Phil Lesh Quotations

In a way, it's my way of dealing with, finding closure with Grateful Dead music, and giving thanks in a way to Jerry and Bob and all the guys in the band for making up this wonderful music.

Yes, Pluton, actually, in the play. And I play him in my most stentorian voice.

There was always so much encouragement, to just really take it and run with it, from Deadheads.

So what it boils down to, in my humble opinion, is that we need to support the arts in schools, and at every other level in the education of children.

To sing a simple round is truly an enlightening experience.

We sing a little song before we eat, a little blessing before we eat, and it's really - we're thanking the Lord and the Earth for the food that we eat, and it really brings you together in a profound kind of way.

When the band would leave the stage, and then the audience would just take over, and keep the groove goin'.

Actually, the year anniversary of what you just heard, my son Grahame and I are going to be in a play together, and I'm acting for the first time in front of an audience that doesn't consist of a high school drama class.

But we were really locked in to that kind of format, and as the '90s wore on, it became for me more solidified, in that sense that there weren't as many of those magical shows that were just magic all the way through as there had been in earlier years.

In St. Louis, some people were hurt seriously when some fans got on top of a roof that was where other fans were underneath it, at a park somewhere, and it collapsed.

Of course, we didn't survive to play all the way through the '90s, so I can say that - as I said, everybody in the band was aware of this, and we trying to figure out ways to make it different.

So, in the course of events, I had an opportunity to come in contact with Colin Matthews, through the Rex Foundation sponsoring recordings of various music that was being recorded over there.

And that format was - we'd been using that format, I guess, since the late '70s, and it was starting to get very predictable. In other words, certain songs would surface in the same points in the set every so often; it was like rotation.

And the input that we always got from Deadheads, at the moment of making the music, was always a factor.

Bruce's band is so different from the Grateful Dead; there's no lead guitar player, for one thing.

I mean, sports are big, big, big business.

Michael is the kind of guy who has rhythm; he has rock'n'roll in his soul, whether he really plays it or not.

Not that there weren't great shows, and not that there wasn't plenty of fine music played. It's just that the consistency and the height of where we could take it, with the help of the audience, was less, I felt, in the '90s.

Especially in the realm of bringing an opportunity to do something creative to people, as I said, who wouldn't ordinarily have that opportunity. I think that's very important.

And there was a movement afoot to take another year off, and if we had been able to do that, and rethink everything, I think when we came back it would have been very different.

Because, first of all, we were becoming aware during that tour that there was a group of people that was following the band around, and they weren't interested in coming in to the shows, they were just interested in hangin' out outside and tryin' to break in.

Many people out there know that I was trained in classical music, and I studied composition for many years before joining the band.

Of course, in the band, we all interpreted in our own way simultaneously, so this time I'm just going to do it all by myself and see what comes out.

But the Grateful Dead was my band, and I don't have any desire to form a band of my own, or tour with another band, or do anything like that.

The decision to change the name meant we were getting serious, because we couldn't make a record if some other band had the same name as us. I told the boys I was in a record store, thumbing though 45s, and I'd seen a record with the name the Warlocks on it. I've often wondered whether I hallucinated it, because I never saw the record again and I never heard a word about any band called the Warlocks.

... We borrowed it all from Coltrane. I started encouraging everybody in the band to listen to John Coltrane - 'Check it out, see what these guys do.' They take one chord, the tonic chord, and just play all over it. 'We can do that too!' I wanted to make our music something really amazing - I wanted it to be jaw-dropping and turn on a dime and do all of those things that I knew music could do, and nobody told us we couldn't do it. I shouldn't say 'I,' though - Jerry Garcia was behind it the whole way.

... Everything we (the Grateful Dead) ever did was a demonstration of the value of cross-fertilization, It was unconscious at first, but when we started looking at each other, we had all these different influences... Bobby Weir used to call it electric Dixieland.

If, as some savants of consciousness suggest, we are actually agreeing to create, from moment to moment, everything we perceive as real, then it stands to reason that we're also responsible for keeping it going in some harmonious manner.

And many times that did take place, but what I've said in the past, and my gut feeling, is that it was started to calcify in a sense.