It’s about 10:30 PM on Friday, October 25th. I was planning to go to sleep, as a matter of fact I was trying to… it just wasn’t happening, so here I am. Before I go any further, I think i’ll put some music on my headphones.
Anyway, this afternoon I came back from a walk around my neighborhood and opened Instagram to find out that Phil Lesh had passed away. I’m really not venturing to explain who he was, beyond that he was the bassist and founding member of the Grateful Dead.
I went on a lot of adventures in my late teens and early 20’s to see live music and be part of a kind of culture that wouldn’t have existed without the Grateful Dead, and many of these adventures were centered around the various bands that Phil played in after the passing of Jerry Garcia.
If you are interested in any stories about what those adventures were like, I can provide a few links for you at the bottom.
What I actually had more of a mind to write about, are 2 instances before I even started going on my token white boy hippie road trips, both of which were directly linked not just to The Grateful Dead as a whole, but specifically Phil Lesh.
They both happened around the same period of time, when I was just a freshman in high school and starting to explore various ways that I could change my state of consciousness. I’m not sure what order, or precisely when they went down, so I’ll just write them out in ascending order of how far out I was in terms mind altering chemicals.
I:
I grew up in a small beach community known as Manomet, MA, which itself was a smaller part of a small town (compared to where I live now, but quite large in terms of square mileage). I had a crew of friends and we did what 13–14 year old kids do, we smoked pot every day after school.
my estimate is that it was probably 2000–2001, and while we were discovering drugs, we were also discovering music… and it was a good time for that, because it was the Genesis of the first peer to peer file transferring applications of the internet, which we used to acquire mp3 files of songs. I was fortunate to have a household that had adopted broadband connection, which was light years faster than dialup 56k.
Being that my parents bought monthly cable broadband, I was the one who was downloading all of the music, and then burning it to writeable compact discs.
Now, all of the older kids that we wanted to be like were always going on about this band Phish, so naturally I went looking for MP3s of Phish, and i’m sure I found some. There was one, that was called “Uncle Johns Band”, and it was mislabeled as a Phish mp3. I found out later that it actually came from a 1999 Phil Lesh and Freinds show from the Warfield in San Fransisco that did include Phish’s Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell, but absolutely wasn’t Phish.
This music was this beautiful, almost Calypso re-arrangement of the Grateful Dead staple. It was so joyful, celebratory and uplifting, and I remember being at the beach down the road from my house, with my friends, stoned on pot with a portable CD player. The sun was going down over the ocean, and we took turns listening to this music, because none of us had ever heard anything so beautiful.
You have to understand, that coming from the whole “grunge, generation X, angst fueled 90's” paradigm of what music was even about, I had never in my life known it to be anything but an expression of really negative feelings and disillusionment. Here was the most joyful manifestation of notes that I had ever heard, and suddenly I realized that I had only scratched the surface of what emotions were accessible through music.
I can remember everything about that afternoon on the beach, I know that the CD player was a purple and silver Aiwa discman, with anti skip and all of that.
mentally, the entire way in which I understood the most important art form that has had the deepest impact on me (on every level) had been expanded in a way that would literally change the course of my life.
II:
The other thing that my 9th grade friends and I liked to do, was drop acid on Friday nights, and wander around suburbia.
One night, somehow I got separated from everyone and ended up alone and this abandoned girl scout camp’s cabin in the woods, on about half of a five strip of white blotter. I couldn’t just go home, after all, we had all devised alibis to tell our parents so that we could go out and trip our brains out somewhere without any supervision that would certainly have bummed us way out.
I was by myself, with nothing but maybe a few cigarettes and my portable CD player.
That afternoon, one of the seniors that I looked up to and borrowed CD’s from for my Friday mind excursions insisted that I take the Grateful Dead’s Seminal 1970 album “American Beauty”. It’s a good thing he did.
“Friend of The Devil” is the 2nd track on the album, and it starts out as just an acoustic guitar playing the main theme. I checked exactly when it was, so that I can tell you: at 11 seconds in, Phil Lesh’s bass comes in. I think on this night, in the woods, by myself at the age of 14, out of my head on LSD, 11 seconds into the 2nd track of “American Beauty” I “got it”.
Whatever this Grateful Dead band was, they had been onto something I realized, and I would become obsessed with finding more out, as much as a possibly could. That never went away.
I suppose everyone has their experiences with The Grateful Dead. I’m too young for it to have been seeing Jerry Garcia. I came to obviously realize who he was, and his capabilities later, through the kind of obsessive gathering of recordings that is par for the deadhead course.
When I learned that Phil had passed away, I realized that he was the member of the band that opened the door for me, and I was eternally grateful. The result of walking through the door that was opened by CD players in 9th grade , with recordings of Phil Lesh is much bigger than any single artist (even Jerry Garcia), it’s a matter of expanding the whole universe of how I understood music, what it was, and what it could do.
Here are a few of the aforementioned adventures:
