Phil Lesh Quotes

I really enjoy creating music onstage, to participate in making music live.

It's great to have all this stuff at home. But when you want to make it for real, there's still nothing like making music with a bunch of other great musicians in the same room. That's one thing that'll never change.

Sometimes I like to make music together with a singer or with singers.

I'll never forget when we played Shepherd's Bush in London. We played 'I Run To You', and we put the mic out for the last chorus, and you could hear them singing the chorus with the beautiful accent that they have.

There's nothing to compare to live music, there just isn't anything.

There is still nothing under the sun quite like a Grateful Dead concert.

I'm always making micro-adjustments onstage, listening to the audience, and what a crowd is like can be infectious.

I saw the Dead in '73 at Nassau Coliseum, and that same year, I saw them at the crazy, big Watkins Glen festival. It was just outrageous. It was amazing to see the reciprocity between them and their audience.

A performance is only as good as the audience you are playing to. A lot of times you feed off of the audience, and we always try to give them all we've got and sometimes you don't get a lot back, but we've never been dead whenever we've performed.

I think a lot of musicians play for the playback. I mean, that's the joy of recording - you want to hear what you've done and what you've contributed - but never listening to that playback kind of removes the intellectual part of making music, and it removes the tendency to be revisionist.

There's a wonderful tradition of jazz people getting on stage and jamming and finding some feeling for music with audiences who may be fresh. For others, it might be just like a comfortable shirt they've been wearing.

I'd always been on the giving end of music and creating.

A CCR Headcleaner show will blow your mind.

I'm triggering acoustic instruments. I'm literally beating, smacking, hitting, blowing, doing physical things. It's an incredibly exciting way to make music.

Johnny was great in the studio; he was there to make the music that he wanted to make. We lived right beside each other and had a rehearsal studio that was just ours, with nobody else using it, it was part of Johnny's house, so we could rehearse every day.

But, of course, one relies on the everyday people who just simply like your music, for whom you may not be a hobby but they enjoy being in your presence at a concert.

When I go to my live shows it's often a multigenerational audience, a family bonding experience.

When playing any song in front of an audience, you're watching them experience it, and it changes. In a lot of ways, it's almost like the music is just the background buzz to what's happening between you and the audience in the room.

We did do the whole of the live suite from 'Fly From Here,' and that was very enjoyable to do. In fact, that is actually our longest piece of music, I think, that we'd ever done.

When I play live, I feel how the audience is going and follow and lead at the same time.

Phish is such a good band; they just make stuff up as a jam band.

Even though I have often recorded alone, I still feel the best music is made by musicians playing off each other.

In a way, it's my way of dealing with, finding closure with Grateful Dead music, and giving thanks in a way to Jerry and Bob and all the guys in the band for making up this wonderful music.

When I play live, it's a conversation that we're all having with the song, and the audience... their response and relationship with the songs is as valid as my relationship with the songs.

A Kiss concert experience is like sex or anything else that's done with more that one person. It's the give and take that makes it so great. When the audience takes it to the next level, we can kick it up another notch.