Jerry Garcia Quotes

What a long strange trip it's been.

Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

once in awhile you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look it right

We're like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.

Nothing left to do but smile.

I read somewhere that 77 percent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 percent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.

If the thunder don't get ya then the lightning will.

Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it's been.

The sun will shine in my back door one day..

Done time in the lock-up, done time on the streets. Done time on the upswing, and time in defeat. I know what I'm askin'. I know it's a lot. Just to say that I love you. Believe it or not.

Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you'll always win! live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future! Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.

There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night, and if you go, no one may follow, that path is for your steps alone

Whistle through your teeth and spit cuz, it's Alright

Don't tell me this town 'aint got no heart

every mind is at least as heavy as mine

Hang me, oh, hang me, so I'll be dead and gone. I wouldn't mind hanging, boys, but you wait in jail so long.

I'm not Beethoven!

We're sort of like the town whore that's finally become an institution. We're finally becoming respectable.

Seems like everything lead up to this day and it's just like every day that's ever been. Sun goin' up and then the sun it goin' down.

For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

what a long strange trip it's been

It’s all part of it, man.

What a long, strange trip it's been.

A leaf of all colors plays a golden-string fiddle To a double-e waterfall over my back

James Brown went to the pearly gates and met St. Peter who took him to a room where Jerry Garcia was playing and Jimi Hendricks and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. James Brown says, “I was worried maybe I was going to hell, but I guess not.” Jerry Garcia says “You think this is heaven?” Just then Lawrence Welk walked in and says “All right, one more time. ‘The Anniversary Waltz.’ And a one and a two and a one, two, three…

It's not enough to be the best at what you do; you must be perceived as the only one who does what you do.

Her one big cheat had been and always would be Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia; she simply could not see a world without it!

For me, making a record is like building a ship in a bottle. Playing live music is like being in a rowboat in the ocean.

Sometimes we live no particular way but our own.

Lady finger, dipped in moonlight, writing what for across the morning sky.

You’ve heard that song a thousand times before, but now you suddenly hear it in all its soul-piercing beauty, the sweet bottomless poignancy of the guitar line like a revelation, and for the first time you can understand, really understand, just what Jerry Garcia meant by every note, his unhurried cheerful-baleful improvisation piping something very near the meaning of life directly into your mind.

Jerry [Garcia] held his guitar and picked some random licks. I spoke from an LSD haze. 'LSD changes perception. Music transcends the musician. You are the vehicle for communication.' Garcia stopped and stared at me. 'I practice,' Garcia declared. 'Anyone can do that.' That shut me up and he returned to the guitar

Eventually they [Sarunas Marciulionis and Don Nelson] got a call from a representative of the Grateful Dead, whose members had been inspired by Lithuania's struggle for independence. Nelson and Marciulionis showed up at the address they were given in San Francisco, which was a small, nondescript garage. 'I thought we were the victim of a practical joke until we opened the door and there was a state-of-the-art recording studio' says Nelson. 'I still remember the Dead were trying out Beatles covers, doing stuff like "Here Comes the Sun" and "Hey Jude"... but they were just kind of working through things and sounding kind of nasally and, well, maybe there was a little pot going on. So Sarunas pulls me aside and says 'Donnie, no way these guys are famous. They're terrible.' '.

We do not merely want to be the best of the best. We want to be the only ones who do what we do.” —Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead1

The truth of love an unsung song must tell. The course of love must follow blind, without a look behind.

Jerry Garcia told Charlie Perry, in a piece in that issue, “Janis was a real person. She went through all the changes we did, on all the same trips. She was like the rest of us—fucked up, strung out, in weird places.

I was trying to find a paradigm for “rock and roll values.” I asked Jerry Garcia for advice on how big an organization should get. He said I should stop hiring people once I started not remembering everyone’s name.

That's the "freedom lie." There's been a lie about what freedom is and the big lie is that freedom means absolutely and utterly free, and it really doesn't mean anything of the sort. The case in point is when you have your own scene like that [Haight-Ashbury in the 60s] Somebody comes in and they're free to move in but likewise you're free to tell them to get out.

For any scene to work, along with that freedom there's implicit responsibility - you have to be doing something somewhere along the line - there is no free ride. And you have to know where you're going.

All I know is, if you listen to society, you’ll never get anywhere. JERRY GARCIA

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.

One final note one the [Rolling] Stones, though: When they came through the Bay Area earlier on that tour for regular concerts at the Oakland Coliseum Arena [before the Altamont free concert, 1969], 'They blew up all their equipment at the first show,' Betty Cantor-Jackson relates. 'They had all this Ampeg equipment, and it just went Ffffffttt! They were in a panic, so [Larry] Ram Rod [Shurtliff] and [Unknown maybe Rex?] Jackson raced to our [Grateful Dead] warehouse and brought down a bunch of our [rewired, kicked up, tinkered and experimented with] Fender amps for them, and the next show we sat up onstage while they played, and it sounded amazing. That was one of the times Bill Graham was nice to us,' She laughs. 'Anyway, I remember the first note Keith {Richards} played through Jerry's [Garcia] amp, and his mouth just dropped open. 'Woah!'. He couldn't believe the power and the clarity.'.

We drove it to the panhandle to listen to Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead in the first round of those Love-Ins the hippies had in the late 60’s.

4 BE SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU Here’s comedian Steve Martin’s advice to young comics: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” Love it. Life favors the devoted. The more you give to life, the more life sends back. It’s just not possible for you to be great at what you do, always reaching for your brilliance and standing for excellence, and not win in the end. (Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead once said, “You do not merely want to be the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.”) Sometimes

Meanwhile, David Grisman, a Ralph Rinzler protege and Monroe devotee from New Jersey, was living in California and developing his own newgrassy sound, a blend of bluegrass, swing, and Jewish klezmer that he called “dawg music” (after the canine nickname bestowed on him by friend Jerry Garcia).