all about. We're just an excuse for them to get together, really. I appreciate that, and I want to do everything I can to help them stay together and grow as a community.

SW: Do you feel you're kind of competing with yourself by allowing fans to put Dead MP3s on the Web?

PL: That's something that we're continually evolving our stance on. As far as I know, all we're allowing to be posted is our people's audience tapes. I don't have any control over those, and we gave up that control when we made the decision to allow people to tape.

SW: So do you just see this as tape-trading in a different form?
 

PL: Yes, exactly. As long as they don't charge for it and nobody advertises and there's no money changing hands, it's perfectly OK with us.

SW: Where do you draw the line – broadcasts, great-sounding soundboard tapes?

PL: MP3 is not great quality, so it doesn't bother me.

SW: Your bass playing has been compared to Paul McCartney's, where it's part of the song and feel of the music, not just rhythm or accompaniment. 

PL: My first musical experiences were in classical music, and the bass is very important in classical music in a melodic sense as well as harmonic underpinning and voice-leading, those kind of technical matters. I brought a little of that to the Grateful Dead, and, as a matter of fact, I made a conscious decision not to be a background player. I also came out of jazz music, and in jazz music, the bass functions in many different roles. I tried to bring all of that sensibility into the Grateful Dead. I felt that was one way we could make it unique. The other way was the collective improvisation sort of thing, which eventually spawned the whole jam-band syndrome.

SW: There's always been speculation among fans that you were frustrated in the band because of your classical training.

PL: Well, there's only so far that you can take those kinds of techniques in rock music. I just felt that the way I was playing was pretty much sufficient. We tried to use some related techniques in our segues and sequences and medleys we put together, and I'd always try to use key symbolism and little motifs to use as cues in the jams to take em in different directions. I still do that today.

SW: Has the demise of the Grateful Dead given you a different perspective on the music you made?

PL: I'm still performing the music at this point. I'm just performing it with different musicians and getting a different perspective on it, which is very interesting to me. Each musician is unique like each person is unique. When they play material that they didn't create themselves, they tend to bring their own perspective to it. The perspective I get from working with these other musicians is vastly different from what I got with the Grateful Dead. We're trying to interpret the material like it was a canon of work, like Shakespeare or Beethoven.

SW: Are you still the keeper of the Dead vaults?

PL: Sometimes, yeah. I'm just quality control. I just make sure that … Dick's thing (the "Dick's Picks" live series) is pretty independent. I don't pass judgment on what he puts out. Anything else that comes out, I'm pretty much just quality control. I pass on the mix, I pass on the quality of the performance.

SW: How did that fall to you?

PL: I was the one who was the most interested in preserving the quality of what we put out. There's a demand for that material, the old concert tapes. I just didn't wanna start putting it out haphazardly. In the Grateful Dead, the quality of the performance was variable. So I wanted to make sure that everything we put out was as high quality as it could be.

SW: So what's the next project?

PL: There's a box set planned for the fall.

SW: All unreleased stuff, or a career overview?

PL: It's gonna be a spectrum of stuff, some already released, some not. It's a retrospective in a sense. We're talking about four CDs now.

SW: Have you come across anything brilliant that's just gonna make people's jaws hit the floor when they hear it?

PL: Every note.

SW: Of course. But anything that has been dug out of hiding, rarities or anything?

PL: I really can't comment on that right now. We're still in the middle of looking for it.

SW: What else is coming up? Another Furthur Festival for 2000?

PL: No, we haven't really discussed anything like that. Personally, there's a possibility I'll be touring this fall; I'm not sure really when or where, but back East, probably. And I'm still working on my symphonic piece that involves Grateful Dead song themes and rhythms and stuff like that.

SW: When is that due?

PL: I've given myself a deadline of June 2000, but I don't know if I'm gonna make it or not. The main thing I have planned is my two sons are both Little League all-stars, so that's what I'm gonna be doing next spring. And I'll be doing shows at the Warfield from time to time.
 

Photo/image credits: Courtesy of the Grateful Dead Original article on Sidewalks (Denver) NO LONGER AVAILABLE