Jerry Garcia is known for his legions of fans, jam band music and his Bay Area-born rock group, the Grateful Dead. His songs were long, meandering, catchy, improvised and beloved.
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Garcia, who passed away in 1995 at the age of 53, saw a lot of the world through his tinted sunglasses and from the perch of his many stages. With dozens of albums to his credit, along with millions of concert tickets sold, one might wonder what Garcia has to say about his life, craft and the world around him. Here are the 20 best Jerry Garcia quotes.
1. “Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.”
2. “I don’t know why, it’s the same reason why you like some music and you don’t like others. There’s something about it that you like. Ultimately I don’t find it’s in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it’s fundamentally emotional.”
3. “If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously.”
4. “Stuff that’s hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don’t know what it does.”
5. “And as far as I’m concerned, it’s like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.”
6. “My kids seem to be more mature and older than I am now somehow. They’ve gotten ahead of me somehow. But they’re very patient with me.”
7. “If we want the quality of the shows to be good, and we want the energy to be high, and if we want to be in good enough physical shape to do them, and not exhaust ourselves on the road, and not get stale, we have to pace.”
8. “Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison.”
9. “We’re not uncomfortable with it, and we’ve already been through enough of the music business where I’m not really worried that commercial success is going to in some way—we’re already past saving, you know what I mean? It’s too late for us.”
10. “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.”
11. “Just because you’re a musician doesn’t mean all your ideas are about music. So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.”
12. “America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That’s the nature of America, I think.”
13. “I don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘Jeez, I feel great today. I think I’ll write a song.’ Anything is more interesting to me than writing a song. It’s like, ‘I think I’d like to write a song… No, I guess I better go feed the cat first.’ You know what I mean? It’s like pulling teeth. I don’t enjoy it a bit.”
14. “For me, the lame part of the sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.”
15. “My guitar is a mutation between a classic Fender Stratocaster guitar, which I played for years, and a Gibson solid-body like an SG or a Les Paul. It contains all sounds of the basic classic rock n’ roll guitars. It does what I want it to do.”
16. “I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven’t heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum and Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.”
17. “The process of selecting the tone on the guitar is an aesthetic process like any other, so you try a lot of different things.”
18. “So it’s one of those things where we have to—our problem is pacing ourselves and still reaching a large enough number of our audience. Because we don’t want to burn the audience. And we don’t want to be excluding anybody.”
19. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually written from inspiration, actually had a song just go, ‘Bing!’ I only recall that happening to me twice—once was with ‘Terrapin’ and the other was ‘Wharf Rat.’ I mean, that’s twice in a lifetime of writing!”
20. “The live show is still our main thing.”
Photo by Larry Hulst/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
