Phil Lesh: My Life With the Grateful Dead

[DudeAsInCool]

SEARCHING FOR THE SOUND: My Life With the Grateful Dead. By Phil Lesh. (Little, Brown, $25.95.) It's hard to say which of these miracles is more profound: the fact that after three decades with the Grateful Dead, Lesh has any memories of the experience whatsoever, or that he's been able to consolidate them into a single volume of less than 20,000 pages. In his marvelously economical and engrossing memoir, Lesh, the band's bassist, recounts the Dead's creation against the backdrop of the Bay Area's beatnik culture and its historic performance at Woodstock (and nonperformance at Altamont), but he also takes a frank look at the drug abuse that marred the group's later years, as well as his own struggles with alcohol and with liver disease. Through it all, Lesh proves to be as capable and enthusiastic a writer as he is a musician; whether he's describing the ''immense, turbulent, Druidic'' snoring of Jerry Garcia, the ''saber-toothed crotch cricket'' hum of the Woodstock sound system or a roadtrip travel game called ''Radio I-Ching,'' he consistently exhibits a peculiar and poetic fondness for language, transforming what could have been a routine exercise in nostalgia into a work as graceful and sublime as a box of rain.

--DAVE ITZKOFF (The editor of Spin)

http://nytimes.com/2005/07/03/books/review...ICIT.html?8hpib

[slum_goddess]

the only thing i wanna know about them is how jerry garcia managed to hide his heroin addiction for so long.

[DudeAsInCool]

the only thing i wanna know about them is how jerry garcia managed to hide his heroin addiction for so long.

The ones i met are pretty cool. He used to (may still) hang out at the Rainbow Club and were pretty friendly. The sound mixers let me play with the soundboard at their DC concert ...