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    Phil Lesh Didn’t Hold Songs Down. He Lifted Them Higher.

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    Some rock bassists make it their job to hold down the bottom of a song: to hone parts that crisply but unobtrusively stake out a harmonic and rhythmic foundation, that are felt as much as heard. Phil Lesh, a founding member of the Grateful Dead who died on Friday at 84, wasn’t one of them. Instead, Lesh’s playing carried songs aloft.In the telepathic tangle of the Grateful Dead’s arrangements — never played the same way twice — Lesh’s bass lines hopped and bubbled and constantly conversed with the guitars of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. His tone was rounded and unassertive while he eased his way into the counterpoint, almost as if he were thinking aloud. Lesh’s playing was essential to the Dead’s particular gravity-defying lilt, sharing a collective mode of rock momentum that was teasing and probing, never bluntly coercive.Jerry Garcia, left, and Phil Lesh rehearse with the Grateful Dead in San Francisco in the 1970s.Ed Perlstein/Redferns, via Getty ImagesLesh wasn’t a rock-and-roller by training or inclination. His 2005 memoir, “Searching for the Sound,” notes that his first instruments were violin and trumpet, that he soaked up classical music and big-band jazz, that he studied music theory and composition and drew life-changing inspirations from John Coltrane and Charles Ives. He and Tom Constanten, the Dead’s early keyboardist, were the band’s avant-garde contingent, a key aspect of the Dead’s ever-evolving improvisational fusion.For all their free-form interludes, the Dead’s songs had clear landmarks and structures — some of them far trickier than the band’s nimble performances would let on. Lesh could stick to a riff, as he dutifully did in the intro to “Touch of Grey,” the Dead’s only Top 10 (and only Top 40) single. But when the verse arrived, he was footloose again: nudging, scurrying, syncopating from below. His bass lines held hints of Bach, jazz, bluegrass, blues, Latin music and far more, as he sought out new interstices each time through a song.Phil Lesh performing with the Dead at Woodstock in 1969. Archive Photos/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Phil Lesh, Bassist Who Anchored the Grateful Dead, Dies at 84

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      One of the first rock bassists whose instrument regularly took a lead role, he also had a hand in writing some of the band’s best-known songs.Phil Lesh, whose expansive approach to the bass as a charter member of the Grateful Dead made him one of the first performers on that instrument in a rock band to play a lead role rather than a supporting one, died on Friday. He was 84.His death was announced on his Instagram account. No further information was provided.In addition to providing explorative bass work, Mr. Lesh sang high harmonies for the band and provided the occasional lead vocal. He also co-wrote some of the band’s most noteworthy songs, including ones that inspired adventurous jams, like “St. Stephen” and “Dark Star,” as well as more conventional pieces, like “Cumberland Blues,” “Truckin’” and “Box of Rain.”Key to the dynamic of The Dead was the way Mr. Lesh used the bass to provide ever-shifting counterpoints to the dancing lines of the lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, the curt riffs of the rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, the bold rhythms of the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, and, in the band’s first eight years, the warm organ work of Ron McKernan, known as Pigpen.A source of particular excitement was the relationship between Mr. Lesh’s instrument and Mr. Garcia’s. At times they mirrored each other. At other times they contrasted, in the process widening the music’s melodic nuances while helping to create the kind of variety and tension that allowed the band to improvise at length without losing the listener.Mr. Lesh’s bass work could be thundering or tender, focused or abstract. On the Grateful Dead’s studio albums, his lines held so much melody that one could listen to a song for his playing alone. At the same time, he shared his bandmates’ love for unusual chord structures and uncommon time signatures. In constructing his bass parts, he drew from many sources, including free jazz, classical music and the avant-garde.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Excavating Jerry Garcia’s Crucial Bluegrass Roots

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      In 1964, the guitarist took a road trip, hoping to become Bill Monroe’s banjo player. The journey, and his longtime love of the genre, shaped the Grateful Dead.Just off the lobby of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum is the “picking room” — a cozy, glass-enclosed corner where visitors are encouraged to grab any of the guitars, banjos and fiddles hanging on the wood-paneled walls and play. Located on the Ohio River 35 miles northwest of Rosine, the small farming community that produced the bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, the museum’s readily available instruments and neighborly spirit are no surprise.What is unexpected? The 1961 Chevy Corvair sticking out of a wall upstairs in the museum’s main hall and the newly unveiled exhibit it anchors: an in-depth look at the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s long and often intense love affair with bluegrass music.Best known as the standard-bearer for San Francisco’s psychedelic sound and the house band for Ken Kesey’s storied Acid Tests, Grateful Dead concerts were not a big draw in the beating red heart of bluegrass country. Of the more than 3,500 shows Garcia played with the Dead and his own bands, only seven were in Kentucky. But the subsequent emergence of the “jamgrass” scene — a bluegrass cousin to the bands who take a cue from the Dead in emphasizing extended improvisations — is one of the ways that time and a widening appreciation have proved the Dead to be one of the most American of bands. It’s also given Garcia a new kind of cultural heft and near-mythological status, 28 years after his death.The new exhibit “Jerry Garcia — A Bluegrass Journey” will run for two years at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum.Chris StegnerMusicians and listeners alike have long singled out “Old & in the Way,” a 1975 LP from one of Garcia’s side projects, as the gateway recording that introduced them to bluegrass. But much of “Jerry Garcia — A Bluegrass Journey,” the imaginative and carefully curated show that recently began a two-year run at the museum, is built around an intriguing and less well-known event in Garcia’s career: Before forming the Grateful Dead, he aspired to a career as a bluegrass musician and undertook a 1964 cross-country musical pilgrimage, largely in the hope of landing a job as Monroe’s banjo player.“I’ve been with the museum for 13 years and an exhibit on Jerry Garcia has always been on the back burner,” said its curator, Carly Smith. Those discussions were pushed to the forefront when the museum moved in 2018 to a new 64,000-square-foot home that enhanced its ability to present detailed exhibits and includes superb indoor and outdoor performance spaces. Though the pandemic necessitated a two-year delay, the show is an ambitious bid to highlight a little-known connection and build bridges between genres and audiences. Mounted with the cooperation of Garcia’s family, it includes a dozen of his instruments, numerous clippings, artifacts and mementos and a well-researched narrative of Garcia’s formative years on the Bay Area’s folk scene.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Frank Wakefield, Who Expanded the Mandolin’s Range, Dies at 89

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      A bluegrass innovator, he recorded numerous albums as a leader, and his list of collaborators included both Leonard Bernstein and Jerry Garcia.Frank Wakefield, an innovative bluegrass mandolinist whose sweeping musicality led to collaborations with the New York Philharmonic and Jerry Garcia, and whose unique voicings and technique expanded the parameters of his instrument, died on Friday at his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He was 89.Marsha Sprintz, his companion of 47 years, said the cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Wakefield played with a host of bluegrass luminaries, including Jimmy Martin and the Stanley Brothers.He first made his mark in the early 1950s after joining a band led by the singer and guitarist Red Allen as a vocalist and mandolin player. Working in Ohio and the Upper Midwest and, by 1960, the Baltimore-Washington area, the band developed a hard-driving, harmony-rich brand of bluegrass that inspired not only other musicians in the genre, but also bluegrass-inclined rock bands like New Riders of the Purple Sage.While still a teenager, Mr. Wakefield mastered the heavily syncopated “chop” chord of the bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, whom he met in 1961 and who immediately recognized Mr. Wakefield’s prowess as a mandolinist.Mr. Wakefield in 2010. Despite suffering from emphysema for years, he toured and recorded well into the 2000s.Michael G. Stewart“You can play like me as good — or near as good — as I can,” Mr. Wakefield, in a 2022 interview with the Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association, recalled Mr. Monroe saying at their initial meeting. “Now you’ve got to go out and find your own style.”Heeding Mr. Monroe’s advice, Mr. Wakefield did exactly that. He devised his own sound by alternating up and down strokes on his instrument with equal force to produce a clear, ringing tone and sustained rhythm, which he likened to a sledgehammer striking a steel rail in a 1998 interview with the bluegrass website Candlewater.com.At other times, plucking the strings with multiple fingers, he produced a richly textured effect suggestive of two or three mandolins playing together.David Grisman, a student of Mr. Wakefield’s and a mandolin virtuoso in his own right, said in an often quoted passage from Frets magazine that Mr. Wakefield had “split the bluegrass mandolin atom” by taking the instrument beyond where Mr. Monroe had.The 1964 album “Bluegrass,” which Mr. Wakefield recorded with the singer and guitarist Red Allen, pushed the boundaries of the genre.Folkways Records“Bluegrass,” the album that Mr. Wakefield made with Mr. Allen for Folkways Records in 1964 (and that a 19-year-old Mr. Grisman produced), proved ample confirmation of that claim: It featured versions of two of Mr. Wakefield’s most enduring originals, “New Camptown Races” and “Catnip,” both of which, with their developments in melody, tunings and chord changes, pushed the limits of what then constituted bluegrass.Mr. Wakefield’s innovations didn’t stop there, though. By the mid-1960s he had begun composing sonatas for the mandolin and arranging classical pieces for traditional bluegrass ensembles. He performed with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1967 and made a guest appearance with the Boston Pops orchestra the next year.The Greenbriar Boys (from left, Bob Yellin, Mr. Wakefield and John Herald) in performance at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. David Gahr/Getty ImagesMr. Wakefield’s forays outside bluegrass extended into pop territory as well, including a mid-1960s stint with the Greenbriar Boys, an urban folk revivalist group. During this period, he also performed with country bluesmen like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Son House and, later, rock acts like the Grateful Dead.Franklin Delano Roosevelt Wakefield was born on June 26, 1934, in the Emory Gap enclave of Harriman, Tenn., the 10th of 12 children of Simpson and Bertie (Isham) Wakefield. Growing up poor, he was forced to leave school after second grade to help work on the family farm.Enthralled by DeFord Bailey’s performances on “The Grand Ole Opry,” young Frank took up the harmonica at an early age and soon also became adept at playing the guitar.His father, who worked as a brakeman to supplement the family income, froze to death in a local railyard when Frank was 13. Several of his sisters moved 300 miles north to Dayton, Ohio, as part of a Depression-era migration. Frank and his brother, Ralph, were left to move between orphanages until Frank finally ran away to join his sisters in Dayton, where a brother-in-law introduced him to the mandolin.Billing themselves as the Wakefield Brothers, Frank and Ralph, who played guitar, made their first public appearances at house parties and on local radio in 1960. Two years later, Frank joined Red Allen’s band, and his path as a musician was set.However, his tenure with Mr. Allen was fraught with conflict, much of it brought on by Mr. Allen’s abusive behavior, especially when he was drinking. Nevertheless, apart from a period with the Detroit-based Chain Mountain Boys in the mid-1950s, Mr. Wakefield persevered with him until 1965, when he joined the Greenbriar Boys to replace Ralph Rinzler, who had left the band to become Bill Monroe’s manager.Mr. Wakefield in a New York recording studio in 1966, at around the time he embarked on a solo career.David Gahr/Getty ImagesAfter recovering from a near-fatal automobile accident in the late 1960s, Mr. Wakefield moved to Saratoga Springs and embarked on a solo career. Over the next five decades, he released albums for a variety of bluegrass-aligned record labels, including Takoma, Flying Fish and Patuxent Music. His 1972 Rounder album, called simply “Frank Wakefield” and featuring the New York bluegrass band Country Cooking, is widely regarded as a touchstone of the movement known as newgrass, which incorporated elements of rock, jazz and classical music into traditional bluegrass.Despite suffering from emphysema for years, Mr. Wakefield continued to tour nationally and to record well into the 2000s.Besides Ms. Sprintz, Mr. Wakefield’s survivors include a sister, Susie Norton; a son, Greg Wakefield; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.Despite his musically omnivorous appetites, Mr. Wakefield was unfamiliar with Mr. Garcia, who would later produce the 1976 album “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” a string-band collaboration between Mr. Wakefield and others, when they started playing shows together.“Whenever Garcia played with me and David,” Mr. Wakefield explained, referring to David Nelson of New Riders of the Purple Sage in a 2006 interview with candlewater.com, “we would always have a full house. I thought it was because of me.”“It took me a while,” he added, “to realize that people were coming to the shows because Jerry was playing with us.” More

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      Essra Mohawk, Self-Described Flower Child Singer-Songwriter, Dies at 75

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      She missed a shot at Woodstock glory. But she recorded well-received albums under her own name and worked with Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia and others.Essra Mohawk, a prolific singer-songwriter and self-described flower child whose soulful, dreamlike songs captured the sunny optimism of the Woodstock era, and whose varied career included performing with Frank Zappa and Jerry Garcia and seeing one of her songs turned into a hit single by Cyndi Lauper, died on Dec. 11 at her home in Nashville. She was 75.The cause was cancer, her cousin Jeff Hurvitz said.Over the course of a career that lasted more than a half century, Ms. Mohawk never achieved the fame of contemporaries like Joni Mitchell, Carole King or Laura Nyro (to whom she was often compared). And she missed a chance at hippie immortality when her driver took a wrong turn on the way to the Woodstock festival in 1969.“We got there in time to see the last verse of the last song of the last act of the first night, and then the stage went dark before we got to it from the parking lot,” she recalled in a 2009 video interview.Still, Ms. Mohawk made her mark. Her album “Primordial Lovers,” produced by her husband, Frazier Mohawk, and released shortly after Woodstock, was met with critical praise. In 1977, the rock critic Paul Williams wrote in Rolling Stone that it was “firmly on my list of the top 25 all-time best albums.”While still in her teens, Ms. Mohawk was briefly a member of Frank Zappa’s anarchic band, the Mothers of Invention.via YouTubeShe recorded more than a dozen albums over the years, and, early in her career, served a stint as a member of Frank Zappa’s iconoclastic band, the Mothers of Invention.In the 1970s, Ms. Mohawk sang memorable songs like “Sufferin’ Till Suffrage” and “Interjections!,” for “Schoolhouse Rock!,” the series of animated educational shorts that was a Saturday morning television staple for the children of Generation X.In the early 1980s, she carved out a small place in Grateful Dead lore by touring with one Dead side project, the Jerry Garcia Band, and helping write a song, “Haze,” for another, Bob Weir’s Bobby & the Midnites.Ms. Lauper’s exuberant rendition of her song “Change of Heart” shot to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1987. Two years later, Tina Turner released a version of Ms. Mohawk’s “Stronger Than the Wind.”Ever dogged about finding an audience for her work, Ms. Mohawk even appeared in 1977 on “The Gong Show,” the campy showcase of amateur talent hosted by the colorful Chuck Barris, in which acts deemed flops were dispatched with the strike of a large gong.Some audience members jeered during Ms. Mohawk’s performance of her “Appointment With a Dream,” which involved her own ethereal take on scat singing. Still, she received two scores of 8 (out of 10) and one of 7 from the panel of three celebrity judges.“No, I wasn’t gonged, thank goodness,” Ms. Mohawk wrote in a 2016 post on the blog Rockasteria. “In fact, I scored a 23, my lucky number, but I came in second to a guy who played two saxophones at once.”Essra Mohawk was born Sandra Elayne Hurvitz on April 23, 1948, in Philadelphia, the younger of two children of Henry Hurvitz, a taxi driver, and Anne (Sosnow) Hurvitz, who worked at a beauty shop. She later adopted the name Essra, a twist on Essie, a nickname she picked up early in her career.Ms. Mohawk was married three times. No immediate family members survive. Her brother, Gary, died this year.By her early teens, she was already playing piano and filling notebooks with her songs. After graduating from George Washington High School in Philadelphia in 1966, she briefly attended the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts before moving to New York to start a music career.That career got a jump start when she was 19 and she and a couple of friends were strolling down Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village and met Mr. Zappa. “Frank invited us all in to see his show for free,” she said in a 2003 interview. “We became friends, and it wasn’t long before he had an opportunity to hear me play my music. He asked me join the Mothers right on the spot.”Being a satellite in the Zappa orbit came with its Zappaesque quirks. The band’s lead singer, Ray Collins, “came up with the name ‘Uncle Meat’ at one of our rehearsals, telling Frank that he thought it was a great name for a rock star,” she recalled in an interview with the British site Zappanews. “Frank immediately spun around and, pointing at me, proclaimed, ‘You’re Uncle Meat!’”Displeased with the name, Ms. Mohawk wriggled out of it a few months later, so Mr. Zappa appropriated it as the title for a Mothers album in 1969.Mr. Zappa signed her to his label, Bizarre Records, and, under the name Sandy Hurvitz, she released her first album, “Sandy’s Album Is Here at Last!”She released her last, “The One and Only,” in 2019. But she never forgot the invaluable career boost she missed out on with that wrong turn on the way to Woodstock.“Had I played Woodstock, we all know how that would have changed my life,” she said in 2009. But, she acknowledged, perhaps that was a blessing: “Knowing me, being the feral child that I was, I would have had no restraint, and I would have been long dead.” More

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      Ronnie Tutt, 83, Dies; Powerful Drummer Backed Rock and Pop Stars

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      He was a force in Elvis Presley’s TCB band and accompanied other big names like Jerry Garcia, Billy Joel and Elvis Costello.NASHVILLE — Ronnie Tutt, the prolific and versatile drummer who accompanied both Elvises, Presley and Costello, as well as other major figures in rock and pop like Jerry Garcia and Neil Diamond, died on Oct. 16 at his home in Franklin, Tenn. He was 83.His death was confirmed by his wife, Donna, who said he had lived with chronic heart problems.Mr. Tutt was singing jingles and drumming in local bands in Dallas when, in his early 30s, he was hired to play drums in Presley’s TCB (Taking Care of Business) band for a series of historic engagements at the International Hotel outside Las Vegas in 1969.Presley’s four-week residency there marked his triumphant return to the stage after an eight-year hiatus, reviving a career hampered by uninspired movie roles and an image that had lost relevance in the face of the ’60s counterculture.The comeback — a transformation that also invigorated Las Vegas’s nightclub scene — was due in no small part to the strength of Presley’s rhythm section, a dozen of whose performances were documented on the live portion of the 1969 album “From Memphis to Vegas/From Vegas to Memphis.” Foremost among them was a racing take, nearly eight minutes long, of “Suspicious Minds” featuring Mr. Tutt’s hyperkinetic, barely controlled drumming.Mr. Tutt’s powerful yet nuanced style enlivened many of Presley’s studio recordings from this period as well, including “Burning Love,” a Top 10 pop hit in 1972 that lives up to its incendiary title. Admired for his use of cymbals, Mr. Tutt was known for his ability to anticipate Presley’s moves onstage and accentuate them on the drums.“Elvis always bragged how you intuitively could keep up with his stage moves, even when he tried to trick you,” Presley’s ex-wife, Priscilla Presley, wrote in a tribute addressed to Mr. Tutt on Instagram.Mr. Tutt did studio work for other artists while in Presley’s employ. He provided empathetic support to Billy Joel’s 1974 Top 40 hit “Piano Man.” He contributed propulsive cymbal and snare rhythms to Gram Parsons’s “Ooh Las Vegas,” a 1974 recording that featured Emmylou Harris on vocals. In the 1970s, Mr. Tutt played in both Ms. Harris’s Hot Band and the Jerry Garcia Band.Working concurrently with Presley and Garcia, the Grateful Dead founder and lead guitarist, proved a study in contrasts, Mr. Tutt said: His work with Presley was meticulously rehearsed, his sessions with Garcia more impromptu and improvisational, akin to jazz.“Elvis’s music was a lot more in your face; you could never play enough,” he recalled in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone. “With Jerry we never talked about it, but I just knew that my role with that band, no matter what configuration it was, was to help keep it together. We weren’t there to do flashy solos.”Ronald Ellis Tutt was born on March 12, 1938, in Dallas, the only child of Frank and Gladys Tutt. His father owned a dry-cleaning business; his mother was a homemaker.Young Ronnie took dance lessons at an early age. His first instrument was ukulele, followed by guitar, violin and trumpet. He did not begin playing the drums until his senior year in high school.“When I was 3, I started dancing, so the rhythm of everything was more important to me than the melodic,” Mr. Tutt said, discussing his affinity for the drums in a 2016 interview with the website Elvis Australia. “I was frustrated with playing trumpet and guitar because I wanted to express myself rhythmically. It was a very easy transition.”He worked as a drummer with Presley until Presley’s death in 1977. He then played on recordings by the Carpenters, Mink DeVille and others before joining Mr. Diamond’s band, as a drummer and background singer, in 1981. Onstage, Mr. Tutt routinely drew ovations for his drum crescendos during performances of Mr. Diamond’s 1969 pop hit “Holly Holy.”He remained with Mr. Diamond until 2018, while continuing to do studio work on projects like Mr. Costello’s “King of America” (1986) and Los Lobos’ “By the Light of the Moon” (1987). From 1997 to the mid-2010s he also appeared in “Elvis: The Concert,” a touring extravaganza that featured video footage of Presley performing, with new live backing by members of the TCB band and other musicians.In addition to his wife, Mr. Tutt is survived by seven daughters, Cindy Rutter, Tina Dempsey, Christine Edson, Terie Tutt, Rhonda Henderson, Elisia Notermann and Rachael Dodson; two sons, Ron Jr. and Jared; 16 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Another son, Nathan, died 10 years ago.Though he was not known as a producer, Mr. Tutt served in that role, albeit uncredited, on “Burning Love” while Felton Jarvis, Presley’s regular producer, was recovering from a kidney transplant.“He was lying on his back in the control room at RCA,” Mr. Tutt said of Mr. Jarvis in his interview with Elvis Australia. “Emery Gordy came up with the bass line, and I produced the record for Felton — you know, the whole session.”“It more described the kind of music that we were trying to get Elvis to do at the time,” he said of “Burning Love” and the aspirations that he and other members of Presley’s Nashville rhythm section had for the session. “So I take a little pride in that.” More