URBANASPIRINES | TRIBUTE TO PHIL LESH by KOSTAS

Phil Lesh (March 15, 1940 – October 25, 2024) 

Grateful Dead (7 Albums)

lovely tribute to Phil Lesh, bassplayer of the Grateful Dead, with a seven album selection from Urbanaspirines’ Kostas who does his usual thorough and extensive review of an innovator who frankly reinvented the instrument he mastered!

Philip Chapman Lesh (March 15, 1940 – October 25, 2024)was an American musician and a founding member of the Grateful Dead, with whom he played bass guitar throughout their 30-year career. 

After the band's disbanding in 1995, Lesh continued the tradition of Grateful Dead family music with side project Phil Lesh and Friends, which paid homage to the Dead's music by playing their repertoire, as well as songs of the members of his own group. 

From the debut album (here to classic like American Beauty to Working Man’s Dead to Live Dead Anthem of the Sun to Aoxomoxia, Skull & Roses of 1971 seven of the most classic Dead albums assessed and revisited here. I went through a mini jag of listening to the Dead again last year and listened to over some thirty albums but these seven are worthy of anyone’s collection. If you don’t have ANY (where ya bin!?) then these will do nicely and all feature Phil I think!

read on here . . . .

UPDATE:

There was some discussion on Kostas’ page about the back cover of Aoxomoxia and who was portrayed in it when the Dead stayed (and hosted Leary acid tests) at the famous Olompali commune inhabited by the Shoen Ones so called, where the picture was taken. They rented the house and stayed there for about two months only

There was also some discussion nearly ten years ago now that Courtney Love was featured in the foreground as one of the children (far right). This is not the case The children were from the commune The Chosen Ones and the girl featured on the right mistakenly identified as Love is actually Bill Kretzmann’s daughter Stacey. 

"The Grateful Dead leased Olompali for the months of May and June in 1966 and visited the ranch several times over the next three years. In 1969 they returned for a photo shoot for the back cover of their album, Aoxomoxia. Pigpen is lying in front. Jerry Garcia is on the left with the tree trunk behind him. In addition to the band, members of the Merry Pranksters and the Chosen Family Commune were also included in the photo. The blonde girl in the left front and the blonde girl sitting next to Garcia are the daughters of my brother-in-law Jim Hagedorn’s cousin, Paula McCoy."

Deadhead sources documented this back in 2015. 

read on here . . . .

“The (San Francisco/Haight-Asbury) Summer of Love began one afternoon at Olompali.” Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.