Deal Quotes

“I didn’t know what to do, so I called Ken Kesey and laid out the situation. “Hey Ken, funniest thing happened … Shelley accidentally put LSD in her right eye.” He didn’t miss a beat: “Right on, Bill. Put it in your left eye and have a good time. Bye.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“filmed for broadcast by the BBC, but the film crew became unexpectedly incapacitated. It was rumored that someone—or perhaps some band—dosed them with LSD.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“But for “The Eleven,” we took 12/8 and subtracted an eighth note to make it 11/8—hence the name of the song. Right after we came out with that, the Allman Brothers did the same thing on the intro to a tune that would become one of their biggest songs—“Whipping Post.” The key is different, the changes are different, and when the vocals kick in, they slide it into a 12/8 blues. But the intro cheats that one beat, too. It’s 11/8. I wonder where that came from? Of course, I can’t say for sure. That’s for their story. Not mine.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“some of the guys went so far as to shoot up with LSD. Inject it. You can’t do it to yourself because you can’t look at your arm with the needle in it; that’s a heavy thing to see while hallucinating on acid. It comes on that fast. You’re high. There’s no come-on. You’re just there. It’s instantaneous.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“When we would stretch out and go long, when we got really loud and into it, the dancers would look at us uncomfortably and start glancing at the bartenders for help. But rather than putting an end to it, this one particular bartender, who had a glass eye, would add to the freakiness. He would pour lighter fluid all along the drainage ditch of the bar, pop his glass eye out of its socket, spin it on the bar top, and then set the whole damn thing on fire. From my perch on the drum riser, it looked like a curtain of flame with a madman’s eye spinning right through it. Everyone was like, “What the fuck is going on here?”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“When someone comes along and changes the way something is done, if it doesn’t work, they call it foolish. But when it works, they call it revolutionary.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“If I told you all that went down/ It would burn off both your ears. —“Deal” (Lyrics by Robert Hunter)”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“Marijuana is fine, GMOs are not, and God bless the Grateful Dead.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“The only good thing about hitting the floor is that you have nowhere to go but up. It’s a choice ”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“Every other Grateful Dead keyboardist left their post only when they died or were dismissed. Bruce Hornsby was the only one who walked away. Respect.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“The band was in great spirits for the recording of In the Dark. If you ever want to resubscribe to the good life, try recovering from a coma. It will put the spring back in your step.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“We were all hyperaware of the volcano because of a crazy experience that we had just a couple weeks earlier in Portland, Oregon. We did a show there on June 12 and, about halfway through “Fire on the Mountain,” Mount St. Helens started erupting. The synchronicity was classic Grateful Dead.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“The host had the kind of cannons that you’d find on a pirate ship. So, naturally, we filled them with black powder—like pirates—and tons of fruit—like hippies—and just blasted the booty off into the forest.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“demolished to make room for the Moscone Center—in a sign of the times, tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook now hold conferences on the same corner where the Mars Hotel once housed winos and junkies.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“The 1960s were over. Most of the people in the band had stopped taking acid regularly. We were now onto cocaine and other stuff. Welcome to American life in the 1970s.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“So, for the record, the drummer from the Grateful Dead smokes weed and thinks it should be legal—is that any surprise?”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“the Grateful Dead were never an organized religion. We offered an alternative to all that noise.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“Phil was into speed—many years ago, not now of course—and he had a stash of Ritalin. He used to drive a mail truck on Market Street in San Francisco during rush hour and he became The Crazy Postman. He’d go out there and just beat everybody to the line and race like crazy.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“Like the Pink House and Olompali, Lagunitas was really far-out. But in 1995, Jerry died at a facility that’s a stone’s throw from our old camp, and when I think of Lagunitas, I can’t help but think of that.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“Danny Rifkin—who would soon start co-managing us with a guy named Rock Scully for many, many years—first stumbled into our world as a visitor at the Pink House. Danny came there with Harry Shearer,”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“The Doors were a good example of the Southern California scene. They wore that outfit well, what with the leather pants and the affected swagger and all. But the Grateful Dead were ambassadors from the north.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“Jann Wenner was there, in the audience. Two years later, he founded Rolling Stone Magazine—with a feature on the Grateful Dead in the very first issue.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“Technically, we played our first show at Menlo College in Menlo Park, one town over from Palo Alto. That was on April Fool’s Day, ’65.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“But when I first picked up On the Road, it was my boarding pass out of Palo Alto and into destinations unknown—my life’s great adventure.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“But the coolest thing about my serendipitous encounter with Huxley is that Huxley was also an acid head. A few years later, so was I. In fact, in different ways, we’re both now famous for our love of acid. And because of it.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“But his guest didn’t mind. He prodded the headmaster in the side with his elbow. “No, tell him to keep playing. I’ve never heard anything like that.” I liked that guy. It turns out, that guy was Aldous Huxley, the author.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

“At some point, Phil actually snuck into Kesey’s house and read part of the manuscript Kesey had been working on, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, before it was published. He came back and said, “Kesey’s a really good writer.”
― Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead