The Phil Lesh Quintet: The Planet Jams (June-July, 2001)

Over the course of a summer month in 2001, the Q played seven Lesh-composed instrumentals known as “The Planet Jams.” Each was performed only once.

On the phantasytour.com site, user Brinkdeers30 posted the following:

I interviewed Barraco a few years back and asked him about the Planet Jams Tour. This is what he said..

“Phil got this idea to honor the seven ancient planets. He wrote all of this incredible music and we decided to hire this guy, John Dwork, and have him have a vision of what this could be. Every show we were going to do one of these pieces that would be a special honoring and it would involve the audience and take place during the whole day. It was supposed to be this spectacular tour and somehow it imploded. What we were left with was this big circle Candace Brightman had built, you see them at dead shows... it's like a canvas with lighting.

Each day, we would come out on stage and see a symbol for one of the planets and we knew, that day we would be playing that specific music. But nobody in the audience was hip to what the f*** was going on. We were playing this crazy music but (the audience) didn't understand. In a way, I don't understand why we went through the motions without actually making it happen. It was so bizarre, but the music Phil wrote... Jimmy has said it many times, he said, 'That was the coolest s*** Phil ever wrote.' It was very deep and every single tune was different and really cool.

Phil is a great composer, he really is. This was written music, we actually had to read that s***. Phil's not the most prolific composer, but think about the body of his work, it's pretty impressive. Just think about "Box of Rain" and "Unbroken Chain" alone.

All of the music was very heady and different, but from the audience perspective, they didn't know what was going on. But it was cool for us, we dug it.”

The objective for this mix was to extract these pieces as cleanly as possible from the music that directly flowed into and out of them. They were almost all tightly sandwiched – one of them in the middle of Viola Lee Blues. So, I found the best starting place I could for each and faded all of them. Thank you to the audience tapers for their beautiful work. I’m sorry my files do not contain the info to credit all of them.

The band:

Phil Lesh
Warren Haynes
Jimmy Herring
Rob Barraco
John Molo

73-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

Intrada > (7/28)
Saturn (7/28)
Luna (6/30)
Mars (7/22)
Comes a Time jam > Venus (7/17)
Sun (7/20)
Jupiter (7/26)
Mercury (7/6)

This mix is a sequel to the Save Your Face “PLQ Jazz 1" mix. Posted here. Streaming here. Thank you to Josh Klay for introducing me to The Planet Jams and serving up the perfect concept for volume 2 of the series.

Cover art: “Round,” Amaranth Ehrenhalt, 1961. PLQ Jazz logo: John Hilgart & Ben Powers

31 responses

This is really incredible! I never would have known about this project. Very cool music, very different mood to each track, some parts more simple and others very complex. Thanks for including the story about Phil's concept. I'm remembering photos I've seen where Phil is wearing a NASA shirt

— Ryan Bouchard

Thanks for this. I remember hearing about this, but the recording didn't include the song names and I hit a dead end. Very interesting stuff.

— Richard Plumb

Holy god these are so good and simply put l, they are some of the greatest pieces of rock and roll improv by one of the greatest rock bands of all time. Phil will eventually get the credit the Q is due but in the end it doesn’t matter. Those who know and those who, like my young ass self and friends and most importantly brothers, were so stoked to be a part of it at first and while we may have been a touch naïve as to what was transpiring, it ain’t so hard to tell now what we witnessed was a band hitting pinnacles for three years straight. Please stay healthy Phil for as long you can. Love everyone that was there and participating.

— J Ohhhh Edy

Yes, this Baracco story is true. My festival production company, Peak Experience Productions, was legendary for helping foment the "Transformational Festival" movement. Rob, who I had worked with many times over the years, nudged Phil to consider a collaboration. Phil's agent took notice that we were selling out all our festivals in advance with groups like the String Cheese Incident because we heavily involved the audiences as essential characters in the unique mythic themes we custom wrote for each festival. Much like Burning Man, our audiences got to be the stars of these events that traditionally climaxed with jaw-dropping mythic rock and roll operas featuring the great jam bands of the time performing with world-class Cirque acts, enormous custom-built theater props, visionary special effects, etc. We developed a detailed written plan with sketches, budget, etc., to make Phil's music come alive with the sort of theatrical spectacles you'd see in Fellini or Alejandro Jodorowsky films, which we had become very good at delivering. We flew down and spent an afternoon negotiating with Phil, Jill & Robbie Taylor. Ultimately, the Phil camp felt like too much artistic power/focus would be given to the audience and too much money would be spent on making the art that supported the music. Though they were gracious, we came away with a sense that they didn't really grok what a truly profound paradigm shift occurs when you share the creative spotlight with the audience the way we did. Given the choice between having a much smaller artistic production with Phil or doing the sort of full-tilt spectacles we were already doing with String Cheese, the Phil collaborations never happened.

— Johnny Dwork

Johnny Dwork, thank you so much for your post. This is a piece of Dead history that ought to be lodged in a more permanent place.

— John Hilgart @4CPcomics

Lovely job. I have been listening to these for a bit but this cleaned it up nicely. Sun, moon, five visible planets. Pentatonics, as Kimock says “human birdsong”.

— Aiq

Aiq, so good. I've now listened to these dozens of times, after having had no idea they existed before compiling them.

I was brought back here because of an email update informing me of a new respondent to this comment section for these two singular and overwhelmingly powerful fan made Phil mixes…a good reminder to check out both of them when the time is right, along with a more urgent personal reminder to always check my verbosity and grammar when trying to get a point across…so it goes. Phil is gone now—I have no clue when I even wrote what did before, but what a guy punch to see a comment that is hoping to get more live shows from him. It seems greedy, and indeed I caught two the two final Quintet shows and can live with myself knowing I got to have two final peak Phil experiences before he shuffled off. All that said (and before I once again revert back to my occasional issue of wordiness exacerbated by stimulant), I have gone on a PLF bender to end all others since his passing, fitting it in with GD of the highest grade (all eras) and the occasional other music when the situation calls for it. Especially when comparing the PLQ to the GD, and using the Summer 01 Planet Jams as one of my pieces of evidence, I’ve come to a point of certainty in regards to the Q and where they stand in the pantheon of all time great rock bands. They are one of the top 10. I’m not going to expound much more because the lady is forcing me to brunch…that said…the SPAC 01 shown that features that Mars jam also features another jam that I beg anyone who has commented on this page to check out. That whole set is more than worthy of attention, but toward the end listen to the Lucy in the Sky w/Diamonds and in particular the jam that closes it. I’ll link it later for the similarly lazy folks like myself. It is stunning and gives the impression that it was done on the fly given the location of the jam and when it was dropped, combined with the fact that there isn’t another even close to it in other versions of LSD. My first SPAC show. High school junior. Puddled. Phil picked up a soldier for life that day. Thanks again for these links and sorry to ramble. You’ll understand if you listen to my suggestion. RIP Phil…Impossible to measure my gratitude.

— Crow E D VT

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