#39: Forgiveness Is the Key to Every Door
Goodbye Phil Lesh / Hello Lee Baggett
Hey y’all. Deep apologies for all the space between posts here. Between hitting ⅔ of the Phish Shows in Albany and a nagging cold that took down everyone in our house, there just wasn’t any time and energy left over last week. I promise to do better and protect myself from wook flu more effectively going forward.
And then this week, well, I don’t need to say too much about that right now, but let’s just say it was hard letting music heal but somehow I found a path. I’ve gotten out of the practice of taking life one moment at a time, and now feels like the place to resume. The sun is shining, we’re here, we have family, friends and music. Let’s enjoy this stuff that’s close by before spiralling into the unknown—what’s coming is coming, let’s get ourselves ready for it but not at the cost of the moment. Let’s build and strengthen our communities.
We got back to business on the waves of the air/net with the Trailhead this week. Of course, we celebrated the spirit of Phil Lesh with a mournful first set that included a lot of solo acoustic guitar courtesy of Anthony Pasquarosa, John Fahey, Barry Archie Johnson and David Van Auken. We also welcomed back our friend Matt LaJoie under his ML Wah guise with a beautiful new piano piece aided and abetted by another old friend, Wednesday Knudsen. The first set opened with a great lo-fi guitar piece from Finland’s Juho Toivonen.
Set two was a more explicit tribute to Lesh, featuring three jams by the Grateful Dead. We led off with a soaring Bird Song from the undersung US Fall tour of 1972, followed by a stellar connection to Dark Star that took place at RFK Stadium in the Summer of ‘73. We closed this week’s loop with an otherworldly Eyes of the World from June of 1974 that will surely leave you reeling and thinking “Gee, maybe Phil was the leader all along?.”
Listen to the show here and peep the tracklist below. And if you haven’t already, please make a free Mixcloud account and give us a follow over there and like and repost the shows. It really helps spread the word.
The Trailhead 151:
1. Juho Toivonen - Kanava 6 - Taivaskanava (Grapefruit Records, 2024) 00:00
2. Anthony Pasquarosa - Apparition of Melmoth - VDSQ Solo Acoustic Volume Seven (VDSQ, 2014) 01:50
3. John Fahey - My Shepherd Will Supply My Needs - Vol. 6 / Days Have Gone By (Takoma, 1967) 10:03
4. Satan Club - Bardo - Home Recordings (Aural Canyon, 2024) 18:50
5. David Van Auken - Dark Year - Dark Year (Debacle, 2024) 22:40
6. Barry Archie Johnson - Outlaw's Wand - Fortune's Mirror (VDSQ, 2024) 26:25
7. ML Wah - Living Space (ft. Wednesday Knudsen) - Sight Unfolding (Flower Room, 2024) 35:51
8. Grateful Dead - Bird Song - 1972-10-2, Springfield Civic Center, Springfield, MA (LMA, 20XX) 1:01:35
9. Grateful Dead - Dark Star - June 10 1973, RFK Stadium, Washington, D.C. (Rhino, 2023) 1:14:41
10. Grateful Dead - Eyes of the World - Road Trips Vol. 2 No. 3: Wall Of Sound (GD Records, 2009) 1:40:11
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Maybe a small part of my absence was avoiding writing about Phil Lesh. Losing him has been pretty difficult, even in this modern era of saying final goodbyes to so many of the musical giants of our lives. To depart at 84 years old is, objectively, a great gift. Add in a liver replacement, bouts with cancer and thirty years on the road with the Dead, and it’s a goddamn miracle.
But still it felt sudden and awful.
I never saw the Grateful Dead. Despite getting my High School crew into them via an American Beauty cassette in the summer after 8th grade, it just wasn’t meant to be. I did have a ticket to one of the nights of the band’s final MSG run in the Fall of 1994 but it was purchased by a shady friend’s mom and this guy weirdly sold my seat to another kid in some kind of weird power move the night before. The guy was an asshole to begin with so I shouldn’t be surprised.
I got deeper into the Dead via the tapes I was given in High School and College and via live shows I would buy at a head/music shop on Long Island called Prime Cuts. The store was cute with the band’s taping/trading policy and said it was simply selling the blank tapes, not the music but I was so thankful to get high-speed dubbed shows whenever I had some extra cash so I’m ok with the breaking of the Deadhead code in that instance.
It’s at times like this I take extra issue with the classification of the Dead as a rock band. It’s such a narrow definition and one that just doesn’t stick during music of the time, especially in their most exciting years between 1968 and 1975. Stick the Bobby, Jerry, Phil, Keith, Billy or Mickey from that era in The Stooges and nobody is leaving the first rehearsal happy or excited or thinking there will be another one. These guys just didn’t (and couldn’t) play rock and roll the way the best did and thank fuck for that. One of the main reasons is Phil.
Yes, the night he passed we listened to “Box of Rain” a lot but, as any head will tell you, Phil’s contributions to the Dead’s greatness lie in every song, jam, silence and space.
I played three favorites on the latest Trailhead but here are a few great post-Jerry Phil jams to sink your teeth into.
Phil & Friends, Warfield Theater, San Francisco, CA, 1999-04-15
For my money, the April 1999 run at the Warfield in San Francisco is THE best furthering of Grateful Dead music since Garcia exited. There has simply never been anything since that has come close to touching it. Trey Anastasio, Steve Kimock, Phil Lesh, Page McConnell and John Molo came together to produce three timelesss evenings of music that will stand the ravages of time. Almost any piece from the run is worth raving about but start at the beginning with “Viola Lee Blues” and take it easy but take it all. (Get the full recording here)
Phil & Friends, Cuthbert Ampitheater, Eugene, OR 1999-08-17
Phil didn’t keep the same band together for that long after the demise of the Dead but that kept things interesting. This fickleness could be a little maddening with some runs showing a lack of cohesion or depth likely due to the players just not having that much time together. This show featuring Steve Kimock, Al Schnier of moe. and some String Cheese Incident dudes is great though. Check this deep “Dark Star” with some violin! (Get the full recording here)
Phil & Friends, Red Rocks, Morrison, 2001-07-06
Most heads point to the quintet of Phil with Jimmy Herring, Warren Haynes, John Molo and Rob Barraco to be the best band he ever put together. For years, I was unconvinced of this without doing any real deep inspection, mostly due to a weird aversion to Haynes who I assumed to just be a southern rock guy who couldn’t get cosmic. It was only in the last couple years, thanks to a random coming across of a killer “Low Spark" by this band, that I began giving this lineup its due. Here they are doing “Unbroken Chain” at Red Rocks and it’s all the convincing one needs that it was, indeed, a special band. (Get the full recording here)
Gotta give a huge shoutout to Jeffrey Alexander who posted about this new Lee Baggett record—Waves for a Beegul—recently and it was enough of a rave that I had to put it on this morning. And, goddamn, my friend down there in Philly was right: this is a great fucking record. Issued by Perpetual Doom just last week, the album opens with a drop into a warmy, fuzzy bath and pretty much keeps you there, swaying and head nodding for a good 45 minutes. Early 70s Neil is the obvious point of reference while cruising Baggett’s new world here but there’s also orange and purple streaks of Dinosaur Jr, MV & EE at their most conventional and the Meat Puppets at their most serene. The jams never last too long (boo) but they pack a lot of punch and those baked-just-right solos are a guarantee source for spirit soar. I can’t say there’s any new ground being broken here but I’m not looking for a nice, wooly flannel shirt I found in a thrift store to radically shift my perception—I just wanna feel warm and comfy, ya know? Baggett, a resident of the Pacific Northwest, seems to have been pretty prolific at home so there’s a lot I need to backtrack on. One of the best musical feelings in the world is the personal discovery of an artist with a deep catalog you can get lost in.