Acting
Mar 14, 1940
Berkeley, California, USA
Phil Lesh
Acting
Biography
Philip Chapman Lesh (March 15, 1940 – October 25, 2024) was an American musician and a founding member of the Grateful Dead, with whom he played bass guitar throughout their 30-year career. After the band's disbanding in 1995, Lesh continued the tradition of Grateful Dead family music with side project Phil Lesh and Friends, which paid homage to the Dead's music by playing their originals, common covers, and the songs of the members of his band. Lesh operated a music venue called Terrapin Crossroads. He scaled back his touring regimen in 2014 but continues to perform with Phil Lesh & Friends at select venues. From 2009 to 2014, he performed in Furthur alongside former Grateful Dead bandmate Bob Weir. Lesh was born in Berkeley, California, United States, and started out as a violin player. While enrolled at Berkeley High School he switched to trumpet and participated in all of the school's music-related extracurricular activities. Studying the instrument under Bob Hansen, conductor of the symphonic Golden Gate Park Band, he developed a keen interest in avant-garde classical music and free jazz. After attending San Francisco State University for a semester, Lesh was unable to secure a favorable position in the school's band or orchestra and determined that he was not ready to pursue a higher education. Upon dropping out, he successfully auditioned for the renowned Sixth Army Band (then stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco) with the assistance of Hansen, but was ultimately determined to be unfit for military service. Shortly thereafter, he enrolled at the College of San Mateo, where he wrote charts for the community college's well-regarded big band and ascended to the first trumpet chair. (A snippet of tape of Lesh on trumpet at CSM can be heard on "Born Cross-Eyed" from the Grateful Dead's 1968 release Anthem of the Sun.) After transferring with sophomore standing to the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, he befriended future Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten before dropping out again after less than a semester. At the behest of Constanten, he studied under the Italian modernist Luciano Berio in a graduate-level course at Mills College in the spring of 1962; their classmates included Steve Reich and Stanford University cross-registrant John Chowning. While volunteering for KPFA as a recording engineer during this period, he met bluegrass banjo player Jerry Garcia. Despite seemingly opposite musical interests, they soon formed a friendship. Following a brief period as a Post Office Department employee and keno marker in Las Vegas (initially rooming with Constanten, who soon departed to study under Berio and other members of the Darmstadt School in Europe); a second stint with the Post Office in San Francisco; and a collaboration with the likes of Reich, Jon Gibson and Constanten upon the latter's return from Europe under the auspices of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Lesh was talked into becoming the bassist for Garcia's new rock band (then known as The Warlocks) in the fall of 1964. This was a peculiar turn of events, as Lesh had never before played bass. According to Lesh, the first song he rehearsed with the band was "I Know You Rider". He joined them for their third or fourth gig (memories vary) and stayed until the end. ...
Feature Films (52)
A detailed chronicle of the famous 1969 tour of the United States by the British rock band The Rolling Stones, which culminated with the disastrous and tragic concert held on December 6 at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, an event of historical significance, as it marked the end of an era: the generation of peace and love suddenly became the generation of disillusionment.
Gimme Shelter
This documentary explores the Deadhead phenomenon. For thirty years, Jerry Garcia played guitar and sang for the Grateful Dead, and by doing so, inspired a modern cultural phenomenon: the legions of nomadic fans that made a communal way of life out of following Jerry and the Dead, the Deadheads. The End of the Road began shooting three months prior to Garcia's death in 1995, on the road with the wandering family of Deadheads- on what would be the final tour with Jerry and the Grateful Dead. Featuring a soundtrack by Merl Saunders and Jerry Garcia, the film celebrates this social, political and cultural movement in its twilight.
The End of the Road
View from the Vault, Volume One, sometimes known simply as View from the Vault, is the first release in a series of DVDs and companion soundtracks by the Grateful Dead known as "View from the Vault". The audio is taken from the soundboard and the video from the video screens at the concerts. The first volume was recorded and filmed at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh on July 8, 1990 with bonus material recorded two days earlier at Cardinal Stadium, Louisville. The set was certified Gold by the RIAA on February 2, 2001.
Grateful Dead: View from the Vault
Television & Series (6)
'Basketball: A Love Story' is a series of 62 interconnected short stories that creates a vibrant mosaic of the game, featuring 165 exclusive interviews. The cast encompasses basketball's most prominent figures and explores the complex nature of love as it relates to the game.
Basketball: A Love Story
The long and unique tale of The Grateful Dead. The tale of the Grateful Dead is inspiring, complicated, and downright messy. A tribe of contrarians, they made art out of open-ended chaos and inadvertently achieved success on their own terms. Never-before-seen footage and interviews offer this unprecedented and unvarnished look at the life of the Dead.
Long Strange Trip
Apostrophes was a live, weekly, literary, prime-time, talk show on French television created and hosted by Bernard Pivot. It ran for fifteen years (724 episodes) from January 10, 1975, to June 22, 1990, and was one of the most watched shows on French television (around 6 million regular viewers). It was broadcast on Friday nights on the channel France 2 (which was called "Antenne 2" from 1975 to 1992). The hourlong show was devoted to books, authors and literature. The format varied between one-on-one interviews with a single author and open discussions between four or five authors.
Apostrophes
A documentary series about pop and rock albums that are considered the best or most distinctive of a well-known band or musician or that exemplify a stage in the history of music.
