Top 100 Quotes About Jerry Garcia
#1. There is no one who has ever created music with the combination of intelligence, intuition, depth, creativity, and humor that Jerry Garcia has. His work and life will continue to be a limitless source of inspiration for all of us.
Bruce Hornsby
#2. I love playing the Fillmore. I love the walk from the hotel and climbing up those old, iron stairs that lead to the stage. I imagine Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors and all those other great bands climbing those same stairs.
Patti Smith
#3. The jam stuff doesn't appeal to me in general. My newfound love for the Dead came from Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia's songwriting, not the elaborate guitar solos. I'm a song person. Once it starts to break out of that structure and become loopy, it's uninteresting to me.
Colin Meloy
#4. You know what I hate about rock? I hate tie-dyed tee shirts. I wouldn't wear a tie-dyed tee shirt unless it was dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Jerry Garcia.
Kurt Cobain
#5. The loss of Jerry Garcia feels like the end of an era in the same way it felt when Elvis died and John Lennon was killed.
Lyle Lovett
#6. Jerry Garcia was one of the original American icons. He played naturally and beautifully.
Ornette Coleman
#7. I love the Dead. As far as Jerry Garcia, Jerry Garcia could walk on water. He could do anything any man could ever do. He's a prince.
Duane Allman
#8. Harry Patch didn't get enough recognition. Jerry Garcia got too much.
Trevor Dunn
#9. 'Entertainment Tonight' would send me out to do interviews with musicians like Sting and Coldplay, and I was able to watch how they plan their shows. The late Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead always had a game plan, but he also was flexible if he had to change something at the last minute.
John Tesh
#10. When you strip it all away, Jerry Garcia
(former Grateful Dead guitarist) destroyed his life on
drugs. And yet hes being honored, like some godlike
figure. Our priorities are out of whack, folks.
Rush Limbaugh
#11. Jerry Garcia used to take his paints on the road. I don't do that. Either I'm a singer or a painter. I'm not good at multi-tasking.
Grace Slick
#12. There are no Jerry Garcias coming down the pike, anymore than there is a Jimi Hendrix or Bob Marley. They are all at the same level - the highest level that you strive to get to as a musician. Me and my friends - we'll all be long dead, people will still be trying to dig into what Jerry Garcia did.
Trey Anastasio
#13. Swinging at daisies is like playing electric guitar with a tennis racket: if it were that easy, we could all be Jerry Garcia. The ball changes everything.
Michael Bamberger
#14. There is not a sentence in the world that could respectfully do justice to the life and music of Jerry Garcia.
Branford Marsalis
#15. You know, it's cigarettes that killed Jerry Garcia. Everyone thinks it's heroin, but it wasn't. It was cigarettes.
John Mellencamp
#16. Jerry [Garcia] got high and Jerry's dead. I went hunting and I'm still Ted.
Ted Nugent
#17. I have total respect for the self-contained rock artist. Whether you're dealing with Jerry Garcia or Lou Reed or Patti Smith or a Whitney or an Aretha, they know what they want with their career.
Clive Davis
#18. Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead did as much for mankind as any president.
Grace Slick
#19. Jerry Garcia was a great American master and the Grateful Dead are not just a genuine piece of musical history, but also an important part of American history,
Trey Anastasio
#20. Listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul.
Jerry Garcia
#21. Yeah, I think we have to. If we want our shows to be - if we want the quality of the shows to be good, and we want the energy to be high, and if we want to be in good enough physical shape to do them, and not exhaust ourselves on the road, and not get stale, we have to pace.
Jerry Garcia
#22. Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you'll always win!
live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future!
Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.
Jerry Garcia
#23. I think it's too bad that everybody's decided to turn on drugs, I don't think drugs are the problem. Crime is the problem. Cops are the problem. Money's the problem. But drugs are just drugs.
Jerry Garcia
#24. Live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future!
Jerry Garcia
#25. I mean, just because you're a musician doesn't mean all your ideas are about music. So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.
Jerry Garcia
#26. And there's a lot of that stuff with people bringing their kids, kids bringing their parents, people bringing their grandparents - I mean, it's gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.
Jerry Garcia
#27. Whistle through your teeth and spit cuz, it's Alright
Jerry Garcia
#29. And Warner Bros. seems to be pretty much into re-releasing all of their catalog. So there's the Warner Bros. stuff and the stuff that we have control over, we're gradually re-releasing it. Some stuff we don't have control over.
Jerry Garcia
#30. Truth is something you stumble into when you think you're going someplace else.
Jerry Garcia
#31. We're like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.
Jerry Garcia
#32. It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.
Jerry Garcia
#34. I equate Deadheads to people that like black licorice. There aren't many people that like black licorice, but the ones that do, REALLY REALLY like it! Or buttermilk, or whatever.
Jerry Garcia
#35. I sat down to my supper, twas a bottle of red whiskey.
Jerry Garcia
#36. I read somewhere that 77 percent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 percent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.
Jerry Garcia
#37. What's been great about the human race gives you a sense of how great you might get, how far you can reach.
Jerry Garcia
#38. Cats on the bandstand, give them each a big hand, anyone who sweats like that must be all right.
Jerry Garcia
#39. What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.
Jerry Garcia
#40. Our strong suit is what we do, and our audience.
Jerry Garcia
#41. You ain't gonna learn what you don't wanna know.
Jerry Garcia
#42. In folk music, I've always been fond of the fragment. The song that has one verse. And you don't know anything about the characters, you don't know what they're doing, but they're doing something important. I love that. I'm really a sucker for that kind of song.
Jerry Garcia
#43. And when you don't have to talk to the person next to you, that's real clean. Takes a certain thing not to try to keep anything up, not to have to entertain one another.
Jerry Garcia
#44. I Don't Think There's A Good Excuse For Being Unhappy. I'm Not Particularly Unhappy, But I Know What Pain Is. I think That Life Is Characterized By Pain, Partly. Part Of The Way You Can Tell You're Alive Is By How Much Pain You're Experiencing, Or How Little ...
Jerry Garcia
#45. I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.
Jerry Garcia
#46. We're not uncomfortable with it, and we've already been through enough of the music business where I'm not really worried that commercial success is going to in some way - we're already past saving, you know what I mean? It's too late for us.
Jerry Garcia
#47. The sun will shine in my back door one day..
Jerry Garcia
#48. It's a joke. Greed and the desire to take drugs are two separate things. If you want to separate the two, the thing you do is make drugs legal. Accept the reality that people do want to change their consciousness, and make an effort to make safer, healthier drugs.
Jerry Garcia
#49. Done time in the lock-up, done time on the streets. Done time on the upswing, and time in defeat. I know what I'm askin'. I know it's a lot. Just to say that I love you. Believe it or not.
Jerry Garcia
#50. You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.
Jerry Garcia
#51. America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That's the nature of America, I think.
Jerry Garcia
#52. If you're able to enjoy something, to devote your life to it or a reasonable amount of time and energy, it will work out for you.
Jerry Garcia
#53. We've been trying to sell out for years, nobody's buying!
Jerry Garcia
#54. Hang me, oh, hang me, so I'll be dead and gone. I wouldn't mind hanging, boys, but you wait in jail so long.
Jerry Garcia
#56. What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. If you reject one, you're not getting the whole thing that's there to be had.
Jerry Garcia
#57. So we are pretty convinced we don't want to play huge stadiums unless we can play them well.
Jerry Garcia
#59. So it's one of those things where we have to - our problem is pacing ourselves and still reaching a large enough number of our audience. Because we don't want to burn the audience. And we don't want to be excluding anybody.
Jerry Garcia
#61. If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously.
Jerry Garcia
#62. Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk.
Jerry Garcia
#63. To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe.
Jerry Garcia
#64. But audio is a component of video, so there's always been that anyway, and although we've never expressed a visual side apart from the Grateful Dead movie, I don't find it that remote, you know what I mean? It's a departure of sorts, but it's like a first cousin.
Jerry Garcia
#65. You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only one who does what you do.
Jerry Garcia
#66. All I know is, if you listen to society, you'll never get anywhere!
Jerry Garcia
#67. Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison.
Jerry Garcia
#68. But hey, when you live in Watts, you need a little smack to get by, you know what I mean? You need something soft and comfortable in your life, 'cause you're not going to get it from what's around you. And society isn't going to give it to you.
Jerry Garcia
#69. Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.
Jerry Garcia
#70. Stuff that's hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don't know what it does.
Jerry Garcia
#71. The alternate media are becoming important and viable alternatives to playing live. Records, videos, that kind of thing. They're going to start to count for something. Because there's only a limited amount of us-time available to us.
Jerry Garcia
#72. I don't know why, it's the same reason why you like some music and you don't like others. There's something about it that you like. Ultimately I don't find it's in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it's fundamentally emotional.
Jerry Garcia
#73. We didn't invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead. We were just in line to see what was going to happen.
Jerry Garcia
#74. It's not enough to be the best at what you do. You must be perceived as the only one who does what you do.
Jerry Garcia
#75. I don't think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut's books mostly I don't feel are movie material.
Jerry Garcia
#76. I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like.
Jerry Garcia
#77. You don't want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one.
Jerry Garcia
#78. The real problems are cultural. The problems of the people who take drugs as a cultural trap - I think there's a real problem there, the crack stuff, the hopelessness of the junkie. The urban angst.
Jerry Garcia
#79. There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night, and if you go, no one may follow, that path is for your steps alone
Jerry Garcia
#80. If the thunder don't get ya then the lightning will.
Jerry Garcia
#81. I'm goin' where the wind don't blow so strange, maybe off on some high cold mountain chain.
Jerry Garcia
#83. Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you've been to some of those places, you think, 'How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?'
Jerry Garcia
#84. I have all the patience in the world about Sirens. For me it's not a Grateful Dead project, it's a Me project.
Jerry Garcia
#85. See, there's only two theaters, man that are set up pretty groovy all around for music and for smooth stage changes, good lighting and all that - the Fillmore and The Capitol Theatre. And those are the only two in the whole country.
Jerry Garcia
#86. Don't tell me this town 'aint got no heart
Jerry Garcia
#87. Magic is what we do.
Music is how we do it.
Jerry Garcia
#88. And as far as I'm concerned, it's like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.
Jerry Garcia
#89. once in awhile you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look it right
Jerry Garcia
#90. We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life.
Jerry Garcia
#91. For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.
Jerry Garcia
#92. I'm not trying to clock scores in this lifetime, it's just that things are better now than they were like five, ten years ago. Music has gotten a lot better. There's a lot of people who are committed to - soulfully.
Jerry Garcia
#93. For me, I think the only danger is being too much in love with guitar playing.
The MUSIC is the most important thing, and the guitar is only the instrument.
Jerry Garcia
#94. Her one big cheat had been and always would be Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia; she simply could not see a world without it!
Julia Mills
#95. The bigger issue, was the whole takeover of the food industry by big corporations.
Jerry Garcia
#96. Too much of a good thing is just about right
Jerry Garcia
#97. Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.
Jerry Garcia
#98. It's much too late to do anything about rock & roll now ...
Jerry Garcia
#99. You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.
Jerry Garcia
#100. And the live show is still our main thing.
Jerry Garcia
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
