So Many Roads by David Browne Page B

soon-to-be-girlfriend, Pakhala. He’d also obtained his first-ever cube of LSD and, taking it alone in his apartment, saw “a kaleidoscope of emotional peaks,” as he would later write. But again Lesh’s life stalled. He realized the piece he’d written wasn’t working and soon fell in with a crowd who loved to shoot speed, which Lesh himself dabbled in. “I was content to live in the moment, I guess,” he says. “I didn’t see any future in composing. You had to be either part of the academic scene or I didn’t know what. I wasn’t going to back to school; I was completely done with that.”
    During a break in the Warlocks’ set Garcia sat Lesh down in one of Magoo’s booths. Without any preamble he said, “Listen, man, I want you to play bass in this band. We have to tell this guy every note to play. I know you can do it. I know you’re a musician.” Lesh was stunned. The idea seemed ludicrous: Lesh didn’t know how to play that instrument, had never even held one in his hands before, and hadn’t played rock ’n’ roll yet. But Garcia was insistent. Watching nearby, Swanson recalls “the feeling of trying to get Phil to become part of the band.”
    Both Swanson and Denise Kaufman—another band friend who’d graduated from an all-girls private school in Palo Alto and had seen various Warlocks play in different configurations—recall Garcia venturing to Lesh’s apartment in San Francisco to make a final push for Lesh to sign up with the band. (Swanson believes she drove Garcia and then waited outside Lesh’s apartment during the talk.) Lesh himself has no recall of such a meeting: “I don’t remember him having to convince me to join the band,” he says. But Garcia’s determination to make Lesh a new Warlock was undeniable. “I remember Jerry telling me about it,” says Kaufman. “It was a big deal. Jerry was a very discriminating guy, but he was excited by the level of Phil’s musicianship.” Lesh’s lack of bar-band experience, Kaufman thinks, wouldn’t have been a deterrent to Garcia. “Jerry was an out-of-the-box creative person, so what would be a left-field choice for someone else wouldn’t be for him,” she says. “He thought Phil would make the music more interesting. Phil had already put years into his musical development, and that was fascinating to Jerry.”
    Ultimately Lesh didn’t need that much convincing to join the Warlocks. “That’s when I realized this is what I’d been waiting for,” he says. “This is why I hadn’t done anything else in music. There it was—the reason I didn’t go back to classical. This was my chance to play with Jerry. And it was a chance to redefine part of that music, shape it in my own image, if you will. I could bring my training and compositional sense to that level while still collaborating.” Grant says he felt Lesh’s joining a band gave him “a physical manifestation of what he could do musically instead of just on paper.” Lesh was now a Warlock.
    The timing was right. Lesh was no longer a rock hater: he’d seen the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (after which he’d adopted his Fab haircut), caught a Rolling Stones show in the area, and was mesmerized after hearing Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on the radio. As with the guys playing at Magoo’s, Lesh now realized rock ’n’ roll hadendless possibilities, and the idea of joining the array of misfits was supremely appealing as well. “To find a place where everybody seemed to be on the same wavelength—about music and about substances, if you will—it was just a revelation,” he later told Hajdu. In a 1990 interview Lesh, who’d been fired from the post office in San Francisco thanks to his grown-out hair, admitted that taking up the