Phil Lesh & Friends Go Greene

By: Tim Dwenger

Phil Lesh & Friends by Blakesberg

The music of The Grateful Dead has transcended decades and generations to become some of the most enduring music produced by one band in the history of rock & roll. For 30 years The Dead jammed and noodled their way through shows, inadvertently creating an entire rock subgenre that continues to grow and thrive 12 years after the band officially parted ways.

While it’s true that The Grateful Dead name was retired in 1995, when legendary lead guitarist and vocalist Jerry Garcia passed away, the music has lived on through the various surviving members. Bob Weir‘s RatDog is actively touring, Mickey Hart and his various projects still interpret the material and bassist Phil Lesh has done his part to keep the flame burning by enlisting various “Friends” over the past eight years to help him in his quest to reinvent the songs and spirit of The Grateful Dead.

That quest has not come without its obstacles. Over the past 10 years Lesh has endured several serious widely publicized health problems. In 1998 he underwent a liver transplant and, more recently, surgery to combat prostate cancer. Both operations were completely successful and the bassist told JamBase in a recent interview from his home in Marin County, CA that he is feeling great these days. “I had the prostate surgery back in December and it’s going on nine months now and everything is just fine. My health is good, I’m working out, I’m building muscle, and everything is good right now,” says Lesh.

He says his family has been his rock. “Mostly I have to give the credit to my wife and my family for their support. My wife did the research to find the best possible people and institutions to do these surgeries and she has also really been keeping me healthy since our kids started coming. It is a lot easier to come back from surgery if the systems that weren’t screwed up are in pretty good shape,” Lesh chuckled.

Lesh & Greene by Blakesberg

While his family has remained the same for the past 20 or so years, Lesh’s “Friends” have included a virtual “who’s who” of the jam band music community including Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell from Phish, Paul Barrere and Billy Payne from Little Feat, Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks who currently play with The Allman Brothers, and more recently John Scofield and Ryan Adams. Though each incarnation Phil Lesh and Friends has produced some memorable musical moments but it has always been tough to get a band together that really gelled.

“It’s been kind of a roller coaster ride with lots of different musicians coming and going,” Lesh says. “We had ‘The Q’ [The Phil Lesh Quintet] which went for a couple of years, but it’s hard in the final analysis to work around everyone’s schedules. As a result, we decided to try and get a band together that we could work with a while. All the musicians in the current lineup have given us a commitment that they will be available to work with us for about the next year or so. It is really a relief to have those commitments and now we can really focus on taking the music to another level.”

The men who have signed on to work with Lesh are his longtime drummer John Molo, multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell, singer-songwriter Jackie Greene and Particle keyboardist Steve Molitz. This lineup debuted in late July at The Independent in San Francisco and drew rave reviews.

While Molitz has known Lesh for several years and has played with the bassist for a couple of one-off gigs, this is his first national tour as a “Friend” and Lesh is eager to show his fans what Molitz can bring to this group.

“Steve is a young guy with a whole different perspective ’cause he comes out of that electronica jam band scene. I’ve been wanting to integrate that aspect of jam band music into my band for a long time and Steve is the ideal person because he can play the root stuff on the regular keyboards and jam out, yet, when the moment is right, he can do the really spacey but still jammin’ kind of stuff,” says Lesh. “He played this amazing solo on ‘Unbroken Chain’ at Mountain Jam in New York this summer. It was a synthesizer thing that fit so perfectly that I kept thinking to myself, ‘Why have I waited so long to sneak this element in?”

The bluesy Jackie Greene is another relative youngster who’s recently joined Lesh. Greene has stepped into the spotlight and is handling many of the vocal duties as well as playing guitar and keyboards.

Continue reading for more on Phil Lesh & Friends…

It’s been kind of a roller coaster ride with lots of different musicians coming and going… All the musicians in the current lineup have given us a commitment that they will be available to work with us for about the next year or so. It is really a relief to have those commitments and now we can really focus on taking the music to another level. -Phil Lesh

“He’s a real find, this guy,” gushed Lesh. “Last year I heard a cut from his album American Myth on the radio and I said, ‘Whoa, who is that?’ So, I went to the radio station website and checked their playlist and saw it was Jackie Greene and I went out and got his record. I absolutely loved it. Everything about it was just so wonderful, the tunes, the singing, the guitar playing, the arrangement and the way the guitars interlocked with one another – all these great little ideas that were bubbling in the background. It was just delightful. I said something about the album in an interview and two months later I got an email from Jackie saying, ‘Wow, thanks for the great comments on our album, I’d love to meet you sometime.’ I was working on a couple of other projects where I wanted to collaborate with songwriters and we got together and it just clicked and we invited him to join the band. Fortunately, he jumped at the opportunity, which was really gratifying.”

Jackie Greene

After speaking with Greene and Lesh, it’s clear the two share a mutual admiration for each other and their friendship has really blossomed since that first meeting. “Phil and I have been hanging out a lot,” says Greene. “He’s a warm, amazing person and I can’t really say enough good things about him. He’s got a great family. You might think Rock Star Family’ but that’s not it at all. He’s got a regular, really nice family, and that’s refreshing. He’s one of the finest human beings I know.”

The project that began this friendship is a step out of the box for a man who’s made his living for more than 40 years performing live. Lesh is in the early stages of developing a television show, and while there is no definite production schedule at this time he is very excited about the project.

“It’s about a fictional rock band. We are going to invent the band and their back catalog and history. Then, we are going to catch up with them 10 years into their career,” Lesh says. “We are just getting some agreements together to start working on it, so it is all up in the air at this point. But, if it gets going it would be a new way to get the music out there and I would be free to write songs that don’t fit with The Grateful Dead. I could write punk songs or anything else I wanted to.”

While things are obviously still in the initial stages of development, Lesh and Greene spent some time at The Plant studio in Sausalito, CA earlier this year with Larry Campbell and John Molo recording some songs that may be used in the production.

Phil Lesh by Blakesberg

“It was the first time we had played music together and it was a lot of fun,” Greene says. “We did a couple of songs that I had written, some that [Lesh] had written and some were songs that Warren Haynes had written. I ended up singing all of them and it was just a good time. Phil didn’t make things feel very high pressure and it was just a great experience.”

After the sessions at The Plant, Greene, who grew up in California, spent the summer learning as much of The Dead’s material as he could in preparation for the fall tour. “Phil would load me down with a waist high stack of songs from the archives and just say, ‘Find ones that you really like.’ I was never a Deadhead and I’m kinda turning into one now because I’ve gotten to discover all this music that I never knew,” offers Greene. “I had all the big records growing up and I knew all the songs like ‘Casey Jones.’ I love those songs but I never got to know the more obscure ones. Now, I am finding that there a lot of songs I didn’t know that I like, so it is really fun.”

When relating the experience of playing with Lesh to his own career, Greene is very complimentary. “This has been such an inspiration to me as a songwriter because it is really difficult to find songwriters that I really like,” he says. “I am in the process of recording my next album and I just wrote a song that is totally Grateful Dead inspired. As we were recording it I realized that it is kinda ‘Scarlet Begonias.'” The album, Greene’s fifth full-length in his young career, is expected to hit shelves in February of 2008. In addition to his own songs it may feature a few written with his new songwriting partner. “Phil and I have started to write some songs together,” Greene revealed. “If we have enough time we might try to break some of those out on the tour this fall.”

Continue reading for more on Phil Lesh & Friends…

Phil would load me down with a waist high stack of songs from the archives and just say, ‘Find ones that you really like.’ I was never a Deadhead and I’m kinda turning into one now because I’ve gotten to discover all this music that I never knew. -Jackie Greene

Photo by Jay Blakesberg

Phil Lesh & Friends by Jay Blakesberg

Recently Greene released an EP entitled Small Tempest with his own band and a record with a band called The Skinny Singers. “The Skinny Singers is myself and my friend Tim Bluhm, who is the lead singer of a rock band called The Mother Hips. We’ve been friends for a while and we decided that we’d get together and form our own acoustic duo. It’s turned out to be more than just an acoustic thing and is now just about songs we’ve written together,” says Greene. “It started off as a fun thing for us because I am seen as the serious guy in my band and he is in his, as well. The Skinny Singers is kinda a goof that is fun and isn’t supposed to be taken too seriously. We really tried to make a record that just two people could do. It’s not chock full of instrumentation. It’s just the best it could be and the biggest it could sound with just two people doing it.”

In mid-September, The Skinny Singers played a four show CD release run that was highlighted by Phil Lesh joining the band at The Independent (read the review here). When Lesh took the stage he jokingly remarked, “I hope I am skinny enough to belong to this band.” The group ran through Greene’s original “Gone Wanderin'” before closing out the show with The Dead classics “Friend of the Devil,” “Ripple” and “Sugaree” to the delight of the intimate crowd.

Lesh & Greene by Jay Blakesberg

The sit-in came on the heels of Phil and Friends rehearsals for the fall tour, where Greene said things went very well and seemed easier than he had imagined they would. “I guess Phil must have noticed that my vocal range is almost identical to Jerry’s. We don’t have to change the keys or anything; it’s just natural for me to sing in that register,” Greene says. “I like a lot of the uptempo songs like ‘Bertha’ and ‘Deal,’ and I really like to sing the bluesy songs like ‘Speedway’ because I can just growl on it and play harmonica. It is just such a great song.”

In addition to focusing on the extensive Grateful Dead catalog, the band is breaking out several of Greene’s originals and a slew of new covers. “I’m letting Phil decide what songs of mine we are going play,” Greene says. “He’s picking tons of them, so we might be doing up to four or five a night, and it seems great because they fit right in.”

Another surprise for this tour is the addition of an acoustic set in select locations. “Jackie’s music and his playing really lend themselves to playing acoustically,” Lesh says. While he only confirmed that the band would be playing the stripped down third set at Red Rocks, there is much speculation that the band will break out the acoustic instruments for at least one more show on the tour. “It was an idea that we came up with because of the album Reckoning, and I just thought it would be such a great vibe to do a set like that on our tour,” says Greene. “Everybody was stoked on the idea, and I’m glad because I think a lot of The Dead songs work very well like that.”

Like Reckoning, Lesh’s recorded output for the past 20 years has mostly been confined to concert recordings with one notable exception. In 2002, at the height of “The Q,” Lesh decided the energy in the group was right to put some songs on tape. He led the group into the studio where they recorded the songs that were released as There and Back Again. The record featured several songs written by Lesh and longtime Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, as well as tracks composed by Warren Haynes and other band members. While There and Back Again is Lesh’s only studio recording since The Grateful Dead’s Built To Last came out in 1989, he did hint that maybe this new lineup would enter the studio together.

Phil Lesh by Jay Blakesberg

“A new album isn’t out of the question,” he says. “I haven’t made any definite plans, but we already worked together in the studio with this lineup, minus Steve [Molitz], on the TV project and it was very, very successful. We were able to do some really interesting work in a very short time. What it really depends on is how much new, original, material we can come up with between us.”

Whether or not they record an album, it will be exciting to watch this diverse group of musicians grow together as a band. As they learn more about each other’s playing styles the quality of the improvisation and the overall sound is sure to skyrocket.

“The potential of this particular band is absolutely immense,” says Lesh. “Everybody has such great little ideas that they can stick in there. Nobody seems reticent or reluctant to put ideas out, even in the body of the song, which I really like because it gives the song itself a whole new interpretation.”

With the TV project in the works and a tour with a new band underway, Lesh is proving that he is an anomaly in many ways. At 67, he is still striving to grow and develop as a musician and a person. He consciously brought Molitz and Greene into the band because “the kind of energy that Steve and Jackie bring to the band is so fresh and so exciting that the rest of us old guys kinda gotta get jacked up to that level,” he says. “It makes us play differently and that’s really what I am after with the band. I want to be inspired to play outside of my comfort zone and outside of the box that I have always been in with The Grateful Dead.”

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