Phil Lesh & Friends with Trey Anastasio + Page McConnell start the Warfield Run in 1999
Phil Lesh & Friends with guitarist Trey Anastasio and keyboardist Page McConnell from Phish started their three-day run at The Warfield in San Francisco on that day in 1999. Guitarist Steve Kimock and drummer John Molo rounded off the lineup of one of the best memorable collaborations the jam world has seen.
The shows also marked Lesh’s return from a liver transplant. The April 15th concert began with Phil and his sons Brian and Grahame Lesh performing Eric Clapton’s “Hello Old Friend” as a suitable first song for Phil. The fiver then showed its firepower with a 34-minute “Viola Lee Blues”.
In a 1999 interview with Jambands.com, Lesh revealed that it was Anastasio’s idea to do “Viola Lee,” and talked about how he started listening to Phish and how the collaboration came about. Read an excerpt below:
[Phish’s music]… was absolutely adorable, it was just great … but I couldn’t hear the piano very well on the live tapes so I went back to the CDs and listened to Page and what he was doing and said “Well …” and my wife said: “Come on, come on, call her.” Somehow I got their phone numbers and called them both. We talked about it and they said we’d love to, so we set a date and we started shouting back and forth and like I said before they recorded a dozen Grateful Dead songs, I never thought of doing, but they wanted to [do] You. And we met at rehearsal and the first thing we did together was “Viola Lee Blues,” and from then on it was like we were doing this and doing this now. It was a real rehearsal in the sense that the Grateful Dead were seldom. Grateful dead samples were kind of weird. We believed in public rehearsals.
After the explorative bar setting “Viola Lee”, the quintet went through more material from the Dead canon, with Trey and Page harmonizing on “Big Railroad Blues” and Phil “Jack-a-Roe” and Phil, Trey and Seite, the sang on “Cosmic Charley” before delving into the run’s first Phish tune (and only one that night), “Wolfman’s Brother”. Phil also spoke to Jambands.com about adding it to the Phish catalog:
I thought we might do this or that tune and in the end we just made one tune that I thought we would do and that was “Prince Caspian” and then they brought up the other three : “Wolfman’s Brother,” which I had never heard before, and “Down With Disease” and “Chalkdust Torture,” which I hadn’t heard until we played them at rehearsal, and then I got the CDs and checked them But then I started listening to their other stuff, their other stuff is really interesting, but you can tell by that they take their forty hour weeks because they really have to jerk this shit down.
After a first set closing of “Uncle John’s Band”, the second frame began with Lesh as the lead character on “Alabama Getaway” and “Sugaree”, where the band took things out and extended the song to over 20 minutes. Phil went back to the microphone for a cover of Bob Dylan’s classic “Like A Rolling Stone,” in which Trey and Page joined him in chorus and led to a spirited “I Know You Rider”. Anastasio then hosted the quintet with a sweet version of “Row Jimmy” in front of the philanthropic “Shakedown Street”, where the band stretched their legs again for a nearly 20-minute excursion. Next, “The Wheel” ushered in the classic sewing “Not Fadeaway” to bring sentence two to a close. After Phil’s donor rap and band intros, Phil & Phriend’s Night One ended the run with Phil, who Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man ”, which they did in the style of the Byrds.
Check out the full performance of Phil Lesh & Friends on April 15, 1999 on the JamBase Live Video Archive for this issue of Throwback Thursday:
| Viola Lee Blues | 00:00:00 |
|---|---|
| Big Railroad Blues | 00:34:04 |
| Jack-a-Roe | 00:44:08 |
| Cosmic Charlie | 00:50:07 |
| Wolfman’s brother | 02/01/49 |
| Uncle John’s band | 01:17:01 |
| Alabama Getaway | 01:41:55 |
| Sugaree | 01:50:38 |
| Like a Rolling Stone | 02:11:00 |
| I know you rider | 02:21:27 |
| Row Jimmy | 02:35:54 |
| Shakedown Street | 02:45:24 |
| The wheel | 04/03/43 |
| Don’t fade | 03:13:54 |
| Mr. Tambourine Man | 03:31:48 |
Also, check out the full show audio:
Set One: Hello Old Friend, Viola Lee Blues, Big Railroad Blues, Jack-a-Roe, Cosmic Charley, Wolfman’s Brother> Uncle John’s Band
Set 2: Alabama Getaway, Sugaree, Like a Rolling Stone -> I Know You Rider, Row Jimmy, Shakedown Street> The Wheel> Don’t Fade
Encore: Mr. Tambourine Man
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