Phil Lesh Didn’t Hold Songs Down. He Lifted Them Higher.

 

 

"For all their free-form interludes, the Dead’s songs had clear landmarks and structures — some of them far trickier than the band’s nimble performances would let on. Lesh could stick to a riff, as he dutifully did in the intro to “Touch of Grey,” the Dead’s only Top 10 (and only Top 40) single. But when the verse arrived, he was footloose again: nudging, scurrying, syncopating from below. His bass lines held hints of Bach, jazz, bluegrass, blues, Latin music and far more, as he sought out new interstices each time through a song.

“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,” he wrote in his memoir. “I wanted to play in a way that moved melodically but much more slowly than the lead melodies sung by the vocalists or played on guitar or keyboard. Contrast and complement: Each of us approached the music from a different direction, at angles to one another, like the spokes of a wheel.”"

read article by Jon Pareles

Phil Lesh Didn’t Hold Songs Down. He Lifted Them Higher. – DNyuz