Features

Phil Lesh Goes There and Back Again (Relix Revisited)

From there, you went and played with tons of people. You played with the Little Feat guys, you played with Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady…

Phil: At one point I had seven sets of three-day rehearsals with different personnel, just trying to create a pool of musicians that could come and go, according to various scheduling situations. It worked well for a while, until it got to be really counterproductive in that [with] the amount of energy it took to teach all the new people coming in the basic tunes, there was never really enough time or energy left to expand the repertoire. At that point, I started thinking about having a group that would stay together for a while, and the group I have now sort of fell together.

In your shows, you focus effort on furthering the mission of organ transplants and encouraging people to become organ donors.

Phil: If you need an organ, or someone you love needed an organ and one was available, would you accept it? Of course you would. Well, fair is fair. If you’re willing to accept it, then you should be willing to be a donor, as well.

It’s a weird experience, to be in the middle of a rock concert and everybody’s yelling “Whoo!” and then you bring it down and talk about organ donations.

Phil: It’s a slice of reality because, hey, if there hadn’t been an organ donor somewhere… About a year and three months after the transplant, we got a letter, written to all the recipients, from [my donor’s] mom. The thing she said in her letter was, “Don’t let anybody you know do anything on wheels without a helmet.” It was terribly moving, because we found out more about him. My donor told his mom (six months before his death) that if anything happened to him, he wanted his organs to go to somebody. His name’s Cody and my new album is dedicated to him.

Did you talk to David Crosby while you were sick?

Phil: Oh, yeah! As soon as he heard I was having liver problems, he was right there. He was a brick, and [artist] Stanley Mouse, too. Both of those guys have had liver transplants and they were like pillars for me. In fact, David and I compare scars. I think mine’s prettier.

Do you feel like a different person than before?

Phil: There’s a part of somebody else in me, and I’m the host for this personality that’s part of somebody else’s spirit. It’s very subtle, intangible, but there’s something that’s different. “Symbiosis” is the term, where two distinct organisms work together to survive.

After you were sick, business issues caused problems among you and your Dead mates. Was that tempered by things that were the bullshit that fell away and the things that were important?

Phil: The thing about any organization, or like any organism I should say, like the Grateful Dead, is that it’s made up of committed, creative, passionate individuals, all of whom have highly developed and strong opinions about everything. When we were a working band, all of that individuality was channeled into a common goal: to make the music. When the band was no longer a performing entity, it really devolved into a corporation, then that individuality started manifesting itself in different ideas about how to do things. I found myself on the opposite side of the table from everybody else. I said, “Okay,” and I went my own way and developed my own musical identity. So did each of the guys in the Grateful Dead. They all have their own bands, they’re all making music in the way they want to. I think it’s a good thing. It’s more diverse.

The wedge seemed to have been the deal to digitize the Vault for public consumption.

Phil: I felt that we should deal with the Vault ourselves and management and the remaining band members felt that they should involve investors, take it public, make a whole big separate corporation thing out of it and I just disagreed. In any event, it never happened. We finally all got together – because of whatever had been going on was not working – and said, “We’ve got to change this. We’ve got to do something.” We started out playing music together. Bobby and I got together and played last summer RatDog opened for us and Bob sat in with my band and it was really quite nice. We had some good times playing music together. I wanted to reopen everything on that level, on a “let’s make music” level. We’re also talking about the business, and hopefully, starting to clear up some of the unfinished business.