"Paging Mr. Lesh ... Mr. Philip Lesh ..."
If you were a Strip casino regular during the summers from 1991 through 1995, that announcement might ring a bell, whether or not you recognized its playful intentions at the time.
For Deadheads congregated in Las Vegas to see the Grateful Dead's annual stops at Sam Boyd Stadium (then known as the Silver Bowl), it seemed nothing was funnier than paging their musical heroes in the great halls of Caesars Palace, the Mirage or the Sahara.
As in "Paging Mr. Weir ... Mr. Robert Weir ...," "Paging Mr. Kreutzmann ... Mr. William Kreutzmann ..." and "Paging Mr. Garcia ... Mr. Jerry Garcia ...," the last, of course, being the giveaway to even the least initiated that something was afoot.
Along with his band's zealous fans, Lesh—the Dead's longtime bassist—got a kick out of the seemingly incongruous scenes in the hours after a concert let out.
"It was always a flash to see all those tie-dyes in the casinos ... like cognitive dissonance in some way," Lesh says, chuckling during a phone interview from his Marin County, California, home.
The Dead's relationship with Vegas actually dates back before Sam Boyd was even constructed, to March 29, 1969 and a show at the long-since-defunct Ice Palace in the Commercial Center on East Sahara Avenue.
That specific piece of the band's long, strange trip eludes the 65-year-old Lesh at the moment. "I almost remember something like that," he offers.
Details of a short Las Vegas residency, however, are quite a bit clearer.
"I'm kind of an old-Vegas hand myself. I lived there in '62 and '63 for about nine months," Lesh says. "I worked at the post office and then down on Fremont Street ... at one of those casinos ... It was right across the street from the world's tallest neon cowboy (Vegas Vic). I was a keno dealer, which is a weird thing."
After leaving Las Vegas, Lesh returned home to Northern California. "And then," he matter-of-factly recalls, "Jerry called me to come join the band."
This weekend Lesh returns to town—10 years after the Dead's last Sam Boyd performance—to take part in the inaugural Vegoose Festival. His current band, Phil Lesh & Friends, plays the Double Down Stage at 5:15 p.m. on Saturday, then returns for an extended encore with a midnight after-show on Sunday at the Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel.
Listening to Lesh talk, that late-night engagement, which sold out weeks ago, promises to be one of the weekend's unforgettable events.
"We have plans," he says mysteriously. "We're gonna take it all the way through the wee hours and come out the other end that night."
Lesh's cryptic agenda might have been scrambled a bit last week, when he announced that alt-country rocker Ryan Adams—who was scheduled to guest with Lesh's band for the two Vegas shows—has dropped out for unspecified "personal reasons."
Joan Osborne—of "(What if God Was) One of Us" fame—will step into the void. But considering Adams is a Deadhead from way back whose expected presence prompted Lesh to term the Vegoose sets "full of immense potential," you get the feeling the retooled group might be scrambling a bit this weekend.
Then again, when jam bands are involved, operating without a net can often yield the best results. Lesh knows plenty about that, having helped spawn the entire jam movement that will be in full effect this weekend in the hands of such Dead successors as Trey Anastasio, Widespread Panic, moe. and the String Cheese Incident.
Though a fan of many of the current batch, Lesh steadfastly deflects any notion that he is somehow responsible for the current jam-band scene.
"Don't put it on me man," he says with a laugh. "It's not like we invented it. We just stole what jazz musicians were doing and applied it to rock 'n' roll."
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Garcia's death. "I miss him every day," Lesh says.
But somewhat surprisingly, Garcia's former bandmates—who have reunited in recent years under the truncated moniker "the Dead" —are not marking that event, nor the 40th anniversary of the Grateful Dead's formation, with a tour.
When Lesh opted not to participate in last month's "Comes a Time" benefit/Garcia tribute, all-star concert in Berkeley, California, reports of friction with ex-Dead mates Weir, Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart (all of whom performed at the Berkeley event) ran rampant online.
"It was a scheduling thing," Lesh insists. "My son went away to college and we had all kinds of family things going that week."
Still, when pressed on a possible schism in the Dead ranks, Lesh does little to assuage speculation.
"It's like a family. In the most real possible sense those guys are my brothers, although we're not related by blood," Lesh says. "And sometimes families don't agree, sometimes they don't see each other for a while and sometimes they get together and have a good time and then go on their own ways. All these things are typical and ordinary."
Typical and ordinary. Two words rarely used to describe the Grateful Dead, or anything having to do with a Deadhead experience that has produces so many indelible moments, on and offstage.
"Paging Ms. Godchaux ... Ms. Donna Jean Godchaux ..."