To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe.
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.
To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.
We have quite a large area, and that makes it more fun for us – certainly more satisfying, because it doesn’t restrict us to one particular idea or one particular style.
People may need something to celebrate. They need a context in which to celebrate things. They need something that fills the void that’s left by the bankruptcy of religion and so forth.
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.
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.
… 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.’
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.
The result, I think, is pretty interesting … we don’t expect to make a fortune at it or ever be popular or famous or worshipped or hit The Ed Sullivan Show or the circuses or the big top.
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.
