When I heard Grateful Dead music, I knew that it was the most powerful force on the planet.

The Grateful Dead were very kind. It was Santa Claus. It did good things. It allowed other people to benefit. The benefits that we played were enormous, and we played free. So you've got a band that loves to play free, and that was a wonderful thing.

Dreams sometimes foretell the future.

I hated science in high school. Technology? Engineering? Math? Why would I ever need this? Little did I realize that music was also about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, all rolled into one.

The musical mystery is: How do you marry tuned percussion and voice? On a metaphorical level, everything that's really important - like the clouds, the sky and the earth - is a giant mystery.

There's nothing like music to relieve the soul and uplift it.

What is the best music is impossible to define. Just because it's played by a virtuoso player, doesn't mean it's great music. It might not reflect the soul of a people, which is really my criteria for great music.