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Phil Lesh, Grateful Dead Founding Bassist, Dies at 84
Bob Dylan once called Lesh "one of the most skilled bassists you'll ever hear in subtlety and invention" and "a postmodern jazz musical rock-and-roll dynamo."
Oct 25, 2024
Phil Lesh—co-founder and bassist of the iconic California-born counterculture band the Grateful Dead—"passed peacefully" on Friday morning, according to a post on his Instagram account.
"He was surrounded by his family and full of love," the post continued. "Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love."
Lesh revealed in 2015 that he was battling bladder cancer, although his cause of death has not yet been made public.
Along with lead guitarist and vocalist Jerry Garcia, rhythm guitarist and vocalist Bob Weir, keyboardist Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, and drummer Bill Kreutzmann, Lesh founded the Grateful Dead in Palo Alto, California in 1965. The band debuted at one of Ken Kesey's Acid Tests that same year. By 1966, the Dead were prolific performers at psychedelic events in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
As Rolling Stonereported Friday:
From the time of the Dead's earliest incarnation as the Warlocks, Lesh enjoyed an intimate three-decade-long partnership with lead guitarist Jerry Garcia. He also claimed responsibility for their long-form improvisation inclinations, electronic experiments, and nightly free-form "space" interludes. After the group dissolved in 1995 due to Garcia's death, Lesh went on to become an active keeper of its live flame in various configurations with former band members and in several iterations of Phil Lesh and Friends. The latter included numerous guests from the extended multigenerational improvised-rock community.
The Grateful Dead played "electric chamber music," according to Lesh, whose primary influence as a bassist was Johann Sebastian Bach's style of counterpoint (the relationship of two independent yet interdependent musical voices). When not dropping his infamous "bass bombs," he played his instrument as though it were a low guitar, usually with a pick, and often like a lead instrument.
"When Phil's happening the band's happening," Garcia once said of Lesh.
Among the Dead songs co-written by Lesh—a classically trained musician—are "Box of Rain" and "Unbroken Chain"—both widely considered psychedelic masterpieces.
In his 2022 book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan called Lesh "one of the most skilled bassists you'll ever hear in subtlety and invention" and "a postmodern jazz musical rock-and-roll dynamo."
Lesh is survived by his wife, Jill, his sons Brian and Grahame, and his grandson, Levon.
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After Weekend Walkouts, Hotel Worker Strikes Grow on Labor Day
"We refuse to accept wages that can't support our families. It's insulting. And it ends now."
Sep 02, 2024
After approximately 10,000 hotel workers across the United States walked off the job over the weekend ahead of Labor Day, the strikes not only continued but grew on Monday, with employees of the Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor taking to the streets.
In Maryland's biggest city, workers with UNITE HERE Local 7 carried signs that said, "Respect our work," "One job should be enough," and "Make them pay."
Sharing a video of the picket line on social media, the union said: "We refuse to accept wages that can't support our families. It's insulting. And it ends now."
The Baltimore workers joined staff from two dozen other hotels in Boston, Greenwich, Honolulu, Kauai, San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose, and Seattle who started their strikes on Sunday and plan to stay on the picket line through Tuesday.
"10,000 hotel workers across the U.S. are on strike because the hotel industry has gotten off track," UNITE HERE international president Gwen Mills said in a statement. "During Covid, everyone suffered, but now the hotel industry is making record profits while workers and guests are left behind. Too many hotels still haven't restored standard services that guests deserve, like automatic daily housekeeping and room service."
"Workers aren't making enough to support their families," she emphasized. "Many can no longer afford to live in the cities that they welcome guests to, and painful workloads are breaking their bodies. We won't accept a 'new normal' where hotel companies profit by cutting their offerings to guests and abandoning their commitments to workers."
Striking workers echoed the messages from Mills and their signs. Christian Carbajal, a market attendant who has worked for 15 years at the Hilton Bayfront in San Diego, said that "I'm on strike because I don't want hotels to become the next airline industry."
"I used to work in room service, but after Covid, they closed my department. Now I work in the grab-and-go market," Carbajal continued. "Guests complain to me that they can no longer get a steak delivered up to the room, and the tips aren't what they used to be. I'm making less than I used to, and now two families share my house because we can't afford the rent anymore. The hotels should respect our work and our guests."
Elena Duran, who has worked as a server at Marriott's Palace Hotel in San Francisco for 33 years, similarly said that "since Covid, they're expecting us to give five-star service with three-star staff."
"A couple weeks ago, we were at 98% occupancy, but they only put three servers when we used to be a team of four or five," Duran noted. "It's too much pressure on us to go faster and faster instead of calling in more people to work."
Mary Taboniar, who has been a housekeeper at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Honolulu for six years, said that "I have to work a second job because my job at the hotel is not enough to support my kids as a single mom."
"I'm living on the edge where I'm not sure if I'll be able to pay our rent and groceries or provide my family with healthcare," Taboniar added. "It's so stressful. One job should be enough."
Daniela Campusano, who has been at Hilton's Hampton Inn & Homewood Suites in Boston's Seaport District for a dozen years, also said she is not making enough as a housekeeper.
"I'm on strike because I need higher wages. I currently have two jobs, and I work about 65 hours a week," Campusano said. "Everything is so expensive now—all my monthly bills have increased, and I need to earn more money so I can help my daughter pay for her university studies. One job should be enough."
Fellow housekeeper Rebeca Laroque, who has been at the Hyatt Regency Greenwich for the past 12 years, explained that "I'm on strike because I need more wages, I need the health insurance, and I need less rooms."
"I work so hard and come home exhausted at the end of the day, but I still don't make enough money to pay my bills," Laroque said. "Going on strike is a huge sacrifice, but it's something I have to do because I need a better life for me and my two kids."
Other groups and lawmakers expressed solidarity with the striking hotel workers, including the AFL-CIO, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, the National Employment Law Project, the United Auto Workers, and U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).
Along with corporate price gouging that is driving up prices, hotel workers have been impacted by practices including stock buybacks. An Institute for Policy Studies analysis released last week shows that Hilton and Marriott are among the 20 largest low-wage employers who have poured millions of dollars into share repurchases since 2019.
Meanwhile, Americans' support for organized labor has hit a seven-decade high, according to Gallup recent polling. Citing that survey, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Monday that "the working people of our country are increasingly aware of the unprecedented level of corporate greed and power we are now experiencing, and the outrageous level of income and wealth inequality that exists."
"They understand that never before in American history have so few had so much, while so many continue to struggle," he added. "And they are fighting back."
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Newsom Threatens to Defund California Counties That Don't Clear Homeless Encampments
"Gavin Newsom using a Republican Supreme Court's cruel decision in order to pivot to anti-homeless demagogue is shameful and sleazy," said one critic.
Aug 09, 2024
After personally participating in the forced displacement of homeless people in a Los Angeles encampment, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday threatened to withhold funding from counties that don't sufficiently crack down on the unhoused.
Buoyed by the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court's recent City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson ruling—which was welcomed by Newsom and other Democratic leaders like San Francisco Mayor London Breed who filed amicus briefs in the case—the governor issued an executive order last month directing officials to clear out homeless encampments, which have proliferated amid rampant economic inequality and stratospheric housing prices in the nation's most populous state.
After taking part in a Thursday sweep of an encampment in Mission Hills in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley, Newsom declared: "I want to see results... If we don't see demonstrable results, I'll start to redirect money."
Newsom praised leaders like Breed and Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for reducing the number of people sleeping on their cities' streets and directed his ire mostly toward county governments.
"This is a sincerely held belief that we need local government to step up," the governor added. "This is a crisis. Act like it."
Newsom has made—and followed through on—similar promises in the past. Last month, his office redirected a $10 million grant for San Diego County to buy so-called "tiny homes" for the unhoused because officials there "could not move with the urgency the housing and homelessness crisis demands."
University of California, Los Angeles sociology professor and homelessness expert Chris Herring toldThe Guardian following Newsom's executive order that the directive is "giving a green light to a harsher approach" to tackling California's unhoused crisis, which critics say criminalizes people for being poor.
"It sends a clear message to municipalities that even if you do not have shelter available, you can go through with this," Herring said. "The law now allows cities and counties to cite and incarcerate individuals for sleeping outside."
In San Francisco—where Breed, a moderate Democrat, is up for reelection in November—police have begun aggressively sweeping homeless encampments. Unhoused residents are given a choice between capacity-challenged shelters, where they're often separated from family and pets and subjected to dangerous conditions, or jail.
This, in a city that's
short several thousand shelter beds.
Some San Franciscans who initially supported police sweeps have recoiled when faced with what one small business owner called the "inhumane" reality of the policy.
As The San Francisco Standard's Christin Evans reported this week:
One woman described to me having her wallet—containing her ID, debit, and EBT cards—pulled from her hand as a police officer proceeded to "taunt" her with possible arrest. Why? Because she declined to accept a bed at a crowded shelter where she would be separated from her husband. A day later, police officers arrived at the site where the couple had relocated a few blocks away and issued a citation for illegal lodging. Now, the couple have a court date to address a "crime" that is punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.
Experts from across the political spectrum have asserted that homeless sweeps don't work. A study of Los Angeles' homeless population published in July by the Rand Corporation, a Santa Monica-based think tank, found that cleared encampments generally return after a month or two.
"We found continuing evidence that local encampment cleanup activities don't appear to lead to a persistent reduction in the number of unsheltered residents in the area," study co-author Jason Ward said during a video conference, according to an article published last week by The American Prospect. "They just tend to move them around and the numbers tend to return in our relatively small area to previous trends pretty quickly."
"Homelessness is dangerous, humiliating, and traumatic. Nobody needs to be reminded of these truths," article author Nicholas Slayton wrote. "If Gavin Newson wants to fix the problem, he could work to get more housing built, especially affordable units—by, for instance, signing rather than vetoing a social housing bill."
"But if he wants to sweep the problem under the rug so as to pretend like he's doing something useful while actually making the problem worse, he could continue on his present course," he added.
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