Features

Furthur’s Origin Story: Dead Behind, Furthur Ahead (Relix Revisited)

Photo by Jay Blakesberg

By the time that Furthur took the stage for the first time at Oakland, Calif.’s Fox Theatre on September 18, 2009, the music was already advancing toward a zone that befits the band’s moniker. Furthur debuted with an declaratory jam, which then segued into “The Other One,” “The Wheel” and then “Jack Straw”—a sequence that demonstrated the new group’s facility for dense improvisation balanced by an affinity to lock into a more playful groove.

“On any given night, we make a ferocious amount of music,” Weir explains. “We have lot of firepower in this band and everybody listens as hard as they play. My biggest criticism is that from time to time people can get too busy—a little too notey—although that’s to be expected from a band of guys with the kind of facility that we have. But I don’t think that’s going to get you to heaven. The songs are going to get you to heaven, not the playing.”

To this end, the Fox Theatre run also offered something that the preceding Dead tour had not: a new Phil Lesh composition, “Welcome to the Dance.”

“I think it says something that right away in our first three shows, we were already playing original material,” Kadlecik observes. “At this point, we have almost an album’s worth of material we are playing in the first year of the band’s history and it doesn’t show any sign of letting up.”

Lesh affirms, “I’m trying to bring in new originals as fast as I can and Bob is also. I don’t work very fast unfortunately but we’re both committed to it. I’m also searching out some cool covers.”

One recent songwriting collaborator is someone Lesh has known for quite some time—his younger son Brian (currently a Princeton undergrad and fronting his own group, Blue Light River). “Brian’s lyrics have always struck me as being unusually mature and thoughtful,” says the elder Lesh. “There was this one tune I was having trouble finalizing, so I made a little demo recording of it and asked if maybe he could think up some lyrics for it and maybe change the sequence of events around it a little bit. So he took that on and it came out beautifully [“The Mountain Song” which can be heard on this issue’s CD sampler]. He also wrote some lyrics for an arrangement of an Ola Belle Reed tune called ‘High on a Mountain.’”

The bassist also speaks with reverence of a performance this past summer at one of Levon Helm’s Midnight Rambles, where Brian and his elder son Grahame, a recent Stanford grad with his own group, Maiden Lane, joined him. “It was the most awesome feeling,” says the proud father. “I think the most moving part of it was singing together because siblings have familial voices that blend really neatly. It was always in the back of my mind that maybe it could happen but now that it is happening, it’s better than I could imagine. It almost seemed like that could be the future.”

As for the future of Phil & Friends, Lesh acknowledges that Furthur’s development hasn’t precluded it but “I’m having such a fun time touring with Furthur and playing with those guys that I haven’t given it a lot of thought. There are some intriguing options that are starting to present themselves but I’m always one for allowing things to happen in an organic, natural way rather than trying to push them in any direction. So I’m just waiting to see what’s going to come up.”