Features

Phil Lesh Goes There and Back Again (Relix Revisited)

It sounds like a lot of work is going into the album.

Phil: It’s like a coalescence of lighter materials that gravity pulls together to form a star. That’s sort of what this band is like to me. It’s been together now for about eighteen months and it’s amazing how each time we play, we raise the bar for ourselves. Part of that process has been creating new material. We all felt that this material was so strong that we wanted to put it out so people would know what it is, and so that when we played it in concert, they would have some grasp of it. They could sort of sit home and study it.

How do those two approaches differ? The approach of “Let’s let this song grow organically, live, into that it’s going to be, and then set it down in wax” or the idea of “Let’s make an object first and throw it out there and see what else it becomes?”

Phil: We’ve used both approaches. Grateful Dead, of course, always let the songs evolve live – sometimes for eight years or longer – before they’d be recorded. This material – my songs and one of Warren’s songs – were in rotation starting last spring so they evolved to a certain point but they also had a structure before we even started playing them. When we got into the studio, some of that had to change. Jimmy’s tune, “Again and Again,” we sort of Frankensteined it. We took it apart and put it back together in a different sequence than we had originally played. So we actually used more than those two approaches.

The technology informed the songwriting process.

Phil: We ended up using it as a compositional tool in several instances where we’d say, “Gee, this arrangement is not satisfying. It’s not entertaining me right here. What can we do?” So we would move things around and listen to the result and say, “Okay, that’s good there, let’s try this over here.” Then we’d go out and play it in that way. So everything you hear is not [only] the result of moving things around in [the digital recording program] ProTools, it’s the result of us learning or experimenting and then going out and playing that sequence, that arrangement, live. I was not fond of working in the studio in the past but this experience just makes me want to make more records.

It’s a different trip being in the studio with these guys than being in the studio with the Dead.

Phil: Very much so. Mainly, I have to say, because of the technology.

What was the day like when you found out Jerry had died?

Phil: I was taking my son to summer camp, and I got the call. I think my first reaction was “Well, now I can stay home with my kids.” As you can imagine, the news was not entirely unexpected. In fact, I think, subconsciously, we’d all been waiting for that call for about five years. In a way, he had been slipping away for quite a while so it wasn’t a surprise, it wasn’t a shock. It was just, well, finally – finally, the other shoe dropped. That’s not to say that I don’t think about this guy every day and I don’t miss him every day.

Did you know right away that that was the end of the band?

Phil: I think I probably knew we couldn’t go on as the Grateful Dead. It would not have been right, and everybody knew that.

Do you still feel his presence when you’re playing?

Phil: It’s not so much when I’m playing , but actually, when I was writing some songs last year, I definitely felt a connection. One of the songs sat up and said to me, “I’m a Robert Hunter song,” and this particular song was something where I felt I was channeling, in a way, a piece of Jerry’s harmonic sensibility, his sense of chord structure. I thought, “Wow, that’s neat. This sounds like Garcia a little bit in some places.” It sounds like the little quirks of harmonic motion that he would come up with.

You eventually went out as the Other Ones. Before that, it seemed like there was some feeling around for how the band would take shape.

Phil: My wife and I started a foundation, and Phil Lesh and Friends started out just doing benefits, drawing from this pool of musicians around the Bay Area familiar with Grateful Dead music. I got involved by playing a benefit over at the Ashkenaz with David Gans’ band, the Broken Angels, and I discovered there was this enormous pool of musicians who loved this music and were reinterpreting it every day. So I started doing it sort of on my own with some of these folks. Then at one point I did my Philharmonia benefit, and Bruce Hornsby came out and Bobby came out, and we sat in with David’s band at the after-party, and then they asked me about coming out on the road next year. I said, “Yeah, but let’s do a band because I don’t have a band of my own,”