Music Makes My Heart Sing: The Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh

I went to see Phil Lesh, longtime bassist for the Grateful Dead, perform recently with his band, Phil Lesh and Friends. He has a fascinating horoscope. I don’t know his birth time, but he is a creative, artistic Pisces, born March 15, 1940, in Berkeley, Calif.

Phil Lesh has a perfect bowl pattern in his horoscope: A retrograde Mercury in Pisces sits exactly opposite his retrograde Neptune in Pisces, a phenomenon known as mutual reception wherein two planets rule each other's signs, strengthening the power of the two planets. All his other planets are on one side of that opposition. The bowl pattern shows a person who is self-contained, subjective, and mission-oriented.

One of my favorite Grateful Dead songs, “Box of Rain,” was composed and sung by Phil Lesh (the Dead lyricist Robert Hunter wrote the words), and it is a song which seems to have come out of Lesh’s Piscean, Mercury-Neptune soul. “Box of Rain” was written for his dying father. From Wikipedia: “According to lyricist Hunter, Lesh ‘wanted a song to sing to his dying father and had composed a piece complete with every vocal nuance but the words. If ever a lyric wrote itself, this did—as fast as the pen would pull.’ Lesh practiced the song driving to the nursing home where his father lay with terminal cancer”:

This is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago….
Please don’t be surprised when you find me dreaming, too….
Maybe you’re tired and broken,
Your tongue is twisted with words half spoken and thoughts unclear
What do you want me to do, to do for you to see you through?
A box of rain will ease the pain, and love will see you through.
Just a box of rain, wind and water,
Sun and shower, wind and rain.
In and out the window like a moth before a flame.
Such a long long time to be gone, such a short time to be here.

Hunter once wrote, in answer to a question: “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, and I don't know who put it there.”

67 year-old Phil Lesh himself just recently survived a bout with prostrate cancer, as Pluto squared his Sun.

Lesh also has an exact conjunction of Venus, Mars, and Uranus. He has always had an interest in avant-garde music, and he is still finding ways to make original, freeing music filled with energetic beauty. And unlike many other older rockers, Phil Lesh is not surrounded on stage by a gray-haired, balding band. Phil Lesh and Friends’ lead guitarist, musical phenom Jackie Greene, is a full 40 years younger than his mentor, Phil Lesh.

My story of the first Grateful Dead concert, when they were called the Warlocks and performed at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor in Menlo Park, California, is recounted in some detail in my book (in a chapter on the 1960’s Uranus-Pluto conjunction). Actually, Deadheads were some of the first to buy my book when Cosmic Trends was mentioned in a Grateful Dead blog. I was in the audience at that pizza parlor concert, but wrote about it in the third person for my book.

When I was a junior or senior in high school, Phil Lesh lived just a few blocks from our high school campus in Palo Alto. A friend of mine knew him and, since we had an open campus, a few friends and I would often walk over to his house during lunch to hang out. Usually, he was just waking up, but was always friendly and welcoming. He would have been in his early 20’s at that time and was just starting with the Dead—who were no more than a local band, having not yet even performed in San Francisco. I never became a Deadhead, but have enjoyed their music over the years.

In concert, Phil Lesh sang a number of Dead classics, ending with the beautiful “Broke-down Palace.”

He was low-key Pisces all the way. At the Santa Barbara Bowl, where my wife and I saw him perform, one can always see the fancy, sleek, polished star tour buses parked next to the stage. Phil Lesh—who is probably quite wealthy and was playing to what looked like a capacity audience at the start of a fall concert tour—had two large Enterprise rental trucks. While his crew was setting up on stage, he was hanging out over by the drum set, chatting with friends and band members. His “star entrance” involved taking a few steps downstage to begin the concert.

Most bands have an opening act and then think they’ve given the audience their money’s worth by playing a 90-minute set. Phil Lesh and Friends was their own opening act. They took the stage at 6:00, played one long set, took a short break, then came back and played until 10:00. That’s almost four hours of music from the same band.