21 Jerry Garcia Quotes That Are as True Now as They Were Then

Jerry Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995) was a legendary American musician who was the leading songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist for the ever esteemed, widely loved, religiously followed Grateful Dead. Garcia was responsible for co-founding the Grateful Dead during the 1960s when the counterculture movement as a whole was just beginning to gather some serious steam. One of the most loved parts about Garcia’s character as a human being was that he remained so selfless during his astronomical leap into fame. He really didn’t want that spotlight. He’d just as much have rather gotten himself and anyone else who was around and lucky enough to listen, lost in a dreamy haze of brain circuit-frying guitar solos. Some of those songs feel like they still haven’t ended. Maybe they haven’t. We’ll now take a look at some of Jerry Garcia’s most unforgettable quotes.

1. On choosing the lesser of two evils

“Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.”

2. On doing your own thing

“I’m shopping around for something to do that no one will like.”

3. On fearing the subconscious

“Stuff that’s hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don’t know what it does.”

4. On his kids

“My kids seem to be more mature and older than I am now somehow. They’ve gotten ahead of me somehow. But they’re very patient with me.”

5. On being a musician

“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.”

6. On pacing out their shows

“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.”

7. On selecting the guitar’s tone

“The process of selecting the tone on the guitar is an aesthetic process like any other, so you try a lot of different things.”

8. On the Grateful Dead’s audience demographics

“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.”

9. On the evolution of music

“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.”

10. On playing at stadiums

“So we are pretty convinced we don’t want to play huge stadiums unless we can play them well.”

11. On navigating the music business

“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.”

12. On his music tastes

“I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven’t heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum and Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.”

13. On the visual side of music

“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.”

14. On being the best

“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.”

15. On being shown the light

“Once in awhile you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look it right.”

16. On people who like and dislike the Grateful Dead

“We’re like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.”

17. On silver linings

“Every silver lining has a touch of grey.”

18. On needing music

“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.”

19. On the invention of the Grateful Dead

“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.”

20. On the truth

“Truth is something you stumble into when you think you’re going someplace else.”

21. On the soul of the Grateful Dead

“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.”