Phil Lesh gets funky

In my last post, I transcribed Jerry Garcia’s solo on “Slipknot!” from Blues for Allah. Immediately after that solo comes another part of that tune that I love, a call and response between a repeated riff played by the full band and Phil Lesh’s bass. This eight bar section is a rare instance of the Grateful Dead being funky. Listen at 6:11.

The Dead hardly ever spotlighted a single instrumental voice in an organized way like this; usually everybody just played all the time during tunes. These four bass breaks would even make good hip-hop samples, which is not true of much Dead music.

Here’s my transcription of the bass breaks, with bass tab. This passage is at a laid back 92 BPM, with very lightly swinging sixteenth notes. Everything is in A Dorian mode. Phil creates a nice harmonic openness in his breaks by using every note in the scale except for C, the minor third. If you leave that out, the remaining notes don’t feel clearly major or minor. The F-sharp feels major-ish, but the G-natural feels minor-ish. The A, B, D and E could go either way. Phil leans hard on B and D, which together with A and E form a nicely symmetrical whole-step-plus-perfect-fourth structure.

Let’s think through the breaks one at a time.

• Break one: Phil starts off very hip, accenting the “and” of one and then leaving a space before playing two more fragmented phrases. He crosses the “invisible barline” of beat three with the highest B and then accents the “and” of three. The last little phrase accents the “and” of four. That is a lot of musical information in one bar.
• Break two: A more continuous stream of sixteenth notes, but Phil anticipates beat four and then ends on the “and” of four. The jump from B down to F-sharp down to A and back up to E is elegantly angular. The D to A to E stack of fourths that follows is hip too. 
• Break three: Things get more syncopated, with accents on the “a” of one and the “e” and “a” of three. Lots more wide interval jumps.
• Break four: The break starts on the “e” of one, the weakest subdivision in the bar. There’s an accented F-sharp that anticipates beat two. Then Phil jumps down to D and up to B before resolving to A on the “a” of three, outlining a Bm7 chord. This idea comes straight out of Miles Davis and works great here. The last beat in the phrase alternates F-sharp, A, E, A, an abstraction of the boogie-woogie riff, and it concludes on the “a” of four, the other weakest subdivision in the bar.

Phil played a lot of complex and rhythmically unpredictable ideas on bass, but when he’s supposed to be holding down the bassline, all that pushing and pulling against the beat and the harmony can be too much information. I like his “continual flowing countermelody” approach better when he’s out front and is supposed to be the foreground voice, not a supportive voice.

The notes-on-the-page aspect of this passage is satisfying, but the timbre is working well too. The sleigh bells, the chunky attack of the pick on the bass strings, the dirty Fender Rhodes, and even the murky lo-fi recording create an air of mystery and intrigue. I said above that these bass breaks make good hip-hop samples; their dustiness definitely contributes.

If you are a non-Deadhead reading this, you should know that Phil Lesh is one of the weirdest bass players in the history of rock. He isn’t even really a bass player at all; he functions as a low-register second lead guitarist, in a constant improvisational dialog with Jerry and everyone else. This can make for exciting and unpredictable grooves, or it can make for a wandering mess. Nick Paumgarten describes the positive aspect:

Variation was built into the music. They played their parts as if they were inventing them on the spot, and sometimes they were. The music, even in the standard verse-chorus stretches, often had a limber, wobbly feel to it that struck many listeners as slovenly but others as sinuous and alive, open to possibility and surprise. It came across as music being made, rather than executed.

The downside to the Dixieland-ish approach is that if everybody is not fully present in the music, the music quickly becomes an unstructured mush. I often find myself wishing for more focus and clarity, more empty space, more of a sense of foreground and background. And the band could definitely have done with a more conventional bass player at times, someone who just locked in with the kick pattern, held down the time and didn’t pull focus.

Phil’s idiosyncratic bass style is a mixture of his antiauthoritarian orneriness and the unusual way that he came to the instrument in the first place. Many bassists start out on another instrument, but usually that other instrument is the guitar. Phil came to it from classical trumpet. Jerry recruited him into the Dead because they needed a new bass player, and thought Phil had enough overall musicality to be able to learn the instrument in a hurry. One hundred percent of Phil’s formative bass playing experience was in the context of the Dead. He has wide and eclectic musical tastes and influences, but he never bothered to learn how to play bass in a conventional way, for good or ill.

I read Phil’s autobiography hoping to find more specific information about his musical choices. He talks a lot about creativity within the band, but more in an interpersonal and poetic sense than in a technical music sense. Maybe he thought that his readers weren’t interested in the nuts and bolts. However, he does get into nuts and bolts specifics about the Dead as a business entity, which turns out to be a fascinating (if depressing) subject. I learned that in the later years, the band’s overhead was five hundred thousand dollars a month, and any breaks in touring would have meant cutting a lot of salaries or just laying a lot of people off. Everyone could tell that Jerry was circling the drain, and it seems obvious in retrospect that some short-term financial pain would have been worthwhile if he could have taken some time off and gotten himself straightened out. But no one wants to fire a bunch of their friends. It’s sad to think about, and much less fun than inhabiting those recordings when everything still clicked.