Mickey Hart Pens Tribute to Phil Lesh: ‘He Was Singular, an Original, Nobody Sounded Like Him’

Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart penned a tribute to his longtime band mate Phil Lesh following the death of the group’s founding bassist Friday at the age of 84.

“Phil Lesh changed my life. There are only a few people you meet in your lifetime that are special, important, who help you grow spiritually as well as musically,” Hart wrote. Like Bob Weir, Hart credited Lesh with exposing the members of the Grateful Dead to music that would inspire the band’s legendary improvisational style.

“He turned me on to the world’s music, gave me my first Alla Rakha record when we lived on Belvedere Street, changing forever what I thought was musically possible. Phil was foremost an improvisationalist and taught me, all of us,” Hart wrote.

“Phil was bigger than life, at the very center of the band and my ears, filling my brain with waves of bass. All those years we all rode the third rail together creating something that cannot be defined in words. Phil was a master of a style he invented, he was singular, an original, nobody sounded like him, nobody. He had wisdom, was older and showed us the way.”

Trending

The surviving members of the Grateful Dead — Hart, Weir, and Bill Kreutzmann — also issued a joint statement honoring Lesh. “Phil Lesh was irreplaceable,” the band wrote. “In one note from the Phil Zone, you could hear and feel the world being born. His bass flowed like a river would flow. It went where the muse took it. He was an explorer of inner and outer space who just happened to play bass. He was a circumnavigator of formerly unknown musical worlds. And more.”

Hart’s tribute continued, “Later he became first and foremost a family man.. There is no one who loved his wife and sons more than Phil and no one was more dedicated to the Grateful Dead. His sound is indelibly embedded in my mind as is Jerry’s sound… and always will be.