Searching for the Sound by Phil Lesh

Author:Phil Lesh
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Genre.Biographies and Autobiographies, Music
ISBN: 9780316027816
Publisher: Little Brown & Co.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

While on the road earlier in the year, I had received word from home that my dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and had undergone surgery. As soon as I got back, I drove up to Napa (where my folks were living then) to visit him in the hospital. Since I’d finally left home at the age of twenty (after two failed attempts at independence), I hadn’t spent much time visiting with Mom and Dad, certainly not as much as I should have; that no doubt contributed to my feelings of guilt and apprehension as I approached the hospital. Also, the relationship between Dad and me had been on a roller-coaster ride ever since my entry into adolescence. It was only within the last year or so that I’d felt he had come to accept me as a person in my own right, and not as merely his wayward child.

My earliest memory is of being cradled tenderly in his arms as he sat in the big chair by the huge console radio in our living room; I’m staring at a brilliantly colored faux Tiffany lampshade showing quaint Dutch landscapes with windmills. (That same lamp stands today on my son Grahame’s bedside table.) I loved him unreservedly then, as a child will. When we went on our Sunday drives with my grandma Bobbie and Mom, I would stand on the seat next to him with my arm around his neck and watch him drive.

The last time I’d seen him had been the preceding Christmas; I’d gone over for dinner, and it struck me forcibly how he’d shrunk—he looked so much thinner and shorter than I remembered him. Of course, at age thirty thoughts of anyone’s mortality rarely enter one’s head; I assumed that Dad, at age sixty-five, was just getting old.

Dad was a guy who worked hard all his life, and the way I saw it, he didn’t have much to show for it. I felt that he’d been beaten down by life and never had any kind of aesthetic or spiritual payoff from his work to make it all seem worthwhile. Mom and Dad had lost their business during World War II; when he then went into teaching, he ended up coming home pissed off: “My students don’t want to learn anything—I don’t know what they’re doing in my class, or any class, for that matter.” Even when he went back into business, events seemed to conspire against him. He bought some office machines from a former student, and they turned out to be hot. He was prosecuted for receiving stolen property, and the costs of his defense doomed his new business.

As I walked into the hospital elevator, the smell of a chance wisp of cigarette smoke spun me instantly back to my childhood. Every morning, my dad would get up, light a cigarette, and head for the shower; I had to get up right about then, too, to get ready for school. Since Dad had to leave first,

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