There's that famous saying about whores and ugly buildings: If you stay around long enough, eventually you get respectable.
(Los Angeles Times)

Music was something I was not good at. I took lessons on the piano forever, for maybe eight years—my mom made me. None of it sank in.
(Rolling Stone)

When we get onstage, what we really want to happen is, we want to be transformed from ordinary players into extraordinary ones, like forces of a larger consciousness. And the audience wants to be transformed from whatever ordinary reality they may be in to something that enlarges them. So maybe it's that notion of transformation, a seat-of-the-pants shamanism, that has something to do with why the Grateful Dead keep pulling them in.
(Rolling Stone)

We've been falling uphill for 27 years...incredible luck probably has a lot to do with it.
(San Francisco Examiner)

Some of these songs, it does hit you, you can't help but notice these things. You're dying, everybody's dying, and at some point or another you have to face it. It's a beautiful metaphor, a lovely way of saying that this is happening to all of us.—thoughts on mortality after performing Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"
(Chicago Tribune)

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.
(S.F. Examiner)

I went to see [jazz violinist] Stéphane Grappelli and he's 83. You see these guys and you say, "Goddamn right!" If I can, then yeah, if I'm alive and moving, I'll be playing.
(L.A. Times)

I believe that a good song is a good song. My great experience in these last couple of years was [getting to meet] Mitchell Parish, the guy that wrote the lyrics to "Star Dust." I got to hang out with him—92 years old.... He was like the book, you know. He wrote "Deep Purple," "Sweet Lorraine"..."Star Dust," for Christ's sake! "Sophisticated Lady," I mean, God—what a guy.
(Rolling Stone)

I'm not Beethoven—Garcia's first words after coming out of a five-day diabetic coma in 1986. He didn't remember saying it, but later commented that he was probably thinking, "I may not be great, but I'm alive."
(L.A. Times).

The coma gave me that midlife kick in the ass that you need sometimes.
(L.A. Times)

So what is it about the '90s in America? There must be a dearth of fun out there in America. Or adventure. Maybe that's it, maybe we're just one of the last adventures in America.—on the Deadhead phenomenon
(Rolling Stone)

The Deadheads catch more [flak] undeservedly. I'd put our audience against any audience. Take the average sports audience: They drink a lot and are rowdy and wreck stuff, and no one complains. Our audience cleans up after itself and is caring and considerate.
(L.A. Times)

I'd rather fill in all the Os in the phone book.—on how much he hated writing songs
(Guitar Player)

Charlie Parker, I listen to him like I go for a drink of water.
(L.A. Times)

I love it when somebody else is singing, because one of my favorite things to do is backup singing. I can't back up my own singing.
(Guitar Player)

Our income doesn't come from records. It comes from live work. Making records is a different thing. It's not playing for warm human beings. It's a very artificial situation, with the overdubs and everything. In my mind, it's never really been making music.
(Detroit Free Press)

I keep an open mind. I like disco music a lot.
(Guitar Player)

I picked up a trick or two from my cousin Danny—he knew some rhythm and blues—but the most important thing I learned was that it was okay to improvise. "Hey, man, you can make it up as you go along!"
(The New Yorker)

When you have a group of musicians in a studio, it's not unlike having a room full of plumbers.
(Grateful Dead Family Album, Warner Books)

The media portrait of the innocent hippie flower children was a joke. It wasn't that innocent.
(Bill Graham Presents, Doubleday)

You definitely knew that this was a milestone, it was in the air. As a human being I had a wonderful time, hanging out with friends in the music business and sharing great little jams. But our performance onstage—the Dead's part in Woodstock—was musically a total disaster that is best left forgotten. I've certainly been trying to forget it for 25 years.
(Woodstock 1969, Square-books)