Postcard from Phil

I received a postcard from Phil that read,

"GREETINGS TO THE AMBASSADOR PLENTIPOTENTIARY FROM THE LAND OF ZONK!   

ALL THE BEST FOR THE HOLY DAYS!!!

I'VE SIGNED ABOARD A PSYCHEDELIC SAILING SHIP AS FLUNKY OR SUPERCARGO, AND JOINED A ROCK & ROLL BAND TO MAKE A MILLION LAUGHS...WELCOME ABOARD!!!!

PHIL"  (1966)

Excerpt from artist Bill Walker's article about the making and meaning of the Anthem of the Sun album cover. The article get a little esoteric, but there are some interesting nuggets.

http://www.billzart.net/showcase.php?gallery=anthem

Here is some more:

With the beginning of summer rains in June of ’62, TC and Phil Lesh showed up at my
door. Fresh from Berkeley, effervescent with enthusiasm, loaded with new, exciting music and
ideas, and loaded … TC and Phil had become friends at UC Berkeley and had taken a composition
class with Luciano Berio, the composer in residence at Mills College in Oakland. They were
planning to go to Europe in the fall of ’63 and immerse themselves in the European avant-garde
music scene (See TC’s fine book, Between Rock and Hard Places for a very detailed and personal
account of the avant-garde music scene of the sixties). TC’s stepfather was a pit boss at the Sands
Hotel in Vegas and TC hoped to get Phil a summer job at the hotel to make enough bucks to get to
Europe....

Neither the gig at the Sands nor staying at TC’s parents worked out for Phil so he moved
into my house which we shared for about a year. In order to keep from experiencing severe lack-ofculture
shock in Vegas, he worked at a post office, dealt Keno at a downtown casino, recited from
table top petrifying passages from Henry Miller’s Tropics of… to unsuspecting plaster saints and
the too-cool-to-be-real who unsuspectingly dropped bye, and composed Foci, an outrageous
orchestral piece requiring the massive force of 125 instruments (with players) and 4 conductors
(with metronomes). I’m convinced the reason Foci was completed in the Nevada desert was
because the only place it could safely be performed would be at the Nevada Atomic Test Site.

One thing was certain, whenever Phil was around, there was music–usually loud music.
After the aural initiation of weed and the Ormandy/PSO concert I was completely open to the
deluge of music, ideas, laughter and general good will which cascaded through the house and
overflowed into the neighborhood–I think the cops only showed up once. Phil and TC brought
tapes of amazing ‘new music’ like Berio’s Epiphany , Legiti’s Atmospheres and Varèse’s
Arcana. And over the year we went through definitive recorded performances (or in some cases the
only recorded performances) of the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, Nielson,
works by Richard Strauss, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Firebird and Petrushka and much
more. I recall one 20 hour session of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and after a few hours of sleep, Parsifal
followed by Tristan und Isolde . Phil introduced me to reading and following a score which added
another dimension to the understanding and pleasure of symphonic music....

Phil finished Foci in late spring of ’63 and headed back to California.