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Paul Krassner 1985 Interview of Jerry Garcia

PAUL KRASSNER is the editor of "The Realist" and a purveyor of Freethought, Criticism and Satire.
Issue #131 (Autumn, 1995) of "The Realist" reprinted the opening portion of an interview of JERRY
GARCIA by Paul Krassner that first appeared in "The Realist" #99 (September-October 1985). It was
called a Premiere Issue as Issue #98 was published in February, 1974.

A six issue subscription to "THE REALIST" is $12 at Box 1230, Venice, CA 90294 (or send $2 cash and a
self-addressed stamped envelope with your single issue request).

Circa Summer 1967, I saw Paul Krassner perform at a post-midnight appearance at the Los Feliz Theater
in Hollywood the same night that a police action took place against anti-war demonstrators outside the
Century Plaza Hotel where then President Lyndon Johnson was in residence. I never got to see Lenny
Bruce in person, but I saw his spirit that night.

On November 1, 1995 Paul Krassner wrote that his collection of satire, "The Winner Of The Slow
Bicycle Race", is to be published in May 1996 with a dedication to Jerry Garcia. His comedy album, "We
Have Ways To Make You Laugh", is to be released in January 1996.

>From "THE REALIST" #99 (September-October 1985)

JERRY GARCIA interviewed by PAUL KRASSNER

PART ONE OF FOUR:

Q. Does the world seem to be getting weirder and weirder to you?

A. Yeah. The weirdest thing lately for me was that thing of the Ayatollah and the mine-sweeping
children. In the war between Iran and Iraq, he used kids and had them line up like a human chain, holding
hands, and walk across the mine fields because it was cheaper than mine detectors.

Q. That's just unfathomable.

A. It's amazingly inhuman. And people complained about the Shah - a few fingernails and stuff - but this
is kids walking across mine fields. It's absolutely surreal. How could people go for that?

Q. But how do you remain optimistic? There's 48 wars going on now simultaneously - and yet the music
is joyful - even "Please don't murder me" is a joyful song.

A. Well, when things are at that level, there's kind of a beauty to the simplicity of it. I wrote that song
when the Zodiac Killer was out murdering in San Francisco. Every night I was coming home from the
studio, and I'd stop at an intersection and look around, and if a car pulled up, it was like, this is it, I'm
gonna die now. It became a game. Every night I was conscious of that thing, and the refrain got to be so
real to me. "Please don't murder me, *please* don't murder me..."

Q. Oh, so it came out of a literal truth - it wasn't even metaphorical.

A. No, not really. It was a coincidence in a way, but it was also the truth at the moment.

Q. And, if you extend that logically, statistics show that more than half of young people today think
there'll be a nuclear war in their lifetime - but they also are concerned about whether they want a career
or marriage.

A. Well, you've got to do something in the meantime. Nuclear war - that's *easy* to see, because it's true
that most of the energy is still going to the old arms buildup. It hasn't changed a bit, and it's more
horrible than ever, and not only that, but we haven't done anything to get rid of all the *old* shit, so that
thing has been growing and growing for the last 40 years. If you're a kid now, that's what you see, that's
the immediate past, 40 years of this shit, and nobody's made any serious effort to turn it in any direction.
I'm scared too, frankly.

Q. It used to be there was one weird old man with a sign saying, "The world is coming to an end," but
now you've got it embossed on bumper stickers. Still, you know that new age parable of the 100th
monkey - about these monkeys on an island that have subsisted on sweet potatoes and they've always
eaten them with the sand on.

A. Oh, I know about those monkeys. They wash the sweet potatoes in the salt water now.

Q. But one young monkey started it.

A. A young female monkey.

Q. And then other monkeys started following suit, and when there was a certain critical mass - and that's
the metaphor of the 100th monkey, it could've been the 97th or the 108th - when enough young monkeys
were doing it, then the first adult monkey started. Reverse generational influence. Then other adult
monkeys started doing it.

A. Yeah, there was a moment when all of a sudden it seemed as though all the monkeys knew how to do
it.

Q. And then, even on adjoining islands - a psychic connection. And how that applies to human behavior,
no matter what we're doing on an individual or a group basis, if we take ourselves as the 100th monkey,
we could be the one to change the tide.

A. Absolutely. It always did seem like it was a matter of numbers, like you really only needed a
percentage of people kind of pulling psychically in the right direction in order to just avoid the worst
possible scenario, and it always seemed that the positive had some kind of natural inclination to get the
weight. Destroying things lacks a certain element of organization, it's operating at a disadvantage
essentially, because the idea of building things always requires some kind of agreement. Destroying
things doesn't require that, it kind of works against itself in the long run.

Yeah, I *believe* that idea. I always believed that psychedelics meant that in a certain way. I always felt
that if enough people got turned on, there would be sort of a consciousness jump, a paradigm shift in
reality somehow. It's much slower than anybody imagined. That's the way I've chosen to deal with it
philosophically, to avoid getting too discouraged in the meantime, just to think, well, it's gonna take a
long time.

Q. Do you think that the renewed interest in the '60s is a deep interest in terms of perpetuating a spiritual
revolution or that it's just an interest in a 60's fad?

A. No, it's deeper than that. It's definitely not just the surface, it's much more the soulful stuff, because I
see those kids, they're in the audience, and I talk to them, the 16-year-olds of today, the 18-year-olds,
and they're the same people that we were then.

Q. Except with a loss of innocence.

A. Exactly. They *know* there's way more bullshit going on, but all that stuff is more visible, and so in a
way it's easier for them to deal with it. We were dealing with that world and didn't quite understand what
we were up to, although we suspected the worst, and now they're used to being in that kind of paranoid
reality.

Q. So they have less deconditioning to do?

A. That might work for them, it might work against them, but the point is that they're game, they're good
people, I know that about them.

[the above interview text was reprinted in Autumn 1995 "The Realist" #131]

Q. Do you think, since the roots of the Grateful Dead are psychedelic, that affects the structure of a song
in particular, or the structure of a concert, in terms of the buildup?

A. It doesn't so much affect the structure of a song particularly.

Q. Except when you have a free reign in the middle of it.

A. That's right, some of our songs are big affairs, and some of them are also meant to be opened up.
They're kind of like looseleaf files, you can open 'em up and stick things in them; some are arranged so
you can contain an experience, sort of direct it, and our second half definitely has a shape which, if not
directly, is at least partially inspired by the psychedelic experience, as a wave form - there's sort of a rise
in that - the second half for us is the thing of taking chances and going all to pieces, and then coming back
and reassembling.

Q. And that's the leap of faith of psychedelics - which is, somehow I'll get back to that core - I may
make a few convolutions in the process...

A. That's right, you might lose a few pieces, but you don't despair about seeing yourself go completely to
pieces. You don't despair about it, you let it go. We've been doing some interesting things in the last
couple of years in our most free-form stuff that's not really attached to any particular song. It's just
fre
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e-form music, it's not rhythmic, it's not really attached to any musical norms, it's the completely
weird shit.

We've been picking themes for that, and thinking of it as being like a painting, or a movie. Reagan in
China was one of our themes. One time we had the Kadafy Death Squad as our theme. Sometimes the
theme is terribly detailed, and sometimes it's just a broad subject. We do this when we think about it,
when we remember to, it's not a hard and fast rule, but that part of the music at times has some
tremendous other level of organization that pulls it together, makes it really interesting.

A. It's like whether you worry about the world *out there* when you're having some kind of personal
experience, a psychedelic experience or whatever, anything that's happening in your life - and the world
out there, how it affects you, how it sort of colors things that are happening in your trip. The music is like
psychedelics in a way, and there are times even when I come off stage, and I swear I've been dosed but I
know I haven't.

And it's happening to all of us in the band. There is some bio-chemical reality in there that has to do with
maybe the loudness of the music, or maybe like the East Indians believe, that intervals in music contain
emotional realities. Their music is organized where each interval has an emotional truth that goes along
with it, and so when they're playing, they're playing your heart, or they're playing a kind of nervous
system music. That's the way they believe, and it feels that way when you hear it too, so there may be
those kinds of realities in there that are kicking off some kind of bio-chemistry, subtle brain proteins, and
changes of that sort.

Q. It could be, because there's certain notes you reach on a guitar, I'll find my body moving, and when I'm
really close to myself, I realize that what I'm doing is, I'm producing endorphins.

A. Absolutely right. It's there. Since that work is kind of *outre*, nobody is really delving into that stuff
to see, is it happening or is it not happening? Maybe eventually.

Q. They're waiting until they can see some way to synthesize and merchandise endorphins - because we
can get 'em free now. They've discovered that addiction to cigarette smoking is really addiction to
endorphins produced by the tissue damage. So if a drug company, ethical or unethical, were able to
manufacture synthetic endorphins, they could eliminate all these middle processes. People wouldn't have
to jog anymore...

A. Right, the joggers are definitely strung out on endorphins. They experience withdrawal and everything.
There's so much mystery there in brain chemistry that I'm sure you cough up a psychedelic experience
every once in a while. It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens pretty frequently - frequently enough
for me personally to be aware that there's something there.

More interesting yet is that I've experienced at times - this has only happened on those rare occasions
when somebody on stage is smoking DMT, it's usually like the Hell's Angels - but when there's DMT
being smoked on stage, there's actually an interference that occurs, a measurable effect that happens to the
electronics on stage. I mean I can hear it, and if I had the right meters, I could measure it. It really changes
things - there's a real *electron* leap of some sort that produces a kind of wireless broadcast.

There are times when I'd notice, hey, suddenly something is very different, and *then* notice the smell of
DMT. Like you're playing an electric guitar, you're doing very minute things with your fingertips. The
smallest string is 9/1000th of an inch in diameter, and that's pretty small - so you're dealing with minute
little changes which are amplified up to huge size, and so the psycho-acoustic effect that happens in that
chain, is something you feel with your body, it's not just something you hear, you *feel* it, it affects your
touch.

So that DMT thing, it's like somebody sticks in a square wave generator, all of a sudden the waves are just
chopped off right at the top, it's like a super fuzz tone is inserted in the line somewhere, and also the
amplitude jumps up about 20-30%. It's an amazing effect. We don't *know* what the brain does. I'm
sure it's a measurable, quantifiable, repeatable thing, in terms of "science."

Q. But always, underneath, there's another layer of mystery - but everybody needs a metaphor for the
mystery - so people who hear the 100th monkey story, say, well, the first young female monkey to wash
off the sweet potato was an Aires, and they have a certain pioneer spirit.

A. What was the sweet potato saying to the monkey?

Q. Help me to meet my sweet-potato-hood.

A. Help me get the skin off.

Q. The truth is, those monkeys needed all of that sand on the sweet potatoes for roughage in their diet -
then these meddling anthropologists come along - now there's islands full of constipated monkeys.

A. Now the monkeys just love the anthropologists. They take their lunch. They don't even f**k with the
sweet potatoes anymore.

Q. They take their laxatives anyway.

A. Japanese monkeys hooked on Ex-Lax.

Q. That could be a theme for a Dead concert ... What picture would you paint right now?

A. Well. let's see, we should be on enormous divans with silk cushions all over, surrounded by nubile
maidens feeding us peeled grapes, with huge bubbly hookahs.

Q. You didn't have to think about that image very long, did you?

A. No, no, all I had to do was tune in to that rock 'n' roll place where things happen.

Q. And so as we look around the room we see some young female monkeys washing sweet potatoes in the
salt water bathtub.

A. There's the wreckage of jeeps over there.

Q. There is Persian powder being smuggled inside Khomeini posters.

A. By amputeed children who've been blown up from mine-detecting.

Q. I'd like to send a note to Khomeini, "Those kids weren't raised to be mine-detectors." And a note to
Jesee Jackson, "If you can apologize to Jewish leaders for saying *hymies*, I want you to apologize to the
rock community for saying that you want to censor the lyrics of rock music."

A. Oh, no - did he say that?

Q. Yeah, because he was afraid that it would lead to sexuality, or even accompany it.

A. Come on, doesn't he remember back when they were calling rock music "*nigger* music?"

Q. That'll be the Dead's next benefit - for the Jesse Jackson Birth Control Clinic ... Even though your
music is on one level entertainment, I think it's always service.

A. Actually, I've always thought that we were like a public works, really, a utility as much as anything
else. That's the way it feels, and for a lot of people, it's *therapeutic* to have a real good time once in a
while. I know it is for me, definitely, and that's what we do as far as I'm concerned, really. And being
able to direct that in some way or another is awfully nice.

I remember one time a long time ago - Ken Kesey and Wavy Gravy were involved with it too, I guess not
coincidentally - we played someplace funny, like Cincinnati, at a university there, and they had Kesey
speaking there, and the Hog Farm was there also, and this was in '69, maybe '68. We went there and
played and the people got off on it, just enormously, and we left town, but the Hog Farmers stayed behind,
and the day after the concert they got on the local FM radio station - back in those days, they had loose,
free-form radio - and they said, there's this vacant lot - there was this lot in the black section of town
that had old tires and bedsprings and junk and garbage and all kinds of shit - and they said, "Let's clean up
this lot." And they got people to stop there, sort of steaming on the energy of the concert from the night
before, kind of continuing that feeling.

At the end of the day, when those ladies came home from their jobs over on the white side of town, there
was a *park* there. It's like taking the energy of that high - Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farmers have such
grace in doing things like that - and to me, that's always been a great ser
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vice model, you know, how can
you turn this into something, how can you take it another step, without it turning into some kind of
willful mind manipulation? And that was one of the times that happened, really spontaneously. It was just
great, and we got such lovely feedback from it. But for me, it's always been this model of, if you get the
right elements going there and people who are clear about that good energy, there's definitely stuff that
you can make happen that turns out good, and everybody feels good about it.

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