This month's postcard is delivered via time warp from 1982. It's a profile of Phil Lesh that I wrote for Musician magazine.

PHIL LESH's Unbroken Changes

The music of the Grateful Dead can be described as an ongoing conversation, not just between musicians but between musics. Guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, keyboardist Brent Mydland and bassist Phil Lesh -- and the others who have played in the band in the past -- each brought a radically different set of values, traditions and goals to the party and set out to create their music anew at every performance.

Phil Lesh is a pivotal participant in the Dead's improvisations, contributing a puckish instrumental personality as well as deep musical literacy gained in a lifetime of formal training. He urges jams into uncharted territory and adds rich counterpoint to song arrangements. In concert, his face reflects the mood of the music and the musician as he runs through a panorama of unself-conscious poses: leaning into his axe in total concentration; shooting looks at his bandmates to register approval, reproach or intent; and dancing joyously, looking like a marionette caught by a sudden gust. "Phil goes through his changes much more frequently and intensely than I think of myself as doing," says Garcia, who sums up Lesh's role in the ever-shifting Dead dynamic: "When Phil's happening, the band's happening."

Though I had been warned by the Dead's publicist that Lesh "never does interviews," he did agree to see me -- probably because he'd seen the pile of clippings I sent over to prove that I am a serious student of Grateful Dead music and neither a Deadhead apologist nor a fan-mag muckraker.

At our first meeting, which took place at the Dead's rehearsal/recording place in Marin County, the bassist gave me a detailed history of his musical development, beginning at the time he heard Brahms' First Symphony on the radio at age four and continuing in a relatively straight line to the present. Along the way, he rhapsodized about the composers who have inspired him and commented on how the music of the Grateful Dead has been shaped over the 17 years since the band started. Lesh evinces a quick and sardonic humor -- he has a wicked laugh -- as well as a deeply philosophical attitude toward the musical and social phenomenon in which his life is irrevocably involved.

He invited me to his home to hear concrete examples of the music he was discussing, and so I spent the Fourth of July listening to Ives, Stockhausen, Berio, Beethoven, Coltrane and the Grateful Dead. Lesh brought out scores and pointed out the notation of particularly interesting or complicated passages, and he offered critiques and marginalia on everything we heard. It was like a visit to the home of a hip college professor: his love for the subject and the presence of a willing pupil elicited a marvelous private lecture, replete with brilliantly-articulated opinions, anecdotes and insights into what the past and present mean to each other in the life of this unique musician. Lesh not only gave generously of his knowledge, but he listened to my observations and engaged in a spirited give-and-take discussion about the Dead's music.

"I got into popular music backwards," Lesh explains. "Until I was about 16, my entire input was classical. The more complicated classical music leads you to jazz; the blues content of jazz gradually sucked me into pure blues, and that led straight to rock'n'roll." Lesh never so much as picked up an electric bass guitar until he joined the band that became the Grateful Dead, so one of his unique contributions to the musical conversation is a pair of hands unspoiled by the retooled-guitarist habits of most bass players.

By the time he hooked up with Jerry Garcia's electrified jug band in the mid-'60s, Lesh had taken up and given up the violin and then the trumpet and turned to "serious" composition. He wrote pieces for multiple ensembles, each playing not just different keys and times but different music, and then dropped out of the Unversity of California ("a school for musicologists, not musicians") midway through his first year and went straight into a graduate-level course under the tutelage of Luciano Berio. Hearing "Subterranean Homesick Blues" on the AM radio taught him that artistic substance and commercial survival weren't necessarily mutually exclusive. After finding himself "the only guy in a roomful of screaming chicks" at a showing of A Hard Day's Night, he decided "there must be something to this!" and started growing his hair long. These and "various other life scenarios" opened Lesh to the LSD-fueled creative flux that gave rise to the Dead and other San Francisco bands in the psychedelic '60s.

Lesh's pre-Dead influences can best be heard on Anthem of the Sun (1968), which includes passages of musique concrete directly traceable to Berio's electronic music, and Live Dead (1969), where "Dark Star" illustrates the group's improvisational bent and "The Eleven" shows Lesh's ambitious structural and harmonic ideas. But Lesh will be the first to admit that Grateful Dead albums aren't the best way to hear Grateful Dead music. "I don't know whether what we do can be captured," he sighs. "And personally, if I never had to play in a recording studio again I'd be a happy man."

Lesh gave up writing for the Dead after 1974's Mars Hotel album. "'Unbroken Chain' could have been really something," he says, "and some people think it really is something. But I wanted it to be what I wanted it to be, and it just didn't happen. I can't get what I want from the band, and I don't want to lean on them because I know it would be counterproductive." He did contribute "Passenger" to Terrapin Station (1977), but "the only reason I made that song up was that I wanted the guitar players to play with a little raunch."

The Grateful Dead may not make platinum platters, but year after year they can be found at or near the top of the list of box-office winners. The reason is that for the Dead and their fans, each concert is more like a seance in the guise of a carnival than an evening of "entertainment" in the usual sense. The musicians approach each other sonically, entwining their ideas in two 90-minute sets and hoping to catch a whiff of "it," that ephemeral spiritual linkage of minds that results, Lesh says, in moments "when you're not a musician any more, you're not even human any more -- you're just there." And that's what most of the Dead's audience is there for, too. "That improvisational attitude is the one thing we all agreed on in the beginning -- subconsciously, because we didn't really talk about it until much later."

In characterizing the uniqueness of the players, Bob Weir notes that "Jerry doesn't play guitar like anyone else I've heard, and neither do I; Phil doesn't play the bass like a bass..." And it's true: like the rest of the Dead's two-drummers-no-waiting rhythm section, Lesh doesn't dwell too much on the traditional role of his instrument in the ensemble. "It was obvious at the beginning that there were certain fundamentals that had to be observed," says Lesh. "Coordinate with the bass drum, play the root of certain chords, and so forth. But after six months it was obvious to me that a lot of that could be disposed of. I could play off-beat to the kick, and I could put the seventh -- or even the ninth -- in the bass line and still have it make sense."

The constantly-changing quality of the Dead's music is, says Lesh, "the nature of the beast. I prefer it this way, because if it didn't change it wouldn't exist any more. Sometimes a change isn't necessarily positive: sometimes it's not necessarily growth. But whatever occurs gives one certain person, or some people, or everyone, a different perception -- which then leads to something positive."

In the early days of the band it was possible for the music to go "outside" at any time, but a decision was made at the start of the '70s to include more songs per se and therefore rely less on improvisation. "The Workingman's Dead-American Beauty style of material and the concept of the 'warmup set' have forced us into more rigidity than I'd like to see," says Lesh. "This particular show that we're doing now has been ossifying since 1970."

Deadheads and band members alike have endured periods when the musicians, rather than "playin' in the band" as the song says, have found themselves playing at the band. Lesh, Weir, Kreutzmann, Hart and Garcia have been exploring each other's mental/musical terrain for so long that frustration and individual assertiveness often match or exceed the ego-detachment and mutuality of purpose that must be there to allow "it" to happen.

"There's nothing you can do to make 'it' happen," Lesh says, "but there are ways of making it easier -- like playing dynamically and listening to each other -- and sometimes we don't do them.

"Some nights we come out on stage and from the first note it's straight on up. No problems -- away we go! Then there's the more common experience where we have to start from just about nowhere, and by the end of the first set or the middle of the second set we get to a place where something can happen.

"Or there's the one where nothing you do makes any difference. I'll systematically try everything I can think of to make a change -- I'll play more, I'll play less, spread out my registers, play one note. I also do something that gets people really crazy: I will stop playing when I don't have anything to say or I know that what I do is not going to matter." He cocks his eyebrows and emits one of those diabolical belly laughs of his.

"When the Grateful Dead is happening, I can't put a finger in a wrong place," Lesh continues. "I don't have to think about what I'm playing: there's no time to think about it!" Those are the times that make all the rest of life seem pale by comparison. Lesh quotes aerialist Karl Wallenda to illustrate: "The wire is life," he says. "The rest is just waiting around."

After years of using sophisticated, custom-made basses, Lesh recently turned to simpler instruments -- but only temporarily. A chance encounter with a '57 Jazz bass caused him to shelve his Doug Irwin (a twin to Garcia's six-string), and he subsequently switched to a new G&L bass. "It's louder and it has more tone controls than the Fender, and it has a master volume," notes Lesh. "On the Jazz, when I wanted to change the volume I had to use two fingers, and I couldn't do it very rapidly. The G&L also has treble boost and bass boost, and humbucker-to-single-coil switching. I always use the single coil, because the humbuckers sound so choked. I don't quite understand that, because other humbucking pickups don't sound like that."

The G&L will soon be replaced by Lesh's dream bass. "My idea is to have a six-string bass that's tuned in fourths, with a B below the normal E and a C above the G, so it's playable like a regular bass but with half again the range," he says. The new bass will incorporate a filter developed by Lesh and Alembic for the modified Guild Starfire II that Lesh played from 1971 to 1974 (and still uses on occasion). "The filter has five modes: notch, hiqh pass, low pass, bandpass, and bandpass with boost," he explains. "There are frequency, bandwidth and gain controls for the filter, plus an unfiltered gain control.

"If the acoustics are right, the bass can walk up your backbone," says Lesh with a mad-scientist glint in his eye. "I'd like to be able to start from the feet."

After experimenting with steel picks (which cut his fingers and, being magnetic, tended to shoot pulses through the pickups), Lesh settled on a pick made of titanium. "It's really strong and really light, and it doesn't wear out like the Gibson heavies I used to use," he says. "The feel of it is superior for the bass -- you hit the string and it knows it's been hit!"

Because of his early involvement with electronic music, the complexity of his basses and his adventures with synthesist Ned Lagin in the mid-'70s, Lesh is thought of as a computer-music freak. "That was really only happening for a brief period, and somehow it got around that it was a big deal in my life," he shrugs, "but it's not. I'm not a computer person at all, but I know that it can be used to make music."

Lesh's collaboration with Lagin took the form of improvisations between the Dead's sets in 1974, and an album called Seastones, released in 1975. "Ned just had people blow, as it were, electronically and on drums and things," says Lesh. "Then he processed the tapes into a form that he could work with in his own way. I still don't understand completely how he arrived at the final product; he used the recordings sort of like the foundation of a building: most of the time you don't hear what was played."

Adding to Lesh's techno-geek image is the oscilloscope in his amp rack, but his stage setup is actually pretty straightforward, starting with an Intersound IVP preamp. He uses four 18" and four 15" speakers by Meyer Sound Labs, the same outfit that designed the Dead's current PA. Meyer's system uses an electronic processor to monitor the coupling of the speaker to room acoustics and correct phase distortion, yielding truer frequency response and greater efficiency than conventional speakers.

His power amps are Godzillas. "John Meyer says they aren't made right," laughs Lesh, "and they aren't -- but they have a slew rate of 600 volts per microsecond, which means that they deliver power the fastest. I need that because of the transients from the titanium picks." Wattage is relative, he adds. "Some say it's 600 watts and some say it's 1000, but all I know is that now I can be as loud as Garcia -- and that takes some doing."