On Friday (Oct. 25), Phil Lesh, the founding bassist for the Grateful Dead, passed away at age 84. Many music icons have been sharing tributes for the beloved musician, and now the surviving Grateful Dead members posted joint and separate eulogies as well.
“Today we lost a brother,” the joint statement on social media reads. It continues:
Our hearts and love go out to Jill Lesh, Brian and Grahame. Phil Lesh was irreplaceable. In one note from the Phil Zone, you could hear and feel the world being born. His bass flowed like a river would flow. It went where the muse took it. He was an explorer of inner and outer space who just happened to play bass. He was a circumnavigator of formerly unknown musical worlds. And more.
We can count on the fingers of one hand the people we can say had as profound an influence on our development — in every sense. And there have been even less people who did so continuously over the decades and will continue to for as long as we live. What a gift he was for us. We won’t say he will be missed, as in any given moment, nothing we do will be without the lessons he taught us — and the lessons that are yet to come, as the conversations will go on.
Phil loved the Dead Heads and always kept them in his heart and mind. The thing is… Phil was so much more than a virtuoso bass player, a composer, a family man, a cultural icon…
There will be a lot of tributes, and they will all say important things. But for us, we’ve spent a lifetime making music with Phil Lesh and the music has a way of saying it all. So listen to the Grateful Dead and, in that way, we’ll all take a little bit of Phil with us, forever.
For this is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon, long ago….
In Bob Weir’s statement, he reminisced on how Lesh “introduced me (and us) to the wonders of modern classical music, with its textures and developments, which we soon tried our hands at incorporating into what we had to offer.”
Mickey Hart wrote that Lesh was “bigger than life, at the very center of the band and my ears, filling my brain with waves of bass.” Bill Kreutzmann explained that Lesh “wasn’t just like a brother to me — he was like an older brother. A roommate. A bandmate. A mentor.”
Jerry Garcia’s family also shared a statement, writing that they “will miss his sharply dry humor, wry smiles and brilliant insights.”
Dead & Company’s John Mayer wrote, “He played bass in a singular way, climbing up and down the arrangements to give the songs and the players around him the feeling of flight.”
Trey Anastasio, who played with Phil Lesh & Friends and at the Fare Thee Well concerts, made a post commemorating their friendship, and on Friday he covered “Box Of Rain” — one of the Dead’s most beloved songs, written by Lesh — with Phish in Albany. Watch that below.
