Phil Lesh & Friends

Phil Lesh & Friends is an American rock band formed and led by Phil Lesh, bassist of the Grateful Dead. Phil & Friends is not a traditional gr

Phil Lesh & Friends is an American rock band formed and led by Phil Lesh, bassist of the Grateful Dead. Phil & Friends is not a traditional group in that several different lineups of musicians have played under the name, including ones featuring members of Phish, Little Feat, and the Zen Tricksters. The most permanent of these lineups, known as the Phil Lesh Quintet (PLQ or just "the Q" for short) played on a mostly-regular basis from September of 2000 through December 2003. The members of this incarnation were Lesh, Warren Haynes (guitar & vocals; also of Gov't Mule and Allman Brothers Band), Jimmy Herring (guitar; The Dead, Allman Brothers Band, Aquarium Rescue Unit, etc), Rob Barraco (keyboards; The Zen Tricksters) and John Molo (drums; Bruce Hornsby and the Range). This unit released an album, There and Back Again, on Columbia Records in 2002. It included several new songs from Lesh and Robert Hunter, longtime Grateful Dead lyricist, as well as one recent favorite from Jerry Garcia and Hunter, and several original contributions from Haynes, Barraco/Mattson and Herring.

The Phil & Friends concept takes the music of the Grateful Dead (and an ever-increasing number of other influences, including Bob Dylan, Traffic, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Warren Haynes' own Gov't Mule, the Allman Brothers, etc) and explores and interprets it in new ways. Through the Quintet years, a Phil & Friends show was often focused on harder, faster rock than that which the Grateful Dead played, thanks in large part to Haynes' and Herring's talents at the Southern rock style. Lesh was fond of calling it "Dixieland-style rock." However, all of the incarnations of Phil & Friends have followed a trend of "updating" the Grateful Dead's massive body of work, and all have been extremely adept at the long, exploratory jams that were a trademark of the Dead. Phil & Friends has been acclaimed for giving new life to the Grateful Dead's material, bringing in new styles and innovations, while at the same time remaining loyal to the original music and the original fans. It is this melding of musical influences that has given them extremely wide appeal not only among old Deadheads, but the modern-day fans of other jam bands as well.