Phil Lesh and Friends was an American rock band formed and led by Phil Lesh, former bassist of the Grateful Dead.[1]
Phil & Friends is not a traditional group[2] in that several different lineups of musicians have played under the name, including groups featuring members of Phish, the Black Crowes, and the Allman Brothers Band.
Music
The Phil & Friends concept takes the music of the Grateful Dead (and an ever-increasing number of other influences, including Bob Dylan, Traffic, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Warren Haynes' band Gov't Mule, the Allman Brothers Band, etc.) and explores and interprets it in new ways.[3] Through the period known as the Quintet years (see below), a Phil & Friends show was often focused on harder, faster rock than that which the Grateful Dead played, thanks in large part to Haynes' and Jimmy Herring's talents at the Southern rock style. Lesh was fond of calling it "Dixieland-style rock".[4] However, all of the incarnations of Phil & Friends have followed a trend of "updating" the Grateful Dead's body of work, and all have been adept at the long, exploratory jams that were a trademark of the Grateful Dead. Phil & Friends has been acclaimed[5] for giving new life to the Grateful Dead's material, bringing in new styles and innovations, while at the same time remaining loyal to the original music and the original fans. It is this melding of musical influences that has given them wide appeal not only among old Deadheads, but the modern-day fans of other jam bands as well.
Phil & Friends has continued the Grateful Dead's tradition of allowing fans to record concerts, and trade these recordings freely. The Internet has been an invaluable source for these tapers to disseminate this music through various sources, including Archive.org and the BitTorrent file-sharing network. Phil has also embraced the Internet by providing free soundboard recordings of many concerts through his website, even providing high-resolution CD covers for fans to print. For his Summer 2006 tour, Phil partnered with Instant Live, a company that was able to provide soundboard CDs of a concert immediately upon its finishing, as well as make these recordings available for fans to download online, though this service was not free.
History
Original Phil Lesh and Friends
The first use of the Phil Lesh and Friends banner was on September 24, 1994, at the Berkeley Community Theatre. The band was an acoustic version of the Grateful Dead and featured members Phil Lesh, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Vince Welnick. Grateful Dead drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart were not part of the band. After this gig the band name was put to rest until Phil formed a new band in 1998.
1998–2000 permutations
In 1998, Lesh played with a rotating cast of musicians under the Phil Lesh and Friends name, mostly at San Francisco's The Fillmore. Bob Weir, Steve Kimock, Jeff Chimenti, Dave Ellis, Prairie Prince, Scott Amendola, Stan Franks, Gary Lambert, Bobby Strickland and Vince Welnick were among the musicians who participated in the gigs.[6]
After these opening concerts and until October 1999, Phil kept the same "core" of himself and Kimock, and generally Molo as well, while regularly rotating in new musicians on guitar and keys (and sometimes additional instruments). Over this period, the lineups included:
This lineup released the only Phil Lesh and Friends studio album, There and Back Again, on Columbia Records in 2002. It included several new songs from Lesh and Robert Hunter, longtime Grateful Dead lyricist, as well as one recent favorite from Jerry Garcia and Hunter, and several original contributions from Haynes, Barraco/Mattson and Herring.
During the summer tour of 2001, the band performed a series of instrumental numbers composed by Lesh. The songs were inspired by the solar system. While they were never officially released on an album, they have come to be known as the Planet Jams. A bootleg compilation of these songs has been circulating since then.
Post Quintet Era
Ryan Adams started performing with the band in June 2005 after meeting Lesh at the Jammys,[7] followed by Chris Robinson in November/December 2005.
2006
During 2006, Phil Lesh and Friends consisted of a core of musicians including Lesh, Larry Campbell (guitar, violin, slide guitar, mandolin, and vocals), Joan Osborne (vocals), Rob Barraco (keyboards and vocals), and John Molo (drums). On the first half of the summer tour, they were joined by John Scofield (guitar), and on the second half, by Barry Sless (pedal steel) and, during the third quarter of the tour and generally for the second set, by Trey Anastasio. Saxophonist Greg Osby joined the group for various concerts, particularly toward the end of the tour, and guest artists including Page McConnell and Dickey Betts sat in for individual sets.
Concerts with Scofield had a jazzy, astringent quality. Anastasio contributed a strong rock lead guitar to the sets he played in, while Sless brought a softer, more lyrical quality. The relative lack of comment about these lineups compared to the earlier "Quintet" and later 2007-8 configuration suggests that they were not as popular with Lesh's core fan base, but they gave unique and varied interpretations to some of the Grateful Dead's classics along with numerous other songs. Furthermore, the fact that the entire tour was distributed online and later via Instant Live CDs, and a live DVD was made of an early concert at the Warfield (with Scofield and Osby), meant that the various configurations of the year's lineup left a larger body of recorded work than many groups that worked together for years.
2007–2008
Phil Lesh & Friends performing at The Pageant in St. Louis, Missouri on July 3, 2008
A new formation of Phil & Friends, including Lesh, Larry Campbell (guitar, mandolin, fiddle), Teresa Williams (vocals), Jackie Greene (vocals and guitar), Steve Molitz (keyboards), and John Molo (drums), debuted in September 2007 in Santa Barbara, California.
On February 4, 2008, Phil and Friends joined Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and drummer Mickey Hart, along with Barry Sless and RatDog guitarist Mark Karan, for a concert called "Deadheads for Obama", in support of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. The show was the first time that Weir, Hart, and Lesh had played together since 2004. Even more recently, the band performed the final shows at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco. Bob Weir sat in for a run of five nights that included sets of the Grateful Dead's first few albums.
In the fall of 2008, Phil Lesh and Friends toured the Eastern United States, including a run of 14 shows in 19 days, known as "Philathon", at the Nokia Theatre Times Square in New York City. The final Phil Lesh and Friends performance until 2012 was on 12/31/08. Meanwhile, Phil had been touring with The Dead and Furthur.
2012
On Phil Lesh's website, 3 dates at the 1stBank Center in Broomfield, Colorado, were scheduled for the February 16, 17, and 18. A twelve-date appearance at Lesh's new club, Terrapin Crossroads, is set to commence on March 17, 2012, which many old members of the band returning to appear alongside Lesh, as well as a few new members.[8]
On April 26 through April 29 the original Quintet returned, performing four sold-out shows at Terrapin Crossroads.
Phil Lesh and Friends featuring Warren Haynes, Jackie Greene, John Medeski and Joe Russo performed two shows on April 14 and 15 at Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Phil and Friends then played two shows at Central Park's Rumsey Playfield on May 28 and 31. The incarnation of this band included Warren Haynes, John Scofield, John Medeski and Joe Russo.[10]
2015–2016
Starting in January 2015, Phil Lesh and Friends celebrated the Grateful Dead's 50th Anniversary by performing tribute concerts, recreating select concerts from the Grateful Dead's 30-year career, at his restaurant Terrapin Crossroads, along with select Grateful Dead Recreational Tribute shows at The Capitol Theatre, in Port Chester, New York. These celebrations of the Grateful Dead's 50th Anniversary continued into 2016.[11]
In 2015, Phil Lesh And Friends had to cancel two shows at Terrapin Crossroads on October 24–25, due to the bladder cancer diagnosis of Phil Lesh.[12]
The following musicians have accompanied bassist and vocalist Phil Lesh with various lineups of Phil Lesh & Friends from 1999 (with one performance in 1994). Note: This list is incomplete.
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