Bassist’s transplant journey inspires two decades of on-stage advocacy for organ donation.
The Grateful Dead, the legendary San Francisco jam band and its various offshoots, were known for never playing the same show twice, switching up their setlists each night. But since the late ’90s, at nearly every concert featuring original bassist Phil Lesh, who passed away Friday at 84, one thing always kicked off the encore.
It wasn’t a song, but a short speech from Lesh asking everyone in the crowd to sign up as organ donors. This was deeply personal for him: In 1998, at 58 and battling chronic hepatitis C, the avant-garde bassist got a liver transplant.
Lesh’s Personal Connection to Organ Donation
“I’m only here today,” he said before a 2015 show with the other living original Grateful Dead members including Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, “because a guy named Cody chose to be an organ donor. He did it the easiest way possible: He turned to a loved one and said, ‘Hey, if anything happens to me, I want to be an organ donor.'”
As Lesh, a co-founder of the Grateful Dead, told Relix magazine in 2002, “If you or someone you care about needed an organ and one was available, wouldn’t you take it? Of course. Well, it’s only fair. If you’d accept one, you should be willing to donate too.”
A New Lease on Life and Music
Lesh’s transplant came just three years after Jerry Garcia, his fellow Grateful Dead founder, died of a heart attack while in a drug rehabilitation facility. Garcia had long struggled with drug addiction, including to LSD and heroin. Lesh said the transplant saved his life and let him tour heavily for decades after with Dead spin-offs like Further and his group, Phil Lesh and Friends, where he continued to showcase his melodic byways and improvisational fusion on songs like “Unbroken Chain”, perhaps the best song with bass in the Dead’s catalogue.
The “Donor Rap”: A Concert Staple
The pre-encore talk became a concert staple that fans and websites tracking Phil and Friends’ setlists often included it: “Donor Rap” or “Phil’s Donor Rap.”
Six years ago, Phil Lesh and Friends played a show for the American Transplant Foundation at Red Rocks Amphitheatre near Denver to mark the 20th anniversary of Lesh’s transplant.
“We didn’t have to convince him of anything,” the foundation’s director, Anastasia Henry, said briefly on Friday. “He had no demands – very straightforward.”
Honouring the Gift of Life
At the encore, before playing “Fire on the Mountain” and perhaps Lesh’s most famous Grateful Dead song with its counterpoint vocal harmonies, “Box of Rain” from the classic American Beauty album, Lesh gave his donor speech. Calling his liver donor only by his first name, Lesh said Cody’s choice helped not just him, but gave life to several others after death. “Me and Cody,” he added, “have had a great bond for 20 years.”
Phil Lesh’s Musical Journey and Legacy
Lesh’s death comes after he was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2006 and prostate cancer in 2015. The Grateful Dead were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 and recognized as MusiCares Persons of the Year in 2023. They were also selected as Kennedy Center honorees in 2021 for their unique psychedelic sound that blended elements of rock, folk, bluegrass, blues, reggae, country, jazz, psychedelia and space rock. Some of their most well-known songs showcasing their harmonic motion include “Truckin'”, “Touch of Grey”, “St. Stephen”, and “Cumberland Blues” from the Workingman’s Dead album. It’s unclear who Drew Hunter’s wife is or who dies in American Beauty.
Source:
Marc Tracy (October 25, 2024). The Personal Plea Phil Lesh Made Every Time He Took the Stage. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/arts/music/phil-lesh-liver-transplant.html
Header Photo: Phil Lesh performing at Terrapin Crossroads December 6, 2013
Photo credit: SaltyBoatr, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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