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 think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large.
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.
We're involved in a society which is undergoing some really weird changes now.
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.
We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life.
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.
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 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's a need for a ritual and for real joy and real bliss. Real fun.
America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That's the nature of America, I think.
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.
Right now, America is under the gun. It's being tested and is being co-opted in a big way.
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.
Everybody needs adventure, and everybody needs something to enlarge his or her lives.
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.
You can't repeat things because each time is different. The universe has changed. Everything has changed.
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.
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.
For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.
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.
Listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul.
Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you'll always win!
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 you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects.
