The surviving members of the Grateful Dead - Bobby Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann - have paid tribute to their bassist and founding member Phil Lesh, who died Friday at the age of 84.
“Today we lost a brother,” the trio wrote on social media. “Phil Lesh was irreplaceable. In one note from the Phil Zone, you could hear and feel the world being born. His bass flowed like a river would flow. It went where the muse took it. He was an explorer of inner and outer space who just happened to play bass. He was a circumnavigator of formerly unknown musical worlds. And more.”
“We can count on the fingers of one hand the people we can say had as profound an influence on our development - in every sense," they continued. "And there have been even less people who did so continuously over the decades and will continue to for as long as we live. What a gift for us. We won’t say he will be missed, as in any given moment, nothing we do will be without the lessons he taught us - and the lessons that are yet to come, as the conversations will go on.”
The post described Phil as “much more than a virtuoso bass player,” noting he was “a composer, a family man, a cultural icon…"
“There will be a lot of tributes, and they will all say important things. But for us, we’ve spent a lifetime making music with Phil Lesh and the music has a way of saying it all,” they shared. "So listen to the Grateful Dead and, in that way, we’ll all take a little bit of Phil with us, forever."
They ended the post with, “For this is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon, long ago…”
In addition to the group tribute, Kruetzmann, Hart and Weir also shared their own personal tributes on their social media pages.