Phil Lesh gets funky

Taking a little detour from the Summer of Jerry

In my last post, I transcribed Jerry Garcia's solo on "Slipknot!" from Blues for Allah. Immediately after that solo comes another part of that tune that I love, a call and response between a repeated riff played by the full band and Phil Lesh's bass. This eight bar section is a rare instance of the Grateful Dead being funky. Listen at 6:11.

The Dead hardly ever spotlighted a single instrumental voice in an organized way like this; usually everybody just played all the time during tunes. These four bass breaks would even make good hip-hop samples, which is not true of much Dead music.