Grief will ripple through the Bay Area music community today, as the family of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh announced that he passed away peacefully early Friday morning.

Berkeley-born musician Phil Lesh is best known as a founding member of the Grateful Dead, and co-wrote two of their most iconic tracks, "Box of Rain" and "Truckin'". And when the band broke up after the Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995, Lesh kept playing in the bands with which he and Bob Weir kept the Grateful Dead legacy alive: Furthur, The Other Ones, and The Dead.

But KRON4 and the Associated Press have confirmed reports that Phil Lesh died Friday morning, from causes yet to be disclosed.

He was 84.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Phil Lesh (@phillesh)

“Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed peacefully this morning,” says a post from just past noon Friday on Lesh’s official Facebook page. “He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love.”

Lesh was born in Berkeley in 1940, and went to Berkeley High School, where he was a trumpet and violin player. He attended the College of San Mateo and then UC Berkeley, though dropped out of that school after not even one semester. But it was at that time that he met a banjo player named Jerry Garcia, with whom he would form a band called The Warlocks.  

That band would become the Grateful Dead. They didn’t really sell that many records (their only Top 10 hit was 1987’s “Touch of Grey,” recorded 22 years after the band was founded). But the Grateful Dead were one of the top-grossing concert acts in the world for nearly three decades, and effectively pioneered the “jam band” style of play.

As an interesting aside, Lesh was also a mail carrier with the US postal service in San Francisco in the early 1960s. In 2011, he opened a live music venue called Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, though that venue closed permanently during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lesh struggled with health issues starting in 1998, when a case of chronic hepatitis C forced him into a liver transplant operation. He was also diagnosed with colon cancer in 2006, and bladder cancer in 2015. All of these briefly sidelined him from touring. But after the liver transplant operation, he routinely took time during live shows to encourage the audience to be organ donors.

Phil Lesh is survived by his wife Jill and sons Grahame and Brian.

So fare thee well, Phil Lesh. We’ll leave you Deadhead readers out there with Phil Lesh and Friends’ full performance at the 2022 Stern Grove Festival so you can get your shakedown on.