Jerry Garcia

Jerry Garcia was the lead guitarist and vocalist of the psychedelic rock band the Grateful Dead.

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• Another loyal Dead Head fan has passed. The Grateful Dead provided a universe, a place of association and individual passion by many, as in the case of the late follower, Richard Blood, who passed away 9-14-09.

• 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.

• Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.

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

• I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like.

• I've always been really fond — 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.

• We are all bozos on the same bus

• Truth is something you stumble into when you think you're going someplace else.

• I think basically the Grateful Dead is not for cranking out rock and roll, it's not for going out and doing concerts or any of that stuff. I think it's to get high. 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. And I think every human being should be a conscious tool of the universe.

• We've been trying to sell out for years, nobody's buying!

• Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

• 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, man. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it. ... Nobody has to fool around with musty old scores, weird notation, and scholarship bullshit: you can just go into a record store and pick a century, pick a country, pick anything, and dig it, make it a part of you, add it to the stuff you carry around, and see that it's all music.

• I can envisage a new world in which society has a way for there to be music, whose function is to get you high, that's the sort of thing we're hammering at...

• 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?"

• 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.

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