I haven't yet listened to the Libertines' CD (which, dachelle, is Up the Bracket) because I spent last night reading Searching For the Sound, Phil Lesh's account of his life playing bass in the Grateful Dead.

I did mention that I have an unusually long attention span sometimes, didn't I?

Anyway, this is the same book we gave to my out-west brother for Christmas and on reading it myself it was probably a good choice. The first thing I should note up front is, it's Lesh's autobiography, and in fact Lesh actually wrote it. I checked the cataloguing-in-progress information inside the cover as well as the Library of Congress, and there are no other authors listed. So: a celebrity author who actually authored his own book!

Lesh starts off by scoring some points there.



A week or two ago when I was reading the other books about the Dead, I mentioned that the band members who get the extra affectionate adjectives were Garcia, Weir, and Pigpen. Lesh seemed to impress people as an uptight overly intellectual type, sort of a geek, demanding and critical and hard to get along with. (Although the McNally book did note that Phil was generally fair-minded.) Even Phil seems to concur with this assessment of the bass player as a young man.

Which actually wins Phil a few more points. Here's the thing. You know how time alters your perspective, and the farther away you get from an argument or whatever, the likelier you are to rationalize it so that you were right? I do it, many of you do it, and when you run into someone who doesn't, I for one tend to kind of admire them for trying to be fair.

[Example: Matt Mays and his relationship with his old band the Guthries. (Some of you knew I was going to bring up Matt Mays, and yes, I bring him up all the time because I like him, but I will repeat: I like him because of stuff like this.) Matt joined the Guthries after they had been a band for a while, stayed with them for a year or so, contributed four songs to their first record and, if reviews I've found on the Internet are anything to go by, became a major focus of the live show. And then he left the band. At the time, everyone involved claimed it was a mutual decision that everyone was cool with, and the band itself split up a few months later apparently due to the fact there were too many talented people with too many ideas for one band to hold. This all occurred, as near as I can figure, when Matt was between the ages of about nineteen and about twenty-one.

Old interviews with Matt have him saying things like, "Well, I was into my own thing and it seemed like the best idea."

Slightly later interviews have him admitting he was asked to leave the band because he was so into his own writing he wasn't really focusing on the band.

And in an interview from last year sometime, he'd gotten to the point of explaining that the band asked him to leave because he was "flaking out" on them, focused on his own writing, and wasn't sure what he wanted to do as a musician and songwriter anyway. In other words, he was asked to leave the band because he wasn't being a good band mate.

So: the farther away he got from the experience, the more he was able to recognize his own responsibility for the situation. I may add that in all the interviews Matt never said a bad word about the Guthries, and the remaining band members gave maybe one interview with a borderline-subtly-snarky comment about Matt and all the rest were we-wish-him-well stuff. Everyone involved handled things, in public anyway, with remarkable maturity and professionalism which may be why now, half a dozen years later, they all seem to play on each other's stuff all the time. But: I find Matt's behaviour notable because it's relatively uncommon for someone to look back and realize that, in fact, he probably was at fault, even though in this case the fault was certainly not malicious and indeed was probably something that could not be helped.]

Back to Phil Lesh: Phil does something similar. Forty years after the fact, Phil sounds a lot more understanding about things that went on back when he was young and a whole lot of people who are dear to him were still alive and driving him crazy. In the ensuing forty years, of course, he's lost a number of friends and family, gained a wife and kids, and survived a band feud and a few major health crises. If a guy was ever going to get perspective, that lot would just about do it.

So the story Lesh tells is regretful in places, affectionate all the way through, warm, and funny. (Example: Phil used to work for the post office. At least, he did until "someone wrote a letter of complaint! To the Postmaster General! Of the UNITED STATES! About my hair!") He's not into raking up muck, but he doesn't let himself off the hook especially--in the early days, he notes, there was some scapegoating of people he and Garcia didn't feel were pulling their weight musically. And he doesn't talk much about the drug habits of anyone but Garcia (obviously, since no Dead book can possibly not talk about Jerry's death, and that's pretty much what killed him) and himself. He sounds sympathetic and still grief-stricken about Jerry, and pretty disgusted with himself.

And, as in the Matt Mays example above, he's also reframed at least one famous incident in the band's history, at least a little bit. Back in 1968, Garcia and Lesh in particular were frustrated as hell about two of their band mates. Pigpen was a drinker who never used psychedelics, and Jerry and Phil thought he wasn't relating to the rest of the band and their experiments. Bobby, conversely, had either used too many psychedelics during the Acid Tests or else reacted particularly strongly to them--either way, two years after swearing off psychedelics he was still mentally somewhere else most of the time, and his rhythm guitar playing was weird and not especially rhythmic.

So the band fired them.

Mind you, they did not make them go away, both continued to play with the band, and eventually the firings were quietly rescinded. The books I read first gave a couple of different versions of the firing, with the Scully book treating the whole thing like a joke in which Scully felt stupid and Bobby was snotty to him. The McNally book made the whole thing sound, as it probably was, horribly uncomfortable, with Jerry trying fruitlessly to do the job without hurting anyone's feelings and the firees pretty much speechless. The band eventually reframed Pigpen's role in the band so it still worked, but I have seen online reviews of both books that asked, "What about the 'Bobby Problem'? How did they get around the fact that he didn't play rhythm guitar like a normal person?"

Well, part of the solution seems to be that he got better at playing electric guitar. But as Phil tells the story, years later, he explains that the "Bobby Problem" was, had they only had eyes to see it, not really a problem with Bobby at all. No, according to Phil, the real problem was with Phil and Jerry, who were so set on what they wanted to hear from their rhythm guitarist that they failed to realize what was going on: Bobby was not like everybody else, and it was Phil and Jerry's failing that they didn't recognize that he could not, therefore, be expected to play rhythm guitar like everybody else.

And once they accepted that, the Bobby Problem was solved.

Ride the horse you've got.

I sort of love that.

(Okay, yes, I'm simplifying and overstating and everything, but still: "It's not a problem if we do not choose to see it as a problem" is a pretty good approach, depending on the circumstances!)

Like the other books, there's a real sense of the Grateful Dead turning into a giant monster that ate everyone in its path, and there's a real sense of regret about the times when the band kept moving on and didn't stop to wait for someone who couldn't keep up. Like Pigpen--Phil acknowledges now that when the band went back on the road and told Pig to join them when he felt able--well, they were probably unintentionally putting pressure on him to come back as soon as he could. And by the end of the story, when the organization surrounding the band was huge and a lot of employees depended on the band and the tours for income, they couldn't just come off the road even when it was obvious Jerry's health was crashing and a lot of other people were not coping well with stress and exhaustion. There's a very real sense there of our narrator looking around and wondering how the hell the great adventure of the sixties became such a soul-sucking drag.

It's a relief when Phil get to the part of the story where he meets his wife and finds reasons to pull himself together. By this time I was genuinely fond of my flawed but well-meaning guide through the story and I wanted to get to the part where he started to be happy again. Unfortunately, that part of Phil's story happened at about the same time Jerry's life really started heading downhill with the brakes off. I still got sucked into hoping, along with Phil at the time, that things were going to work out, Jerry was going to get it together and defeat whatever it was that snarled at his heels (it's obvious Garcia had a black dog at least as fierce as Johnny Cash's, although perhaps his fatal flaw was in being unable to openly accept it the way Cash did and fight it in public), and the Dead would find a way to scale down the demands on them so they could recover some of the joy they started with.

Yeah, I know how the story ends, too. But I was hoping it wouldn't.

The major impression I get from the author's voice here is, Lesh is no longer a man who wastes his opportunities. He regrets, for instance, not expressing love more openly to his father, and all the walls that got thrown up between him and his brothers in music. There's a sense that it's not too late for some things to be put right, and for others to avoid the old paths. His relationship with his two sunny-looking boys and the mother they resemble may well be a lot warmer than they might have been if he'd been that younger guy who pushed himself and his friends so hard.

Not everybody gets a second --or third--chance, and there's a strong sense that what we have here is someone who knows that and doesn't plan to blow it this time.

Even if I had no interest in music, I think I'd like this book just for that sense. And have good feelings about the guy who wrote it.