A Touch of Gray Suits Phil Lesh By Susan Green Burlington Free Press Published September 29, 2000 Ask Phil Lesh what it means to still be rocking and rolling in middle age and he’ll proudly declare, "I’m a senior!" The bass player, best known for his three-decade stint with the Grateful Dead, is now 60. Time flies when you’re making history. The California native makes music this weekend in Burlington when Phil Lesh & Friends performs two shows at Memorial Auditorium to kick off an autumn tour. In addition to some recently penned tunes, the quintet invariably offers classic Dead material with a twist. "We take it in new directions by remodeling the Dead arrangements," Lesh explains. "For me to sing, I have to transpose them to a different key." Do Deadheads, who faithfully follow every last vestige of the beloved band, accept such changes? Lesh thinks so, but would not be deterred even if fans disapproved. "The business of art and music is to confound expectations," he adds. Lesh confounded his own expectations in 1965 when he decided to take a year off from his academic pursuits at Mills College. He’d been majoring in avant-garde composition after a childhood spent playing classical violin and trumpet. " I would have gone back and probably studied conducting, but then I met this guy named Garcia," he recalls. That fortuitous encounter with folk guitarist/vocalist Jerry Garcia brought the 25 year-old Lesh into a group that included keyboard player Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, and drummer Bill Kreutzmann. The Warlocks were born, initially cranking out amplified rock standards at a time when acoustic was all the rage. As they began to take more and more original approach with lyricist Robert Hunter collaborating on many songs, The Warlocks changed names. Good thing. Warlockheads doesn’t roll off the tongue with quite the same ease as Deadheads. The Dead hooked up with author Ken Kesey and his legendary Merry Pranksters, an assortment of pleasure-seeking bohemians immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." This association represented a new chapter for the musicians who were smoking copious amounts of marijuana, taking LSD and performing at the outdoor Trips Festivals in the Bay Area. The Dead assumed a prominent place in the vanguard of the nascent hippie movement with San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district as ground zero. Although it was a time of unparalleled experimentation with drugs and lifestyles, the band never slacked off. "We worked hard, " Lesh says. "In those first five years, we played for hours at a time every day, rehearsing or just jamming." Lesh’s sensibility helped convince the others that "we could go beyond the three-minute song by improvising in a way that looked to jazz." The Dead soon became known for long, winding meditations on its own tunes or those the band admired written by others. With what one critic described as "extraordinary bursts of imagination," the sound was electric and never repetitive. "We liked to play for dancers," Lesh says. "That’s how we got the highest level of feedback from audiences. At one Trips Festival. I looked out at 5,000 people dancing in waves, forgetting themselves in our music." The excitement of live Dead did not translate to the group’s albums. "We were never really good, frankly, at recording. That was always secondary to us." New people joined the group. Some left. Others, like Pig Pen died. A second drummer, Mickey Hart remained. The Dead, as something akin to an institution, was able to keep on truckin’. "It felt like we were not just making rock ‘n’ roll history, but cultural history", Lesh observes. "It was a blast. The music lifted everyone’s spirits. We felt a responsibility to keep it going after 1972, when everything else from that era disappeared. We ended up being the last remnants of the 1960’s." Even that designation came to a halt in 1995 when Garcia died. The surviving Dead then called it quits. Three years later Lesh, Weir, Hart and keyboardist Bruce Hornsby decided to get together as The Other Ones. But when "business and creative differences" intervened, Lesh ventured out on his own with a revolving cast of "friends" – which initially included Page McConnell and Trey Anastasio of Phish, the Vermont quartet often compared to the Dead. "They are carving out their own road," Lesh says. Phish is one of the most unique musical organizations around today. Like Dylan says, ‘I do my very best to be just who I am.’" Speaking of Bob Dylan, Lesh tour with his fellow senior citizen this summer. The double bill echoed the Dead’s last Vermont performance, a June 1995 gig that drew an estimated 100,000 people to Highgate in June 1995—two months before Garcia’s death. "It was a great honor to work with Dylan again," Lesh says. "His relationship with our band wasn’t quite warm in 1995, although Jerry and Bob loved each other. He was devastated when Jerry died. To us, Bob has always been a prophet, an oracle. His "Love Minus Zero" was the second song the Dead ever rehearsed in 1965." Once they hit the East Coast Lesh and his wife, Jill, plan to drive to Vermont so that they can take in a bit of the New England fall foliage. Such stop-and-smell-the -roses experiences have become more frequent since a 1998 liver transplant necessitated by a 30-year battle with hepatitis C. They replaced my fuel pump," he muses. "It’s like having a whole new life. I’m more aware now of what’s really important." The rejuvenated Lesh is dismayed by the contemporary pop scene, however. "The current chart-toppers, to me, are cotton candy. What a drag the business is only about preteens, even though I have two of my own." (His sons are 11 and 13, but have wide ranging tastes that include jazz.) When Lesh was a young whippersnapper, innovative rockers reached for the sort of longevity that is likely to elude ‘N Sync or Britney Spears. In spirit, if not in body, the Dead certainly attained immortality. "We believed this could really be an art, " Lesh says, "not just disposable music."