Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead bassist who died last week at age 84, had never played the bass when Jerry Garcia asked him to join the band. But he had studied trumpet, violin, modern classical composition and free jazz, and brought an improvisational spirit to the Dead that made them the model for all the jam bands that followed.
Lesh rarely took the spotlight for lead vocals, but “Box of Rain,” the lead track to the band’s 1970 “American Beauty” LP, was a notable exception. Lyricist Robert Hunter recalled that Lesh had written the music for “a song to sing to his dying father. [He] had composed a piece complete with every vocal nuance but the words,” which Hunter wrote after hearing Lesh scat-sing the syllables. “I’m able to translate people’s scat,” Hunter told an interviewer. “I hear English in it, almost as though I write down what I hear underneath that. I hear the intention. … By ‘box of rain,’ I meant the world we live on, but ‘ball’ of rain didn’t have the right ring to my ear, so box it became.” When Lesh injured his vocal cords in the mid-’70s, the song disappeared from the band’s set list for a decade.
Phish, the jam band everyone likes to compare to the Dead, paid tribute to Lesh the night he died, starting their concert in Albany, N.Y., with “Box of Rain.”
