Phil first came to appreciate the power of music at four years old when he heard a radio broadcast of the New York Philharmonic performing Brahms’s First Symphony. And he has been a student and aficionado of all types of music ever since. But Phil did not naturally gravitate to the bass guitar. In fact, he had never even picked up the instrument until Jerry asked him to join the Warlocks as their bassist.
Growing up, Phil took up and progressed quickly on the violin; by age ten, he was playing publicly in a regional youth orchestra. In his teenage years, after getting his braces off, Phil switched to trumpet and rapidly became a bit of a local prodigy. Shortly thereafter, he began his real music education, transferring to Berkeley High School so he could take music theory courses. As a matter of course, he also joined the school’s jazz band and took advantage of every opportunity to hone his chops.
All the while, Phil was also constantly listening to music and, as he was drawn further into jazz, had his world rocked by his first encounter with John Coltrane in the summer of 1957, at the age of seventeen. As Phil wrote in his autobiography, Coltrane gave him an “inkling that jazz and improvised music could carry the weight and spiritual authority of the greatest classical works,” something he would fully prove in later years with the Grateful Dead.
While Coltrane really blew open the doors of musical perception, it would be another couple years – in 1964 at 24 years old – before he sampled LSD and fully appreciated the ways it and other psychoactive substances could be “tools to enhance awareness, to expand our horizons, to access other levels of mind, to manifest the numinous and sacred,” including, or perhaps no more so than, through the melding of mind-expanding drugs and music. In fact, on his first trip, Phil “found [himself] outside in the front yard on a beautiful starry night, conducting, with extravagant gestures, Mahler’s great Tragic Symphony, which was blasting from the house.”
Providentially, but perhaps unsurprisingly, it was at about this same time that Phil first met Jerry Garcia, developing a friendship around their love and deep knowledge of music. But the two fell out of touch after Phil moved to Las Vegas in spring ’65 with his good friend Tom Constanten. Returning to the Bay Area several months later, Phil heard rumors that Jerry and Pigpen had formed an electric blues band, the Warlocks, and Phil had to check it out for himself.
Heading down from San Francisco to Palo Alto, Phil arrived too late for the gig. But he did reconnect with Jerry and also met a seventeen-year-old Bobby, who rolled by the afterparty with some killer dope. The die had been cast, however, and a month later, Phil again travelled south, heading to Magoo’s Pizza Parlor in Menlo Park to catch the Warlocks. This time, he actually saw the band play and was blown away by their verve and volume. What’s more, at set break, Jerry came over and offered Phil the bassist position in the band. At loose ends, Phil quickly agreed on the condition that Jerry give him a lesson on the instrument, which Phil had yet to play.
Jerry’s lesson didn’t amount to much, but Phil quickly mastered the basics of the bass guitar and was soon running through the Warlocks’s repertoire with the rest of the band. Without the direction of a bassist mentor, Phil developed his own style of play from the get go, melding classical and jazz influences with his own artistic sense.
From the moment Phil joined the Dead, his formal musical training and deep interest in classical music informed the band’s evolution, right alongside Jerry’s wide knowledge of traditional Americana, Pigpen’s commitment to the blues, and the band’s mutual dedication to psychedelia. In time, Phil’s growing interest in avant-garde music would also help shape the Dead’s musical direction and also lead to things like Seastones, his ongoing collaboration with Ned Lagin. Of course, Phil also epitomized, just as he helped distinguish, the Dead’s contributions to the San Francisco Sound, improvising and adding another lead element, alongside Jerry and, later, Keith and Brent.
Into the early seventies, Phil often sang alto or high tenor harmonies alongside Bobby and Jerry. However, because of improper technique, Phil damaged his vocal cords and relinquished those singing duties to Donna. Starting in the mid-eighties, the bassist once again answered the chants of “We want Phil,” delivering lead vocals on a select bunch of tunes, including The Weight, Tom Thumb Blues, Maggie’s Farm, and Box Of Rain. And the Dead’s 1986 breakout of the aforementioned Box Of Rain (and video) and 1995 debut of Phil’s Unbroken Chain (video) remain legendary.
However, Phil’s greatest contributions to Dead shows came via his bass. Phil himself captured what he thought of as some of his finest performances on the double compilation album, Fallout from the Phil Zone. But there are so many other shows where his playing is extraordinary. During the primal era, Phil could always be counted on for a booming counterpuntal melodic line or huge series of bombs as he does characteristically throughout, for instance, the March 1, 1969 show at the Fillmore West.
Despite his incredible playing through the sixties and early seventies, Phil really came into his own – or is it just that we can fully hear his contributions? – during the Wall of Sound era. As Phil himself wrote in Searching for the Sound, that “period remains to this day the most generally satisfying performance experience of my life with the band. Playing Grateful Dead music through that system was both exhilarating and terrifying; the combination of the collective risk-taking inherent in our music and the knowledge that one’s slightest move was being scaled up to almost godlike omnipotence was humbling.” From those forty or so Wall of Sound shows it is hard to pick favorites, but the Weather Report Suite into The Other One from June 18, 1974 definitely captures Phil in all his glory.
Eager to be back touring regularly with the Dead, Phil embraced the return from the hiatus and quickly made his presence felt, literally, with his bombs and, more figuratively, with the rest of his playing. Just sample the Help> Slip> Franklin’s from Roosevelt Stadium on August 4, 1976, or his performance at the Cow Palace New Year’s show. And Phil kept dealing in ’77, starting with the year’s opener at the Swing Auditorium. But Phil seemed to take it to another level altogether in October of that year; check out, for instance, the second set from the 10/2/76 show in Portland or the opening Bertha> Good Lovin’ from October 15th at Southern Methodist University.
Throughout the late 70s and early 80s, Phil could be counted on to drive the disco beat in Shakedown, as in the opener from July 5, 1981, in Oklahoma City. Of course, he continued to deliver on other songs, as he did throughout the Cape Cod night on October 27, 1979, just check out that Dancin’ In The Streets, for instance. Phil also loved to play, like the rest of the band, Madison Square Garden, his personal favorite venue. And he made that clear during the epic fall 1990 MSG run, putting in command performance after command performance.
Of course, there are also Phil’s many noteworthy, one-off Space segments through the years, including his first Earthquake Space during the Dead’s 1982 Hartford Civic Center show on the 76th anniversary of the San Francisco quake and Raven Space from the very next day in Baltimore.
After Jerry’s passing, Phil continued to play with the various iterations of the Dead as well as with his own group, Phil and Friends. Together with his wife, Jill, Phil also opened Terrapin Crossroads, a bar, restaurant, and venue located in San Rafael. Until 2021, the Crossroads provided a place for Phil to play publicly close to home, which became increasingly important as age and medical issues – bouts of cancer and an earlier 1998 liver transplant – curtailed his time on the road.
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