All I know is, if you listen to society, you'll never get anywhere!
Music goes way back before language does. And music is like the key to a whole spiritual existence which this society doesn't even talk about. We know it's there. The Grateful Dead plays at religious services essentially. We play at the religious services of the new age. Everybody gets high, and that's what it's all about really. Getting high is a lot more real than listening to a politician. You can think that getting high actually did happen - that you danced, and got sweaty, and carried on. It really did happen. I know when it happens. I know it when it happens every time.
And for me there's still more material than 20 lifetimes that I can use up.
I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.
Things come up from the outside, the outside world says, okay, you have do this, you have to go here and here and here, and these are your options. You can be here or you can be here. You can do this, or you can do this. You can go here, or you can go there. So each one of those things becomes a place of decision, and the way we make decisions is that we all get together and if somebody doesn't feel right about it or it doesn't seem to sit right, usually we'll go with the no vote. If somebody's not comfortable with it, we'll figure it's not going to be worth doing.
Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural.
We are not completely autonomous.
The Japanese are hard to figure out.
I Don't Think There's A Good Excuse For Being Unhappy. I'm Not Particularly Unhappy, But I Know What Pain Is. I think That Life Is Characterized By Pain, Partly. Part Of The Way You Can Tell You're Alive Is By How Much Pain You're Experiencing, Or How Little.
Every silver lining has a touch of grey.
What we need is something, a definition of a human, starting from the ground up, so that the suitable moral structure that goes around it makes sense. The context has to come from the human first, rather than bits and pieces of fragments of old religion and all of the old moral superstructure, whatever it used to be.
You don't want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one.
Live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future!
I like all the kinds of music I've been into. I'm certainly not a purist in that I will only play country licks in a country song or blues licks in blues stuff. The thing I would like to be able to do is to make the music sound right no matter what it is. If somebody else wants to have a label for it, then that's their business.
We didn't invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead. We were just in line to see what was going to happen.
... Grateful Dead - that's it !! ... nobody in the band liked it, (the name) I didn't like it, either, but it got around that that was one of the candidates for our new name, and everyone else said, 'Yeah, that's great.' It turned out to be tremendously lucky. It's just repellent enough to filter curious onlookers and just quirky enough that parents don't like it.
If you are picking the lesser of two evils, you are still picking Evil.
The alternate media are becoming important and viable alternatives to playing live. Records, videos, that kind of thing. They're going to start to count for something. Because there's only a limited amount of us-time available to us.
How many Beethovens are there that just for lack of the training, the world doesn't get exposed to.
In this universe the top end is light and the bottom end is real hard stuff.
The sun will shine in my back door one day.
If you can create a reality that is entirely fictitious, it doesn't owe anything to this stuff out here, but you interact with it on your own terms. I mean, if you took it to the point where finally you get, say, tactile feedback, so you were wired in in terms of the whole nervous system. The sensorium. You would have the ultimate art form. I mean, any painter would want it, any filmmaker would want access to it you know, any musician would want access to it. It would eliminate the need for the divisions between what we describe as the arts, converting the whole thing to experience.
See, there's only two theaters, man that are set up pretty groovy all around for music and for smooth stage changes, good lighting and all that - the Fillmore and The Capitol Theatre. And those are the only two in the whole country.
We were very fortunate to have a a little time in history when LSD was still legal and were able to experiment with drugs just like we were doing with music.
We're like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.
It's a joke. Greed and the desire to take drugs are two separate things. If you want to separate the two, the thing you do is make drugs legal. Accept the reality that people do want to change their consciousness, and make an effort to make safer, healthier drugs.
You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.
We are experiencing a real confusion here in the United States, you know. Why is it OK to drink, but it's not OK to take drugs? Blah, blah, blah. What's a crime? What's criminality? What can you do, what can't you do, and so forth. All these things are really confusing. A lot of it is really contradictory; it doesn't really make sense.
And as far as I'm concerned, it's like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.
You need to have many points of reference; many places to touch down and make contact with.
You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.
Seeing sound, the high order stuff that's not audible still affects how everything else behaves. There might be a visual metaphor for that somewhere.
I think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large.
Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk.
Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.
This virtual reality stuff is the technological equivalent, really, of psychedelics.
Truth is something you stumble into when you think you're going someplace else.
Right now, America is under the gun. It's being tested and is being co-opted in a big way.
I'm goin' where the wind don't blow so strange, maybe off on some high cold mountain chain.
The performances in the future would be like an audience wired to somebody who was sort of instigating, and then moment-to-moment creation would be transmuted individually.
Listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul.
Nothing left to do but smile.
I equate Deadheads to people that like black licorice. There aren't many people that like black licorice, but the ones that do, REALLY REALLY like it! Or buttermilk, or whatever.
I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like.
The pursuit of happiness is an overview kind of thing. It's not in the Bill of Rights.
If the thunder don't get ya then the lightning will.
We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life.
You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.
Why it's okay for people to tape the shows? Because even so, there's no way you can bottle up the experience. You can take the notes home, but that experience is one you have to be there.
For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.
The satisfaction of producing a work of art is the thing of getting off on it on some level.
I recognize that as a musician there is a certain chauvinism attached to it, which is the thing of, "I spent my time learning how to play. You didn't spend time learning how to play, therefore, you are not a musician."
I think that the revolution in music is over, and what's left is a mop-up action. It's a matter of the news getting out to everybody else. I think that the important changes have already happened, changes in consciousness. It's mostly a matter of everything else catching up to that. Everything is traditionally slow - much faster than it ever has been on earth but still far, far too slow.
What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. If you reject one, you're not getting the whole thing that's there to be had.
There's a need for a ritual and for real joy and real bliss. Real fun.
And when you don't have to talk to the person next to you, that's real clean. Takes a certain thing not to try to keep anything up, not to have to entertain one another.
There's a lot there to enlarge you. That's part of the value of being in an extended family is that it enlarges you. It makes you bigger. It makes you more.
If you assume you haven't learned anything yet, there's no reason your playing can't stay dynamic all your life.
The world that you can go walk outside and walk around the block. That's reality. The reality that's being talked about is something else entirely.
Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.
There are any number of things that survive great, and don't need any kind of consciousness, so why bother going through all the trouble of evolving monkeys that don't run very well or climb very fast or have particularly sharp teeth, but have big heads.
American society has gone completely into denial.
Listening. That's what music is about. You hear it. And I'd listen to it and something would move me one way or another; and I would try and play it.
People may need something to celebrate. They need a context in which to celebrate things. They need something that fills the void that's left by the bankruptcy of religion and so forth.
In reality everybody has got musical thoughts. If you are able to overcome the part of it which is muscle training, which is what most musical playing actually is, performance actually is, is muscle training, and you are able to convert your ideas directly into music, you're a musician, too.
The only way things work around here is if everybody wants it to work. If everybody wants it to work, then it has a prayer. Even then, there's no guarantee. But at least it has a prayer.
For me, I think the only danger is being too much in love with guitar playing. The MUSIC is the most important thing, and the guitar is only the instrument.
If you are going to develop beast technology, you want to start by having cage technology. You want to make the rules first, you know.
Cats on the bandstand, give them each a big hand, anyone who sweats like that must be all right.
But hey, when you live in Watts, you need a little smack to get by, you know what I mean? You need something soft and comfortable in your life, 'cause you're not going to get it from what's around you. And society isn't going to give it to you.
I think the Muslim religious is a little too tight. It doesn't fit humans. Humans can't possibly fit into it, so there are a lot of really unhappy people, terribly repressed. It is a religion that works against you because the template don't fit. It's not human, you know.
What we're thinking about is a peaceful planet. We're not thinking about anything else. We're not thinking about any kind of power. We're not thinking about any kind of struggles. We're not thinking about revolution or war or any of that. That's not what we want. Nobody wants to get hurt. Nobody wants to hurt anybody. We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life. A simple life, a good life. And think about moving the whole human race ahead a step, or a few steps.
America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That's the nature of America, I think.
If you're able to enjoy something, to devote your life to it or a reasonable amount of time and energy, it will work out for you.
Yeah, I think we have to. If we want our shows to be - if we want the quality of the shows to be good, and we want the energy to be high, and if we want to be in good enough physical shape to do them, and not exhaust ourselves on the road, and not get stale, we have to pace.
Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.
Some things may work, but they definitely won't work every time. Some things may work at various times.
Too much of a good thing is just about right
I'll try any guitar just to see if it's different in an effort to see if it will lead me anywhere. I'm trying to have a guitar built. What's needed is better instruments, better amplifiers, better hardware for electric music to get better.
Music is a universal language insofar as you don't need to know anything else about a musician that you are playing with other than that they can play music. It doesn't matter what their music is, you can find something that you can play together, with what their culture is. The dialect part of it comes into play, but nothing like the differentiation that language sets up, for example.
Done time in the lock-up, done time on the streets. Done time on the upswing, and time in defeat. I know what I'm askin'. I know it's a lot. Just to say that I love you. Believe it or not.
The pursuit of happiness is such a large of concept.
The bigger issue, was the whole takeover of the food industry by big corporations.
I think that America is in danger of losing its adventurous spirit in the cause of some kind of illusion of safety, or substitute of law and order there.
We're involved in a society which is undergoing some really weird changes now.
In my own musical existence I don't feel that being a guitar player is like the best thing on earth to be. I would rather be a balanced musician. Playing in a group, I'm tending to think more about the music and less about the guitar. That's just me getting older. I'm not interested in being a virtuoso guitar player or anything like that.
It's not enough to be the best at what you do. You must be perceived as the only one who does what you do.
You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only one who does what you do.
What a long strange trip it's been.
I think it's too bad that everybody's decided to turn on drugs, I don't think drugs are the problem. Crime is the problem. Cops are the problem. Money's the problem. But drugs are just drugs.
Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you'll always win! live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future! Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.
I mean, just because you're a musician doesn't mean all your ideas are about music. So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.
Everybody needs adventure, and everybody needs something to enlarge his or her lives.
Each person makes their own decision about what it is that is happening, whether they like it or don't like it, whether they want to lend their energy to it or not or what, you know.
Whistle through your teeth and spit cuz, it's Alright
You can't repeat things because each time is different. The universe has changed. Everything has changed.
If you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects.
The information is there, you may not perceive it, but it does affect the lower orders. There are places where it just peaks out. It is like the color spectrum, it just simply goes beyond where you can perceive it any more but it is still going on. If you decide that the invisible continuation of the color spectrum is important to your sense of what reality is about, then you would want to extend it. Extend it as far as you could, as an aesthetic.
What's been great about the human race gives you a sense of how great you might get, how far you can reach.
And the live show is still our main thing.
The nature of what we're doing is something, which is by its very nature, is non-formulaic. There's no way that you can make it happen by intention alone. It's something that you have to sort of allow it to happen, and you have to allow for it to happen.
If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously.
If something doesn't work, it becomes obvious immediately. This just isn't going to work.
The thing of being able to share somebody's reality, which has so far been a matter of what communication is about, you know. Now it has gotten a whole new leg. It has gotten a thing of being able to actually step in somebody's reality and walk through it like they do, experience it the way they do, specifically. The implications, to me, are immense. I mean, how far can it go? If you go into a complete, like a cyberspace model of some type, in which... you know the discussion about the mind and the interaction between the mind and the universe as a holographic phenomenon.
Magic is what we do, music is how we do it.
Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you've been to some of those places, you think, 'How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?'
It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.
You ain't gonna learn what you don't wanna know.
We've been trying to sell out for years, nobody's buying!
Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you'll always win!
It's much too late to do anything about rock & roll now.
The great thing is the thing of being able to see things through many points of view. That's enlarging. I mean, it saves you from ultimately from the boredom of having one point of view, like being locked in a room with nothing but your own point of view, your own references.
I have always had this basic biological question in terms of evolution, if the drive to evolution is to like survive. An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.
I don't know why, it's the same reason why you like some music and you don't like others. There's something about it that you like. Ultimately I don't find it's in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it's fundamentally emotional.
I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.
To me, that's the key thing, the pursuit of happiness. That's the basic, ultimate freedom.
In folk music, I've always been fond of the fragment. The song that has one verse. And you don't know anything about the characters, you don't know what they're doing, but they're doing something important. I love that. I'm really a sucker for that kind of song.
There is some art that says the same thing to everybody. WE need something like that. What that is, I don't know. But virtual reality may be the key to it.
I don't feel that one instrument has more weight than others. Any sound that you can produce adds to your vocabulary of possibilities.
And there's a lot of that stuff with people bringing their kids, kids bringing their parents, people bringing their grandparents - I mean, it's gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.
Light shows are sort of a meditative kind of experience, you know. It is not like a shock.
To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe.
... We have quite a large area, and that makes it more fun for us - certainly more satisfying, because it doesn't restrict us to one particular idea or one particular style. The result, I think, is pretty interesting ... we don't expect to make a fortune at it or ever be popular or famous or worshipped or hit The Ed Sullivan Show or the circuses or the big top. As long as we can play, we'll play, regardless of what it's for, who it's for or anything. It's fun for us - that's the important thing.
Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it's been.
You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music. The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it's real. I don't think that you can fool anybody for too long in music. And you certainly can't fool everybody.
