The bass player for the greatest improvisational band in American history tells the full, true story of his life, Jerry Garcia, and the Dead.
Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Right in time for the Grateful Dead's 40th anniversary, eccentric bass player extraordinaire Phil Lesh has delivered fans a most welcome gift: his autobiography. There are many books out there about the Dead told from the perspective of roadies, journalists, third party observers, and fans. However, with the exceptions of Jerry Garcia's ramblings in Garcia: A Signpost to New Space and Conversations With the Dead, Lesh's Searching for the Sound is the first time a founding member of America's favorite band tells their own story of what it was like inside the Grateful Dead. And what a wonderful, strange tale it is.
Phil Lesh, considered the most academic of the group due to his avant-garde classical composition training, literate mind, and passion for the arts, decided to write his story himself. Written without the crutch of a ghostwriter, Searching for the Sound might be considered disjointed in places, but overall it comes across as conversational, intimate, informative, and candid (particularly regarding topics of drug use and death). If you are familiar with the band and their extended family, their history, the sixties' musical milestones and influences and all the band's famous tales (the Garcia/ Lesh "silent" confrontation, being busted on Bourbon Street, the Wall of Sound), you may be a little disgruntled there is not much new here in the way of content. However, what is "new" and totally satisfying is Phil's warm, optimistic perspective on the many events that helped shape his life. As described by Lesh, his life's journey, much like the Dead's music, is "a [series] of recurring themes, transpositions, repetitions, unexpected developments, all converging to define form that is not necessarily apparent until it's ending has come and gone." For the many fans who enjoyed the fruits of his life pursuit of sonic explorations, Searching for the Sound is a welcome addition to their Dead library. --Rob Bracco
From Publishers Weekly
Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh has written the memoir one might have expected: energetic and flawed, but sure to be loved by fans. Lesh joined the band's original members—Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzman and "Pigpen" Ron McKernan—in 1965 and helped morph the legendary outfit from its beginnings as a jug band to the unique, psychedelic improvisational jam band that spawned arguably the most loyal, iconic audience in popular music history: the Deadheads. What a long, strange trip it was. For 30-plus years, from being the house band for Ken Kesey's acid tests to stadium tours in the 1980s and '90s, the band pioneered a new paradigm for musicians, operating as an extended, albeit dysfunctional, family. Along the way, three keyboardists died, two managers robbed the band, bad deals were signed, massive debt was accrued and drug and alcohol problems flared. In 1995, the trip finally ended (or did it?), when Garcia died. Lesh infuses his prose with his wacky personality, which is endearing, but also maddening, especially when he's rendering acid trips or discussing music. Indeed, many fans who twirled ecstatically at Dead shows will struggle to follow Lesh's extended explanations of the band's compositions. Also, the second half of the band's life gets short shrift. Nevertheless, Deadheads will surely celebrate Lesh's honest, intimate remembrances. (Apr.)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
63 of 65 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
No one book can ever tell the entire tale of the Grateful Dead. Searching For The Sound by bassist and founding member Phil Lesh is the first book by a member of the band to focus on the band itself and Phil has a tale to tell and tells it well. The book starts with Lesh's birth and quickly moves on to his discovery of music. Then Lesh takes us through the embryonic San Francisco scene and on into the evolution of the Grateful Dead. The rest of the book focuses on Phil's intertwined life with the band, the band's extended family, and, ultimately, Phil's own family. It takes only the last dozen or so pages to cover the years since Jerry Garcia's death, but the subtitle of the book is My Life With The Grateful Dead and that name passed into history at the end of 1995. The drugs are there, but rather than glorifying them, a full reading of the book shows that, in the long run, the drugs took a heavy toll. Lesh's writing style is conversational and stream of consciousness and fits perfectly with the story he's narrating. Ultimately, it's a book about MUSIC, its creation, and its powers. In the spirit of the age of disclosure, I must admit to attending 27 Grateful Dead shows between Penn State '79 and Las Vegas '95 and have followed the band members in whatever incarnation since the death of Garcia. I don't think this makes me biased, but I thought you should know. I found the book to be an eye opener and it added context to a major part of my life during the last quarter of the 20th Century. A non-Deadhead should enjoy the book, especially anyone with a taste for biography and the history of rock. If you're looking for the description of one endless drug trip, stay away [or better yet, read the book with an open mind]. I enjoyed Searching For The Sound and would love to see Lesh give us another book sometime in the future.
71 of 74 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. Not by the writing. In fact, some of the prose is quite unnerving, such as "if Mickey had been born Native American, his name would have been `Pushing the Envelope.'" Although he did remember the concept of foreshadowing from High School English, and he makes of point of highlighting all of the ominous signs of the chaos to come. But overall I was surprised, because, unlike many musicians' autobiographies I've read (for example, Miles Davis), Phil Lesh does not come off as a brittle narcissist. He does not use this opportunity as a format for squabbling, for giving his side of the story. He actually comes off as a thoughtful, sincere guy, and someone willing to take the time to reflect on the past.
I was interested to hear his take on the disintegration of the Grateful Dead in the eighties and nineties. His take on it was not unlike my own. He takes some ownership for his role, admitting that the Grateful Dead had become too large of an organization, too much of a money-maker with too many dependents. The band had to keep up an outrageous tour schedule, despite the obvious decline in the quality of the music and the painfully obvious deterioration of Jerry Garcia.
He makes a note-worthy observation about the parallel process between the band and the audience. At first, it was a bunch of guys with different musical backgrounds, but all with open minds, all in the right place at the right time, who used drugs to expand the individual consciousness of each member as well as the group consciousness in step with the counter-cultural revolution happening around them. They pushed boundaries but they also communicated with each other through the music, with novel sounds erupting organically from their collective experiments. But the drugs that fueled their creativity would also eventually isolate each of them from each other and from themselves. As alcoholism and heroin addiction destroyed the sense of community within the band, the dead head scene would suffer as well. By the end, prior to Jerry's death, you had a band on stage pretending they were playing together, pretending to play with even a fraction of their potential. And as an audience, we pretended too. Or at least those of us who still believed we were there for the music pretended, and the frat boys just came for the party. And they continued to sell out stadiums, while shows were marred by police stings, gate crashers, riots, tear gas, and death threats.
When I was catching shows, late eighties early nineties, you would hear two different kinds of fans as you filed out of one of their 2 in 3 mediocre shows. The Pollyanna-heads would be glowing, talking about how Jerry lifted his arm at one point, or almost rocked his shoulders with the beat, "Yeah, he was really into it tonight." The more jaded heads would just be complaining, complaining about the lackluster set-list, complaining the Jerry continued to tune himself down in the mix, that he was quitting on solos, that Bobby was trying to steal the show again. Both types annoyed me. I like to tell people that I quit going to shows because I realized that the fans who supported the Dead were enablers, burying our heads in the sand. But in reality, that's a post-hoc, grandiose explanation. I quit going because I was paying $35 for tickets a mile away from the stage, to see dishearteningly bad performances, while the drunken frat boys all around me didn't even know enough to get quiet during those increasingly rare moments of musical transcendence. The breakdown was complete, and for both band and audience, going to show meant little more than participating in a ritual.
Phil spends the most time on the early years. That's a good thing. That's the most interesting part. When they were actually hippies, living like hippies, and things were just starting to happen. Woodstock and Altamont are recounted not just as events but as contrasting symbols of everything that was good about the hippie scene and everything that was wrong about it. Ultimately it is a commentary on human nature, the capacity to love and experience ecstasy versus the tendency to retreat into hostility and hatred.
Like I said, Phil owns his role in it all, admits to mistakes, and doesn't spend a lot of time defending himself or trying to bolster his reputation. The only part where it felt like he had a little bit of a self-serving agenda was when he talked about the different directions he wanted to push the band, more experimentation with exotic time signatures for example. But even then, he talks about it in terms of lessons learned. He realizes he misread the mood of the band, they were content to play their songs and didn't want Phil as martinet. I think Phil is giving an honest account here. If you listen to the post-Dead music coming from all the living members of the Dead, it is Phil and Friends who continue to be the most exploratory. Though not the most charismatic of a stage presence, he may have been the biggest "believer" of the bunch, the most devout in his quest for the divine through the psychedelic. Along those lines, it's also interesting hearing Phil weave in and out of magical thinking. He's often grounded and very down-to-Earth, but moments later can go off on a tangent about any kind of mystical spirituality that he can tie in to the moment.
It's worth a read. Not great writing but good enough, readable, and will certainly be of interest to any fan of the band. The book ends with the recent history, the fall-out from Jerry's death, some of the ugly fighting over who owns the rights to what, and ultimately Phil's hepatitis and liver transplant. He really does end up sounding like a likeable guy, the grinning musical little brother of Jerry, the classically-trained marching band nerd, and the survivor who gets a second chance at the gift of being a father.
I was interested to hear his take on the disintegration of the Grateful Dead in the eighties and nineties. His take on it was not unlike my own. He takes some ownership for his role, admitting that the Grateful Dead had become too large of an organization, too much of a money-maker with too many dependents. The band had to keep up an outrageous tour schedule, despite the obvious decline in the quality of the music and the painfully obvious deterioration of Jerry Garcia.
He makes a note-worthy observation about the parallel process between the band and the audience. At first, it was a bunch of guys with different musical backgrounds, but all with open minds, all in the right place at the right time, who used drugs to expand the individual consciousness of each member as well as the group consciousness in step with the counter-cultural revolution happening around them. They pushed boundaries but they also communicated with each other through the music, with novel sounds erupting organically from their collective experiments. But the drugs that fueled their creativity would also eventually isolate each of them from each other and from themselves. As alcoholism and heroin addiction destroyed the sense of community within the band, the dead head scene would suffer as well. By the end, prior to Jerry's death, you had a band on stage pretending they were playing together, pretending to play with even a fraction of their potential. And as an audience, we pretended too. Or at least those of us who still believed we were there for the music pretended, and the frat boys just came for the party. And they continued to sell out stadiums, while shows were marred by police stings, gate crashers, riots, tear gas, and death threats.
When I was catching shows, late eighties early nineties, you would hear two different kinds of fans as you filed out of one of their 2 in 3 mediocre shows. The Pollyanna-heads would be glowing, talking about how Jerry lifted his arm at one point, or almost rocked his shoulders with the beat, "Yeah, he was really into it tonight." The more jaded heads would just be complaining, complaining about the lackluster set-list, complaining the Jerry continued to tune himself down in the mix, that he was quitting on solos, that Bobby was trying to steal the show again. Both types annoyed me. I like to tell people that I quit going to shows because I realized that the fans who supported the Dead were enablers, burying our heads in the sand. But in reality, that's a post-hoc, grandiose explanation. I quit going because I was paying $35 for tickets a mile away from the stage, to see dishearteningly bad performances, while the drunken frat boys all around me didn't even know enough to get quiet during those increasingly rare moments of musical transcendence. The breakdown was complete, and for both band and audience, going to show meant little more than participating in a ritual.
Phil spends the most time on the early years. That's a good thing. That's the most interesting part. When they were actually hippies, living like hippies, and things were just starting to happen. Woodstock and Altamont are recounted not just as events but as contrasting symbols of everything that was good about the hippie scene and everything that was wrong about it. Ultimately it is a commentary on human nature, the capacity to love and experience ecstasy versus the tendency to retreat into hostility and hatred.
Like I said, Phil owns his role in it all, admits to mistakes, and doesn't spend a lot of time defending himself or trying to bolster his reputation. The only part where it felt like he had a little bit of a self-serving agenda was when he talked about the different directions he wanted to push the band, more experimentation with exotic time signatures for example. But even then, he talks about it in terms of lessons learned. He realizes he misread the mood of the band, they were content to play their songs and didn't want Phil as martinet. I think Phil is giving an honest account here. If you listen to the post-Dead music coming from all the living members of the Dead, it is Phil and Friends who continue to be the most exploratory. Though not the most charismatic of a stage presence, he may have been the biggest "believer" of the bunch, the most devout in his quest for the divine through the psychedelic. Along those lines, it's also interesting hearing Phil weave in and out of magical thinking. He's often grounded and very down-to-Earth, but moments later can go off on a tangent about any kind of mystical spirituality that he can tie in to the moment.
It's worth a read. Not great writing but good enough, readable, and will certainly be of interest to any fan of the band. The book ends with the recent history, the fall-out from Jerry's death, some of the ugly fighting over who owns the rights to what, and ultimately Phil's hepatitis and liver transplant. He really does end up sounding like a likeable guy, the grinning musical little brother of Jerry, the classically-trained marching band nerd, and the survivor who gets a second chance at the gift of being a father.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
It is so refreshing to read a book by a musician who is in it for the MUSIC. I knew some background on Mr. Lesh. I'm not a rabid Deadhead...never quit my job and followed them on tour or anything, but I have seen them at least six times. I've read the books by Hank Harrison, Blair Jackson and Rock Scully and enjoyed them all, and have many of their CDs. But Lesh's book is a well-written memoir of what it was like being on that wonderous ride through that unique time in history. If you want to hear stories about shagging endless lines of groupies, or snorting endless lines of cocaine, go elsewhere. Lesh touches on the drug element in the band, but doesn't dwell on it....except for maybe the LSD experimentation which was so crucial the the development of the band. And I've honestly never read such a "dead-on" (sorry) description of the effects of mind-altering drugs. Lesh is obviously an intelligent man, and to be honest, he loses me occasionally when talking about electronics/sound/acoustics, but I knew enough about him to expect that.
It's rare you get to read a book by a dedicated musician, and not a *ROCKSTAR*. Listening to the Grateful Dead taught me a lot about listening to music in general. After appreciating the dynamic between Garcia, Lesh and Weir, I was able to move on to Coltrane, Garrison, Jones and Tyner and many more great combinations after that. I've always admired Lesh as a musician, but now I also admire him as a writer, a husband and a father. Go in peace, Mr. Lesh! Thanks for the great read!
It's rare you get to read a book by a dedicated musician, and not a *ROCKSTAR*. Listening to the Grateful Dead taught me a lot about listening to music in general. After appreciating the dynamic between Garcia, Lesh and Weir, I was able to move on to Coltrane, Garrison, Jones and Tyner and many more great combinations after that. I've always admired Lesh as a musician, but now I also admire him as a writer, a husband and a father. Go in peace, Mr. Lesh! Thanks for the great read!
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reads like a beautiful Bass line
incredible insight from an incredibly insightful man.
who had first hand experience as a member of
an incredible group. highly recommend
who had first hand experience as a member of
an incredible group. highly recommend
Published 7 days ago by steven schell
5.0 out of 5 stars
Searching for the Sound; My Life with the Grateful Dead
I purchased this book as a gift for my son. He has always been a fan of the Grateful Dead! Thanks!
Published 22 days ago by Judith L. Rettberg
5.0 out of 5 stars
A look into the soul of a band
Though Garcia gets the attention, I think Lesh was the musical genius.
He plays the bass like a lead guitar and he was/is the soul of the Dead. Read more
He plays the bass like a lead guitar and he was/is the soul of the Dead. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Ken Walker
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great to see Dead history through Phil's Eyes
Wonderful to see the history of the Dead through the eyes of one of its founding members. The writing is not fantastic (Phil is definitely much more skilled at music than writing),... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Dan J M
5.0 out of 5 stars
one of the best books written about the Grateful Dead
To me this is the best of all the books or I guess I should say my favorite of all the books written which I have most of them and have read them multiple times. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Jerbear
5.0 out of 5 stars
Autographed copy of "Searching for the Sound"
Received this autographed copy of "Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead" well packaged so as to present a perfect gift.
Published 4 months ago by frank carnevalino
5.0 out of 5 stars
this book is a great read
i was really excited when it finally arrived at my local library and so far, i've been reading it for the last week and phil's memoir hasn't dissappointed. Read more
Published 10 months ago by dee's sososikwitit
4.0 out of 5 stars
Searching for the Sound
The book gives a very personnel view of what life was like being a member of the Grateful Dead. I was impressed with Phil's love and compassion for the other members and the life... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Mike Cobb
4.0 out of 5 stars
Deadhead must
This is a wonderful history of the Dead by one of its founding members. It is written in high flowing "Leshian" language and is a must read for any Deadhead.
Published 12 months ago by Wolfman
3.0 out of 5 stars
Kindle Edition Has No Pictures
I liked the book! But where are the photographs? Would have added so much ... In the credits it references photos, but they did not make it into the Kindle edition. Weak!
Published 14 months ago by David Holubetz
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 24
books:
See all 24 books this book cites
- The Rite of Spring (Dover Miniature Music Scores) by Igor Stravinsky on page 13, and page 24
- Bartlett's Familiar Quotes by John Bartlett on page 60
- The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell: Two Complete Nonfiction Works (Perennial Classics) by Aldous Huxley on page 33
- The San Francisco Oracle (Facsimile Edition) by Allen Cohen on page 91
- More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon on page 54
See all 24 books this book cites
