In my own musical existence I don't feel that being a guitar player is like the best thing on earth to be. I would rather be a balanced musician. Playing in a group, I'm tending to think more about the music and less about the guitar. That's just me getting older. I'm not interested in being a virtuoso guitar player or anything like that.
What a long strange trip it's been.
Listening. That's what music is about. You hear it. And I'd listen to it and something would move me one way or another; and I would try and play it.
Every silver lining has a touch of grey.
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.
You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music. The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it's real. I don't think that you can fool anybody for too long in music. And you certainly can't fool everybody.
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.
... 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.
American society has gone completely into denial.
In this universe the top end is light and the bottom end is real hard stuff.
If you assume you haven't learned anything yet, there's no reason your playing can't stay dynamic all your life.
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.
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.
If you can create a reality that is entirely fictitious, it doesn't owe anything to this stuff out here, but you interact with it on your own terms. I mean, if you took it to the point where finally you get, say, tactile feedback, so you were wired in in terms of the whole nervous system. The sensorium. You would have the ultimate art form. I mean, any painter would want it, any filmmaker would want access to it you know, any musician would want access to it. It would eliminate the need for the divisions between what we describe as the arts, converting the whole thing to experience.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.
The bigger issue, was the whole takeover of the food industry by big corporations.
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.
The thing of being able to share somebody's reality, which has so far been a matter of what communication is about, you know. Now it has gotten a whole new leg. It has gotten a thing of being able to actually step in somebody's reality and walk through it like they do, experience it the way they do, specifically. The implications, to me, are immense. I mean, how far can it go? If you go into a complete, like a cyberspace model of some type, in which... you know the discussion about the mind and the interaction between the mind and the universe as a holographic phenomenon.
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.
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'm goin' where the wind don't blow so strange, maybe off on some high cold mountain chain.
If you are picking the lesser of two evils, you are still picking Evil.
