Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead by Phil Lesh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes.
Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis..."

I heard Grateful Dead's live version of Dark Star for the first time a little over 50 years ago, most likely in 1969. From that very first time of listening to the entire 20+ minutes of the glorious guitar improvisation, it has always been one of the musical mainstays of my life, along with - acquired a bit later - A Love Supreme by John Coltrane and several works by J. S. Bach, particularly St Matthew Passion and Cantata BWV 140. I am not a Grateful Dead fan and I do not really like their songs. But then Dark Star, with its minimal lyrics, is not a song; it is instead an extended piece of transcendent beauty, which goes far beyond the genres of rock or jazz.

With apologies for this insanely overwrought intro: I have now had a chance of reading Phil Lesh's Searching for the Sound. My Life with the Grateful Dead (2005). Phil Lesh was the bass guitar player for the whole lifespan of Grateful Dead, from 1965 to 1995. He was, quite likely, the second most important member of the band (if such a ranking is meaningful), after Jerry Garcia. His bass playing is an essential component of the beauty of Dark Star. And he writes a lot about Dark Star in the book.

Mr. Lesh writes about his childhood in Berkeley, California, where he attends a violin school and plays trumpet in Berkeley High School. In 1957 he listens to John Coltrane's music for the first time:

"This encounter with Coltrane was my first inkling that jazz and improvised music could carry the weight and spiritual authority of the greatest classical works."

The author then embarks on a fascinating narrative about the early- and mid-1960s in the then center of the Universe - San Francisco, Berkeley, and the entire Bay Area. This is where the Sixties began, this is where the monumental cultural revolution, whose aftereffects are felt to this day, was born.

While classically trained in music, Mr. Lesh had never played guitar until his fateful meeting with Jerry Garcia in 1965, when Garcia suggested that Lesh learns bass guitar because they needed this instrument for the band. So it began: both musicians, along with Bob Weir, "Pigpen" McKernan, and Bill Kreutzmann, formed The Grateful Dead, one of the most famous and most popular rock bands in history. (The designation "rock band" is a bit misleading: as the example of Dark Star shows, they ventured into jazz, blues, folk, bluegrass, as well as avant-garde and experimental music.)

The Grateful Dead were not just passive participants in the cultural revolution; they were one of its principal forces; their music, emanating from the very heart of Haight-Ashbury, shaped the "flower power" hippie movement that culminated in the "summer of love" and the Woodstock event. Mr. Lesh beautifully writes about it:

"At the beginning, we were a band playing a gig. At the end, we had become shamans helping to channel the transcendent into our mundane lives and those of our listeners. We felt [...] privileged to be at the arrow's point of human evolution [...]"

and later

"At the end of the day [...] I felt as if I'd been privileged to be part of something that was bigger and more important even than music: a community of loving, peaceful people gathered together to celebrate a new form of consciousness -- one that I hoped would expand to embrace the whole world."

One thing is certain: in a marked contrast with many if not most rock musicians, contemporary and past, the members of Grateful Dead did not create and perform music to make money; they played to have their music serve a higher purpose of making life better and more meaningful for the people.

Mr. Lesh offers a thorough, detailed, and well written 30-year history of the band. They were mainly a "touring band," so they gave over 2,300 concerts for millions of "Deadheads" and more casual fans. Many performances are described in full detail. The Grateful Dead played for incredible range of audiences. I love the bitter irony when in the later part of the band's history the author juxtaposes two performances in 1978: one in the "shadows of the Great Pyramid of Giza", in Egypt, and the other, when they were musical guests on Saturday Night Live. Two pinnacles of human culture, heh-heh.

Mr. Lesh does a great job in this memoir. Highly recommended!

Four stars.

A well-written quote from a professional music critic:

"Dark Star, elusive, mysterious and glorious beyond description, is a cornerstone of Grateful Dead's music."
(Jeff Tamarkin)

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