Jerry Garcia Quotes

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.

That's part of that thing of transcending languages. Every person will have their own language.

With the recognition comes additional responsibility, because then we're no longer a one-shot. We're now part of the environment.

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.

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.

This virtual reality stuff is the technological equivalent, really, of psychedelics.

Technology didn't just go, clunk. It was this early disease, starting with a plow, I guess, or something like that, the first tool that made it so you could do more things. The first domesticated animal, or the first wheel.

Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.

All I know is, if you listen to society, you'll never get anywhere!

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.

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.

If you assume you haven't learned anything yet, there's no reason your playing can't stay dynamic all your life.

Things come up from the outside, the outside world says, okay, you have do this, you have to go here and here and here, and these are your options. You can be here or you can be here. You can do this, or you can do this. You can go here, or you can go there. So each one of those things becomes a place of decision, and the way we make decisions is that we all get together and if somebody doesn't feel right about it or it doesn't seem to sit right, usually we'll go with the no vote. If somebody's not comfortable with it, we'll figure it's not going to be worth doing.

If you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects.

The reality which is pretending be reality right now, impersonating reality, is just a pretty flimsy structure. There is not a lot of substance to it. You can't find people who are actively involved of affected by it. What you see is a completely different world, what you see is the world of the homeless, and so forth.

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.

In reality everybody has got musical thoughts. If you are able to overcome the part of it which is muscle training, which is what most musical playing actually is, performance actually is, is muscle training, and you are able to convert your ideas directly into music, you're a musician, too.

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.

There's a need for a ritual and for real joy and real bliss. Real fun.

Whistle through your teeth and spit cuz, it's Alright

The only way things work around here is if everybody wants it to work. If everybody wants it to work, then it has a prayer. Even then, there's no guarantee. But at least it has a prayer.

The Japanese are hard to figure out.

I am not a keyboard person. The mouse is better.

We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life.

Now there is no place you can go where you don't hear certain types of music.

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.

What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.

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.

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.

Listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul.

The performances in the future would be like an audience wired to somebody who was sort of instigating, and then moment-to-moment creation would be transmuted individually.

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.

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.

Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you'll always win!

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.

Kerouac was a breeze, some kind of incredible super-American, mythos personality blasting through the highways of 1947 America.

Nothing left to do but smile.

... 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.

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.

I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like.

To me, that's the key thing, the pursuit of happiness. That's the basic, ultimate freedom.

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 something doesn't work, it becomes obvious immediately. This just isn't going to work.

What a long strange trip it's been.

Everybody needs adventure, and everybody needs something to enlarge his or her lives.

In this universe the top end is light and the bottom end is real hard stuff.

You don't want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one.