Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To me, that's the key thing, the pursuit of happiness. That's the basic, ultimate freedom.
Right now, America is under the gun. It's being tested and is being co-opted in a big way.
Light shows are sort of a meditative kind of experience, you know. It is not like a shock.
If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.
I'm goin' where the wind don't blow so strange, maybe off on some high cold mountain chain.
You need to have many points of reference; many places to touch down and make contact with.
The satisfaction of producing a work of art is the thing of getting off on it on some level.
So we are pretty convinced we don't want to play huge stadiums unless we can play them well.
That's part of that thing of transcending languages. Every person will have their own language.
Cats on the bandstand, give them each a big hand, anyone who sweats like that must be all right.
Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural.
How many Beethovens are there that just for lack of the training, the world doesn't get exposed to.
And as far as I'm concerned, it's like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.
Some things may work, but they definitely won't work every time. Some things may work at various times.
We're like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.
You can't repeat things because each time is different. The universe has changed. Everything has changed.
It's not enough to be the best at what you do. You must be perceived as the only one who does what you do.
What's been great about the human race gives you a sense of how great you might get, how far you can reach.
Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison.
I have all the patience in the world about Sirens. For me it's not a Grateful Dead project, it's a Me project.
If you assume you haven't learned anything yet, there's no reason your playing can't stay dynamic all your life.
You reach into cyberspace and you grab some cyber stuff, build it up, and the computer will give you a 360 of it.
For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.
I think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large.
The process of selecting the tone on the guitar is an aesthetic process like any other, so you try a lot of different things.
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.
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.
It's odd that there is a high level of appreciation of nature. There is the aesthetic side that really loves nature and beauty.
Kerouac was a breeze, some kind of incredible super-American, mythos personality blasting through the highways of 1947 America.
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.
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.
With the recognition comes additional responsibility, because then we're no longer a one-shot. We're now part of the environment.
My kids seem to be more mature and older than I am now somehow. They've gotten ahead of me somehow. But they're very patient with me.
If you are going to develop beast technology, you want to start by having cage technology. You want to make the rules first, you know.
I don't feel that one instrument has more weight than others. Any sound that you can produce adds to your vocabulary of possibilities.
I don't think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut's books mostly I don't feel are movie material.
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.
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.
Seeing sound, the high order stuff that's not audible still affects how everything else behaves. There might be a visual metaphor for that somewhere.
I have one custom guitar which I play almost exclusively. I have others - sometimes you want a little texture, kind of a different sound or something.
Western ears have a hard time hearing anything that isn't in four-four time. A lot of cultures experience music in five-eight, for example, five-four.
The point is there is more information now then you can pass along comfortably in an oral tradition, say a strictly speaking culture. That is a problem.
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.
Most musicians, regardless of what culture they come from, can get together and agree on some stuff about music. As there is going to be a common ground.
There is some art that says the same thing to everybody. WE need something like that. What that is, I don't know. But virtual reality may be the key to it.
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.
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.
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.
It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.
You can't make rules regarding the moral behavior of something unless you know what the hell it is, and what it's capacities are. What it can do, what it can't do.