Reviewed by Nancy Webber

“What I want to know is where does the time go?“

In Searching for the Sound Phil Lesh, bass player for the Grateful Dead, takes us on a romp through thirty years of rock touring and recording history with one of America’s most enduring bands. From the epicenter of the psychedelic music revolution, Lesh provides a view of the music and the times.

For Lesh, the musical search begins in 1958 when, as a college student and aspiring musician, he explores “the scene” in Menlo Park, California. He finds a Stanford professor who holds open house every weekend and when it gets too rowdy, calls on the wrestler/writer next door, Ken Kesey, to be his bouncer. When Lesh moves into a nearby party house, there’s Joan Baez and a friend merrily pulling a prank on him. He careens through San Francisco, with Neal Cassidy driving, convinced that Neal really can see around corners. And in the middle of it all is a guy playing folk music named Jerry Garcia.

They were seekers, as Lesh describes it,“brimming with intellectual and spiritual curiosity . . . searching for the next wave, or what was around the next corner, or what was hidden behind the surface of appearances.”

Lesh makes a literary dash from the band’s formation through the Acid Tests, Woodstock to Altamont raceway, a cross-Canada tour by rail with a pantheon of rock’s greatest, the ballroom gigs with Bill Graham producing, the experimental stage and the mediocre studio recordings that confirmed the Grateful Dead as the best live band of the era. The band moved from psychedelic to folk to country to blues and back again, incorporating it all to produce a collective improvised sound, according to Lesh, “ so jaw-droppingly intricate and flexible that no single mind could think it all up in such detail.”

The stories and the years and the innovations seem to flow from one to the next with little pause for reflection.  There was the wall of sound - 40’ high, 70 ‘ wide, 600 speakers, 25,000 watts all stacked in a single line behind the band. The first mail order ticket service. A break from the recording industry to start the band’s own label. Free concerts for 200,000. The “tapers,” who were allowed to record live concerts. The band agreed with Jerry Garcia who said, “As soon as we play it, we’re done with it. Let ‘em have it.” Today, as the battles rage over downloading free music, the “tapers” still share Grateful Dead live concerts online.

As Lesh confirms, the business plan was not a plan so much as an attitude, a revolt against the pop music empire. The band worked from a shared belief thatsomehow the music could make the world better.  “People came to our shows as if they were attending a family reunion,” he observes, emphasizing the unbroken chain between the music and the utopian community the Grateful Dead aspired to create.

Write on, Phil.