Searching for the Sound:
An Analysis of the Electric Bass Style of Phil Lesh
An Analysis of the Electric Bass Style of Phil Lesh
In the world of pop-rock music, the Grateful Dead have long been recognized for, and by, the highly idiosyncratic nature of their musical style. Although sharing certain characteristics with various other bands that were part of the mid-to-late 1960s San Francisco music scene, the Dead stand out on account of their longevity (1965-1995), their stylistic diversity and the thoroughness of their collective improvisations. While they were by no means the only pop-rock musical group from the 1960s till the present to “jam” (colloquial for collective improvisation) they were the among the first to make it a, if not the, primary constitutive element of their musical practice and to pursue its consequences in each one of their performances.
But while collective, their improvisations, as well as studio recordings, were of course themselves constituted by the playing styles of the individuals that made up the group throughout its 30 year career: two guitarists, an electric bassist and two drummers.1 A complete analysis of the Dead’s style would therefore necessarily involve analyzing each individual’s style in order to understand how it fits into the whole that it is but a part of. Given that such a project is far beyond the scope of this paper, however, I would like to instead proffer a beginning of such an effort through an analytical investigation of but one member—their electric bassist Phil Lesh.
I have chosen him as my focus on account of how frequently the uniqueness of his bass playing, and its importance to the overall sound of the Dead, has been remarked upon. For example, in an interview with Lesh for Bass Player magazine Karl Coryat states “Your style is so different—it seems there’s a standard way to play bass, and a Phil Lesh way.”2 Furthermore, Lesh has repeatedly stated how little he was influenced by other electric bass players claiming to have instead have instead been inspired by the acoustic bass playing styles of Charles Mingus and Scott LeFaro. For him, this meant trying to “play the bass in a melodic way, in a contrapuntal way, which derives ultimately from Bach.”3 Elaborating on this concerning his initial approach to the instrument Lesh writes that:
I soon reached a saturation point with the prevalent style of bass playing which was to stick to the root and always play on the downbeat...I wanted to play in a way that heightened the beats by omission, as it were, by playing around them, in a way that added harmonic motion to the somewhat static chord progressions of the songs we were playing then. I wanted to play in a way that moved melodically but much more slowly than the lead melodies sung by the vocalists or played on guitar or keyboard. Contrast and complement: Each of us [i.e. the band members] approached the music from a different direction, at angles to one another, like the spokes of a wheel.4
While somewhat overly simplistic, “stick to the root and always play on the downbeat” does describe fairly well the conventional approach to harmony by bass players in most pop-rock groups. This is on account of its arguably most important function besides setting up the rhythmic groove in conjunction with the drums and percussion: to define “vertically,” through metrical and harmonic accentuation, the harmony which the various pitches at a particular moment all relate to.5 Accentuating the root of the appropriate harmony on downbeats is therefore important, in these terms, in order to clearly delineate the music’s harmonic movement.6
Having analyzed a number of recordings on which Lesh plays, his style, in comparison to that of most electric bassists, is best understood as emphasizing, to provide a contrasting spatial metaphor, a horizontal approach. Instead of focusing primarily on defining the harmony by emphasizing the roots and fifths of the prevailing harmony on metrical downbeats, his bass lines often function, as the above invocations of Bach and counterpoint would suggest, as independent lines in relation to higher pitched melodic material—sometimes, in fact, superseding them in importance. The problem with such an approach, and the justification for the conventional emphasis of roots on downbeats and, along with fifths, more generally, is that it leads to harmonic instability. By not clearly enunciating roots of chords they lack the definitive grounding that properly informs listeners as to the music’s harmonic movement, which, in most kinds of pop-rock music, is of significant importance. I would argue, however, that in the music of the Grateful Dead, as well as that of his own continuing Phil & Friends ensemble, this harmonic vagueness is not a fault, but instead plays a primary role in facilitating the extended improvisationally-structured playing that is such a stylistic hallmark of both groups.7
What is crucially important to understand about such an approach is that it involves not merely the extemporization of melodies, i.e. soloing, over a pre-established harmonic structure, but also, and more significantly, the collective, in-the-moment invention of all musical elements—melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, dynamics, timbre etc. This most often takes place as a way of bridging distinct, pre-composed musical structures, but on occasion as distinct entities of their own. Given the uncertainty that must necessarily accompany such a musical practice in which musical “destinations” are not preordained but are rather the outcome of decisions made in the course of the performance, harmonic certainty would be not necessarily a virtue, but, quite possibly, a hindrance to its successful realization. Thus, on this account, the ambiguity created by Lesh’s avoidance of root accentuation plays an important structural role in enabling the overall success of this style of music by “opening up” the music to the possibilities that the musicians are then able to realize through the process of collective improvisation.
As the preceding discussion of composed structures suggests, however, this improvised, free-form kind of playing by no means constitutes all the music that the Grateful Dead played or that Lesh’s own group continues to perform. Both groups are characterized instead by a quite exceptional degree of stylistic multiplicity encompassing genres as distinct as country & western and non-tonal sonic explorations whose closest descriptive appellation is perhaps musique concrète.8 Not surprisingly, Lesh adapts his playing to these differences. For while harmonic ambiguity may be advantageous in those improvisationally-structured sections already described, it would be obviously less so, and in fact quite problematic, for other more tonally regular, and therefore harmonically stable, styles of music.
The goal of this paper will be therefore two-fold. First, to make sense of how Lesh reflected this diversity in his playing in order to better understand the overall musical style of the Grateful Dead and, as they were its originators, of arguably the entire jamband genre. Second, by making explicit the intricacies of his idiosyncratic technique, suggest, and explain how to realize, an alternative way to think about realizing bass lines in pop-rock music for those who might be so interested.
Of all the songs of the Grateful Dead, as well as of Lesh’s current group that continues to perform it, “Dark Star” is the one most closely associated with their improvisationally-structured performance style. Discussing the song, Rob Bowman writes that, “the idea of bass/guitar counterpoint was intrinsic to the stylistic alchemy of the Dead in general. That said, it was perhaps nowhere more in evidence than on ‘Dark Star.’” He quotes Lesh concurring that, “Some reviewer described the way I play as being ‘Like a sandworm in heat wrapped around Garcia’s [the Dead’s lead guitarist] guitar line’...I try to do that all the time but “Dark Star” is supposed to do that.”9 [Italics in original] What makes “Dark Star” particularly appropriate in this regard, and what Lesh is referring to, is its harmonic simplicity and essentially modal character. Although three chords recognizably appear in it—A, G and E minor—the mode of A Mixolydian is predominant with an arguable occasional shift to E Dorian.10 This modal, as opposed to tonal, approach to harmony is, of course, not at all unique to the Dead, but it is a musical technique they used frequently to facilitate a less structured, and more improvisationally based, type of playing. By not being limited to a particular harmonic progression the group could instead improvise as long as they might want within a particular modal “space.” And although not limited to such contexts, it is in such moments that Lesh’s contrapuntal approach is particularly advantageous. For these reasons “Dark Star” is a particularly good candidate for an analysis that intends to understand this aspect of his playing.
Furthermore, in his admirable transcription-analysis of unarguably the most famous performance of “Dark Star,”11 Graeme Boone supports the above stated understanding of Lesh’s playing by noting that “[lead guitarist] Garcia is usually the melodic leader in instrumental passages…[while] Lesh’s bass provides harmonic support, but that role is tempered by a strong tendency to melodic and rhythmic exploration that often results in an independent lead, or counterpoint to Garcia.”12 Though the focus of Boone’s article is on the overall performance rather than Lesh’s playing specifically, this statement provides even more evidence for this song, and this performance of it in particular, as a relevant example to be analyzed for this paper. And indeed an examination of his transcription bears this out.13
As Boone points out, “Dark Star” doesn’t technically begin until 1:24 (1 minute and 24 seconds) into the released recording up to which point the group is engaged in a collective transitional improvisation strongly suggestive of D Dorian.14 But as such bridging passages, while not essential to the song, call into question the notion of clear beginnings and ends and are constitutive of a listener’s experience of it, I will follow Boone by considering at least the latter section of this transition part of “Dark Star” itself.15 His transcription in fact begins at 0:56 of the released recording which he labels as measure 1.
Immediately, various characteristics of Lesh’s playing in line with what has been stated above stand out. In the first measure, he offsets the overall implied root of D by an eighth note by playing C on the downbeat. Then, from the pickup to measure 3 through the end of measure 8 the bass is the dominant melodic instrument in the ensemble as the two guitars play quite static harmonic and melodic figures behind him. The lead guitar then begins to assert itself to become equal in importance to the bass, but not until measure 16 (1:17 into the track) does Lesh finally play D on a downbeat after joining in with the lead guitar on the three eighth-note figure (B, A#, B), first heard in measure 12, that, repeated twice more, leads into the “Dark Star” introductory eighth-note line in measures 18 and 19.
That it is only at this point that Lesh fulfills the conventional role of the bass by playing the root of the prevailing harmony on the downbeat is significant given that it is here, for the first time, that a sense of harmonic stability is arguably desirable as the group shifts away from its improvisational wanderings and prepares to begin the song’s composed form. Avoiding such clarity before this through the avoidance of any downbeat articulation of the root and the emphasis of other notes such as the repeated A downbeats in measures 5 and 7, the sustained B in measures 8 and 9, and the syncopated G in measures 9 through 11, makes sense not only of Lesh’s statements concerning how he approaches playing the bass, but is also an instance of the “tonal and expressive ambiguity” invoked by Boone in the name of his article.
In the song “Help on the Way” Lesh shows a similar balance between sections of harmonic support through the downbeat articulation of chord roots, and those in which his melodic lines dominate.16 The latter is particularly notable in the first four bars as his syncopated melodic line played above the bass’s 12th fret is accompanied by the guitars and keyboards sounding unambiguous F minor chords. Lesh begins on a high Ab on the downbeat of the first measure and then leaps down to a Bb that then resolves up to a C, rises briefly to an F, before lowering again back to C. This pattern is then repeated again with a minor variation to end on a Db that stands in contrast to the D natural in the same measure held over from the previous bar. This implied modal shift to an Aeolian mode creates a degree of harmonic tension that is then resolved in the following measure as the vocal line enters with the ensemble playing again a definitive F minor chord. Lesh then takes on a more conventional supporting role yet remains extremely rhythmically active not once repeating himself in subsequent measures and only rarely repeating the same rhythm, but never with the same notes, as far as the fifth bar of A2 where the guitar solo begins.
Another one of the Dead’s more improvisationally-focused songs is “Birdsong.” Though its chorus unambiguously expresses E major, the rest of the song (with the exception of a pre-chorus made up of major triads descending in fourths starting on C and ending on E) is in an E Mixolydian modality. I have chosen to transcribe and analyze the introduction to a September 9, 1972 performance on account of it demonstrating quite well the explicitly contrapuntal nature of Lesh’s playing while also showing when, and why, he uses a more conventional approach.17
Its first seven measures find the band setting the rhythmic feel and harmony of the song and Lesh thus sensibly supports this by very simply holding the root after a preliminary dropping down from the fifth. In the 8th measure, however, the first surprise occurs as he leaps up two octaves and a perfect 4th (!) to begin a descending line that outlines a B minor 7th chord, but that, on account of the E major modality, also suggests an E dominant 9 suspended 4th sonority. This seems to act as a point of transition, as on the downbeat of measure 9 the main riff of the song, played in harmony by the two guitars, is heard for the first time. At first Lesh plays a very understated role—returning to E (still the root of the prevailing harmony), although not on the downbeat and an octave higher than before. Two variants of the earlier descending line—both also starting on a high A—are then played before he returns to a steady emphasis of E to accompany the 3rd repetition of the main riff that then leads towards the entrance of the vocal melody.
This 8 bar section beginning in measure 9, in fact, encapsulates in miniature Lesh’s playing style. He at first affirms the song’s key/modality by playing its root, although by here delaying its appearance till the “and” of the 3rd beat he subtly undermines it at the same time. Having done this, however, he moves away from the expected towards the unexpected by creating ambiguity in various ways such as the use of an unusually high instrumental tessitura, unexpected rhythmic emphasis (or, through silence, the complete lack thereof), and the accentuation of chord tones other than the roots and fifths that so pervade most bass lines. Then, in order to provide a stable transition into whatever section is coming next (and in this case to also support the unexpected change of meter to 2/4 in measure 16), he returns to a more conventional approach. In other words, beginning with stability (perhaps mixed with some doubt to foreshadow what is to come), moving to instability and then back to certainty; as musical metaphors, consonance followed by dissonance that then resolves to consonance; or even tonic moving to dominant and back to tonic.
Interestingly, this approach, whether conscious or not, seems to parallel on a small scale the overall form that came to characterize Grateful Dead concerts from the late 1970s onward, and that continues to be used by Lesh’s group and many other groups influenced by the Dead. Whereas the songs in the first set of a performance are, for the most part, relatively short with generally clear divisions, and sometimes lengthy pauses, between them (segues do frequently occur here at least once however)—i.e. consonance—the second set is made up of a continuous, unbroken sequence of music as songs are connected with improvised passages or immediate transitions that gradually become increasingly explorational. As the set proceeds, tonality gives way to modality, then to atonality, that finally arrives at a point where discrete pitches themselves become lost in a mælstrom of “noise”—made up of feedback, synthesizers and low-pitched percussion—that serves as the space of extreme dissonance. The group then slowly improvises out of this seeming sonic chaos to slowly coalesce around a key or mode of a song—i.e. the resolution of the dissonance—that is then followed in continuous succession by 3 or 4 other songs to end the set, and, with an inevitable encore, the concert.
In his late essay “Vers une musique informelle,” in which he (finally!) offers a positive account of the progressive and emancipatory music that he critiqued so many others for not realizing from the 1920s on, Theodor Adorno describes something intriguingly similar:
This throws some light on the category...of equilibrium, the generation of tensions and their resolution through the total form. This norm was the apotheosis of the traditional notion of the organic. In Schoenberg the totality becomes for the last time what the pure particularity of the dominant-tonic succession once was...A composition as a whole creates tension and resolution, just as used to happen in the tonal idiom with its primal model, the cadence. This shift to totality, however, has stripped the parts of their power. In order to become equal to the task, then, which at present remains hidden, it would be necessary to construct down to the last detail the entire texture of the composition…Relationships have to be established between events which succeed each other directly and indirectly—and this applies to events within simultaneous complexes—relationships which themselves provide the necessary stringency [my italics].18
Although not completely applicable given Adorno’s singular, and not surprising, focus on Post-war serialist composition, it does seem to suggest both the substance of Lesh’s style within a composition, as well as the Dead’s, and other groups influenced by them, overall concert form—if understood in its entirety as a composition. Consonance, dissonance and resolution, then, do not solely describe tonal relationships, but are rather, in this wider sense, applicable to the dynamic interaction of all aspects of music.
Thus, as I have shown, not only is the rhetoric surrounding Lesh’s bass playing justified on account of his relatively unique, in pop-rock music, melodic/contrapuntal style, but, reflecting the whole that it is a part of, it is a crucial component in the creation of an entire improvisationally-based performance form, encompassing the most basic tonal musical forms as well as the most abstract sonic cacophonies. That this arguably realizes something Adorno, for the most part, denied was possible post-Beethoven’s Middle “Heroic” period—the bringing together of music both popular and artistically progressive— signifies that an understanding of Lesh’s style might, then, not only be of interest to other pop-rock bassists, but to all those curious as to how such a practice might be possible.
Endnotes
1 Significantly, however, from 1965-67 and 1971-74 they had only a single drummer. They also had at least one, and sometimes two, keyboard players, but as this position was filled by 6 different people in the Dead’s 30 year career any analysis involving them would be made either considerably more limited or complicated by taking their differing styles into consideration.
2 Karl Coryat, “Lesh Is More! Portrait of An American Beauty,” interview with Phil Lesh, Bass Player (March 2008), http://www.bassplayer.com/article/lesh-more-portrait/mar-08/3433 (accessed Dec. 7, 2008).
3 Phil Lesh, “All in the Music,” interview by T. Virgil Parker, College Crier Online 7, no. 3 (Sept. 2008), http://www.collegecrier.com/interviews/int-0042.asp (accessed Dec. 7, 2008). The influence of Bach, and of counterpoint more generally, is invoked repeatedly in discussions of his playing style. The Wikipedia article on him, irrespective of its truth, being perhaps the most obvious example. “Lesh had never played bass before joining the band, which meant he learned ‘on the job’, but it also meant he had no preconceived attitudes about the instrument's traditional ‘rhythm section’ role. Indeed, he has said that his playing style was influenced more by Bach counterpoint than by rock or soul bass players.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Lesh (accessed December 20, 2008).
4 Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound (New York: Back Bay Books/Little Brown and Co., 2005), 57.
5 An extensive discussion and explanation of this is found in, among many other places, Robert Hodson, Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz (New York: Routledge, 2007)—especially pages 57-60.
6 In a book on bass technique that proclaims its having been endorsed by a number of well-known bassists on its cover, Chuck Sher writes, “[p]laying bass on tunes often involves nothing more than...hitting the root of each chord as it occurs and then playing around with the basic scale, leading you to the root of the next chord.” The Improviser’s Bass Method (Petaluma, CA: Sher Music Co., 1979), 6. His notated examples concur with this in nearly every case (with the notable, and understandable, exception of the section on soloing) as do those found in Chuck Rainey, The Complete Electric Bass Player—Book 2: Playing Concepts & Dexterity (New York: Amsco Publications, 1985), although in the latter this is notably never made explicit, but rather delineated solely through the musical examples.
7 And of the jamband genre, that the Grateful Dead first defined, in general.
8 For examples see http://www.archive.org/details/GratefulDead and http://www.archive.org/details/PhilLeshandFriends—both have extensive recordings of live recordings that can be either listened to online and/or downloaded. One notable example is the Grateful Dead’s September 14, 1974 performance in Munich, Germany (http://www.archive.org/details/gd1974-09-14.28353.sbeok.flac16) in which nearly 18 minutes at the end of the first set is taken up by a musique concrète-like piece that is then followed by a cover of the Johnny Cash song “Big River” at the beginning of the second set (accessed December 21, 2008).
9 Rob Bowman, “Dark Star,” Grayfolded [CD Booklet]. Toronto: Swell/Artifact.
10 The G and E minor chords can, of course, be understood as being not independent harmonies, but rather collections of chord tones over an essentially unchanging A Mixolydian pedal: G major’s G, B and D being respectively the 7th, 9th and 11th; E minor’s singular different note of E being the 5th. The only note of caution is D as it cannot exist as a chord tone simultaneously with A major’s C#, but can replace it to produce a suspended sonority.
11 Recorded Feb. 27, 1969 at the Fillmore West in San Francisco and released on their 1969 live album Live/Dead.
12 Graeme Boone, “Tonal and Expressive Ambiguity in ‘Dark Star,” in Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 176.
13 It is important to note that although Boone does not obviously notate the drums or percussion given his focus on the relationship of melody and harmony, there is an organ being played in this performance as well. As it only rarely plays a role of any importance within the ensemble during the performance, however, its exclusion is of little import to Boone’s overall thesis.
14 Indeed in the performance that the recording is taken from the song “Mountains of the Moon,” which is in D minor, precedes “Dark Star.”
15 Especially in this instance as the entire 23:07 track is specifically referred to as “Dark Star.”
16 This analysis is of the studio recorded version off the 1975 album Blues for Allah, but though often extended in its live performance Lesh’s style remains consistent.
17 Grateful Dead, “Birdsong,” Grateful Dead Live at Hollywood Palladium on 1972-09-19 (Soundboard), 11 min., 39 sec.,; streaming audio; from Internet Archive, Grateful Dead Collection, http://www.archive.org/details/gd72-09-09.sbd.popi.14086.sbeok.shnf (accessed Dec. 28, 2008).
18 Theodor Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in Quasi una Fantasia (London: Verso, 1992), 311.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor. “Vers une musique informelle.” In Quasi una Fantasia. London: Verso, 1992.
Boone, Graeme. “Tonal and Expressive Ambiguity in ‘Dark Star.” In Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Bowman, Rob. “Dark Star,” Grayfolded [CD Booklet]. Toronto: Swell/Artifact.
Coryat, Karl. “Lesh Is More! Portrait of An American Beauty,” interview with Phil Lesh, Bass Player (March 2008). http://www.bassplayer.com/article/lesh-more-portrait/mar-08/3433 (accessed Dec. 7, 2008).
Hodson, Robert. Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Lesh, Phil. “All in the Music,” By T. Virgil Parker, College Crier Online 7, no. 3 (Sept. 2008). http://www.collegecrier.com/interviews/int-0042.asp (accessed Dec. 7, 2008).
———. Searching for the Sound. New York: Back Bay Books/Little Brown and Co., 2005.
Rainey, Chuck. The Complete Electric Bass Player—Book 2: Playing Concepts & Dexterity. New York: Amsco Publications, 1985.
Sher, Chuck. The Improviser’s Bass Method. Petaluma, CA: Sher Music Co., 1979.
Discography
Grateful Dead. “Birdsong,” Grateful Dead Live at Hollywood Palladium on 1972-09-19. Soundboard; 11 min., 39 sec.,; streaming audio. From Internet Archive, Grateful Dead Collection, http://www.archive.org/details/gd72-09-09.sbd.popi.14086.sbeok.shnf (accessed Dec. 28).
————. “Dark Star.” Live/Dead. Warner Bros., CD B000002KB0 ℗ 1990; originally as LP in 1969.
————. “Help on the Way.” Blues for Allah. Arista. CD B000002VJH ℗ 1995; originally as LP in 1975.
