Latest Jerry Garcia Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Jerry Garcia

  Spiritual, Religious, Real

  Source: deadsources.blogspot.com

• You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music. The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it's real. I don't think that you can fool anybody for too long in music. And you certainly can't fool everybody.

  Jerry Garcia

  Real, Thinking, Long

  Source: deadsources.blogspot.com

• I think that the revolution in music is over, and what's left is a mop-up action. It's a matter of the news getting out to everybody else. I think that the important changes have already happened, changes in consciousness. It's mostly a matter of everything else catching up to that. Everything is traditionally slow - much faster than it ever has been on earth but still far, far too slow.

  Jerry Garcia

  Thinking, Important, Earth

  Source: deadsources.blogspot.com

• I don't feel that one instrument has more weight than others. Any sound that you can produce adds to your vocabulary of possibilities.

  Jerry Garcia

  Possibility

  Source: deadsources.blogspot.com

• In my own musical existence I don't feel that being a guitar player is like the best thing on earth to be. I would rather be a balanced musician. Playing in a group, I'm tending to think more about the music and less about the guitar. That's just me getting older. I'm not interested in being a virtuoso guitar player or anything like that.

  Jerry Garcia

  Player, Thinking, Musical

  Source: deadsources.blogspot.com

• I'll try any guitar just to see if it's different in an effort to see if it will lead me anywhere. I'm trying to have a guitar built. What's needed is better instruments, better amplifiers, better hardware for electric music to get better.

  Jerry Garcia

  Effort, Trying, Get Better

  Source: deadsources.blogspot.com

• As a musician you fall into certain patterns that you're not conscious of, unless you start listening to yourself on tape a lot. If you do that you start recognizing habits; then you have to try and break them.

  Jerry Garcia

  Fall, Listening, Trying

  Source: deadsources.blogspot.com

• I like all the kinds of music I've been into. I'm certainly not a purist in that I will only play country licks in a country song or blues licks in blues stuff. The thing I would like to be able to do is to make the music sound right no matter what it is. If somebody else wants to have a label for it, then that's their business.

  Jerry Garcia

  Country, Song, Kind

  Source: deadsources.blogspot.com

• 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.

  Jerry Garcia

  Moving, Listening, Trying

  Source: deadsources.blogspot.com

• You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

  Jerry Garcia

  Thinking, Space, Musical

  Source: medium.com

• If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

  Jerry Garcia

  Thinking, Space, Syntax

  Source: medium.com

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

  Jerry Garcia

  Type, Certain

  Source: medium.com

• 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. It doesn't matter what their music is, you can find something that you can play together, with what their culture is. The dialect part of it comes into play, but nothing like the differentiation that language sets up, for example.

  Jerry Garcia

  Play, Together, Matter

  Source: medium.com

• In the last 100 years since the invention of sound reproduction, music has really taken off and it is much more a common language because of records and transportation.

  Jerry Garcia

  Taken, Years, Sound

  Source: medium.com

• 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.

  Jerry Garcia

  Together, Musician, Culture

  Source: medium.com

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

  Jerry Garcia

  Powerful, Thinking, Dialect

  Source: medium.com

• 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.

  Jerry Garcia

  Hard Times, Eight, Example

  Source: medium.com

• Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural.

  Jerry Garcia

  Art, Thinking, Music Is

  Source: medium.com

• 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.

  Jerry Garcia

  Art, Reality, Keys

  Source: medium.com

• 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.

  Jerry Garcia

  Firsts, Needs, Pieces

  Source: medium.com

• We are experiencing a real confusion here in the United States, you know. Why is it OK to drink, but it's not OK to take drugs? Blah, blah, blah. What's a crime? What's criminality? What can you do, what can't you do, and so forth. All these things are really confusing. A lot of it is really contradictory; it doesn't really make sense.

  Jerry Garcia

  Real, Confusion, Confusing

  Source: medium.com

• I think the Muslim religious is a little too tight. It doesn't fit humans. Humans can't possibly fit into it, so there are a lot of really unhappy people, terribly repressed. It is a religion that works against you because the template don't fit. It's not human, you know.

  Jerry Garcia

  Religious, Thinking, People

  Source: medium.com

• I think part of what has to happen, somewhere, pretty soon, is that a human template has to come up. We have to start with, OK let's throw out all this other stuff, everything we have thought about it before, throw out all our models, and start with a human. What is a human?

  Jerry Garcia

  Thinking, Stuff, Come Up

  Source: medium.com

• 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.

  Jerry Garcia

  Moral Behavior, Hell, Capacity

  Source: medium.com

• One of the things that's attractive about cyberspace is that it can be construed as no threat. If you see it through the video game keyhole, the amusement keyhole, the entertainment keyhole, it is no threat. If you see it through the LSD keyhole, the consciousness-expanding keyhole, it's like electronic drugs: it is a threat.

  Jerry Garcia

  Games, Drug, Video

  Source: medium.com