A Long Strange Trip Quotes

“In the middle 1960s the urban AM airwaves had begun to fill up, and the FCC decreed that FM stations generate original programming instead of repeating, or simulcasting, material from AM stations. Until then, FM had been virtually ignored, since few people owned FM receivers and the rare FM stations tended to be foreign-language or generally obscure. Tom Donahue fixed that. Early in 1967 he called every FM station in San Francisco until he found KMPX, which was so broke that its phone was disconnected.”
― Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

“Three of the album’s reviews stood out. Gleason noted correctly that it wasn’t as good as the band live, as did the magazine Crawdaddy!, where Paul Williams said that “only ‘Viola Lee’ has any of the fantastic ‘this is happening now!’ quality of a good Dead performance.” In the Village Voice, Richard Goldstein was balanced and reasonable: “Straight, decent rhythm and blues . . . feels spontaneous; it sounds honest . . . leaderless cooperation you seldom find in rock and roll.”
― Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

“In a display of intuitive good taste, the band vetoed Kelley/Mouse’s notion of putting a quotation, “In the land of the dark, the ship of the sun is drawn by the Grateful Dead,” across the top of the cover. Variously attributed to the Tibetan or Egyptian Book of the Dead, but seemingly a piece of Haight Street apocrypha, it had been floating around the neighborhood for a while.”
― Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

“I don’t think LSD is where it’s at, but it’s a symptom of where it’s at . . . There is something spiritual in everything that’s going on these days, and especially in rock and roll . . . A dance is a kind of celebration of the mind and the body and the senses. Music might be the one thing the earth has in the expanses of the cosmos.”
― Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

“linear progression was distorted. So we would just drop the one, we would get lost, we would call it the pulse. We would go on the pulse, so all of a sudden the pulse would lead us to a place, and we were completely lost, we didn’t know where the original one was, so instead of struggling with the one, we would establish a new one, and that was the telepathy that me and Billy had. And they would catch on to our telepathic one, and they would latch on. When the third person went to it, it became legitimate. It would stay illegitimate for a certain amount of time, and we would be able to fly or float on the pulse, and there was no need to sound the one or recognize the one. Sometimes the one was known, and we’d let it go untouched. Other times we all pounced on it and sounded it and made it into a one.”
― Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

“I am not an artist in the independent sense, I’m part of dynamic situations, and that’s where I like it.”
― Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

“There’s a better way. There has to be education, and the education has to come from the poets and musicians, because it has to touch the heart rather than the intellect, it has to get in there deeply.”
― Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

“In March Miles opened for Steve Miller at the Fillmore East, but Miles’s low opinion of Miller created complications. Miller “didn’t have shit going for him,” wrote Miles, “so I’m pissed because I got to open for this non-playing motherfucker just because he had one or two sorry-ass records out. So I would come late and he would have to go on first, and then when we got there, we just smoked the motherfucking place and everybody dug it, including Bill [Graham]!”
― Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

“possible that the gift of consciousness has a direct relationship to the atoms of the sense and purpose in the design of organisms, you know. I mean, we’re surrounded by artifacts of the mind, things we’ve invented. All these things are metaphors—they’re telling me something about what my mind is . . . It’s furious manipulation, man, and it’s coming from my mind. It’s what separates us from IT. I’m curious because I’ve had my fucking mind blown. What is IT?”
― Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead