Jerry Garcia quotes:

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  • But audio is a component of video, so there's always been that anyway, and although we've never expressed a visual side apart from the Grateful Dead movie, I don't find it that remote, you know what I mean? It's a departure of sorts, but it's like a first cousin.

  • Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

  • And Warner Bros. seems to be pretty much into re-releasing all of their catalog. So there's the Warner Bros. stuff and the stuff that we have control over, we're gradually re-releasing it. Some stuff we don't have control over.

  • Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I have all the patience in the world about Sirens. For me it's not a Grateful Dead project, it's a Me project.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • We're not uncomfortable with it, and we've already been through enough of the music business where I'm not really worried that commercial success is going to in some way - we're already past saving, you know what I mean? It's too late for us.

  • Stuff that's hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don't know what it does.

  • The bigger issue, was the whole takeover of the food industry by big corporations.

  • 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.

  • There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night, and if you go, no one may follow, that path is for your steps alone

  • 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.

  • So it's one of those things where we have to - our problem is pacing ourselves and still reaching a large enough number of our audience. Because we don't want to burn the audience. And we don't want to be excluding anybody.

  • Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.

  • I'm not trying to clock scores in this lifetime, it's just that things are better now than they were like five, ten years ago. Music has gotten a lot better. There's a lot of people who are committed to - soulfully.

  • The real problems are cultural. The problems of the people who take drugs as a cultural trap - I think there's a real problem there, the crack stuff, the hopelessness of the junkie. The urban angst.

  • 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.

  • I'm goin' where the wind don't blow so strange, maybe off on some high cold mountain chain.

  • We're like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.

  • 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.

  • 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?'

  • Whistle through your teeth and spit cuz, it's Alright

  • Our strong suit is what we do, and our audience.

  • I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like.

  • I don't think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut's books mostly I don't feel are movie material.

  • So we are pretty convinced we don't want to play huge stadiums unless we can play them well.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • And for me there's still more material than 20 lifetimes that I can use up.

  • What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • You ain't gonna learn what you don't wanna know.

  • Right now, America is under the gun. It's being tested and is being co-opted in a big way.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Nothing left to do but smile.

  • You don't want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one.

  • Truth is something you stumble into when you think you're going someplace else.

  • We're involved in a society which is undergoing some really weird changes now.

  • 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 you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects.

  • Live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future!

  • 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 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...

  • If you are picking the lesser of two evils, you are still picking Evil.

  • 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.

  • All I know is, if you listen to society, you'll never get anywhere!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That's the nature of America, I think.

  • We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life.

  • 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.

  • One of the things that's attractive about cyberspace is that it can be construed as no threat. If you see it through the video game keyhole, the amusement keyhole, the entertainment keyhole, it is no threat. If you see it through the LSD keyhole, the consciousness-expanding keyhole, it's like electronic drugs: it is a threat.

  • Magic is what we do. Music is how we do it.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • If the thunder don't get ya then the lightning will.

  • The Japanese are hard to figure out.

  • I think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large.

  • If you assume you haven't learned anything yet, there's no reason your playing can't stay dynamic all your life.

  • Too much of a good thing is just about right

  • 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.

  • If something doesn't work, it becomes obvious immediately. This just isn't going to work.

  • The satisfaction of producing a work of art is the thing of getting off on it on some level.

  • 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.

  • 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'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.

  • The pursuit of happiness is an overview kind of thing. It's not in the Bill of Rights.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Every silver lining has a touch of grey.

  • At some point or another, our boundaries run into the boundaries of the exterior reality. Like we run into laws and other things that we don't own or don't have control over.

  • How many Beethovens are there that just for lack of the training, the world doesn't get exposed to.

  • American society has gone completely into denial.

  • Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you'll always win!

  • The pursuit of happiness is such a large of concept.

  • To me, that's the key thing, the pursuit of happiness. That's the basic, ultimate freedom.

  • 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.

  • The reality which is pretending be reality right now, impersonating reality, is just a pretty flimsy structure. There is not a lot of substance to it. You can't find people who are actively involved of affected by it. What you see is a completely different world, what you see is the world of the homeless, and so forth.

  • ... 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.

  • And as far as I'm concerned, it's like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • You can't repeat things because each time is different. The universe has changed. Everything has changed.

  • 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.

  • What a long strange trip it's been.

  • Cats on the bandstand, give them each a big hand, anyone who sweats like that must be all right.

  • Some things may work, but they definitely won't work every time. Some things may work at various times.

  • What's been great about the human race gives you a sense of how great you might get, how far you can reach.

  • 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.

  • Listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul.

  • The sun will shine in my back door one day..

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • ... 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.

  • Don't tell me this town 'aint got no heart

  • Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk.

  • And the live show is still our main thing.

  • It's much too late to do anything about rock & roll now ...

  • 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.

  • This virtual reality stuff is the technological equivalent, really, of psychedelics.

  • I am not a keyboard person. The mouse is better.

  • 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.

  • There is no dogma, there isn't anything about how the universe works.

  • I think part of what has to happen, somewhere, pretty soon, is that a human template has to come up. We have to start with, OK let's throw out all this other stuff, everything we have thought about it before, throw out all our models, and start with a human. What is a human?

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