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The Grateful Dead and its various successors and offshoots were famous for making sure no two concerts were the same, changing their set lists with each performance. But since the late 1990s, at most every show featuring the original bassist Phil Lesh, who died Friday at 84, there was one thing that kicked off each encore.
It was not a song, exactly, but a brief monologue from Lesh urging everyone in the audience to declare themselves organ donors. The subject was personal to him: In 1998, at the age of 58 and suffering from chronic hepatitis C, he received a liver transplant.
“I’m only alive today,” he said before a 2015 concert featuring the three other original living members of the Grateful Dead, “because a man named Cody decided he wanted to be an organ donor. And he did it in the simplest way possible: He turned to someone who loved him and he loved, and said, ‘Hey, if anything happens to me, I’d like to be an organ donor.’”
As he told the music magazine Relix in 2002, “If you need an organ, or someone you love needed an organ and one was available, would you accept it? Of course you would. Well, fair is fair. If you’re willing to accept it, then you should be willing to be a donor, as well.”
Lesh’s transplant came just three years after the death of Jerry Garcia, his fellow founding Grateful Dead member. Lesh insisted the transplant saved his life and enabled him to undertake a formidable touring schedule for the next few decades with Dead successors such as Furthur and his own band, Phil Lesh and Friends.
The pre-encore speech became such a concert mainstay that fans and websites that track set lists for Lesh’s bands would often include it: “Donor Rap” or “Phil’s Donor Rap.”
Six years ago, Phil Lesh and Friends played a benefit for the American Transplant Foundation at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver in honor of the 20th anniversary of Lesh’s transplant.
“We didn’t need to sell him on anything,” the foundation’s executive director, Anastasia Henry, recalled in a brief interview Friday. “He had zero requirements — very simple.”
At the encore, before renditions of “Fire on the Mountain” and perhaps the most notable Lesh-penned Grateful Dead song, “Box of Rain,” Lesh gave his donor rap. Referring to his liver donor solely by his first name, Lesh said that he wasn’t the only beneficiary of Cody’s decision, and that he helped half a dozen people live after his death. “Me and Cody,” he added, “have had a great relationship for 20 years.”
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