Phil interview 4-20-05

[laughingwillow]

http://www.philzone.com/

THE DARK SIDE by Randall Mikkelsen
This is the complete transcript from Randy's interview with Phil conducted on 4/20/05.

His edited Reuters article entitled "Grateful Dead's Dark, Light Sides in Member's Book" can be viewed here. Thanks Randy for allowing us to post the entire transcript here on PZ.com.

Q â€" How do you explain the contractions between the band’s culture of
universal love, one mind, and the dark side?
A (Phil) - "It seems like everything that exists on this plane -- our Earth, in
physical and three-dimensional, four-dimensional reality space-time, whatever,
that everything has two sides to it, even maybe more than two sides. There's
upsides and there's downsides.
"Everything that's born, grows, lives, peaks, decays and dies. These are the
laws of nature….It's not like everything is supposed to be rosy and then we
with all our flaws create the dark side. It's there from the beginning. That's
one of the things that we were put here to learn about, that we agree to come to
this level for and … go through these situations and to grow from them.
"The Grateful Dead, like any other organism, and that's what it was, it was an
organism in the sense of the group mind that we were able to create together --
if you read Jung, you read about the shadow -- every one of us has a shadow,
the darker side of our personality. We usually repress that, and in an organism
like the Grateful Dead it's not easy to repress the dark side because there are
so many people contributing and inevitably it's going to come out in any kind of
group situation and I think we were lucky that … as long as it did."


Q - What did you learn from this?
"It's all a question of choices. You can go to the dark side or not -- you
make that choice. Whether you realize the fact that that's the actual choice you
are making or not, it's kinds of irrelevant, because you make your choices   based
on what you see and you know is going on in front of you. Sometimes you don't
know what you've learned until way too late. It really has to do with what you
might call karma. I believe that we agree to come to be born on this Earth in
order to deal with certain situations and in order to grow, so that in a way its
almost predestiny as to what these situations are going to be, and what it is
we’re supposed to learn

Q - What has been a constructive lesson?
"I don't know if there's been a constructive lesson. I'll tell you the
things that I regret. I regret that we didn't stand up and say lets stop touring
and try to save ourselves from going down in a very negative way. That's what
happened to Jerry and before him to several other members of the band."


TRANSCENDENCE, TO SELF-MEDICATION
Q - Is there a thread in the deaths of all the members of the band?
"The things that we started out using as tools for transcendence of self,
for exploration, the same tools that have been used over millenniums by shamans
in initiatory rituals, after a certain point they turned into tools for
self-medication. Not the same substances -- substances supplanted those
enthiogens, is what I call them, which means manifesting the divine … the
substances that replaced them were essentially for self medication because the
situation that we were in was that there was just too much pressure. Too many
demands on our psyches, on our consciousness. The backstage scene was just
insane, everybody wanting face time and not really having anything to say.
"The band members would end up hiding on stage, never leaving the stage. There
were thousands of people backstage, everybody wanting a piece of you, really
without having anything to give. So people started to self-medicate, just to
take a vacation from all that. That's when it turned dark."


COLORS IN MUSIC
Q - I just heard a feature on the radio about a woman with synesthesia, who sees
colors when she hears music. Did you ever compose music with colors?
"The music inherently has its own colors. Some musicians have ascribed
colors to keys. Scriabin, a Russian composer was one of those. He composed a
piece called Prometheus, and it had a thing called a color organ. Colors were
projected in the surroundings during the performance of the piece. The
technology didn’t even exist for that the time.
"There are colors -- you'll see in my book one of the things that I write about
is a rainbow bridge that was sort struck between me and Jerry at a certain gig,
and the musical notes flowing back and forth and those torrents would have a
certain color projected to them in my mind. It's really kind of hard to
describe; it has to do with the emotional content. But it’s definitely real
and I believe in it.”

Q - And you can access that without psychedelics?
"Absolutely, although having experienced that consciousness, it's easier
for me to focus in on those levels."

BIG BANG
Q - You were present at a cultural big bang. Where are the ripples now? How does
that survive in modern age with many opposing currents.
"They way I see it right now it that the ripples have smoothed out to a
certain extent and that now is the time the galaxies are starting to form. In
other words the whole spirit of that period sort of went underground for a long
time, and basically it still is although it never went completely away. I see it
manifesting in every show that I play, when I look out over four generations of
people who are deeply involved in this. I see whole new quasars everywhere in
law firms, on Wall Street, lawyers and teachers, bus drivers, people that I meet
on the street they come from everywhere and they still share this feeling.”

Q â€" What defines this community?
“A new way of looking at things that involves cooperation, collaboration.
The metaphor has always been … the band, that is a certain number of
individuals that come together to make music, the result of what they do is
something that could not have happened with just one of them or even two of them
or even three of them. It's the collaboration and the submergence, if you will,
of their individuality in something that's large and something in which the
result is greater than the sum of the parts. That's the metaphor.
"That's is what was happening. It was a reaction against the sort of unbridled
individualism that led us into this global warming, warlike era.”

Q - Can the Dead philosophy still work?
"It's sort of working from within at this point. Paradoxically it now
depends on individuals who have this feeling, and if you want to call it this
path."

Q - How did politics of the era affect the music and can the music affect the
politics?
“Politics is a very large area. I suppose you could say your interaction
with the mailman is politics. Any way you relate to the community outside of
yourself. The GD was never overtly political. We were in it to bring people
together; we were giving to create transcendental experiences, to have
collective experiences that were gnostic, in the sense that everyone was
experiencing the reality of a higher order of being. You might even say it was
semireligious . We used to say every place we play is church. And that was not a
facetious statement.”

DOWN THE STAIRS
Q â€" You wrote about interpersonal conflict â€" Jerry throwing you down stairs,
Brent at your throat. Is musical conversation a better form of interpersonal
relationship than dialog?
"For me it's a higher level of connection. A lot of times when the guys in
the band weren't to happy with one another, on a more mundane level we could
still communicate musically and rise above that. In a way, I like to think
that's what we were helping the audiences to do as well."

Q â€" You spoke several times of the Grateful Dead scene getting too big to
sustain, even going back to the Carousel days. What did you learn from going
through that several times?
"We learned that that if we wanted to keep going we had to deal with this.
We had accrued an immense corporation. We had 60 employees at the height of the
band. If we wanted to keep going, it was a true dilemma. Either we had to slow
down, play smaller places and not tour as often, but if we did that we had lay
off a whole bunch of people, most of whom were old friends who depended on us
for their livelihoods, shoes for their kids We just could never bring ourselves
to do that."
"I do regret that we didn't at least take a little time off and put some
money way, take a little less for ourselves maybe or put a little less into the
equipment, and put something aside so that even if we had to put people on half
salaries we could have taken six months off. Maybe if we’d done that Jerry
would still be with us.
“We never could see our way to do that. The pressures … We had to keep doing
that if we were going to keep going."

Q - Why did you frequently blow a lot of big gigs like Woodstock or Monterey,
while shining at lower-profile moments?
"In a way it was we didn't want to be too popular. It wasn't something that
looked like it was a good thing, and that was something that we found out later
on was very true, as a result of all the popularity that came to us after we put
out our single big record."
"That being said, we didn’t really care, it didn't matter whether we played
well or not, because as far as we were concerned it was in the hands of the
gods. We put ourselves up to the flow and sometimes it happens, sometimes it
doesn't. That's the risk you take when you make the decision that every show is
going to be different … Every concert was a unique expression … That’s the
risk that you have to take. And maybe we felt the pressure of those big gigs.
"I tell you at Monterey it was ridiculous. We had to follow The Who, and right
after us it was Hendrix. You know -- who were we? At least we got back at the
Who … (at a two-day stand at the Oakland Coliseum in 1976) … One day they
opened and the next day we opened. The day they had to follow us, we played for
our lives."

Q â€" What were some golden moments?
"What always comes to me was the Trips Festival. It was one of the moments
where it all came together and everything was moving to the beat of a higher
order of reality. The lights, the dancers the music, It wasn't that the music
was making everything move a certain way, and it wasn’t the dancers or the
lights or the drugs even. There was a very strong sense of connection to another
order of reality which was filtering down into our everyday world. It was
absolutely magic. That was one of the moments that made me realize that
everything isn't as it seems, on heaven and earth."


Q - Did you ever try to consciously channel power of music to an end?
"No. You can't do that. That’s not permitted. The power itself won't let
you do that … I supposed you could do it by the kind of lyrics you write. It
always felt like what we as individuals or as a group had to say wasn't that
important. It's what the gods had to say through us. Stravinksy talks about The
Rite of Spring and says ‘I was the vessel through which it passed’ He talks
about his music, it just flows through. I don’t really create this."

AFTER JERRY
Q - How did remaining band members, and music scene respond musically to Jerry's
death.
"It seems to me there was a great outpouring of creativity after Jerry's
death. This isn't going to stop us or slow us down. Bobby and Mickey went right
out on the road carrying the torch. They went out and did a big summer festival
for two years in a row and I joined in on the third year, and after that I
started my own band which I had never done before. The Grateful Dead was my
band. The music wanted to be played. It demanded that we play, to develop and
bring in fresh perspectives ... although I did retire for a little while.”

Q - How is your health, can you play for a long time?
"I think so. I certainly have been for the last six years; I’ve been
touring and playing with all kind of different folks. I've got a new band now
that I put together last December and we're going to go out in November and do a
tour. My son's going to college this fall, so we're going to spend some time, I
'm going to spend some super-quality time with him before he goes."

Q â€" You’re not going out in the summer?
“No”

Q - What about the Dead?
"As always with the Grateful Dead, we know that we want to do something
this year, heck it’s our 40th anniversary, but we don't know what it's going
to be. We're sort just still sort of talking it out. ‘What do you think, well
what do you think?’”

Q - The Dead will play again as a band?
“Oh, sure.”


FREE MUSIC, NEW MUSIC
Q â€" You are releasing free shows on the Internet. What is your philosophy
about the business of music at this stage in your life."
"I think it sucks wind, to be blunt. I made a record with my band a few
years ago. I thought it was a pretty good record. When I saw what had to be done
to market it and as a result of all the money that the record companies spent to
market it on the radio, it was a turn-off. I felt it was just a waste.
”As far as recordings are concerned, I think that live performances that are
recorded should be just given away, just like we do with the tapes. That's what
I do with my band and I'm going to continue to do that as long as the band is
playing. That said, that doesn't mean that I wouldn't record specific
compositions and specific music in the studio, say, or even live recordings of
specific stuff that wasn't meant to be distributed as a show, but I would still
distribute that over the Internet rather than sell it as a (record in a
store?).”

Q Are you still writing new music?
“I have have a whole raft of projects. I've got a cycle of pieces that are
related to the planetary spheres. There's a teaching that the soul ascends to
the planetary spheres after death, at each point shedding certain
characteristics that it acquired during life … so that it regains the purity
that it had before birth or reincarnation. So that’s what I’m doing now, a
semi-stage, dramatical, song-cycle ….”


Q â€" Does that key off the Planet Jams of a few years ago?
"Exactly, that was the core genesis of it. It’s gotten a little more
elaborate since then. Now I’m starting to think about staging.”

Q - Are we going to see some of that in November?
“No. It’s not quite ready. I’m working on it as hard as I can. I have
other composition projects that I want to do. As I said, I don’t really see
making records and selling them â€" hyping them on the radio and selling them in
stores.”

Q â€" That’s kind of a dead-end now?
“It seems like it is. It definitely is for me, the way I look at it.”

Q â€" The band you’re playing with in SF now has a real country sound. How far
can you take that?
“To me it’s like an alloy. It's a blend of different kinds of music
and different kinds of ways of looking at it. Also it's a way to get richer
textures. Having a band with country instruments â€" a steel guitar, fiddle,
mandolin, some of the stuff that these guys would play on rock songs, or some of
Jerry’s ballads, it’s astounding, and it doesn’t really sound like country
music it sounds like an instrument that’s right for what we were playing. I
really hate all the boxes ... what I’ve always been about is throwing those
boxes out, or dumping them out all over … ”

...........

lw