Phil Lesh, Grateful Dead co-founder and bassist, dies at 84

Phil Lesh, the prolific bass player and co-founder of the legendary rock band the Grateful Dead, has died at 84.

Lesh’s death was announced Friday in a post on his official Instagram page, which read, “Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed peacefully this morning. He was 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. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.”

No cause of death was mentioned, but Lesh revealed in a 2015 letter posted to Facebook that he had been diagnosed with bladder cancer. He had previously made a “rapid and complete recovery” from prostate cancer in 2006.

During his lifetime, Lesh was hailed as one of modern rock history’s most inventive and accomplished bass players. In Bob Dylan’s 2022 book The Philosophy of Modern Song, he called Lesh “one of the most skilled bassists you’ll ever hear in subtlety and invention,” and in 2020 he was named the 11th greatest bassist of all time by Rolling Stone Australia.

Lesh is best known as a founding member of the Grateful Dead, one of the most beloved and enduring jam bands in the world. According to his 2006 memoir Searching for the Sound: My Life With the Grateful Dead, Lesh met Dead frontman Jerry Garcia in 1959 at a Bay Area house party. Both men were natives to the area, and crossed paths again in the early ’60s after one of Garcia’s shows with the Warlocks. When Garcia asked Lesh to join this band as their bassist — an instrument he did not play — he accepted the gig anyway.

In 1965, the Warlocks were renamed the Grateful Dead. Lesh would play with the group throughout its entire 30-year run, disbanding in 1995 following Garcia’s death. With drummer Mickey Hart, percussionist Billy Kreutzmann, and rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, he’d later start spinoff bands like the Other Ones, the Dead, and Furthur.

Lesh was born on March 15, 1940, in Berkeley, Calif., to parents who co-owned a local repair business. His interest in music was immediate, starting out as a violin player before trading the string instrument in for a trumpet and studying the avant-garde classical and free jazz sounds that would later characterize his unique bass style with the Dead.

The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a year before Garcia’s death in 1994, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award followed in 2007. Just this summer it was announced that the Dead would be receiving the highest recognition of their career at the 2024 Kennedy Center Honors. Surviving members Hart, Kreutzmann, and Weir will now accept the award alongside the year’s other honorees — director Francis Ford Coppola, jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, singer Bonnie Raitt, and Harlem’s Apollo Theater.

Just weeks before his death, Lesh was still jamming out, contributing his inimitable bass stylings to a session at the Terrapin Clubhouse, where he’d been performing with his band Phil Lesh and Friends for over a decade.

Lesh is survived by his wife, Jill, and their two sons, Grahame and Brian.

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