Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
In the last 100 years since the invention of sound reproduction, music has really taken off and it is much more a common language because of records and transportation.
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.
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.
The world has to tell us. In other words, we don't have an agenda or a battle plan or a map or a direction or anything. We're just going along, and our world is telling us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
As a musician you fall into certain patterns that you're not conscious of, unless you start listening to yourself on tape a lot. If you do that you start recognizing habits; then you have to try and break them.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Technology didn't just go, clunk. It was this early disease, starting with a plow, I guess, or something like that, the first tool that made it so you could do more things. The first domesticated animal, or the first wheel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My guitar is a mutation between a classic Fender Stratocaster guitar, which I played for years, and a Gibson solid-body like an SG or a Les Paul. It contains all sounds of the basic classic rock n' roll guitars. It does what I want it to do.
I don't think I've ever actually written from inspiration, actually had a song just go, 'Bing!' I only recall that happening to me twice - once was with 'Terrapin' and the other was 'Wharf Rat.' I mean, that's twice in a lifetime of writing!
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.