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.

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.

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.

The Japanese are hard to figure out.

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.

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.

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