MICHAEL LYDON
INTERVIEW (FULL TRANSCRIPT)
(microphone
feedback)
Garcia: Testing,
one, two, is there a meter on there anywhere so you can judge level? You don’t
want – if it’s distorted, it’ll be awful. Testing, one two three four five six
seven eight… Okay, let’s see, there’s the meter – no, I think there isn’t any
meter.
(Tape recorder
set up – voices in background.)
Lydon: We were
talking in the car about up til you became the Warlocks.
Garcia: Yeah.
Lydon: Can you go
back?
Garcia: Before
that?
Lydon: No, no,
continue on from there.
Garcia: Oh, sure,
from the Warlocks. Oh, we were the Warlocks for, oh, six months or so; and
during that time we played like, you know, Big Al’s Gashouse and those kind of
scenes; and bars, like you know, those Whiskey a Go Go kind of places, and with
fake IDs and all that shit, like Weir was only 17, and Pigpen was 19; and you
know, we had a whole hustle, you know, we had to join the union and all that,
and it was – the thing that was mostly going on in the music business at that
time, like we weren’t into the business part, we were just playing, and you
know, just trying to get gigs and keep going, and the business at that time was
like that whole Hollywood scene, you know, the whole beach trip, you know, with
weird booking agents and all that kind of stuff; and we were like getting to
the end of the rope in that scene, like we were playing, we were were doing six
nights a week, five sets a night in those bars, you know; and we did it for –
to the point where it was just impossible, I mean, you know when we’re finally
tripping out all the regular clientele, there were no, hardly any more
customers coming in, when they’d come in they’d leave clutching their ears,
“Aaah shit!” – and you know, when you get – we grew into this whole like
malicious thing, man, of just laying it on as thick as we could.
Lydon: What kind
of stuff were you playing?
Garcia: Wild rock
and roll, man; blues, you know, stuff like that, but it was like loud, you
know, real loud; even, you know, for those days it was extremely loud, and for a
bar it was ridiculous, you know like people had to scream at each other and all
that, and that’s how we really started getting louder and louder; and then at
that time –
Lydon: The
numbers you put the people through.
Garcia: Yeah,
right, right – just isolate ‘em. And at that time Kesey was doing his scenes up
at his house in La Honda, on Saturdays they would all get stoned, and coming on
to all that shit; and we had friends, you know, that were living up there and
they had friends that were living down with us, and it was like back and forth,
until finally it was, you know, “why don’t we get together and have a party,
you guys bring your instruments and stuff and play,” you know, and they’d set
up all their tapes and all that bullshit, and – we would all go and get stoned;
and it would be – it was essentially formless, you know, there was nothing really
going on, we’d just go there and make something of it, you know; and then we
just sort of dropped out completely of the straight music thing; we didn’t take
any more of those kind of gigs, we just played the acid tests, which was – the
trip of the acid test was it was gonna be every Saturday night, it was gonna be
a different place every time, and it wasn’t gonna have any plan; that was what
the acid test was, in fact, and that’s the way it was through its whole thing;
it lasted about six months, that particular trip, going various places, you
know, and during that time we did the Trips Festival, acid test at Muir Beach,
and Fillmore Auditorium; and also that was about the same time that they were
having the first Family Dog shows and also the Mime Troupe benefits, which were
like the first time, you know, there was like rock and roll scenes; the Trips
Festival was the first time when all the heads around, you know, were like
together in one place, everybody high, and nobody paranoid; so it was like, you
know, that was the first time it opened out, you know, in any sense, you know.
And during that time we became the Grateful Dead, you know, that became our name.
Lydon: How’d you
get that name?
Garcia: Ohhh,
looking for a name, looking for a name, you know, we abandoned the Warlocks, we
just didn’t have a name for a while, you know, we were trying ones out to see
how they fit the ear, you know; and we were smoking DMT over at Phil’s house
one day, something like that, and he had a big Oxford dictionary, you know,
opened it up, and there’s the Grateful Dead, it said the Grateful Dead, you
know, just – That moment was one of those moments, you know, it’s just like
everything else on the page went blank and diffuse, you know, it was the
Grateful Dead in big black letters edged in gold, you know, blasting out –
(laughter) – and it was such a stunning combination of words, you know, just
the way, you know – and I said, “Well how about the Grateful Dead?” No, you
know, some didn’t like it – Bill Graham didn’t want to advertise us, he didn’t
want to say the Grateful Dead, he wanted to say the Warlocks, you know, we’d
already played a couple of gigs and he thought we had a reputation as the
Warlocks…
Lydon: It was
already like a thing then.
Garcia: Oh, sure,
yeah, sure.
Lydon: That maybe
you wouldn’t last any longer [if you keep the wrong name].
Garcia: Right,
right. See, it’s like, we didn’t give a fuck, you know. (laughter) So they just
started calling us Grateful Dead as soon as we mentioned that it was a
possibility, you know, that was the one, everybody just sort of gravitated
toward it, and so that got to be it, you know.
Lydon: When did
you move up to San Francisco?
Garcia: Well, we
left – we started coming up to San Francisco pretty heavy during the acid test
scene, to the Fillmore, and started meeting San Francisco people; and then we
went to LA, the acid test went to LA, and we did two to three acid tests down
there, and then the bus went to Mexico with the Pranksters, and we stayed in LA
and just practiced and goofed and got really high a lot down in this house down
there, and then we came back like three months later, back up to San Francisco
where everybody had known us from the Fillmore gigs and somewhere,
Longshoreman’s, all the Trips Festivals and so forth, and we came back and
started playing gigs up here, we moved to Rancho Olompali, that was the first
place we had up here; and then we moved from there, we were only there for
about a month or so, we moved from there over to 710.
Lydon: Who owned
that? Did McCoy own that?
Garcia: No, no,
it was owned by just somebody, I don’t know who it was, whoever owned it then,
you know, and they were thinking of putting up a historical monument, and stuff
like that, and we managed to get it, you know, we got together enough rent for
six weeks there; and that was like our first place, you know, because we needed
a place to practice and all that.
Lydon: You were
talking in the car before about Cassady and all that. Is it possible to tell
what the whole thing with Kesey was like?
Garcia:
Ohhh…well, it depended on who you were, when you were there, you know, it was
like, it was one thing to me, there were always a lot of things to me, but I
know that there are a lot of other people that it was a lot of other things
for, if you know what I mean; it was like, it was open, it was a tapestry or
something, you know, or a mandala or something like that, it was like, it was
what you made of it, essentially; and that was the whole – the thing is, okay,
you know, so you take LSD and you suddenly are aware of another plane, right,
or several other planes, or whatever, and the question is to extend that limit,
to go as far as you can go in that particular area, whatever it happens to be,
and that, in the acid test it really meant do away with old forms, do away with
old ideas, try something new; and that’s the way it was, and it was like no -
nobody was doing something, you know, it was like everybody was doing bits and
pieces of something, the result of which was something else (Lydon: Oh, wow),
if you know what I mean, it was like, when it was, when the thing was really
moving right, it was something you could sort of dig, that it was getting
toward, you know, it was like some sort of ordered chaos, you know, some kind
of chaos, and the way the acid test would be was it would start off, and there
would be chaos, you know, everybody would be high and flashing and going
through huge changes and there’d be just insane chaos during which everything
would be demolished and spilled and broken and changed and affected, and after
that another thing would happen, it’s like, the acid test went all night long
til the next morning, and all these things would happen that would like smooth
out within the chaos, if you know what I mean, so another form would happen;
and it would all have to do with just everybody being there, sort of like being
responsive, you know, so that – and there was like microphones all over, you
know, like, there’d be like microphones all over, so if you were just anybody
wandering around, there’d be a microphone, you could talk into it, and there
would be somebody else somewhere in the building at the end of some wire, that would
have a tape recorder and a mixing board and earphones and be listening in on
microphones, and all of a sudden someone would turn it up because it seemed
appropriate, you know, it would seem appropriate at that moment.
Lydon: So your
rap wouldn’t get heard unless, like, someone decided –
Garcia: Well, the
whole thing would be affected, you know, so you might say something into a
microphone and you’d hear it come out maybe a minute later, in a tape loop
somewhere else, some other part of the place, and all of a sudden there would
be all this odd interchange going on, you know, and neural connections and
weird sorts, you know, it would just be like – well, you know, it was like
magic, you know, some far-out magic, and really a gas – (Lydon: Yeah!) The thing
about it was, that there was, you know, it was people doing it all, you know,
people doing it all; like the light show, I remember one time, when somebody
was writing, like Kesey would be writing messages on a projector maybe,
projected up onto a wall, and he would be writing what he was seeing, or what
was going on, and he would write what was going on, it would go up on the board
there, meanwhile somebody else would be making a comment about it on a
microphone somewhere, and it would be ringing out of some speaker somewhere,
and you know – there would be all this stuff happening, exchanging back and
forth, you know. Oh, it was really far out.
Lydon: And you’d
just be playing?
Garcia: Uh, yeah,
we’d be playing, you know, we’d be playing when we were playing, when we
weren’t playing we’d be doing other stuff, you know. And we wouldn’t do sets,
like sometimes we’d get up and play, just play for two hours or three hours,
sometimes we’d get up and play for ten minutes and all freak out and split, you
know, and sometimes, you know, it was just like, we would just do it however it
would happen, you know. I mean it wasn’t a job, you dig? (Lydon: Yeah.) It
wasn’t a job, we weren’t going to do a job, it was the acid test, wherein, you
know, anything is okay, you can do anything you want.
Girl: The thing
about it is nobody paid any money and nobody ever had any money.
Garcia: Right,
right, there was no money, period.
Girl: And you did
it all without money. (Garcia: Right.) That was the neat part about it. Did it all
without any […] of money coming in at all, except for the hassle part […].
Lydon: Before it
all happened, you had been aware that maybe your music could get into that?
Garcia: Uhh,
well, I’ve always been a musician, I’ve always loved to play, and it’s just,
where is there a form which says that you can play all you want to, but you
don’t have to do any bullshit to go along with it – you know like before that
all there was was coffeehouses and things like that – I mean open to me as a
musician. And so, you know, there they maybe didn’t take too kindly to, you
know, 45-minute guitar solos or something – I mean, you know, it’s like, it’s a
timeless experience, I think, you know, the thing about music, and like when
we’re playing together, and the thing that we learned back there, you know, is
that there is something happens after you’ve taken the step over the brink, you
know, when you’ve gone past what you know, and then you’ve learned something
new, you know, that’s where you learn something new, that’s the thing to see –
that’s, like with our music, we’ve been pushing our music in that same way all
along, you know, just to get past where we are, if you know what I mean.
Lydon: One thing
that’s bothered me in the records is, it’s difficult to find a sense of
continuity – but I mean, it must be there.
Garcia: Well, it
depends what sort of continuity you’re talking about. What records are you
talking about?
Lydon: Well, just
from the first to second to third – the second seems more connected to the
third (Garcia: Right), and the first is a whole different number.
Garcia: Well the
first one, we never – it was the first record we ever made, and at the time, it
was unreasonable for us to do what we did, which would have been one LP, two
sides, one song, you know, like they would never have gone for it, you know, it
was not the thing to do with the form, right? So we made the first record of
short songs and stuff that we were doing, but they were like our little – they
were like our warm-up numbers, you know – they were tunes, songs, you know, and
like the thing we do isn’t really that, quite, you know; I mean we weave songs
in and out, you know, but they aren’t really, you know, it’s not just – So
anyway, the first record was songs, and that was because we were making a
record, right – Viola Lee Blues, it was, you know, revolutionary for being ten
minutes long, twelve minutes long, big deal – now, you know, big deal. And then,
so when we came up to do the second record, we thought, you know, this time
let’s do an LP record, let’s not make a record that’s gonna sell or that
somebody in the record company is gonna like, and you know, we had to live with
the first record for a year and we grew to hate it, you know – and so the
second record, you know, like we kicked out the producer and got thrown out of
a lot of studios for being too weird and all that shit, and finally when we
settled down to do it ourselves, we were in effect learning how to make a
record, we were learning about recording techniques and all that; so we
assembled the thing that we were doing, we had a vision of sorts, you know, to
do one unified trip, to do an LP record, in other words. And the Anthem of the
Sun is that, but it’s like still too far, you know, it’s too far for the man on
the street to dig it, you know. It’s a heads record, really – seems to be, I
mean it has never been popular particularly, you know, just only with our fans,
you know, with people who work at listening. (Lydon: Yeah.) People who work at
listening dig that record – well, the new record now, it’s like, I’m in a
different place than I was the last time, and this time, the songs, the words
are Bob’s, but the melodies and all that – the way they grew, the way those
songs grew and the way they happened is like, was really right, you know – like
some of those songs on that album we wrote in the studio, we just went in and
did it, you know…
Lydon (talking
over him): What particular song?
Garcia: Rosemary,
we did in the studio – we didn’t even have any such song, you know, we just –
like in 15 minutes we had that song down, it was just there.
Lydon: Wow. Did
you fuck around with it after that?
Garcia: No,
that’s the way we did it, you know, that’s the way it came.
Lydon: The
melodic thing that’s on Anthem of the Sun is still going in the new record.
Garcia: Right,
right, well the feeling –
Lydon: That’s a
nice melody in that, “he has to die” –
Garcia: Yeah,
right, right.
Lydon: Is that
yours?
Garcia: Yes,
that’s right, one of my melodies.
Lydon: [That’s a
fine song….]
Garcia: Well you
see, the place that I was trying to get at with that, I mean, that’s like one
of those things that just emerged, you know, I was just sitting around playing
the guitar and all of a sudden bam, there it is, and it says something to you,
just the air, you know, like certain airs say certain things to you, and that
says a certain thing and there it was; and on the new record, all those songs
are from that place, you know, they’re all – I don’t know how to explain it;
they’re all true, if you know – I can’t think of any other way to explain it –
but they came out effortlessly, they weren’t worked on particularly, you know
what I mean, in just the conception of them.
Lydon: Your live
show is so different though – in your live show…
Garcia (talking
over him): Yeah well, see now – well in the next month or so, we’re releasing
the next album – really, the one that’s out now, the new one, that one there,
is one aspect of the two records that we’re putting out in the space of a
couple of months – the next one is a double live album which is one of our live
sets, it’s from the Carousel and from the Avalon – and it’s just us live –
Lydon: […]
Garcia: Right,
two records, right.
Lydon: Wow. Did
you jump from – is each one a thing, is each side a thing –
Garcia: Each side
is a thing, and they’re also a thing all together.
Lydon: Right. Did
you fuck around with that?
Garcia: No, not
at all; we just did it like directly the way it happened, you know, just laid
it out, and it’s the truest representation of us live, to date. You know, it’s
us; I mean it’s us live, you know – on good nights, you know, on the nights
when the spirit was there, you know.
Lydon: Was it that
Sunday night at the Avalon?
Garcia: Yeah.
Lydon: Was that
the Lovelight?
Garcia: Yeah,
right.
Lydon: Oh, that
was really too much.
Garcia: Right.
Lydon: Everyone
get dancing.
Garcia: Right,
oh, you oughta hear it, it was like – you hear everybody dance, you know, you
hear, it’s like oh – I mean, it’s really that real thing, you know, which is –
it’s mostly, for us, like when we go to do a live recording thing, it’s such a
number, you know, just hassling all the equipment and getting it all set up and
all like that, and everybody’s stoned, you know, like it’s a wonder, you know,
that it gets done, and like what usually happens when we get a really good
night, like when everybody gets really high, the recording is blown, you know,
we didn’t get the recording; but this time it was just like fortuitous, you
know, it just worked out.
Lydon: How did
you work in the live bit on the second record?
Garcia: Ohh – a
variety of ways, man, we did all sorts of things, we did – frequently we would
take two or three performances of the same song, live performances of the same
song, and take maybe 12 bars; like for example in “That’s It for the Other
One,” just after the drum part, there’s a little drum part and then it comes
in, and what there is there, what’s happening there is it’s like four different
live versions of us doing the same song, simultaneously happening, and then
kind of one fading out and another one fading in, you know, we’re sort of
flipping ‘em like a deck of cards. (Lydon: Oh, wow.) So there’s that – that’s
why the time is so weird, and it tumbles in those weird ways, you know – like
we did a lot of things like that, you know, we sculpted, we used the live stuff
as source material, if you know what I mean, and so Anthem of the Sun is really
a tape composition as much as anything else, as much as like a musical
composition – and then the way we mixed it is, we took each side and performed
the mix, you know, we’d run through the tape, we’d be there over the 8-track,
you know, Phil and I, and we would just play the tape, play the board –
Lydon: And
getting together on it, so each one of you was doing different things – and
both hearing…
Garcia (talking
over him): Right, right, precisely; and we did it enough so we knew all the
nuance and knew what was happening and knew kind of what we were after; and
then we’d get really stoned and we’d mix it for the hallucinations. (Lydon: Oh,
wow.) For what you see, for the place it takes you, you know. And so like
that’s the same on the new record too – we’ve learned to do that, you know, to
mix for the little world, you know.
Lydon: That –
like when you play live, it’s –
Garcia: You have
to do it a different way, because it’s happening right now – when you’re doing
a record, it’s like doing a painting, you know, it’s like you’re gonna work on
it and nobody’s gonna see you while you’re working on it, so your working on it
is not the thing, the finished thing is the thing, so you have all that as a
consideration; so it’s a low energy trip; we record in the wintertime. And then
playing is like something that’s happening now, it’s an expression of the now,
you might say, you know, because anybody who’s there when you’re playing is
affecting the music, they can change the music by glancing at you or by dancing
or by doing anything, you know, it’s all – you know – but a record is closed,
it’s finished, it’s done, it becomes something else; it’s an other thing.
Lydon: I was
thinking about the problem with communication in there – when you just play
live, and it’s right there – and everyone senses a very generous invitation,
you know, to come on in, everybody, [we just love to play.] (Garcia: Right.) On
the record, by going a step, you know, or many steps further down, the
communication thing isn’t as open.
Garcia: No it’s
not, because the medium doesn’t allow it, see, it’s like when – if you include,
for example, on a record, a question, you know, say there’s a question, you
know, let’s say, “who are you?” – you put it on a record and put the record on,
and this question will come out at you, say, “who are you?” but you don’t have
anybody to tell it to, you know, except a record, you know, and you can’t, you
know, so it’s not – a record doesn’t communicate that way, you know, it doesn’t
take anything in; it’s just there, right?
Lydon: It puts
you – you have to get onto the [board] –
Garcia: Right, it
puts you into a place, is what it’ll do, because of the nature of sound, it’ll
put you into a place, and so that’s another sort of language, you see, and the
nature of – you know, I mean, communication is implicit in the whole act of
playing music, I mean, it’s there on one level or some level or another, like
Bob, Bob’s thing is that, you know, his stuff communicates also, on any level
that you care for it to communicate to you, if you – you know, it depends also
how you listen to it, you know.
Lydon: Can you describe
some of the – like a verbal description of some of the places, or one of the
places, or the place, on one of the songs on one of the records […] – I mean
can you remember some – verbally.
Garcia: Oh, sure,
sure, uh – Dupree is a good one, it’s a very specific sort of place – and uh,
like Phil sees that place as being like – or that story as being told by the
fool, you know, the tarot card fool, that guy, and that place he is, where he’s
stepping off a cliff, you know. (Lydon: … ) Right, and you know, that whole
thing; and that’s – it’s also the carnival, you know, the midway, you know,
there’s calliope kind of going on back there, and it’s, you know, it’s that
famous story place, you know, where that kind of mythic trip is going on, you
know – that’s what I hear in it, you know, that’s what I hear in that melody,
and that’s what the words are talking about, you know, the words are running
down that story, you know – it’s a story, you know – but it’s a very particular
one, you know.
Lydon: What do
you see the story as?
Garcia: Well,
just as the guy, you know, the guy who goes and robs the store, you know, the
guy who goes and gets, you know, he’s gonna get the diamond for his honey, you
know, and you know, the judge and all that, the famous confrontations, you
know; it’s just another way of looking at that thing, and bringing a little of
the sideshow into it, you know. I mean it’s like, you know, the thing that I
say about it is just gonna be the place it puts me, but the point is that, if
that is going on in the act of creation, if you’re thinking ‘this is gonna be a
place, it’s gonna be a place to me,’ but you can’t know whether somebody else
is gonna go to that same place; but you can at least say that it’s valid, it’s a
valid place for me, you know, I mean, I experience it in a valid way, a real
way, I mean, it really – I put on the earphones and there’s that – there it is,
there it’s going on, you know, they’re going through their changes there; and
somebody else will hear it different, but even so, that’s, you know, that’s
where it is; I mean, if you can see yourself in something that’s put in front
of you, you know, then it works, you know – it’s, you know, like objective art,
if it’s really righteous, you know.
Lydon: It sounds
like Peter Townshend’s blind dumb and deaf boy […] living in a place of music.
(Garcia: Yeah.) And music losing its quality of being […], but being just a […]
of some kind.
Garcia: Well
that’s the thing, music is an aspect of sound, which is an aspect of your
perception of, you know, what’s going on, you know; it’s the door out of
yourself, you know; and it’s – like you hear all the shit that’s going on,
little sounds here and there, and they’re all in places, and you hear ‘em
because you have two ears, you hear ‘em, they’re a place, there’s a thing going
on, so if you snap your fingers over here, you can identify it as being over
there; do it over there, you can identify it there, cause you have two ears;
and that’s the – when you have two sources of sound, stereo, you’re covering
what hearing is, you know, and that’s like effectively painting a picture in
your head. (Lydon: Yeah, right.) But, you know, the nature of the picture is up
to whose head it is you’re painting in, you know, so anybody who listens to a
record, you know, sees a different picture.
Lydon: Do you
consider yourself playing rock and roll?
Garcia: Uh, it’s
a label, you know, it’s just a label, it’s like, do I consider myself polite? I
mean it’s just a label, but no matter what I consider it, it still is what it
is, you know, it’s still – you still hear it, you know. I mean, I don’t
consider it anything, I just consider it to be what I do, it’s just music, you
know, whatever that is, and I don’t think of it in terms of being rock and roll
or, you know, an idiom – I mean, rock and roll, man, is like the ultimate
non-descriptive label, you know.
Lydon: Oh wow, I
think… To me as a person, I think rock and roll isn’t a label, it’s a whole
thing…
Garcia: Well
what’s the thing, tell me about it.
Lydon: Wow, I think
of it as a whole energy thing, a whole matrix kind of thing, like “Hail hail
rock and roll, deliver us from the days of old.”
Garcia: Oh,
right, right, right. Oh yeah, in that sense, yeah, we’re playing rock and roll,
you know, yeah, we’re still playing rock and roll, I mean we’re still playing –
??
(interrupting): Deliver us from the days of Elvis!
Garcia: Right!
(pause) But yeah, I can dig that place – I don’t know whether it’s, you know –
like, everybody in our – in the band has got their own idea about what we’re
doing, you know, in terms of labeling it. Shit, I don’t know, I don’t think – I
don’t find it convenient to think about it one way or another, you know. It
really comes out – for me it comes out in the experience of doing it, you know
– playing music, courting the muse, you know – it’s my work, you know, and so,
I think of it as my work – although my work might very well be rock and roll,
you know.
Lydon: What about
the whole communication of good times, getting other people to break through –
the whole impact of the Dead live?
Garcia: It’s
something there for you to do, you know – and not everybody sees us that way,
you know, it’s like in San Francisco everybody does, because everybody’s seen
us so many times, everybody knows, you know, what it is we’re doing; people
come mostly to get a chance to get loose – but like in the rest of the country,
we play concerts and like people sit very politely and do all that shit – and a
lot of times, you know, some kid gets up to dance and six cops are on him, and
you know – it’s like different in the rest of America. It’s only really loose
around here, the rest of America’s
pretty weird still. But even so –
Lydon
(interrupting): […] they don’t have an idea of the place that –
Garcia: They
don’t have a model, they haven’t had a model, you know, and when we go there,
the most effective thing is for – like, we go into a town, there’ll be a small
amount of people who know us, because they’ve been out on the coast or one
thing or another, you know, and they’ll come, and they’ll kind of like be the
little microcosm to sort of instruct everybody else on what to do, but even so,
man, it’s a form, you know, it’s really gotten to be a rigid – it’s stuck, it’s
stuck, and the whole thing of playing in a hall, having a light show, band, and
the orientation is, you sit down and you watch and, you know, the lights are
behind the band so that you can see the band and the lights, and it’s like, you
know, really there’s nothing happening mostly, it’s mostly watching television,
large loud television; and that’s not really what we’re doing, you know – so
what we’re trying – what we’re doing at this point in time is we’re trying to
find a way to do another form, to seek another form, or other forms in which
you can play music so it doesn’t have to be so rigid, you know, so rigid one
way or another – like, this form is one that only started like three or four
years ago, but it started as a misapprehension of the thing that was going on
at the time – you see, like Graham was at the Trips Festival, he saw the things
going on, and he saw a light show and band, which were the simplest and easiest
things to identify, right, because it’s obvious it’s a band, it’s got – what do
they got, instruments up there and drums and amplifiers, and here’s these
lights on the screen, why, you know, that’s a light show, so, you take a light
show and a band and that’s a formula, and that formula represents the form
which has been going on now for three or four years, and it’s stuck! It’s
stuck, it’s not going anywhere, you know, it’s not – it hasn’t blown any new
minds, if you wanna – you know, you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. But
really, the thing that was happening back then in the Trips Festival was not
just a rock and roll band and not just a light show but a whole other thing;
but the point was that if you were bustling around, taking tickets and
hustling, you know, hustling to get a production on, you know, or to put a
little order into the chaos, you didn’t observe the stuff that was going on,
you know. It’s a sensitive trip, really, the way it was then; it’s unfortunate
that all that’s been lost, see. The nicest thing about that was the
formlessness, because it was an opportunity for something new to happen with a
large number of people, you know, for them to be able to get together in one
place, a lot of ‘em, helplessly stoned, you know, and find yourself in a room
full of thousands of people, none of whom you were afraid of – you know, it was
like really far out, you know, it’s a heavy thing – and that was the thing that
really happened then, that was the start of the large scenes, you know, people
getting together and feeling good about it, you know, which ultimately led to
the be-ins and so forth, and scenes that are still going on, you know, a good
night at Winterland and all that.
Lydon: Yeah.
You’ve been – I always kind of think the Dead have been working very
consciously to try to keep that thing going.
Garcia: Uh, well,
we’ve been just consciously going, trying to keep our thing going – whatever it
is, you know. It’s like, you can only lend so much of your energy to something
that’s going on, and if nobody picks up on it, it’s not righteous, you know. We
just try and do what we can do as well as we can do it, and stay as high as we
can get, you know, so – on the level of, when we go onto the stage to play
music, it’s an important thing, it’s an important moment, and that’s the way we
enter into it, because that’s the realest, you know – like if you take the long
view – say for example, the long view has been one of our [problems], we’ve
taken the long view, okay what are we trying to do, we’re trying to make it so
things are a little cooler, so people can get along a little, you know, people
can have a little more fun, you know, whatever, all those things that are
missing, seem to be missing; but that view doesn’t aid you when it comes down
to the moment of playing; the thing that aids you when it comes to the moment
of playing is thinking your music, you know, thinking of who you’re playing
with and the music that you’re about to make, and your hands, how well are they
working, you know, how much time you’ve put in practicing and all that – it’s
like a real yoga thing, you know what I mean, it’s something that you really do
do when you’re doing it, and the thought comes way later, you know – you know,
the intellectualization of it, you know, where you say ‘this is what it was’ or
‘that’s what it was’ or you know, cause it’s not really like that, you know;
and the thing that we’re following around is something that’s no farther away
than the end of your nose, you know, we’re just like close behind our noses,
following along, and, you know – there, you know, like I say, it’s nothing that
we – the thing about the whys and whats of it, you know, probing it and stuff
like that, man, there’s just nothing to say ultimately about it, you know,
except that we do it, and it seems to work the way it works, and that we don’t
do it by ourselves, it’s not something – it’s not us generating an enormous
amount of energy that we can do at any time, it’s us going to a place and being
aware of the people there, and the people being aware of us, and us feeding
back and forth, you know, it’s an interactive thing, and that’s the thing,
that’s the experience, you know, really; the rest of it is talk.
Lydon: Yeah.
(laughter)
Garcia: It’s
really a difficult thing to talk about, I mean, like I’m in this music so long
that, for one thing, my only thing about music is like way back, you know –
it’s just like, I just, you know – I’ve spent the last ten years of my life in
music, man, and it’s – I’m covered with it, you know; I can’t really talk about
it, you know; it’s all over, all around, you know; it’s really hard, really
hard to exteriorize it.
Lydon: How does
it – handling the business of it all, and [working that into the framework], is
that a constant […]?
Garcia: Yeah, it
is, with everything, I’m sure, just because – well, for us, like we take a huge
amount of equipment and four equipment guys, plus the band, plus your road
manager, and that adds up to quite a few people, and like our operating
overhead is real high, just to move our stuff and just to get it there and just
to play, so on the practical level, we don’t really make any money, you know,
we just don’t make any money at all. You know, but what else does money do, you
know, the only thing it does is further the trip. And also, like the whole
business thing is like, who wants to take care of business? – in our whole
scene, everybody in the Grateful Dead has been for the last three years nothing
but heads, not a straight soul in the whole thing, you know; certainly nobody
who’s capable of taking care of business, you know. So our business scene has
always been a calamity, man, you know like, it’s not even a shock to hear that
you’re $60,000 in debt, you know – “huh, $60,000 in fucking debt,” you know.
But it’s just, you know, it’s all going on in the paper universe, you know,
where it doesn’t – you know, that’s another thing, if you want to go along with
it and believe it and everything, there it is, as real as can be, you know, you
can go and fight with it and hassle with it and hassle with bankers and pay
bills and do all that, or you can just let it go; and what we did is let it go,
and so here it is, you know, $60,000 in debt; and like, our whole manager thing
is, Mickey’s father is now doing it, you know, he’s like fronting our whole
manager thing, he’s taking charge; we’ve given him the power to do what he
wants to do; his whole trip is to straighten it all out, you know, and make it
so that all is feasible, and also to help us with ideas for new forms and so
forth. So right now, things are looking good, but you know, like the whole
thing about money is still something weird, you know. It’s not really what
we’re doing, you know, we’re obviously not out to make money because we aren’t
even working at it, you know; we’re out to keep ourselves happy with what we’re
doing, you know, to do what we’re doing and make it so that we dig it, so it
isn’t work – so rather than work, go out for 60 days on the road doing a gig
every other night, you know, jumping all over the place like those guys do, and
then coming back and dying, you know, it’s like –
Lydon: Why do you
think they do it?
Garcia: Um,
managers don’t understand about pace, about musicians and pace, or they aren’t,
they don’t – the business world as a whole doesn’t understand what it is to be
someone who does something and that everybody has their own pace at which you
do stuff, and that it’s not always – you can’t continually put out without
having it – without losing it, you know what I mean, if you’re a musician. If I
had to play 60 days in a row, gigs every night, and didn’t have a chance to
practice or to listen to new music or to get some new ideas, I’d hate what I
was doing, you know, by the end of that time; you know, it would make me crazy,
it really would; and it’s because I’m aware of the pace that I have [behind
learning things].
Lydon: A lot of
other bands, for one reason or other, accept the pace; I mean, do do that trip.
Garcia: Um –
maybe it’s because of the bread, maybe because they dig it, you know – you
know, some people dig it, you know, dig the high energy thing.
Lydon: Do you
think Janis does?
Garcia: Probably,
probably. You know, it’s like, I don’t know, I can’t speak for anybody else,
you know, but I dig for it to be – I mean, you know, like music is something I
expect to be doing as long as I am doing anything, you know, and it’s just – I
see it in waves, you know, like there’s downhill slumps, and uphill rises, and
plateaus, and all sorts of levels, all of which you go to in their turn, you
know; and it represents the large, you know, picture of what it is like to be
going through your life creating stuff.
Lydon: How do you
feel about the fact that you haven’t become super big time, popular, […].
Garcia: I’m glad.
(laughs) I’m glad. It’s a big hassle to be popular, just because of the
attention – and all that stuff is weird, you know, the whole thing of, that there’s
a thing set up that says that because you play music, you’re better than
somebody else, or it’s fashionable, you know, and that – all those levels of
consideration, the hierarchy, you know, all that stuff is bullshit – but people
continue to buy that theory, you know, and continue to accept musicians as a
hierarchy, you know, and really, you know musicians are just people, just doing
people stuff, you know; so like, you know, there I am in St. Louis, Missouri or
something like that, and some cat is talking to me about, you know, about rock
and roll and about, you know, something he read in a magazine, something like
that – I don’t know what the fuck he means, you know, and it’s like, it’s not –
it makes it so that it’s more of a burden for you to be able to communicate
with anybody, you know what I mean, it’s just there’s a whole lot of shit you
gotta cut through, because they think you’re somebody you’re not, you know.
Lydon: What about
the – you were saying earlier that one time you wanted to be a rock and roll
star.
Garcia: That
happened when I was 15, you know. I mean that’s when I started playing, when I
was 15, you know; and that was the thing that attracted me to it, you know, I
loved the sound of the guitar and all that, and all that shit was really far out,
you know – you know, but the reality of playing the guitar and getting into
music and all that, all of a sudden you’re different, you’re doing something
different, you’re not after that thing, that initial thing, or, you know,
that’s not where you are anymore, you know; you get older, go through your
changes, and pretty soon music is what you do, and you know about it, you know
– you’ve changed your energy from the one level to the other level, you know –
and like, the rock and roll star thing is just a drag, you know; it never
helped anybody, it never made anybody a better musician, you know (Lydon:
Right, right), I don’t think – with the possible exception of the Beatles,
maybe, who had they not been – if they hadn’t been encouraged by success may not
have continued to create music which has been a gas, you know.
Lydon: Or someone
like Jagger, who plays the role like an instrument, plays the whole –
Garcia: Right,
well in that case, you know, that’s the matter of dealing with that in a
certain way, that’s a way to deal with it, but I personally don’t wanna devote
my energy to playing a role, I would rather devote my energy to music, you
know, and be able to deal with people on some simple human level – you know, I
don’t wanna be – it’s really, when you get that kind of stuff, you know, like
distant cousins and stuff hitting on you, you know, somebody comes up and says,
“listen, I’m your cousin 17 times removed and my family knew yours back in - ”
you know, all of a sudden here you are, you’re somebody, you know, whereas
without that title you’re just another anybody, you know; and it’s much easier
and cooler to be anybody than it is to be somebody. (Lydon: Yeah, right.)
Somebody’s just a big drag, I mean, it’s just more shit you have to do, you
know, which like makes it harder for you to do the thing you’re trying to do.
Lydon: Yeah. One
thing – like in the beginning of that Solomon Burke record ‘Everybody Needs
Somebody To Love,’ “If everybody listened to my song tonight, I believe it
would save the whole world.’ (Garcia: Right.) How… Do you think that way? It
seems – I’ve thought that you do […] like that, […]. [you’d be on his trip kind
of thing] (Garcia: Right.) So how do you connect the music thing with making
people feel good, the social thing, [so that the…]
Garcia: Uhh – I
don’t connect it, period; I mean, I know – I realize that there is a
connection, and I can dig it, but like I say, being conscious of that as a fact
is nothing – like, you can’t translate that idea into music; you can’t say, “this
is this idea, I can concretely translate it into music and make it come out
thus,” see; that you cannot do, music doesn’t say those kind of things, see.
Lydon: A lot of
musicians have tricks, or one thing or another, like with BB King, he can just
sort of – he knows how to do it (Garcia: Right), during the course of the first
song he’ll hit a certain note that does translate the idea –
Garcia
(interrupting): Right, exactly; well, that’s the thing, is finding those things
– I think that the moments that translate the idea originally are pure, and
that once you learn them consciously, they then become a device, and once it’s
a device, it’s frozen, you know; it’s like – for me, that is, I’m talking about
me – so like, I know the trick that you do to get everybody up and dancing, the
trick that you do to get a standing ovation, you know, we’ve learned those
things as a group, right; but you can’t rely on ‘em because they’re lies once
you know ‘em. When you stumble into ‘em and everybody’s up, it’s the truth;
when you know how to do it, man, it’s just like something you can do, it’s an
exercise, you know; and it’s an exercise of will, which is a weird thing –
instead, it’s like, if you have all that as part of what you know about what
you’re doing, that’s a consideration of musicians now is to know all those
things, that this thing will make it really exciting, and this other thing will
make it another way, and it’s like, they’re only there to use if it’s true and
right and boss to use ‘em, and that’s only if it’s going in such a way so that
that’s what happens, you know – I mean, I don’t know if you can understand any
of that – but those moments are really precious to me, man, you know; they
really are far out, you know, when the place becomes one thing – everything,
everybody in there is one thing, and it’s all really going down beautifully;
it’s nothing that you want to resort to as a trick, you know; it’s something
heavier, in my opinion.
Lydon: [It’s
still always…] further.
Garcia: Yeah,
further, man, I mean, I don’t see any sense in doing the same thing over and
over again, no matter what it is, no matter how boss it is; it’s like, to me,
being alive means to continue to change, you know, to continue to learn and
continue to grow and to do all that, and to not be where I was last week or two
months ago or a year ago or any of that; because, you know, you can’t, I mean –
it’s just not interesting, you know, to me; and I think that that’s the way – I
think anybody who’s into music, or who’s a musician, and is in the process of
teaching themselves about music and how to play, which as far as I can see, is
a process that lasts as long as you’re alive; it’s like that’s the thing,
that’s the thing you’re doing, you know – I can’t; you know – again, this is a
difficult thing to talk about.
Lydon: Did you
read in Rolling Stone a long time ago the whole Mike Bloomfield […] thing?
Garcia: No I
didn’t…
Lydon: Oh. They
really put you down – I think Bloomfield
particularly.
Garcia: Oh, I
didn’t read it, no, what did he say?
Lydon: Well, just
said it was shit.
Garcia: Well he’s
entitled to his opinions, you know.
Lydon: [… think
that he could know better.]
Garcia: Who
knows, man – I mean, it might very well be that that interview might have been
after he might have seen us on a night when it was shit, or, you know,
depending what he was referring to, you know, maybe he, maybe, you know – I
don’t know, I don’t know where Mike’s head is at, really. I know that he feels
very strongly about purity, a certain kind of purity it seems, because like the
things – not necessarily his playing, but when he does arrangements and stuff
like that, and does production and stuff like that, he gets it so it’s right,
for what he’s doing, you know, I mean really righteous; and it might just be that
what we do violates his aesthetic, you know – I don’t know, I can’t really
tell, you can’t know about things like that. But you know, the thing about
interviews and the thing about music is that you can say anything you want,
man; it’s cool, you know; it’s cool because the experience is such that you can
like it or not like it or you know, say, you know, go out of your mind or leave
in a rage or any fucking thing, I mean, it’s cool to do it, you know – music is
something you can hang any fucking thing on, you know, and it’s okay. (Lydon:
Yeah.) Yeah, I mean like […] Rolling Stone now, because of music, Rolling Stone
has something to talk about – it’s like half the battle of life in this world
is something to do, you know, something to just pass the time away, man, just
something to do, you know – and it’s like, talking about stuff is doing
something. (Lydon: Yeah.) You know, so providing an excuse for talking, man, is
okay. It just means that somebody’s gonna have something to talk about, you
know, it’s all right. And so if you’re gonna put stuff out like a record or
something like that, put something out that anybody can say anything about, so
that – you know, so that it leaves a big open door for stuff to talk about
instead of a little narrow door, you know, or lots of things to talk about
instead of one thing to talk about, you know, whatever.
Lydon: Do you
recall saying before about starting out in blues and country, you never got one
[…] thing down, like blues, the way Mike Bloomfield’s done blues?
Garcia: Um, no,
no, only – yeah, bluegrass music I got down, bluegrass music is the thing that
I was – and traditional music, those were the things that I was into heavy
enough to be able to play them pure and righteously. When I was playing five-string
banjo, like, I went the whole way with it, you know; I went all the way through
the body of music that existed as an example of it, and learned everything that
I could from it, and played with the guys that I could play with, and – you
know, that’s how I began to understand what an idiom was, what style was, and
what kinds of music, you know, like that – yeah, I’ve done that, I’ve done
that; in fact –
Lydon: How could
you leave it?
Garcia: Because
there was nobody to play with, and because there was no place to play – not on
the west coast, you know.
Lydon: Did you
ever […] like going to Virginia or Nashville?
Garcia: I went to
all those places.
Lydon: You did?
Garcia: Sure.
Lydon: Just on
your own?
Garcia: Yeah.
Lydon: Did you
find stuff to do?
Garcia: Oh, I
recorded bluegrass shows, and stuff like that, me and a friend of mine, Sandy
Rothman, who went on to play guitar with Bill Monroe, who’s the guy who
invented bluegrass music; and, you know, I got to know a lot of musicians and
played with a lot of people and, you know – I did it to my satisfaction.
Lydon: You had a
personal odyssey kind of […].
Garcia: Yeah,
yeah.
Lydon: How long’d
you do it for?
Garcia: Oh, three
months, four months, something like that. I mean actually travelling in the
south and being… [mumbles]
Lydon: Wow. And
then you came [from doing] that back into the folk stuff?
Garcia: No, no,
that was like out toward – you know, I mean, all these things are happening
more or less simultaneously, overlapping, I mean like, started rock and roll,
went to acoustic guitar, from acoustic guitar into folk music, like – by folk
music I mean traditional music, which in this country is country music, and
like old-time country music from the twenties and like that – and that’s where
I got into the guitar, fingerstyling the guitar, and from there into the banjo,
old-style banjo playing, and then into Scruggs-style bluegrass music. You know,
but like, but you know, it’s like, you can’t live in the United States and not
hear all kinds of music, you know, you hear all kinds of music as you’re just
going through your changes, you have a car radio, you know, you hear all kinds
of music; so none of it escapes you, if you know what I mean; so like while I
was into one kind of music, I was hearing all other kinds of music, and that
was all having an effect on me, you know, and you just – you know. It’s all
music, is what it boils down to, you know, there’s all kinds of music, all
kinds – there’s people on the street corners making music, you know, all over –
weird old fiddlers in bus depots and shit like that, they’re all over, people
like that all over, so it’s like, you know, music is everywhere; just people
playing, making music of some kind or another, people on the back porch, people
in church singing, that’s a big thing, music going on all around; and it’s all
going on, you know. That’s why, you know, the thing about, that all those
idioms and styles and different worlds of music are all melting away, man,
because nobody is isolated from all the different kinds of music there are, you
know; everybody’s hearing it all now. So like the guys in the Band who
undoubtedly learned how to play and how to approach their instruments from rock
and roll records and country music records and Ray Charles and the blues and
stuff like that, do their songs like the way Aretha Franklin, you know, gospel
singer from that tradition, does one of their songs, and Bob Dylan’s in
Nashville with Johnny Cash, and you know, it’s like really mixing it up, you
know, they’re really mixing it up, and music is getting that way, you know.
Lydon: Yeah. Is
this the first record you used a Moog on?
Garcia: Yeah,
right. The first time I’ve ever used one.
Lydon: How do you
think the accessibility of electronic music will come about?
Garcia: Oh, the
accessibility of electronic music is a fact; they’ve been accessing electronic
music for some time now – and popular, man, I’m talking about popular, I’m
talking about, let’s say underground radio, FM; every city in the United States
has some kind of underground FM radio, at least one, and a lot of them have two
and three; so that’s something that’s happened in the last couple of years –
all those stations play at least somebody who does some amount of electronic
stuff – the Beatles on their last album had that thing, Revolution No. 9 – it’s
electronic! (Lydon: Yeah, right.) You know, like people are hearing that, you
know; they aren’t hearing the heaviest of it, they aren’t hearing all of it,
and maybe the heaviest of it is a trifle too heavy, but it’s out, you know,
it’s out, like people – it’s not, it hasn’t been ignored; and you can hear bits
and snatches of it on the top 40 radio, you know – the Monkees, everybody, you
know. Those things are the tools now, you know, for everybody, for every
musician, you know, has all of music historically to choose from, because it’s
all here right now in the form of records – go into a record store, man, you
can pick a century, you know; and it’s all there, you can hear it, you know,
you don’t have to hassle with musty old documents and, you know, funky old
scores and shit like that, you can hear it. (Laughter.) And that’s the thing,
you know, that’s the thing, what you can hear, you hear, it goes into your
brain and it’s in there, man, you know, the stuff that you hear is – you know
how a melody gets in your head, or some song that you heard once or twice on
the radio, and it’s, you know, there it is, and it’s locked in your brain,
[until] you retain it, you catch it, you get it, you know, and it happens to
[…] part of yourself; that’s how well your hearing transmits shit.
Lydon: When I
first met you it was during the summer of ’67, and I spent the night – I guess
I knew Danny, and I talked to Danny […] – a very ambivalent thing about the
Haight-Ashbury – wanted to say “why don’t you keep it going somehow,” but not
sure it could ever get that going again there… (Garcia: Right.) I’d really
appreciate it if you could sort of talk about the changes in Haight-Ashbury,
how you saw that, and how you saw the Dead [in relation] to it, and your
eventually leaving, and the Carousel…
Garcia: Well, originally
when we were there, we were just there, you know, we were just other people on
the street and around, you know, like – and that’s the way it was with everybody,
the guys that were doing the posters, all the other musicians, we were just,
you know, we were just freaks, just like always, and it was – there was no
distinctions made. Then, behind all the publicity in Time magazine and all that
shit, the tourist hordes started coming, and the out of town kids and all that
kind of stuff, and pretty soon there was a big traffic problem on the street,
so the people who were on the street who wanted more freedom on the street
started hassling the tourists, and the cops started hassling the people on the
street, and the tourists were hassling the cops, and back and forth; and then,
you know, there were confrontations and hassles and guys were putting out, you
know, firebrand bullshit – and all of a sudden it was just, there was – it was
a political trip, you know, all of a sudden there was cops and National Guard
and all that bullshit – who needs it, you know? I mean, you know – like, who
wants to live in that? You know, like where you’re living, you know; I mean,
you might want to go there to hassle, but you don’t want to live in it
particularly; you know, at least I don’t, and none of us did, so we just split,
because it was, you know, it’s not – it’s not a righteous fight, you know, it’s
just some bullshit, it’s just something to do, you know, it’s another kind of
something to do, but it’s the kind of something to do that I don’t care to do,
and I used to – you know, I did all the fighting I wanted to do when I was a
kid; and I didn’t dig it then either, you know, I mean, it was never a gas, it
was never a good trip, and it’s never a good trip to find yourself surrounded
by National Guard cats with guns and all that shit, man, and police all over
the place and cats throwing bottles and – you know, all that, all that shit was
coming down, coming down real heavy, you know – it was mostly happening on the
cops on one hand who didn’t really live there, have too much to do with it, you
know, the tax squad and stuff like that, and the people from out of town who
weren’t even – who didn’t live there, so didn’t have to pick up broken glass or
didn’t have to, you know, keep the kids out of it, you know, or, you know, any
of that; I mean, there was a lot going on. So shit, we just split.
Lydon: Did you […]
as long as you could…
Garcia: Oh yeah,
yeah, we stayed there as long as we could, and we did, you know, we did what we
could, but it got to be where any kind of […] any kind of thing happening was
some kind of hassle, you know, some kind of meeting or political kind of thing,
that was – you know, it just wasn’t [called for], it wasn’t necessary; it was
crazy. You know, we would go down and play on the street, and we’d go down and
play in the park, you know, just to get everybody off the streets, and the
tourists – if the tourists don’t have anything to look at, they go home, man –
that was like, there was a lot of easy ways to solve all those problems, I
think, just by being cool, you know, not by – and so you can avoid the whole
problem of having to hassle somebody, and having to be hassled yourself, and
maybe eventually ending up in the joint, you know, which is where all that shit
inevitably leads, you know.
Lydon: Did you
feel at least a sense of, to some extent, political responsibility, a sense of
community that was endangered that you could – did you feel a community sense
then, that eventually became impossible?
Garcia: Well, most
of the people who were – like our friends, most of our friends, were splitting
anyway, you know, I mean, just getting out of town and everything, it’s like –
the community is larger than the Haight-Ashbury; the community that is
concerned with itself, and concerned with each part of itself, is way bigger
than the Haight-Ashbury, you know, it’s bigger than the Be-In, bigger than any
of those scenes, there’s a lot of people; and most of the people are cool
enough to be able to find a way it is that’s groovy for them to live, they
don’t need to be told or pointed the way or any of that bullshit; and anybody
who does that is just calling attention to themselves and their own trip, which
is just another trip, as far as anybody’s concerned, you know; everybody’s trip
is as good as everybody else’s, you know; so some cat comes up and tells you
“let’s get the heat out of the Haight-Ashbury,” you know, it’s like, “go ahead,
man, (laughs) I’d rather leave myself, you know, you guys can have the
Haight-Ashbury” – you know, because like now, the result is the Haight-Ashbury
is just another neighborhood, but heads are everywhere, man, all over San
Francisco, all over Marin County, and all over the peninsula, you know, the
east bay, everywhere, you know - and then the hassles are, of course, big –
like in Berkeley there’s that hassle going on – there was the hassle at San
Francisco State, and it’s like anybody who wants to hassle can find something
to hassle about, and they can be righteous or, you know, however you want to go
into it, you know. It seems like, to me, the way it seems is that anything
you’re doing is okay as long as it’s not making you uptight, or endangering
you, I mean, you know, unless that’s what you wanna do; and why put yourself in
a position of, you know, being about to go to jail – jail’s a terrible place,
man. There’s nothing much but bummers to be learned in jail. (Lydon: Yeah,
right.) And all that, you know. And it’s like, unless you think you have – if
you think you have something that’s really important, you know, that really
merits leading people, using whatever you are to lead people, you know, that’s
cool too, I guess, you know; but that’s certainly not my trip, you know; and
there was – see, the groovy thing about the Haight-Ashbury and about that whole
thing was, there was something spontaneous happening there, it didn’t have any
leaders, man, it didn’t have any spokesmen, it’s like the spokesman was whoever
you stopped, you know, and talked to was the spokesman; and like any spokesman
was as righteous as any other spokesman, you know what I mean; and it’s like,
there was none of that stuff going on, no hierarchies, no bullshit, you know;
and all that – all those kind of things came later, and they’re still, you know
– it’s like around here it’s cooler than it is anyplace else, cause mostly
nobody […] on you, too fake; but the rest of the country is still operating on
that celebrities and autographs and all that – a lot of that’s still going on.
Lydon: Right,
right – do you get the celebrity rock and roll band […]
Garcia (talking
over him): Yeah – we don’t get it too heavy, right, we don’t get it – I mean,
we don’t – you know, we discourage it, you know, and mostly any appearance by
us is such a left-handed event, you know, that – you know. (laughs)
Lydon (inaudible,
moving tape recorder): Do you have to […] soon?
Garcia: Pretty
soon, yeah, I got a meeting at –
(Tape ends.)
MICHAEL LYDON INTERVIEW (EDITED)
(microphone feedback)
Garcia: Testing, one, two. Is there a meter on there anywhere so you can
judge level? If it’s distorted, it’ll be awful. Testing, one two three… Okay,
let’s see, there’s the meter – no, I think there isn’t any meter.
(Tape recorder set up – voices in background, can’t make out.)
Lydon: We were talking in the car about up til you became the Warlocks.
Garcia: Yeah.
Lydon: Can you go back?
Garcia: Before that?
Lydon: No, no, continue on from there.
Garcia: Oh, sure, from the Warlocks. Oh, we were the Warlocks for, oh, six
months or so; and during that time we played Big Al’s Gashouse and those kind
of scenes, and bars, those Whiskey a Go Go kind of places, with fake IDs and
all that shit – Weir was only 17, and Pigpen was 19. We had a whole hustle, we
had to join the union and all that. The thing that was mostly going on in the music
business at that time – we weren’t into the business part, we were just
playing, and just trying to get gigs and keep going – and the business at that
time was that whole Hollywood scene, the whole beach trip, with weird booking
agents and all that kind of stuff. And we were getting to the end of the rope
in that scene. We were playing six nights a week, five sets a night in those
bars; and we did it to the point where it was just impossible; when we were
finally tripping out all the regular clientele, there were hardly any more
customers coming in. When they’d come in they’d leave clutching their ears, “Aaah
shit!” We grew into this whole malicious thing, man, of just laying it on as
thick as we could.
Lydon: What kind of stuff were you playing?
Garcia: Wild rock and roll, man, blues, stuff like that; but it was loud,
real loud; even for those days it was extremely loud, and for a bar it was
ridiculous – people had to scream at each other and all that. And that’s how we
really started getting louder and louder. And then at that time –
Lydon: The numbers you put the people through.
Garcia: Yeah, right, right – just isolate ‘em. And at that time Kesey was
doing his scenes up at his house in La Honda; on Saturdays they would all get
stoned, and coming on to all that shit. And we had friends that were living up
there, and they had friends that were living down with us, and it was back and
forth; until finally it was, “Why don’t we get together and have a party, you
guys bring your instruments and stuff and play?” And they’d set up all their
tapes and all that bullshit, and we would all go and get stoned. And it was
essentially formless; there was nothing really going on, we’d just go there and
make something of it. And then we just sort of dropped out completely of the
straight music thing; we didn’t take any more of those kind of gigs, we just
played the acid tests. The trip of the acid test was it was gonna be every
Saturday night, it was gonna be a different place every time, and it wasn’t
gonna have any plan. That was what the acid test was, in fact, and that’s the
way it was through its whole thing. It lasted about six months, that particular
trip, going various places, and during that time we did the Trips Festival,
acid test at Muir
Beach, and Fillmore
Auditorium. And also that was about the same time that they were having the
first Family Dog shows and also the Mime Troupe benefits, which were the first
time there were rock and roll scenes. The Trips Festival was the first time
when all the heads around were together in one place, everybody high, and
nobody paranoid; so that was the first time it opened out, in any sense. And
during that time we became the Grateful Dead; that became our name.
Lydon: How’d you get that name?
Garcia: Ohhh, looking for a name… We abandoned the Warlocks; we just didn’t
have a name for a while; we were trying ones out to see how they fit the ear. And
we were smoking DMT over at Phil’s house one day, something like that, and he
had a big Oxford
dictionary; opened it up, and there’s the Grateful Dead; it said the Grateful
Dead. That moment was one of those moments – everything else on the page went
blank and diffuse, it was the Grateful Dead in big black letters edged in gold,
blasting out – (laughter) – and it was such a stunning combination of words… And
I said, “Well how about the Grateful Dead?” No, some didn’t like it – Bill
Graham didn’t want to advertise us, he didn’t want to say the Grateful Dead, he
wanted to say the Warlocks. We’d already played a couple of gigs and he thought
we had a reputation as the Warlocks…
Lydon: It was already a thing then.
Garcia: Oh, sure, yeah, sure.
Lydon: That maybe you wouldn’t last any longer if you keep [the wrong]
name.
Garcia: Right, right. See, we didn’t give a fuck. (laughter) So they just
started calling us Grateful Dead as soon as we mentioned that it was a
possibility; that was the one, everybody just sort of gravitated toward it, and
so that got to be it.
Lydon: When did you move up to San
Francisco?
Garcia: Well, we started coming up to San Francisco
pretty heavy during the acid test scene, to the Fillmore, and started meeting San Francisco people. And
then we went to LA, the acid test went to LA, and we did two to three acid
tests down there; and then the bus went to Mexico with the Pranksters, and we
stayed in LA and just practiced and goofed and got really high a lot down in
this house down there; and then we came back three months later, back up to San
Francisco where everybody had known us from the Fillmore gigs and
Longshoreman’s, all the Trips Festivals and so forth; and we came back and
started playing gigs up here. We moved to Rancho Olompali, that was the first
place we had up here. And then we moved from there - we were only there for
about a month or so - we moved from there over to 710.
Lydon: Who owned that? Did McCoy own that?
Garcia: No, no, it was owned by just somebody, I don’t know who it was, whoever
owned it then. And they were thinking of putting up a historical monument, and
stuff like that, and we managed to get it - we got together enough rent for six
weeks there. And that was our first place, because we needed a place to
practice and all that.
Lydon: You were talking in the car before about Cassady and all that. Is it
possible to tell what the whole thing with Kesey was like?
Garcia: Ohhh…well, it depended on who you were, when you were there. It was
one thing to me, there were always a lot of things to me; but I know that there
are a lot of other people that it was a lot of other things for. It was open,
it was a tapestry, or a mandala or something like that; it was what you made of
it, essentially. The whole thing is, okay, so you take LSD and you suddenly are
aware of another plane, or several other planes, or whatever, and the question
is to extend that limit, to go as far as you can go in that particular area,
whatever it happens to be. And in the acid test it really meant do away with
old forms, do away with old ideas, try something new; and that’s the way it was.
Nobody was doing something - everybody was doing bits and pieces of something,
the result of which was something else. (Lydon: Oh, wow) When the thing was
really moving right, it was something you could sort of dig that it was getting
toward. It was some sort of ordered chaos. And the way the acid test would be
was it would start off, and there would be chaos, everybody would be high and
flashing and going through huge changes, and there’d be just insane chaos,
during which everything would be demolished and spilled and broken and changed
and affected; and after that another thing would happen. The acid test went all
night long til the next morning, and all these things would happen that would
smooth out within the chaos, so another form would happen; and it would all
have to do with just everybody being there, sort of being responsive. And there
were microphones all over; so if you were just anybody wandering around,
there’d be a microphone, you could talk into it, and there would be somebody
else somewhere in the building at the end of some wire, that would have a tape
recorder and a mixing board and earphones and be listening in on microphones;
and all of a sudden someone would turn it up because it seemed appropriate at
that moment.
Lydon: So your rap wouldn’t get heard unless someone decided –
Garcia: Well, the whole thing would be affected; so you might say something
into a microphone and you’d hear it come out maybe a minute later, in a tape
loop somewhere else, some other part of the place; and all of a sudden there
would be all this odd interchange going on, and neural connections and weird
sorts… It was magic, some far-out magic, and really a gas – (Lydon: Yeah!) The
thing about it was that it was people doing it all…like the light show. I
remember one time, when somebody was writing, Kesey would be writing messages
on a projector maybe, projected up onto a wall, and he would be writing what he
was seeing, or he would write what was going on; it would go up on the board
there, meanwhile somebody else would be making a comment about it on a
microphone somewhere, and it would be ringing out of some speaker somewhere,
and there would be all this stuff happening, exchanging back and forth. Oh, it
was really far out.
Lydon: And you’d just be playing?
Garcia: Yeah, we’d be playing. We’d be playing when we were playing; when
we weren’t playing we’d be doing other stuff. And we wouldn’t do sets -
sometimes we’d get up and just play for two hours or three hours; sometimes
we’d get up and play for ten minutes and all freak out and split; and sometimes
we would just do it however it would happen. I mean it wasn’t a job, you dig?
(Lydon: Yeah.) It wasn’t a job, we weren’t going to do a job. It was the acid
test, wherein anything is okay, you can do anything you want.
Girl: The thing about it is nobody paid any money and nobody ever had any
money.
Garcia: Right, right, there was no money, period.
Girl: And you did it all without money. (Garcia: Right.) That was the neat
part about it. Did it all without any […] of money coming in at all, except for
the hassle part […].
Lydon: Before it all happened, you had been aware that maybe your music
could get into that?
Garcia: Well, I’ve always been a musician, I’ve always loved to play. Where
is there a form which says that you can play all you want to, but you don’t
have to do any bullshit to go along with it? Before that, all there was was
coffeehouses and things like that – I mean open to me as a musician. And so,
there they maybe didn’t take too kindly to 45-minute guitar solos or something…
It’s a timeless experience, I think, the thing about music. And when we’re
playing together, the thing that we learned back there is that there is
something that happens after you’ve taken the step over the brink, when you’ve
gone past what you know. And then you’ve learned something new; that’s where
you learn something new, that’s the thing to see. With our music, we’ve been
pushing our music in that same way all along, just to get past where we are, if
you know what I mean.
Lydon: One thing that’s bothered me in the records is, it’s difficult to
find a sense of continuity – but it must be there.
Garcia: Well, it depends what sort of continuity you’re talking about. What
records are you talking about?
Lydon: Well, just from the first to second to third – the second seems more
connected to the third (Garcia: Right), and the first is a whole different
number.
Garcia: Well the first one, it was the first record we ever made. And at
the time, it was unreasonable for us to do what we did, which would have been
one LP, two sides, one song. They would never have gone for it; it was not the
thing to do with the form, right? So we made the first record of short songs
and stuff that we were doing, but they were our little warm-up numbers. They
were tunes, songs; and the thing we do isn’t really that, quite. We weave songs
in and out, but they aren’t really - it’s not just… So anyway, the first record
was songs, and that was because we were making a record, right? Viola Lee Blues
was revolutionary for being ten minutes long, twelve minutes long – now, big deal. And then, so when we came up to do the second record, we
thought, this time let’s do an LP record; let’s not make a record that’s gonna
sell or that somebody in the record company is gonna like. And we had to live
with the first record for a year and we grew to hate it. And so the second
record, we kicked out the producer and got thrown out of a lot of studios for
being too weird and all that shit; and finally when we settled down to do it
ourselves, we were in effect learning how to make a record; we were learning
about recording techniques and all that. So we assembled the thing that we were
doing. We had a vision of sorts, to do one unified trip; to do an LP record, in
other words. And the Anthem of the Sun is that, but it’s still too far for the
man on the street to dig it. It’s a heads record, really – seems to be; I mean
it has never been popular particularly, just only with our fans, with people
who work at listening. (Lydon: Yeah.) People who work at listening dig that
record. Well, the new record now, I’m in a different place than I was the last
time; and this time, the songs, the words are Bob’s, but the melodies and all
that, the way those songs grew and the way they happened was really right. Some
of those songs on that album we wrote in the studio, we just went in and did it…
Lydon (talking over him): What particular song?
Garcia: Rosemary, we did in the studio – we didn’t even have any such song.
We just – in 15 minutes we had that song down, it was just there.
Lydon: Wow. Did you fuck around with it after that?
Garcia: No, that’s the way we did it, that’s the way it came.
Lydon: The melodic thing that’s on Anthem of the Sun is still going in the
new record.
Garcia: Right, right, well the feeling –
Lydon: That’s a nice melody in that, “he has to die” –
Garcia: Yeah, right, right.
Lydon: Is that yours?
Garcia: Yes, that’s right, one of my melodies.
Lydon: [That’s a fine song…]
Garcia: Well you see, the place that I was trying to get at with that,
that’s one of those things that just emerged. I was just sitting around playing
the guitar and all of a sudden bam, there it is; and it says something to you,
just the air - like certain airs say certain things to you, and that says a certain
thing and there it was. And on the new record, all those songs are from that
place, they’re all – I don’t know how to explain it; they’re all true – I can’t
think of any other way to explain it. But they came out effortlessly, they
weren’t worked on particularly, in just the conception of them.
Lydon: Your live show is so different though – in your live show…
Garcia (talking over him): Yeah well, see now – in the next month or so, we’re
releasing the next album. Really, the one that’s out now, the new one, that one
there, is one aspect of the two records that we’re putting out in the space of
a couple of months. The next one is a double live album which is one of our
live sets, it’s from the Carousel and from the Avalon – and it’s just us live –
Lydon: […]
Garcia: Right, two records, right.
Lydon: Wow. Did you jump from – is each one a thing, is each side a thing –
Garcia: Each side is a thing, and they’re also a thing all together.
Lydon: Right. Did you fuck around with that?
Garcia: No, not at all; we just did it directly the way it happened, just
laid it out; and it’s the truest representation of us live, to date. It’s us
live, on good nights, on the nights when the spirit was there.
Lydon: Was it that Sunday night at the Avalon?
Garcia: Yeah.
Lydon: Was that the Lovelight?
Garcia: Yeah, right.
Lydon: Oh, that was really too much.
Garcia: Right.
Lydon: Everyone get dancing.
Garcia: Right, oh, you oughta hear it – you hear everybody dance… It’s
really that real thing… When we go to do a live recording thing, it’s such a
number, just hassling all the equipment and getting it all set up and all, and
everybody’s stoned; it’s a wonder that it gets done. And what usually happens
when we get a really good night, when everybody gets really high, the recording
is blown, we didn’t get the recording. But this time it was just fortuitous, it
just worked out.
Lydon: How did you work in the live bit on the second record?
Garcia: Ohh – a variety of ways, man, we did all sorts of things. Frequently
we would take two or three live performances of the same song, and take maybe
12 bars - for example in “That’s It for the Other One,” just after the drum
part; there’s a little drum part and then it comes in. And what’s happening
there is it’s four different live versions of us doing the same song,
simultaneously happening, and then kind of one fading out and another one fading
in; we’re sort of flipping ‘em like a deck of cards. (Lydon: Oh, wow.) So
there’s that – that’s why the time is so weird, and it tumbles in those weird
ways. We did a lot of things like that; we sculpted, we used the live stuff as
source material; and so Anthem of the Sun is really a tape composition as much
as anything else, as much as a musical composition. And then the way we mixed
it is, we took each side and performed the mix; we’d run through the tape, we’d
be there over the 8-track, Phil and I, and we would just play the tape, play
the board –
Lydon: And getting together on it, so each one of you was doing different
things – and both hearing…
Garcia (talking over him): Right, right, precisely; and we did it enough so
we knew all the nuance and knew what was happening and knew kind of what we
were after; and then we’d get really stoned and we’d mix it for the
hallucinations. (Lydon: Oh, wow.) For what you see, for the place it takes you.
And so that’s the same on the new record too – we’ve learned to do that, to mix
for the little world.
Lydon: Like when you play live, it’s –
Garcia: You have to do it a different way, because it’s happening right
now. When you’re doing a record, it’s like doing a painting - you’re gonna work
on it and nobody’s gonna see you while you’re working on it, so your working on
it is not the thing; the finished thing is the thing; so you have all that as a
consideration. So it’s a low energy trip; we record in the wintertime. And then
playing is something that’s happening now; it’s an expression of the now, you
might say, because anybody who’s there when you’re playing is affecting the
music. They can change the music by glancing at you or by dancing or by doing
anything… But a record is closed, it’s finished, it’s done, it becomes
something else; it’s an other thing.
Lydon: I was thinking about the problem with communication in there – when
you just play live, and it’s right there – and everyone senses a very generous
invitation to come on in, everybody, [we just love to play] (Garcia: Right.) On
the record, by going a step or many steps further down, the communication thing
isn’t as open.
Garcia: No it’s not, because the medium doesn’t allow it. See, if you
include, for example, on a record, a question – let’s say there’s a question,
“Who are you?” You put it on a record and put the record on, and this question
will come out at you, “Who are you?” But you don’t have anybody to tell it to
except a record, and you can’t… So a record doesn’t communicate that way, it
doesn’t take anything in; it’s just there, right?
Lydon: It puts you – you have to get onto the [board] –
Garcia: Right, it puts you into a place, is what it’ll do. Because of the
nature of sound, it’ll put you into a place, and so that’s another sort of
language, you see. And communication is implicit in the whole act of playing
music - it’s there on one level or another. Bob’s thing is that, his stuff
communicates also, on any level that you care for it to communicate to you - it
depends also how you listen to it.
Lydon: Can you describe like a verbal description of some of the places, or
one of the places, or the place, on one of the songs on one of the records […]
– I mean can you remember some – verbally.
Garcia: Oh, sure, sure – Dupree is a good one, it’s a very specific sort of
place. Phil sees that place, or that
story as being told by the fool, the tarot card fool, that guy, and that place
he is, where he’s stepping off a cliff. (Lydon: […]) Right, that whole thing;
and it’s also the carnival, the midway; there’s calliope kind of going on back
there, and it’s that famous story place, where that kind of mythic trip is
going on. That’s what I hear in it, that’s what I hear in that melody, and
that’s what the words are talking about; the words are running down that story.
It’s a story, but it’s a very particular one.
Lydon: What do you see the story as?
Garcia: Well, just as the guy who goes and robs the store, the guy who goes
and he’s gonna get the diamond for his honey, and the judge and all that, the
famous confrontations. It’s just another way of looking at that thing, and
bringing a little of the sideshow into it… The thing that I say about it is just
gonna be the place it puts me - but the point is that, if that is going on in
the act of creation, if you’re thinking, “this is gonna be a place, it’s gonna
be a place to me,” but you can’t know whether somebody else is gonna go to that
same place. But you can at least say that it’s valid, it’s a valid place for me
- I experience it in a valid way, a real way. I put on the earphones and there
it is, there it’s going on, they’re going through their changes there. And
somebody else will hear it different, but even so, that’s where it is. I mean,
if you can see yourself in something that’s put in front of you, then it works
– it’s like objective art, if it’s really righteous.
Lydon: It sounds like Peter Townsend’s blind dumb and deaf boy […] living
in a place of music. (Garcia: Yeah.) And music losing its quality of being […],
but being just a […] of some kind.
Garcia: Well that’s the thing - music is an aspect of sound, which is an
aspect of your perception of what’s going on; it’s the door out of yourself… You
hear all the shit that’s going on, little sounds here and there, and they’re
all in places, and you hear ‘em because you have two ears - you hear ‘em,
they’re a place, there’s a thing going on. So if you snap your fingers over
here, you can identify it as being over there; do it over there, you can
identify it there, cause you have two ears. And when you have two sources of
sound, stereo, you’re covering what hearing is, and that’s effectively painting
a picture in your head. (Lydon: Yeah, right.) But the nature of the picture is
up to whose head it is you’re painting in, so anybody who listens to a record
sees a different picture.
Lydon: Do you consider yourself playing rock and roll?
Garcia: It’s a label, it’s just a label - it’s like, do I consider myself
polite? It’s just a label, but no matter what I consider it, it still is what
it is…you still hear it... I don’t consider it anything, I just consider it to
be what I do. It’s just music, whatever that is, and I don’t think of it in
terms of being rock and roll or an idiom – I mean, rock and roll, man, is like
the ultimate non-descriptive label.
Lydon: Oh wow, I think… To me as a person, I think rock and roll isn’t a
label, it’s a whole thing…
Garcia: Well what’s the thing, tell me about it.
Lydon: Wow, I think of it as a whole energy thing, a whole matrix kind of
thing, like “Hail hail rock and roll, deliver us from the days of old.”
Garcia: Oh, right, right. Oh yeah, in that sense, yeah, we’re playing rock
and roll…we’re still playing –
?? (interrupting): Deliver us from the days of Elvis!
Garcia: Right! (pause) But yeah, I can dig that place – I don’t know
whether it’s… Everybody in the band has
got their own idea about what we’re doing, in terms of labeling it. Shit, I
don’t know – I don’t find it convenient to think about it one way or another. For
me it really comes out in the experience of doing it – playing music, courting
the muse. It’s my work, I think of it as my work – although my work might very
well be rock and roll.
Lydon: What about the whole communication of good times, getting other
people to break through – the whole impact of the Dead live?
Garcia: It’s something there for you to do. And not everybody sees us that
way – in San Francisco
everybody does, because everybody’s seen us so many times, everybody knows what
it is we’re doing; people come mostly to get a chance to get loose. But in the
rest of the country, we play concerts and people sit very politely and do all
that shit. And a lot of times, some kid gets up to dance and six cops are on
him… It’s different in the rest of America. It’s only really loose
around here, the rest of America’s
pretty weird still. But even so –
Lydon (interrupting): […] they don’t have an idea of the place that –
Garcia: They don’t have a model - they haven’t had a model. And when we go
there, the most effective thing is – we go into a town, there’ll be a small
amount of people who know us, because they’ve been out on the coast or one
thing or another, and they’ll come, and they’ll kind of be the little microcosm
to sort of instruct everybody else on what to do. But even so, man, it’s a
form; it’s really gotten to be rigid. It’s stuck, it’s stuck; and the whole
thing of playing in a hall, having a light show, band, and the orientation is
you sit down and you watch, and the lights are behind the band so that you can
see the band and the lights, and really there’s nothing happening mostly - it’s
mostly watching television, large loud television. And that’s not really what
we’re doing. So what we’re doing at this point in time is we’re trying to find
a way to do another form, to seek another form or other forms in which you can
play music so it doesn’t have to be so rigid, one way or another. This form is
one that only started three or four years ago, but it started as a
misapprehension of the thing that was going on at the time. You see, Graham was
at the Trips Festival, he saw the things going on, and he saw a light show and
band, which were the simplest and easiest things to identify, right - because
it’s obvious it’s a band – what do they got, instruments up there and drums and
amplifiers, and here’s these lights on the screen - why, that’s a light show. So,
you take a light show and a band and that’s a formula, and that formula
represents the form which has been going on now for three or four years, and
it’s stuck! It’s stuck, it’s not going anywhere – it hasn’t blown any new
minds. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. But really, the thing that was
happening back then in the Trips Festival was not just a rock and roll band,
and not just a light show, but a whole other thing. But the point was that if
you were bustling around, taking tickets and hustling to get a production on,
or to put a little order into the chaos, you didn’t observe the stuff that was
going on. It’s a sensitive trip, really, the way it was then; it’s unfortunate
that all that’s been lost. The nicest thing about that was the formlessness,
because it was an opportunity for something new to happen with a large number
of people – for them to be able to get together in one place, a lot of ‘em,
helplessly stoned, and find yourself in a room full of thousands of people,
none of whom you were afraid of. It was really far out, it’s a heavy thing –
and that was the thing that really happened then; that was the start of the
large scenes, people getting together and feeling good about it; which
ultimately led to the be-ins and so forth, and scenes that are still going on,
a good night at Winterland and all that.
Lydon: Yeah. You’ve been – I always kind of think the Dead have been
working very consciously to try to keep that thing going.
Garcia: Well, we’ve been just consciously going, trying to keep our thing going
– whatever it is. You can only lend so much of your energy to something that’s
going on, and if nobody picks up on it, it’s not righteous. We just try and do
what we can do as well as we can do it, and stay as high as we can get. On the
level of, when we go onto the stage to play music, it’s an important thing,
it’s an important moment, and that’s the way we enter into it, because that’s
the realest… If you take the long view – say for example, the long view has
been one of our [problems], we’ve taken the long view: okay, what are we trying
to do, we’re trying to make it so things are a little cooler, so people can get
along a little, people can have a little more fun, whatever, all those things
that are missing, seem to be missing. But that view doesn’t aid you when it
comes down to the moment of playing – the thing that aids you when it comes to
the moment of playing is thinking your music, thinking of who you’re playing
with and the music that you’re about to make, and your hands, how well are they
working, how much time you’ve put in practicing and all that. It’s a real yoga
thing - it’s something that you really do do when you’re doing it, and the
thought comes way later, the intellectualization of it, where you say ‘this is
what it was’ or ‘that’s what it was;’ cause it’s not really like that. And the
thing that we’re following around is something that’s no farther away than the
end of your nose – we’re just close behind our noses, following along… The
thing about the whys and whats of it, probing it and stuff like that, man,
there’s just nothing to say ultimately about it, except that we do it, and it
seems to work the way it works - and that we don’t do it by ourselves. It’s not
us generating an enormous amount of energy that we can do at any time; it’s us
going to a place and being aware of the people there, and the people being
aware of us, and us feeding back and forth. It’s an interactive thing, and
that’s the thing, that’s the experience, really; the rest of it is talk.
Lydon: Yeah. (laughter)
Garcia: It’s really a difficult thing to talk about. I mean, I’m in this
music so long that, for one thing, my only thing about music is way back… I’ve
spent the last ten years of my life in music, man, and I’m covered with it. I
can’t really talk about it; it’s all over, all around. It’s really hard to
exteriorize it.
Lydon: How does - handling the business of it all, and [working that into
the framework], is that a constant […]?
Garcia: Yeah, it is - with everything, I’m sure, just because – well, for
us, we take a huge amount of equipment and four equipment guys, plus the band,
plus your road manager, and that adds up to quite a few people; and our
operating overhead is real high, just to move our stuff and just to get it
there and just to play. So on the practical level, we don’t really make any
money; we just don’t make any money at all. But what else does money do? The
only thing it does is further the trip. And also, the whole business thing is,
who wants to take care of business? In our whole scene, everybody in the
Grateful Dead has been for the last three years nothing but heads, not a
straight soul in the whole thing - certainly nobody who’s capable of taking
care of business. So our business scene has always been a calamity, man - it’s
not even a shock to hear that you’re $60,000 in debt. “Huh, $60,000 in fucking
debt.” But it’s all going on in the paper universe, where it doesn’t – that’s
another thing: if you want to go along with it and believe it and everything,
there it is, as real as can be. You can go and fight with it and hassle with it
and hassle with bankers and pay bills and do all that, or you can just let it
go; and what we did is let it go. And so here it is, $60,000 in debt. And our
whole manager thing is, Mickey’s father is now doing it; he’s fronting our
whole manager thing; he’s taking charge. We’ve given him the power to do what
he wants to do. His whole trip is to straighten it all out, and make it so that
all is feasible, and also to help us with ideas for new forms and so forth. So
right now, things are looking good, but the whole thing about money is still
something weird. It’s not really what we’re doing; we’re obviously not out to
make money because we aren’t even working at it. We’re out to keep ourselves
happy with what we’re doing, to do what we’re doing and make it so that we dig
it, so it isn’t work. So rather than work, go out for 60 days on the road doing
a gig every other night, jumping all over the place like those guys do, and
then coming back and dying, it’s like –
Lydon: Why do you think they do it?
Garcia: Managers don’t understand about pace, about musicians and pace… The
business world as a whole doesn’t understand what it is to be someone who does
something, and that everybody has their own pace at which you do stuff, and
that you can’t continually put out without losing it, if you’re a musician. If
I had to play 60 days in a row, gigs every night, and didn’t have a chance to
practice or to listen to new music or to get some new ideas, I’d hate what I
was doing by the end of that time. It would make me crazy, it really would; and
it’s because I’m aware of the pace that I have [behind learning things].
Lydon: A lot of other bands, for one reason or other, accept the pace, do
do that trip.
Garcia: Maybe it’s because of the bread, maybe because they dig it – some
people dig the high energy thing.
Lydon: Do you think Janis does?
Garcia: Probably… I don’t know, I can’t speak for anybody else, but… Music
is something I expect to be doing as long as I am doing anything… I see it in
waves – there’s downhill slumps, and uphill rises, and plateaus, and all sorts
of levels, all of which you go to in their turn; and it represents the large
picture of what it is like to be going through your life creating stuff.
Lydon: How do you feel about the fact that you haven’t become super big
time, popular, […]?
Garcia: I’m glad. (laughs) I’m glad. It’s a big hassle to be popular, just
because of the attention – and all that stuff is weird, the whole thing that
there’s a thing set up that says that because you play music, you’re better
than somebody else, or it’s fashionable. All those levels of consideration, the
hierarchy, all that stuff is bullshit. But people continue to buy that theory,
and continue to accept musicians as a hierarchy; and really, musicians are just
people, just doing people stuff. So there I am in St. Louis, Missouri or
something like that, and some cat is talking to me about rock and roll, and
about something he read in a magazine, something like that. I don’t know what
the fuck he means – and it makes it so that it’s more of a burden for you to be
able to communicate with anybody. It’s just there’s a whole lot of shit you
gotta cut through, because they think you’re somebody you’re not.
Lydon: What about – you were saying earlier that one time you wanted to be
a rock and roll star.
Garcia: That happened when I was 15. I mean that’s when I started playing,
when I was 15. And that was the thing that attracted me to it; I loved the sound
of the guitar, and all that shit was really far out. But the reality of playing
the guitar and getting into music and all that - all of a sudden you’re
different, you’re doing something different, you’re not after that initial
thing, or that’s not where you are anymore. You get older, go through your
changes, and pretty soon music is what you do, and you know about it – you’ve
changed your energy from the one level to the other level. And the rock and
roll star thing is just a drag; it never helped anybody, it never made anybody
a better musician (Lydon: Right, right), I don’t think – with the possible
exception of the Beatles, maybe, who if they hadn’t been encouraged by success
may not have continued to create music which has been a gas.
Lydon: Or someone like Jagger, who plays the role like an instrument, plays
the whole –
Garcia: Right, well in that case, that’s the matter of dealing with that in
a certain way; that’s a way to deal with it. But I personally don’t wanna
devote my energy to playing a role; I would rather devote my energy to music,
and be able to deal with people on some simple human level. I don’t wanna be… When
you get that kind of stuff, distant cousins and stuff hitting on you – somebody
comes up and says, “Listen, I’m your cousin 17 times removed and my family knew
yours back when.” All of a sudden here you are, you’re somebody; whereas
without that title you’re just another anybody; and it’s much easier and cooler
to be anybody than it is to be somebody. (Lydon: Yeah, right.) Somebody’s just
a big drag, I mean, it’s just more shit you have to do, which makes it harder
for you to do the thing you’re trying to do.
Lydon: Yeah. One thing – in the beginning of that Solomon Burke record
‘Everybody Needs Somebody To Love,’ “If everybody listened to my song tonight,
I believe it would save the whole world.’ (Garcia: Right.) Do you think that
way? It seems – I’ve thought that you do […] like that, […]. [you’d be on his
trip kind of thing] (Garcia: Right.) So how do you connect the music thing with
making people feel good, the social thing, [so that the…]
Garcia: I don’t connect it, period. I realize that there is a connection,
and I can dig it, but like I say, being conscious of that as a fact is nothing
– you can’t translate that idea into music. You can’t say, “this is this idea,
I can concretely translate it into music and make it come out thus,” see. That
you cannot do; music doesn’t say those kind of things.
Lydon: A lot of musicians have tricks, or one thing or another, like with
BB King, he can just sort of – he knows how to do it. (Garcia: Right.) During
the course of the first song he’ll hit a certain note that does translate the
idea –
Garcia (interrupting): Right, exactly. Well, that’s the thing, is finding
those things – I think that the moments that translate the idea originally are
pure, and that once you learn them consciously, they then become a device; and
once it’s a device, it’s frozen – for me, that is, I’m talking about me. So, I
know the trick that you do to get everybody up and dancing, the trick that you
do to get a standing ovation. We’ve learned those things as a group, but you
can’t rely on ‘em because they’re lies once you know ‘em. When you stumble into
‘em and everybody’s up, it’s the truth. When you know how to do it, man, it’s
just like something you can do, it’s an exercise; and it’s an exercise of will,
which is a weird thing. Instead, if you have all that as part of what you know
about what you’re doing, that’s a consideration of musicians now is to know all
those things - that this thing will make
it really exciting, and this other thing will make it another way. And they’re
only there to use if it’s true and right and boss to use ‘em, and that’s only
if it’s going in such a way so that that’s what happens. I mean, I don’t know
if you can understand any of that – but those moments are really precious to
me, man; they really are far out, when the place becomes one thing –
everything, everybody in there is one thing, and it’s all really going down
beautifully. It’s nothing that you want to resort to as a trick; it’s something
heavier, in my opinion.
Lydon: [It’s still always…] further.
Garcia: Yeah, further, man, I mean, I don’t see any sense in doing the same
thing over and over again, no matter what it is, no matter how boss it is. To
me, being alive means to continue to change, to continue to learn and continue
to grow and to do all that, and to not be where I was last week or two months
ago or a year ago or any of that; because…it’s just not interesting to me. And
I think that that’s the way – I think anybody who’s into music, or who’s a
musician, and is in the process of teaching themselves about music and how to
play, which as far as I can see, is a process that lasts as long as you’re
alive – that’s the thing you’re doing… I can’t – again, this is a difficult
thing to talk about.
Lydon: Did you read in Rolling Stone a long time ago the whole Mike
Bloomfield […] thing?
Garcia: No I didn’t…
Lydon: Oh. They really put you down – I think Bloomfield particularly.
Garcia: Oh, I didn’t read it, no, what did he say?
Lydon: Well, just said it was shit.
Garcia: Well he’s entitled to his opinions.
Lydon: […think that he could know better.]
Garcia: Who knows, man – I mean, it might very well be that that interview
might have been after he might have seen us on a night when it was shit, or
depending what he was referring to. Maybe he…I don’t know. I don’t know where
Mike’s head is at, really. I know that he feels very strongly about purity, a
certain kind of purity it seems, because the things – not necessarily his
playing, but when he does arrangements and production and stuff like that, he
gets it so it’s right, for what he’s doing, I mean really righteous; and it
might just be that what we do violates his aesthetic. I don’t know, I can’t
really tell; you can’t know about things like that. But the thing about
interviews and the thing about music is that you can say anything you want,
man; it’s cool. It’s cool because the experience is such that you can like it
or not like it or go out of your mind or leave in a rage or any fucking thing,
I mean, it’s cool to do it – music is something you can hang any fucking thing
on and it’s okay. (Lydon: Yeah.) […] Rolling Stone now, because of music,
Rolling Stone has something to talk about – half the battle of life in this
world is something to do, something to just pass the time away, man, just
something to do. And talking about stuff is doing something. (Lydon: Yeah.) So
providing an excuse for talking, man, is okay. It just means that somebody’s
gonna have something to talk about; it’s all right. And so if you’re gonna put
stuff out like a record or something like that, put something out that anybody
can say anything about, so that it leaves a big open door for stuff to talk
about instead of a little narrow door; or lots of things to talk about instead
of one thing to talk about; whatever.
Lydon: Do you recall saying before about starting out in blues and country,
you never got one […] thing down, like blues, the way Mike Bloomfield’s done
blues?
Garcia: No, only – yeah, bluegrass music I got down. Bluegrass
music and traditional music, those were the things that I was into heavy enough
to be able to play them pure and righteously. When I was playing five-string
banjo, I went the whole way with it; I went all the way through the body of
music that existed as an example of it, and learned everything that I could
from it, and played with the guys that I could play with, and that’s how I
began to understand what an idiom was, what style was, and what kinds of music…
Yeah, I’ve done that; in fact –
Lydon: How could you leave it?
Garcia: Because there was nobody to play with, and because there was no
place to play – not on the west coast.
Lydon: Did you ever […] going to Virginia
or Nashville?
Garcia: I went to all those places.
Lydon: You did?
Garcia: Sure.
Lydon: Just on your own?
Garcia: Yeah.
Lydon: Did you find stuff to do?
Garcia: Oh, I recorded bluegrass shows and stuff like that, me and a friend
of mine, Sandy Rothman, who went on to play guitar with Bill Monroe, who’s the
guy who invented bluegrass music. And I got to know a lot of musicians and
played with a lot of people; and I did it to my satisfaction.
Lydon: You had a personal odyssey kind of […].
Garcia: Yeah, yeah.
Lydon: How long’d you do it for?
Garcia: Oh, three months, four months, something like that. I mean actually
travelling in the south and being… [mumbles]
Lydon: Wow. And then you came [from doing] that back into the folk stuff?
Garcia: No, no, that was out toward – I mean, all these things are
happening more or less simultaneously, overlapping. I started rock and roll,
went to acoustic guitar, from acoustic guitar into folk music – by folk music I
mean traditional music, which in this country is country music, and old-time
country music from the twenties and like that – and that’s where I got into the
guitar, fingerstyling the guitar, and from there into the banjo, old-style
banjo playing, and then into Scruggs-style bluegrass music… You can’t live in
the United States
and not hear all kinds of music - you hear all kinds of music as you’re just going
through your changes. You have a car radio, you hear all kinds of music; so
none of it escapes you. So while I was into one kind of music, I was hearing
all other kinds of music, and that was all having an effect on me… It’s all
music, is what it boils down to; there’s all kinds of music, all kinds –
there’s people on the street corners making music all over – weird old fiddlers
in bus depots and shit like that, people like that all over, so music is
everywhere; just people playing, making music of some kind or another, people
on the back porch, people in church singing, that’s a big thing, music going on
all around; and it’s all going on. That’s why…all those idioms and styles and
different worlds of music are all melting away, man, because nobody is isolated
from all the different kinds of music there are; everybody’s hearing it all
now. So the guys in the Band who undoubtedly learned how to play and how to
approach their instruments from rock and roll records and country music records
and Ray Charles and the blues and stuff like that, do their songs like the way
Aretha Franklin, a gospel singer from that tradition, does one of their songs;
and Bob Dylan’s in Nashville with Johnny Cash…they’re really mixing it up, and
music is getting that way.
Lydon: Yeah. Is this the first record you used a Moog on?
Garcia: Yeah, right. The first time I’ve ever used one.
Lydon: How do you think the accessibility of electronic music will come
about?
Garcia: Oh, the accessibility of electronic music is a fact. They’ve been
accessing electronic music for some time now – and popular, man, I’m talking
about popular; I’m talking about, let’s say underground radio, FM. Every city
in the United States has some kind of underground FM radio, at least one, and a
lot of them have two and three; so that’s something that’s happened in the last
couple of years. All those stations play at least somebody who does some amount
of electronic stuff – the Beatles on their last album had that thing,
Revolution No. 9 – it’s electronic! (Lydon: Yeah, right.) People are hearing
that. They aren’t hearing the heaviest of it, they aren’t hearing all of it,
and maybe the heaviest of it is a trifle too heavy, but it’s out…it hasn’t been
ignored. And you can hear bits and snatches of it on the top 40 radio – the
Monkees, everybody. Those things are the tools now for everybody; for every musician
has all of music historically to choose from, because it’s all here right now
in the form of records. Go into a record store, man, you can pick a century;
and it’s all there, you can hear it; you don’t have to hassle with musty old
documents and funky old scores and shit like that, you can hear it. (Laughter.)
And that’s the thing, what you can hear, you hear, it goes into your brain and
it’s in there, man, the stuff that you hear is – you know how a melody gets in
your head, or some song that you heard once or twice on the radio, and there it
is, and it’s locked in your brain, [until] you retain it, you catch it, you get
it, and it happens to […] part of yourself - that’s how well your
hearing transmits shit.
Lydon: When I first met you it was during the summer of ’67, and I spent
the night – I guess I knew Danny, and I talked to Danny […] – a very ambivalent
thing about the Haight-Ashbury – wanted to say “why don’t you keep it going
somehow,” but not sure it could ever get that going again there… (Garcia:
Right.) I’d really appreciate it if you could sort of talk about the changes in
Haight-Ashbury, how you saw that, and how you
saw the Dead [in relation] to it, and your eventually leaving, and the
Carousel…
Garcia: Well, originally when we were there, we were just there; we were
just other people on the street and around. And that’s the way it was with
everybody, the guys that were doing the posters, all the other musicians; we
were just freaks, just like always, and there was no distinctions made. Then,
behind all the publicity in Time magazine and all that shit, the tourist hordes
started coming, and the out of town kids and all that kind of stuff, and pretty
soon there was a big traffic problem on the street, so the people who were on the
street who wanted more freedom on the street started hassling the tourists, and
the cops started hassling the people on the street, and the tourists were
hassling the cops, and back and forth; and then there were confrontations and
hassles and guys were putting out firebrand bullshit. And all of a sudden it
was just a political trip; all of a sudden there was cops and National Guard
and all that bullshit – who needs it? I mean, who wants to live in that? Where you’re
living – you might want to go there to hassle, but you don’t want to live in it
particularly; at least I don’t, and none of us did. So we just split, because it’s
not a righteous fight; it’s just some bullshit, it’s just another kind of
something to do, but it’s the kind of something to do that I don’t care to do,
and I used to – I did all the fighting I wanted to do when I was a kid. And I
didn’t dig it then either; I mean, it was never a gas, it was never a good
trip. And it’s never a good trip to find yourself surrounded by National Guard
cats with guns and all that shit, man, and police all over the place and cats
throwing bottles. And all that shit was coming down real heavy – it was mostly
happening on the cops on one hand who didn’t really live there, didn’t have too
much to do with it, the tax squad and stuff like that, and the people from out
of town who didn’t live there, so didn’t have to pick up broken glass or didn’t
have to keep the kids out of it, or any of that. I mean, there was a lot going
on. So shit, we just split.
Lydon: Did you […] as long as you could…
Garcia: Oh yeah, yeah, we stayed there as long as we could, and we did what
we could; but it got to be where any kind of thing happening was some kind of
hassle, some kind of meeting or political kind of thing, that just wasn’t
[called for], it wasn’t necessary; it was crazy. We would go down and play on
the street, and we’d go down and play in the park, just to get everybody off
the streets, and the tourists – if the tourists don’t have anything to look at,
they go home, man. There was a lot of easy ways to solve all those problems, I
think, just by being cool… And so you can avoid the whole problem of having to
hassle somebody, and having to be hassled yourself, and maybe eventually ending
up in the joint; which is where all that shit inevitably leads.
Lydon: Did you feel at least a sense of, to some extent, political
responsibility, a sense of community that was endangered – did you feel a
community sense then, that eventually became impossible?
Garcia: Well, most of the people who were our friends, most of our friends,
were splitting anyway, just getting out of town and everything. The community
is larger than the Haight-Ashbury - the community that is concerned with
itself, and concerned with each part of itself, is way bigger than the Haight-Ashbury; it’s bigger than the Be-In, bigger than
any of those scenes. There’s a lot of people; and most of the people are cool
enough to be able to find a way that’s groovy for them to live. They don’t need
to be told or pointed the way or any of that bullshit; and anybody who does
that is just calling attention to themselves and their own trip, which is just
another trip, as far as anybody’s concerned. Everybody’s trip is as good as
everybody else’s. So some cat comes up and tells you, “Let’s get the heat out
of the Haight-Ashbury.” It’s like, “Go ahead, man. (laughs) I’d rather leave
myself. You guys can have the Haight-Ashbury.”
Because now, the result is the Haight-Ashbury is just another neighborhood -
but heads are everywhere, man, all over San Francisco,
all over Marin County, and all over the peninsula, the
east bay, everywhere. And then the hassles are, of course, big – in Berkeley there’s that hassle going on; there was the
hassle at San Francisco
State; and anybody who
wants to hassle can find something to hassle about; and they can be righteous
or however you want to go into it. To me, the way it seems is that anything
you’re doing is okay as long as it’s not making you uptight, or endangering
you…unless that’s what you wanna do; and why put yourself in a position of
being about to go to jail. Jail’s a terrible place, man. There’s nothing much
but bummers to be learned in jail. (Lydon: Yeah, right.) And all that… If you
think you have something that’s really important, that really merits leading
people, using whatever you are to lead people, that’s cool too, I guess; but
that’s certainly not my trip. And there was – see, the groovy thing about the Haight-Ashbury and about that whole thing was, there was
something spontaneous happening there. It didn’t have any leaders, man, it
didn’t have any spokesmen; whoever you stopped and
talked to was the spokesman; and any spokesman was as righteous as any other
spokesman. And there was none of that stuff going on, no hierarchies, no
bullshit; and all those kind of things came later, and they’re still… Around
here it’s cooler than it is anyplace else, cause mostly nobody […] on you, too
fake - but the rest of the country is still operating on that celebrities and autographs
and all that – a lot of that’s still going on.
Lydon: Right, right – do you get the celebrity rock and roll band […]
Garcia (talking over him): Yeah – we don’t get it too heavy… We don’t – we
discourage it; and mostly any appearance by us is such a left-handed event that...
(laughs)
Lydon: [inaudible] Do you have to […] soon?
Garcia: Pretty soon, yeah, I got a meeting at –