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.
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’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.
Live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future!
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 think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
And as far as I’m concerned, it’s like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.
If you assume you haven’t learned anything yet, there’s no reason your playing can’t stay dynamic all your life.
For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.
Too much of a good thing is just about right.
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.
What’s been great about the human race gives you a sense of how great you might get, how far you can reach.
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.
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.
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.