Bassist and founding member of the Grateful Dead, Phil Lesh, has died. He was 84.
The news comes via the musician's official Instagram page, in a post revealing that he had passed away "peacefully" this morning, "surrounded by his family and full of love."
"Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love," the post continued. "We request that you respect the Lesh family's privacy at this time."
A classically trained trumpeter who had played with groundbreaking minimalist composer Steve Reich and studied with Italian avant-gardist Luciano Berio, Lesh was recruited to play bass with the Warlocks — a band fronted by his friend Jerry Garcia — at a pizza parlour in 1965. Despite the fact that Lesh had never studied the bass, he agreed, and the Warlocks quickly evolved into the Grateful Dead.
On the Dead's early albums for Warner Bros. Records, Lesh was usually credited for the music alongside Garcia, and even helped mix 1968 sophomore album Anthem of the Sun after the band split with producer Dave Hassinger. Lesh also co-wrote a number of the compositions that became the long-form jam fixtures of Dead concerts, like "Dark Star," "The Eleven" and "St. Stephen."
"What makes the Dead's sound so distinct from any other kind of rock and roll may be Lesh's bass," Nick Paumgarten wrote in a 2012 piece for The New Yorker [via Variety]. "He did not like to repeat things, which is rare for an instrument usually charged with keeping time. He played around the root and the beat, often skewing the pocket, skipping the one, holding off on the changes, bubbling up around it, or playing a melodic counterpoint. Growing up, he listened more to [classical composers] Elliot Carter and Charles Ives than to Lead Belly or Hank Williams."
While Lesh's influence on the Dead became less preeminent when they took a more roots-oriented turn with 1970's Workingman's Dead (after which Garcia would go on to pen the majority of their songs with lyricist Robert Hunter), he remained — alongside Garcia, guitarist Bob Weir and drummer Bill Kreutzmann — a constant component of the act's lineup for its full 30 years performing.
The bassist also partook in many of the Dead's afterlife iterations up until the outfit was officially laid to rest with its Fare Thee Well concerts in 2015. (Lesh sat out latter-day's Dead & Company, which sees the band joined by John Mayer and Allman Brother Band's Otell Burbridge on bass.)