What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.

The real problems are cultural. The problems of the people who take drugs as a cultural trap – I think there’s a real problem there, the crack stuff, the hopelessness of the junkie. The urban angst.

Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison.

Our strong suit is what we do, and our audience.

I have all the patience in the world about Sirens. For me it’s not a Grateful Dead project, it’s a Me project.

If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously.

But hey, when you live in Watts, you need a little smack to get by, you know what I mean? You need something soft and comfortable in your life, ’cause you’re not going to get it from what’s around you. And society isn’t going to give it to you.

I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I’m more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.

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

And for me there’s still more material than 20 lifetimes that I can use up.

I don’t know why, it’s the same reason why you like some music and you don’t like others. There’s something about it that you like. Ultimately I don’t find it’s in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it’s fundamentally emotional.

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.

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.

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.

For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

The alternate media are becoming important and viable alternatives to playing live. Records, videos, that kind of thing. They’re going to start to count for something. Because there’s only a limited amount of us-time available to us.

So it’s one of those things where we have to – our problem is pacing ourselves and still reaching a large enough number of our audience. Because we don’t want to burn the audience. And we don’t want to be excluding anybody.

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.

I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.

Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.

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.

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

And Warner Bros. seems to be pretty much into re-releasing all of their catalog. So there’s the Warner Bros. stuff and the stuff that we have control over, we’re gradually re-releasing it. Some stuff we don’t have control over.

America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That’s the nature of America, I think.

I think it’s too bad that everybody’s decided to turn on drugs, I don’t think drugs are the problem. Crime is the problem. Cops are the problem. Money’s the problem. But drugs are just drugs.

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

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

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.

And the live show is still our main thing.

And as far as I’m concerned, it’s like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.

I don’t think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut’s books mostly I don’t feel are movie material.

What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.