Jerry Garcia
Jerry Garcia
Jerome John "Jerry" Garciawas an American musician best known for his lead guitar work, singing and songwriting with the band the Grateful Dead, which came to prominence during the counterculture era in the 1960s. Though he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader or "spokesman" of the group...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth1 August 1942
CitySan Francisco, CA
CountryUnited States of America
I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like.
Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk.
... 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.' It turned out to be tremendously lucky. It's just repellent enough to filter curious onlookers and just quirky enough that parents don't like it.
What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.
Don't tell me this town 'aint got no heart
... 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. 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. As long as we can play, we'll play, regardless of what it's for, who it's for or anything. It's fun for us - that's the important thing.
The alternate media are becoming important and viable alternatives to playing live. Records, videos, that kind of thing. They're going to start to count for something. Because there's only a limited amount of us-time available to us.
Stuff that's hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don't know what it does.
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.
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.
Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.
The sun will shine in my back door one day..
For me, I think the only danger is being too much in love with guitar playing. The MUSIC is the most important thing, and the guitar is only the instrument.
Yeah, I think we have to. If we want our shows to be - 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.