For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.
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.
Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you’ll always win!
We’ve been trying to sell out for years, nobody’s buying!
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.
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.
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’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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I sat down to my supper, twas a bottle of red whiskey.
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.
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.
Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison.
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.
It’s all part of it, man.