Customer Reviews

Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead

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4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

Phil Lesh writes with an open and candid style that makes reading his account of the Dead's history an absolute pleasure for both Deadheads and other lovers of music. Phil's story starts off with the typical childhood stuff but rapidly moves to the music scene in Palo Alto and later San Francisco that ultimately coincided with the Summer Of Love and gave birth to the Grateful Dead. The Dead were certainly unique in all of rock in the way their music blended so many influences and Lesh's story clearly demonstrates how those strains of jazz, blues, country,and even classical influences came into play in the extended instrumental explorations the Dead were famous for. I was particularly intrigued by how he describes the influence of John Coltrane on his own muiscal development.
Garcia emerges from this as the Jerry we all know and love. A true musical explorer of the first order.
Anyone who loved the Dead will surely enjoy reading this. Anyone who didn't "get" the Dead should read it anyway because it will give you some insight into what the music was all about.

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!

I always identified with Phil Lesh, who was the most intellectual of the Dead, and the most adventurous musically. Learning years ago of Phil's involvement with avant-garde classical music planted the interest in my mind, which I finally pursued in recent years after a long (and continuing) sojourn in the land of free jazz and improvisation. SEARCHING FOR THE SOUND is a unique view of the Grateful Dead from the inside. It is not as thorough as some of the other books that have been written, but it doesn't aim at completeness, and if you don't expect it, you won't be disappointed. For more on the inimitably strange, visionary, inspiring and humorous thoughts of Phil, Jerry and the others, I recommend CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DEAD.

In this 40th anniversary memoir, Phil shares fascinating details about his avant-classical interest. I knew that Phil had studied composition with Luciano Berio at Mills College in the early '60s, but here we learn that Lesh was the Mills sound mixer, and participated in electronic performances of works by both Berio and Stockhausen. He also mixed the tape sections of Berio's "Differences" for chamber quintet and tape at the Ojai Festival near Santa Barbara prior to joining Jerry in a rock band. Phil claims that Charles Ives and Coltrane were huge influences -- Coltrane, sure, but Ives? It wouldn't have occurred to me, but it makes perfect sense that Ives, the American maverick, with his juxtopositions of high and low, melody and dissonance, would be a hidden influence on the Dead. Phil took the band to hear Ives's masterpiece, his Symphony No. 4, performed by the American Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting, at Carnegie Hall in 1967, two years after its belated 1965 premiere. After marrying in the early '80s, Phil and his wife spent a week at Bayreuth in 1984 and took in the entire Ring cycle by Wagner! The following year, Phil took Jerry to hear part of the Ring in San Francisco. Phil has supported modern composers through the Rex Foundation, including a recording of the masterpiece "Concerto for Orchestra" by the great American composer Elliott Carter (on Virgin Records, 1992 -- see my review), and recordings by the late British composer Robert Simpson, perhaps the greatest symphonist of the late 20th century. Phil was invited to conduct a short Carter piece performed by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra in March, 1994. I was quite happy to find that Phil shares my view of the Dead's most avant-garde recording: "I've always felt that as an artistic statement ANTHEM OF THE SUN was our most innovative and far-reaching achievement on record."

Other than these avant-classical details, the thing that most impressed me about SEARCHING FOR THE SOUND is the utopian vision that still shines through, as in the following quotes:

"It felt then as if we were an integral part of some cosmic plan to help transform human consciousness." (333)

Of the 1965 music of the Acid Tests, and the formation of the group mind: the energy is making the world better, "or at least holding the line against the depradations of entropy and ignorance." (68)

"...in the brief shining moment a spirit was alive in the land: a spirit that blazed like a flaming heart, that could have (and should have) lit up the world. Fear not -- that light still lives, peeking out through the cracks in the wall of our materialistic civilization." (95)

Indeed it does, thanks in some small part to Phil's persistence of vision. We all miss Jerry, but it is fantastic that Phil is still "searching for the sound," and I hope to hear him again one day soon.

Of course it's all about the music -- I've recently put together complete lists of Dead recordings on this site for 1968>1969 (PRANKSTERS & OTHER ONES), 1970>1972 (COSMIC COWBOYS), 1973>1974 (EYES OF THE WORLD), and 1975>1977 (ESTIMATED PROPHETS). Enjoy, and look for my various Dick's Picks reviews as well.

"Look out of any window, any morning, any evening, any day."
Box of Rain by The Grateful Dead

Searching for the Sound tells the story of The Grateful Dead, America's original psychedelic improvisational rock and roll band, through the eyes of one of the found members - bassist, Phil Lesh.
In the book, Lesh writes in a conversational, eloquent tone as he recalls all the good times and all the bad times. Lesh tells the story of how The Dead went from playing at Ken Kesey's Acid Tests to playing at sold-out stadiums thirty year later?
A great factor of the book is the honesty in Lesh's writing. He doesn't sugarcoat the things that were going on - he tells the real story. He tells how drugs brought the band together and how they eventually tore the band apart. He recalls the death of three keyboardists and the beloved Jerry Garcia.
Though drug abuse and death are recurring factors throughout the book, it is not all dark. Lesh also fondly remembers impromptu free shows in San Francisco, Woodstock, The Pyramids, and many other legendary events.
In my opinion, the only bad part about the books is that the language gets a bit too technical when he is talking about musical composition and theory. Aside from that aspect, I loved the book and would recommend it to anyone, Deadhead or not.

I'm so full of music and nostalgia, having just finished this book. I didn't want it to end. I'm exhausted--feeling like I just danced my way through a weekend of shows--and yet, so high on the memories, I'm thrilled and honored to write this review. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Phil, for writing "Searching For The Sound." It's a wonderful book. The best I've read about the Dead. Thank you for sharing everything behind that omnipresent smile you always seemed to have on stage.

Our intimate circle of Deadhead cohorts--best friends, pals, passing and long-term acquaintances that began in Southern Illinois (particularly along with the fabulous and memorable cover group, "Uncle Jon's Band,") through our crew called "East Bay Deadheads For Peace" formed during one of many Berkeley Greek Theater shows, always called Phil "The Professor." I confess I never knew why until I read this book. Wow. Phil brings an intellectual integrity to the story of his own musical education and, of course, to the band--to the history of the music driving The Grateful Dead, and to all of us who continually flocked to see them play for us and for each other. Phil lets us in. Tells us what it was REALLY like. Even when I knew what was coming, I experienced the pains (and the joys) through a different and certainly wiser set of eyes. This book is written with true love and deep respect for all members of the band and above all, for THE MUSIC.

What amazes me most about his book is the clarity of Phil's memory. He recounts (particularly the early days) with such detail that I can't help but believe this is transcribed from personal journals. Passages like: "the whole urban symphony of Industrial Man, coming from near and far, high and low, finally weaving a shimmering web of discontinuous rhythm, and in the longest slow fade ever, subsiding over hours to a dull roar, felt rather than heard, only to rouse itself anew as the sky brightened with the light of another day." Whew! This amazing, true, brutally honest, funny, insightful memoir is full of such . . . such . . . stuff! And it's not just trippy memory-packed description that blew me away. When he describes the "dark and stormy night" that defined their Woodstock experience, he describes the faltering sound-system as an electrical edifice with "a saber-toothed crotch cricket of a hum."

To anyone who not only experienced the phenomenon that was (is) the Grateful Dead, and particularly to those who appreciate the value of music, I highly, highly recommend this read. I haven't felt this emotional over a book in a long, long time. I love you, Phil.

Michele Cozzens, Author of A Line Between Friends and The Things I Wish I'd Said.

An old maxim states that if you can remember the 1960s, then you probably weren't there; a sentiment that suggests, I suppose, that if you really were an active participant in that frenzied decade, with its recreational and psychedelic drug use, then your brainpan should be too sizzled to recall any of it. Putting the lie to this old adage is Phil Lesh, in his 2005 autobiography "Searching for the Sound." If there's any survivor of the '60s who should have his cerebrum toasted well past the point of recall, it is Phil Lesh. As one of the original hippies, a participant at every one of the eight Acid Tests, a veteran of the true Summer of Love (1966), AND the 30-year bass player extraordinaire for that most psychedelic and improvisatory of San Francisco bands, the Grateful Dead, Lesh certainly did have his fair share of electric Kool-Aid pass under his bridge! But, as his beautifully written book reveals, his memory remains remarkably clear, even regarding those events of four decades ago surrounding the birth of his seminal band. To his great credit, Lesh has written his story all by his ownsome--with no ghost writer or coauthor--and tells the Dead's story with clarity, passion and a good deal of touching sentiment; as he movingly tells us in his intro, "I was born an only child but found my true brothers through the art of music." I have personally been a "Deadhead" since the late '60s, and was still unaware of the vast majority of the tales that Lesh doles out in his book. What stories the man can tell! One of the more distressing ones comes early on, when we learn of how guitarist Jerry Garcia almost fell out of a train whilst en route to a Vancouver gig in summer 1966, and would have been crushed by an oncoming train if fellow bandmember Bob Weir had not pulled him back in time. Our good ol' Grateful Dead might have been finished before it had properly begun! Phil matches his writing style and choice of words to match the craziness of some of those Acid Tests, and his way-out description of his craziest (accidental) acid trip is a memorable one indeed. The incident with Barney the Dinosaur and Garcia will surely have all fans of the band laughing out loud, as will Lesh's revelation that an early moniker choice for the nascent band was Mythical Ethical Icicle Tricycle! Lesh seems to hold little back, detailing his descent into alcoholism without maudlin self-pity. Needless to say, many of the stories in this book are sad ones; the Dead lost too many of its family over the years--three keyboardists (well, four now that Vince Welnick has left us) plus Uncle Jerry--and Phil's recounting of these losses is obviously deeply felt. The usual highlights are touched on, of course: Woodstock (pretty nightmarish, from Lesh's description), Altamont (even more so), the bust in New Orleans, the Europe '72 tour, the Dead's gig at the Great Pyramids. But for every by-now-familiar tale (and even these seem fresh through Lesh's eyes) there are a dozen less familiar ones, and the author tells his stories with insight, articulateness, and the wisdom that comes from great trial and experience. (And how gratifying, for me, to learn from Phil how much the band valued audience participation and feedback--I sometimes wondered--and that Madison Square Garden, where I attended so many of my Dead shows, was one of his favorite venues to play in.) What Phil does NOT do in his book is explain the meaning of the Dead's songs ("Box of Rain" excepted); those looking for an in-depth discussion of the recondite significance of "What's Become of the Baby" are advised to seek out another publication (such as David Dodd's excellent new "The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics"). The first five years of the band's history take up the full first half of Phil's story--I gather that he finds the earlier stuff more noteworthy--and, in the book's second half, the final 25 years are increasingly compressed; we can almost feel the accelerating, frenzied tempo of the group's final years. Please don't misunderstand me; I am not complaining here about any disproportionate emphasis. The truth of the matter is that Phil's book could obviously have been four times longer than he has chosen to make it; 30 years in rock music's most heavily gigging band would naturally provide Phil with a superabundance of material, and, again to his credit, he has chosen to write with great economy, cherry picking the incidents that he wants to include and excluding much else. (Perhaps one day we'll be able to coax another book's worth of stories from him...I hope!)
I mentioned up top that Phil's memory seems to be preternaturally clear, and it does; and yet, some sticking points crop up. For example, he tells us that in summer 1970, at the end of the trans-Canadian railway tour so finely chronicled in the film "Festival Express," Janis Joplin received a birthday cake from the tour promoters. But Janis' birthday is widely quoted as being January 19th. Something strange there. Also, Phil tells us of one of the best double bills that he ever witnessed at Bill Graham's Fillmore West: Chuck Berry and Count Basie's Big Band, in summer 1967. BUT, according to the complete listing of Fillmore West concerts provided in the old double CD "Fillmore, The Last Days," such a double bill never occurred that summer. Rather, Chuck Berry appeared with the Steve Miller Blues Band and the Charles Lloyd Quartet from August 16-17, and Basie appeared with the Charles Lloyd Quartet from August 20-21. I'm not saying who's right and who's wrong--how should I know?--but it sure does leave a reader scratching the ol' noggin. Anyway, these are mere quibbles. The bottom line is that Phil Lesh has done all fans of the Grateful Dead and 1960s rock a tremendous service by putting pen to paper and sharing some of his memories with us. Needless to say, as the only band member to do so thus far, he has provided us with a work of great historical significance. I have read the book twice already, and will surely continue to refer to it for years to come. Thanks, Phil! And, on a personal side note TO Phil, please remember to take your milk thistle! We all need you around for as long as humanly possible!

I liked this book more than I expected to! Oftentimes, the memoirs of famous people read like relatively distanced chronicles of events and report only superficial observations. Phil Lesh chose to write something more personal.

Having studied music theory for a few years, I loved the guidance through musical intricacies I can hear but can't quite articulate. (I guess Publisher's Weekly didn't take music geek Deadheads into account when they reviewed the book!)

And, having gone to Stanford as a way of chasing the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test experience, it was exciting to hear Phil talk about those locales and to learn that, despite being twenty years late, what I got really did contain some kernel of what I had hoped to get.

The tone is more conversational than literary: Its "flaw" is its charm. Some passages are probably more compelling if you enjoy the in-jokes about Shostakovich and Berio and have a fondness for Lesh's particular kind of personality quirks.

Overall, a fun read.

I have been on the bus since the sixties in the bay area, when liking the Dead defined yourself to your peers as an uncool nerd and a bit of a weird-o. Nice to hear Phil's journey from the inside. He comes across as warm, human, honest and of course, brilliant. This dude can write...nearly as well as he can play. My wife, who isn't a head, loved reading it, just for the literate style and the anecdotes.

The funniest part of it for me was when I caught Phil in two or three errors of chronology or fact, especially about the business side of the Dead, mostly in the seventies. But he explains how that could have happened, especially during that dark time.

He reminds me a bit of John McCain...having been at death's door, he now has his priorities and values clearly defined and doesn't so much care what you or I (or Mickey, Bill and Bob) think.

A great read, a spiritual quest. Warm-hearted and full of hope.