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Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (Paperback)

by Phil Lesh (Author) "I have always considered myself a very lucky man..." (more)
Key Phrases: amp line, fall tour, other band members, Grateful Dead, San Francisco, New York (more...)

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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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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.) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books (April 25, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0316154490
ISBN-13: 978-0316154499
Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (57 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #321,113 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Front Cover | First Pages | Surprise Me!

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First Sentence:
I have always considered myself a very lucky man. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
amp line, fall tour, other band members

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Grateful Dead, San Francisco, New York, Palo Alto, Bill Graham, East Coast, Acid Test, Bay Area, Bob Dylan, Golden Gate Park, Trips Festival, Haight Street, Mime Troupe, Neal Cassady, San Mateo, San Rafael, Warner Brothers, Bob Hunter, Dan Healy, David Crosby, Front Street, Hells Angels, Menlo Park, Pleasure Crew, United States

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 24 books:

The Rite of Spring (Dover Miniature Scores) by Igor Stravinsky on page 13, and page 24
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett on page 60
The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (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

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Customer Reviews

57 Reviews

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4 star:		(17)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago..., April 16, 2005

By	Bruce Crocker "agnostictrickster" (Whittier, California United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (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.

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27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Searching for a Ghost Writer, November 22, 2006

By	My Uncle Stu (Boston) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (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.

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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best book so far on the Dead, April 17, 2005

By	R. J. Marsella (California) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (Hardcover)

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.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Book On The Grateful Dead So Far
My first review on Amazon; so, you know it must be imporatant. This book is terrific. I've read several other books on the Grateful Dead. Read more

Published 10 months ago by T. Howard

5.0 out of 5 stars Luuuvv U Uncle Phil!
Other than Sting & Sir Pauley, you're the greatest to ever touch the instrument!
XXXJer

Published 12 months ago by Jerry Horn

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Book Written About The Dead
I've read at least 10 different books about the Grateful Dead. While many of these books are very informative, nothing comes close to Phil Lesh's book. Read more

Published 13 months ago by L. Roseman

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Insider's Perspective
I've read a few Dead books and this is by far the best insider's perspective. Phil was there from the beginning and vividly recounts what it was like growing with the band... Read more

Published 16 months ago by John Twain

5.0 out of 5 stars Confessions of a milk freak
I like Phil's book. I like it a whale of a lot more than I do Dennis McNally's egotistical cop-out from writing the "authorized biography" of the GD. Read more

Published 20 months ago by Unicorn2

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely one of the best rockographies ever
Phil Lesh has written a very thoughtful and introspective at times auto- and bio -graphy of his bandmates, lives, loves, families, and most importante to most of us, fictional... Read more

Published 22 months ago by C. Raabe

5.0 out of 5 stars Bass-ically where its at!
As a bassist myself, I relate to Lesh's writing and train of thought. He documents being a part of Grateful Dead as more of an ironic string of occurances than a drugged out trip... Read more

Published on May 14, 2007 by J. L. Kaminski

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and Illuminating
I've never been to a Dead concert, but once had a roommate in college who'd recorded about 100 of them, which he constantly played, so I've certainly heard my share of Live Dead... Read more

Published on March 26, 2007 by R. Bailin

5.0 out of 5 stars great!
received this item in a timely manner and was pleased with the quality of the item. sorry for the late review! thank you!

Published on January 23, 2007 by sady2131

5.0 out of 5 stars Good 'Ol G.D.
My brother got this book signed by Phil himself. Another biography of the Grateful Dead. Written by One of the band members. It's good. Phils good. Check it out.

Published on January 21, 2007 by N. Barnard

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