The Grateful Dead’s bassist drew on his classical and avant-garde background to create his unique approach to the instrument.
Where guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, organist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s influences overlapped to various degrees via bluegrass, folk, blues, and soul, Lesh was reared as a classical musician and gravitated to minimalism, modern composition, and avant jazz before falling under the spell of the Warlocks (as the Dead were then known) and their raw fusion of Stones-style garage blues and twisted folk. Lesh’s almost paradoxical distance from a typical mid-’60s set of influences, and visceral response to the immediacy of those musical forms, made him a vital bonding agent that held the Dead’s disparate musical threads together. And in another very-Grateful Dead bit of yin-yang duality, the unconventional approach to electric bass he developed from a jazz and classical vocabulary were a platform from which the Dead could elevate their rootsiest leanings to stratospheric heights. In the documentary Long Strange Trip, discussing survival strategies the Grateful Dead used to perform while chemically altered at Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in 1965 and 1966, Lesh said simply, “You have to listen.” Both his ear and irreverent disregard for convention served the Dead well as they evolved from the Kings of Golden Gate Park into a mass cultural phenomenon.
Lesh was born on March 15, 1940 in Berkeley, California—fortuitously, in a time and place that positioned him for a future as avant-garde composer or psychedelic rock pioneer. Between this twist of geographical good fortune and his copious talent, it was not improbable he would become both. Lesh’s exposure to classical radio as a child sparked early enthusiasm for Brahms and Bach, which led him to violin and a spot in the Berkeley Young People’s Symphony. At Berkeley High School, he switched to trumpet and began to ingest the leading-edge jazz erupting from America’s bohemian centers in the late ’50s and early ’60s.
In 1971, a fresh-faced Lesh plays with the Dead at the Manhattan Center, using his red paisley Gibson EB-3. That year, the band released its live Grateful Dead album.
Photo by Peter Corrigan/Frank White Agency
For anyone fascinated by modern music at that time, the Bay Area was an Eden. In addition to being a focal point for newer, freer strains of jazz (and extended residencies that sustained those scenes), it also witnessed the birth of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, a ground zero for experimental electronic music that brought together synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla and modern composition giants Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Reilly, and Steve Reich—the latter of whom became a classmate with Lesh when he moved from the University of California, Berkeley, to Mills College in Oakland.
Lesh might have been drawn deeper into avant circles, were it not for the fact that the Bay Area was also a hotbed of bellicose and melodic teenage guitar rock and soul—and in its more southern bohemian enclaves around Stanford University and San Jose, a fast-mutating graft of folky older American traditions, blues, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Animals, Kinks, Byrds, and the Beats that was bearing strange fruit. Lesh wandered into this milieu, already home to Garcia, Weir, McKernan, and Kruetzman as the Warlocks, some time in 1965, after Garcia invited him to see the Warlocks in Menlo Park. Lesh was, by his own account, knocked out by the band’s scrappy potency and rawness and was asked by the ever-intuitive Garcia to join the band on bass in spite of (or precisely because of) Lesh’s relative unfamiliarity with rock idioms and his experimental leanings.
By the time the group became the Grateful Dead later the same year, it was evolving into a crack dance band well-suited for Bill Graham’s and Chet Helms’ ballroom scenes. Critically, the Dead proved equally well suited for another set of social experiments unfolding around the Bay’s hill and beach towns with the help of author and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey: the Acid Tests.
Phil Lesh holds down the bottom on a Modulus Graphite 6-string bass at Giants Stadium in June 1995. By the end of the summer, Jerry Garcia would be dead and the Grateful Dead would begin morphing into various spin offs.
Photo by Frank White/Frank White Agency
Though many fellow Bay Area bands explored psychedelic realms and evolved into more sophisticated players and songwriters at this time, few were touched by the magic convergence of artistic commitment and a lack of commercial ambition quite like the Dead. That made them perfect entertainment for the communal LSD experiences that were the Acid Tests. They could noodle around aimlessly for five minutes or play for five hours straight—chances were it would be all good for the dozens or hundreds of participants zooming deep into the night. That environment was also a perfect playground for Lesh to indulge his sense of musical discipline, lust for improvisational freedom, and his contempt for form and authority in equal measure. Such were the libertine latitudes afforded by the Acid Tests.
As the Dead jammed, played, and toured relentlessly through 1966, ’67, and ’68—for a time living together at 710 Ashbury Street—they cultivated a musical and band identity apart from their Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom contemporaries. They lacked the commercial potential of the Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape (who nevertheless sabotaged that potential in their own special ways). They didn’t have Janis Joplin or Grace Slick star power, and their jams were hit and miss compared to the sometimes more fluid and lyrical extended arrangements of Quicksilver Messenger Service. But freedom from those constraints put them in their element, and Lesh in particular thrived there. Because he was less encumbered by rock ’n’ roll cliché, his technical and intuitive knowledge of the bass guitar fretboard and voice led to a melodic style that kept the Dead rooted and star-roving while putting him in league with Paul McCartney, the Byrds’ Chris Hillman, John Entwistle, Jack Bruce, and the Airplane’s Jack Cassidy.
But few of those players took that melodic sense as far afield as Lesh. And as long versions of “Viola Lee Blues” and “Morning Dew” stretched out and begat more complex extended pieces like “That’s It for the Other One” and the visionary “Dark Star,” Lesh stayed relentlessly engaged—providing melodic counterpoint to Garcia’s skyward-bound vines of filigree while maintaining intricate, swinging dialogue with Kreutzmann’s funky wanderlust.
“Lesh’s musicianship and drive helped the Dead forge their legendary status as a powerhouse improvisational unit and grew the band’s cult, which came to include a dedicated subsect, the Phil Zone.”
Listening to this conversation evolve via live recordings from the mid-’60s to the early ’70s can be exhilarating. Extra-long versions of “Dark Star” and “Playing in the Band,” from the Dead’s 1972 shows in particular, highlight Lesh’s unique chemistry with the band and his contribution of muscular propulsion, funky undercurrents, free-jazz energy, and impressionist elasticity. Lesh was also masterful in the studio, acting first as creative enabler, instigator, and agent of chaos on 1968’s Anthem of the Sun and 1969’s Aoxamoxoa—non-commercial, far-out, and experimental records that nonetheless primed FM radio audiences and curious record buyers for the Dead’s live voyages—and then as musical interlocutor when Garcia’s songwriting blossomed on Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. Lesh started to contribute tunes, too. His masterful “Box of Rain,” a tender and melancholy folk-rock gem penned for his dying father, leads off American Beauty, the 1970 LP that defines the band for most casual listeners.
As the Grateful Dead evolved, ebbed, flowed, rested and returned between the mid-’70s and their unlikely commercial apex in the late-’80s and early ’90s, Lesh’s musicianship and drive helped the Dead forge their legendary status as a powerhouse improvisational unit and grew the band’s cult, which came to include a dedicated subsect, the Phil Zone—a section of showgoers that gathered stage right to swim in the bass frequencies from Lesh’s instrument. Lesh was among the band members that most savored the possibilities of the Wall Of Sound, a 604-speaker, high-power colossus of a sound system designed to envelop band and ever bigger crowds alike in an ultra-detailed tone picture which nearly broke the Dead’s crew before it was retired. He also explored enhancements of audio and instruments in collaborations with luthier and Alembic founder Rick Turner, yielding a much-modified version of Lesh’s Guild Starfire IV, known as Big Brown, and the more ambitious Mission Control bass, which was designed to function within the Wall of Sound—sending output from individual strings to dedicated speaker columns via an array of 11 knobs and 10 push buttons.
Lesh’s deep thought about music technology, ambitious approach to performance, and classical training sometimes lent themselves to perception as the Dead’s resident nerd and technician. Such perceptions, however, tend to discredit Lesh’s intense sensitivity to melody, feeling, soul, and song. David Crosby marveled at the way Lesh’s bass illuminated the intensely personal, pained, fragile, and beautiful songs on his solo masterpiece If Only I Could Remember My Name. And no less than Bob Dylan called Lesh “one of the most skilled bassists you’ll ever hear in subtlety and invention.” He was also a stubborn, laughing personification of how a passion for music breeds longevity, playing with a rotating cast of colleagues right up to a few months before his passing. Certainly, few rock bassists so deftly, freely, or joyously moved between fearless improvisation and selfless, sensitive support of so many great American tunes
With the Messthetics, Anthony Pirog is a melodic and harmonic wildcard, who has few peers in the scope and imagination he brings to the instrument.
But the Messthetics can, and do, which makes their three albums and live performances joyful journeys through the inner and outer sanctums of sound and melody. Like the Mahavishnu Orchestra or ’80s King Crimson, they create instrumental landscapes that astound, punch, and transport.
The heartbeat of the band is the rhythm section of Brendan Canty on drums and Joe Lally on bass, who were already legends in the indie-rock world before the Washington, D.C.-based trio formed in 2016, thanks to their history in Fugazi. The melodic and harmonic wildcard is guitarist Anthony Pirog, who has few peers in the scope and imagination he brings to the instrument. He is an omnivorous student and musician, with a command of rock, jazz, blues, folk, ambient, and contemporary classical music. The documentation is in his substantial catalog of recordings, which, besides the Messthetics’ releases, range from solo albums and various duos including Janel & Anthony; guest turns with drummer William Hooker and other cutting-edge players; the Mahavishnu tribute Five Time Surprise with fellow outsider-guitar-giant Henry Kaiser; and the Spellcasters, a project steeped in the styles of Danny Gatton and Roy Buchanan.
The Messthetics—bassist Joe Lally, drummer Brendan Canty, and guitarist Anthony Pirog—onstage with James Brandon Lewis at Washington D.C.’s Black Cat in March 2023.
Photo by David LaMason
Recently, Pirog has been gigging and touring behind two new keystone works: Janel & Anthony’s New Moon in the Evil Age and The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis. His partner in Janel & Anthony, and in life, is Janel Leppin, a cellist and composer with an equally free-ranging sensibility. And New Moon in the Evil Ageis an entrancing double album that balances melodic exploration with a modernist folk-rock sensibility. It’s easy to get lost in its 20 compositions. On The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, the band enlists the saxophonist, who is deep in the post-Coltrane-and-Ayler school of free-jazz horn and composition, as Pirog’s melodic and harmonic foil. And the results are astounding. Imagine Sonny Sharrock’s ’60s-inclined Ask the Ages with a more bare-knuckled but equally exceptional rhythm section. The balance of beauty and brutality is perfect within its jazz-informed structure. Some pieces, like “Moreso,” are essentially heads with plenty of space for these daring improvisors to unfurl. Others, like “Railroad Tracks Home,” are textural beasts with strong melodic spines.
“We took two or three months to write and arrange the record,” explains Pirog, who brought Lewis into the fold after he and Lewis metworking with William Hooker. “When the Messthetics are not touring, we usually meet twice a week to rehearse, and the rehearsals are essentially writing sessions—a good chance to just bounce ideas around and get a kind of group vocabulary going. So, this album is different from our first two records, where we were trying to explore the possibilities of what the guitar trio can do, in more of a through-composed way. As soon as we knew James was involved, that opened up the whole realm of different textures where I could be part of the rhythm section, or I could stop playing altogether.
“Being in the Messthetics has fueled me to do what I wanted to do,” Pirog continues. “Joe and Brendan play with an intensity I find very inspiring. And the same is true with James. He’s the perfect fit, energetically. We have a similar approach to melody—a kind of free playing and weaving in and out, so when we’re soloing together it’s amazingly fun. That’s really what it amounts to: Everyone’s having a great time and you have an understanding that you’re on the same page and things just flow, without any discussion. I could step on an Octavia and double a melody with James with a close tone that really balances well with the sound of his saxophone. At some points on the album, I can’t even really tell where the line is between James’ sound and my sound.”
On their new album, the band enlists the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis as Anthony Pirog’s melodic and harmonic foil. The balance of beauty and brutality is perfect within its jazz-informed structure.
And as any guitarist knows, sound is an important element of the magic—arguably more important than the notes plotting its course. Pirog is an avid and highly attuned pedal user, with a huge vocabulary of tones and effects at his disposal. He is quite precise in how his stompboxes are deployed. Pirog can turn his Abernethy Sonic Empress, which he runs through a flexible, punchy two-channel, 30-watt Benson Vincent head (“It has incredible clarity and presence to every aspect of the tone”) and cab, into a spacecraft or a growling tiger, utterly annihilate his tone or make it buttery and voice-like, or simply rock out like a maniac, with the push of a few buttons and carefully set dials.
For that reason, and because of the wide range of playing styles under his command, we asked Pirog to share his pedalboards for various gigs: rock, improv, jazz, and roots. “When I’m putting a pedalboard together,” he explains, “there’s nothing too crazy going on. I’m thinking about the source material, which can kind of be pitch-related or timbre-based. Then sometimes I’ll add compression or noise pedals. I’ll put anything that I want to control as the source sound before the volume pedal. Sometimes that can oscillate and create feedback, so I use the volume pedal so it won’t just be blaring. What comes to mind is William Hooker. I did a duo show with him in D.C., and he wanted me to play feedback. So, I put my fuzz pedal on with the gate wide open. Then I’ll consider gain pedals, distortions, sometimes modulation. I don’t have an exact method for modulation. Sometimes it’s before drive and sometimes it’s after, based on the pedal or the pedal type. Then, ambient delay, reverb, and I’ll get into looping stuff at the end of my chain. That’s the basic idea.”
While Anthony’s preferences might change gig to gig, as he’s always on the lookout for new pedals, here are his current pedalboard setups by genre.
Messthetics/Rock Board
Some of Pirog’s favorite pedals include the Strymon Flint, JAM Pedals Delay Llama, Red Panda Tensor, JAM Pedals Rattler LTD, and Greer Amps Lightspeed.
Since the Messthetics’ recent compositions from The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis are essentially heads with lots of room for free-ranging improvisation, Pirog has to be ready to create sounds and travel in different musical directions at less than a moment’s notice. To that end, he needs a wide array of overdrive/fuzz, pitch shifting, modulation, and volume effects.
This is currently what’s at his feet:
• Collector Effectors Zonk Machine (octave fuzz)
• DigiTech Whammy
• Classic Amplification CV-2 (Uni-Vibe clone)
• Klon Centaur
• Lehle volume pedal
• Greer Amps Lightspeed Organic Overdrive
• JAM Pedals Rattler LTD
• Red Panda Tensor
• JAM Pedals Delay Llama
• Strymon Flint (’60s reverb and ’61 harmonic tremolo setting)
• Eventide H9
• Neunaber Immerse Reverberator
Experimental/Improv Board
While the Lehle volume pedal is a staple, the Neunaber Immerse Reverberator and Eventide H9 show up on Pirog’s rock and experimental/improv pedalboards.
Of course, experimentation is a big part of the Messthetics’ aesthetic, but for free-improv gigs, Pirog needs some additional, very specific tools for layering sounds and generating atmospheric elements.
Let’s call this pedal roster his improv/experimental board:
• Collector Effectors Zonk Machine (octave fuzz)
• 4ms Nocto Loco (oscillating octave pedal)
• DigiTech Whammy
• Classic Amplification CV-2 (Uni-Vibe clone)
• Klon Centaur
• Lehle volume pedal
• Gamechanger Audio Plus (sustain)
• MASF Possessed (glitch/oscillation)
• Greer Amps Lightspeed Organic Overdrive
• JAM Pedals Rattler LTD
• Red Panda Tensor
• Montreal Assembly Count to 5 (delay/sampler/octave)
• JAM Pedals Delay Llama
• Strymon Flint (’60s reverb and ’61 harmonic tremolo setting)
• Eventide H9
• Neunaber Immerse Reverberator
• 4ms Noise Swash (oscillating noise pedal)
• EHX 16 Second Digital Delay reissue with additional foot controller (sound-on-sound looper)
• Zvex Lo-Fi Loop Junky
Jazz Board
Excuse the pun: This Klon Centaur is Pirog’s workhorse pedal—part of all his stomp rigs.
Sure, the Messthetics are a rock band, but they often border on jazz—or cross that border. And Anthony’s playing, along with fellow guitarist Henry Kaiser’s, is stellar in the Mahavishnu Orchestra tribute fusion band Five Times Surprise, who’ve so far made just one album, also called Five Times Surprise. But Pirog is also an ace at playing traditional, post-bop jazz as well as the more radical approaches minted by his musical heroes Bill Frisell and Sonny Sharrock.
“When I was in my 20s, playing jazz gigs around the D.C. area and improv gigs in New York, I would just bring my entire, huge pedalboard,” Pirog relates. “Now I’m trying to be more mobile. I can use the Klon’s tone knob to dial back some of the top end even more than I probably would in any other setting. And I will sometimes use the gain knob to boost the signal, which also increases some low end, And then I like to use delay and reverb.”
His pedal array for jazz gigs:
• Klon Centaur
• Lehle volume pedal
• Pro Co RAT
• JAM Pedals Delay Llama (set at 16 ms, to fatten tone)
• Strymon Flint
Roots Board
Roots Board
Pirog is among the rare guitarists who can play in the style of Danny Gatton with the same finesse, touch, and balance of emotional restraint and blues-and-country-based wailing. And gorgeous tone. You can hear him exercise this side of his playing as part of the Spellcasters, in the group’s tribute to Gatton and another D.C.-area Tele giant, Roy Buchanan, on the album Anacostia Delta.
His board for Gatton-style gigs:
• Lehle volume pedal
• Klon Centaur (gain set at 10)
• JAM Pedals Delay Llama
• Strymon Flint (’60s reverb and ’61 harmonic tremolo settings)
And his amp of choice in this playing mode is a ’65 Fender Deluxe Reverb, with volume on 3, approximately.
Rig Rundown - Henry Kaiser's Five Times Surprise
Although he’s currently using a different array of pedals and amps, and a different guitar, too, this look at Anthony Pirog’s rig for the Five Time Surprise recording session is nonetheless fascinating. He leads us through it, at the start of this Rig Rundown.
There’s comical bands (Gwar), there’s parody bands (Steel Panther), and there’s clever combinations of both (Mac Sabbath). The Italian-Australian Donny Benét is none of those and all of those at the same time. His polished compositions, breezy rhythms, and funky fretwork are no laughing matter. Instead, Donny is the joke … or is he?
“I thought, “What would I think if I saw some bald, chubby dude shredding on bass and fretless?’ I’d be like ‘hell yeah,’ so I might as well be the guy that’ll do it,” explains Benét.
Donny (born Ben Waples) is from a musical family in Sydney, Australia. He grew up performing on several instruments, became classically trained on piano, and earned a master’s degree in double bass. The fluent musician started a career as a jazz bassist for various artists in Sydney, and eventually shifted to an experimental jazz/electronica band, Triosk. While both endeavors were challenging and rewarding, Ben wasn’t having fun. After Triosk disbanded, Waples continued writing and recording on his own. It started with Cubase and a Line 6 DL4 that gave him 48-second loops. He started making “Donny Benét” joke songs. His friends and family continued encouraging him to make more, and before he knew it he had enough material to create Don’t Hold Back. (To this day he still records all the parts except saxophone, played by his brother Daniel Waples.) And through his passion for creating music combined with his love for ’70s funk and R&B—he mentions his introduction to electric bass was via a VHS tape featuring Larry Graham, Bernard Edwards, and Nile Rodgers—infused with the aesthetic and aura of Itala-disco performers, Donny Benét was born.
“I’m a seriously trained jazz musician in a prior life, and I try not to take myself too seriously now, but I’m deadly serious about taking the piss out of myself. I like humor, but I definitely don’t make joke music,” states Benét.
Since 2011, he’s released six albums, all showing an evolution and refinement of the Don. Each release has revealed a new part of Benét's infinite swagger, blending influences of Prince, Alan Vega, Lou Reed, Tom Jones, and, of course, James Jamerson, “Duck” Dunn, and the funk forefathers. Yes, Donny B can sweep you off your feet, but that’s because one thing reigns supreme—the music.
“With Donny I’ve always taken the approach of ‘what would I listen to?’ I started there and I continue to follow it. If no one likes it, that’s fine, so long as I like it. If someone else likes it, even better,” says Benét.
Before his headlining gig at Nashville’s Basement East, Donny B welcomed PG’s Chris Kies onstage to chat about his minimal-but-musical setup. Benét explains the origins of “Donny,” covers his custom Furlanetto 4-string and why he calls it “probably the best live instrument I got,” and discusses scoring tons of gear when the exchange rate presents deals.
Brought to you by D’Addario Pedalboard Essentials: & D’Addario"It's Probably the Best Live Instrument I Got."
Benét has been a longtime fan of Steve Swallow. He recalled seeing the bass legend perform with an “F” bass and assumed it was Fodera. He later learned it stood for F Bass, founded by George Furlanetto in 1978. During a tour that was taking him from Toronto to Chicago, Donny B swung by F Bass HQ in Hamilton, Ontario, to check out their instruments. He left the shop without a new companion, but later connected with current owner Marcel Furlanetto and spec’d out this beauty that he stylized after “an ’80s high-end custom bass.” So, he had to have the two-tone body decked out with gold hardware (with a Hipshot D Tuner), a 5-piece neck with stringers, an ebony fretboard, Aguilar AG 4 P/J-HC set pickups, and a custom F Bass 9V preamp with bass, mid, and treble boost. Though the custom F has a P-J setup, Benét notes that during the U.S. tour he’s been playing it more as a P, and because of its versatile setup he can approximate many of the basses in his collection, depending on pickup selection and EQ. He claims that every note is even and it’s a FOH engineer’s dream to mix because it’s so clear and present. The F uses La Bella RX-S4D Rx Stainless Roundwound Bass strings (.045–.105).
Class D for B
Benét has toured the last decade and seen a growing (or shrinking) trend among bassists — smaller setups. He’s onboard with the travel-friendly rigs and has been using a Bergantino Forté HP 2 that has 1200W on tap and weighs just over 6 pounds. Donny mentions he gets most of the bass he needs for monitoring through his wedge, so he could’ve taken a 1x12, but the kind folks at Bergantino sent him through North America using a NXT410-C.
Donny Benét Pedalboard
Most of Donny’s “effects” come from his VF4’s EQ and playing style or attack, but when he needs to intensify or widen his core bass sound, he’ll tap on either the Boss OC-2 Octave or the DC-2W Waza Craft Dimension C chorus. A Boss TU-3 Chromatic Tuner keeps his Furlanetto in check. And everything rides on a Pedaltrain Metro 16 board.
Keymaster
He’s toured with a Moog Little Phatty (bad idea) and records a lot with a Sequential Prophet-6, but for these spring shows he brought over the Korg Monologue analog synthesizer. He’s used them all over the world, and after each run he sings their praises for being durable, dependable, and damn cheap. The best part is that it fits in his carry-on case.
Shop Donny Benét's Rig
Aguilar AG 4 P/J-HC Set Pickups
Boss DC-2W Waza Craft Dimension C
Boss TU-3 Chromatic Tuner
Pedaltrain Metro 16 Pedalboard
Korg Monologue Analog Synthesizer
La Bella RX-S4D Rx Stainless Roundwound Bass Strings (.045–.105)
