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I think that was the difference with the '60s...
is that people didn't care to explain themselves.
If people didn't get it, they weren't invited.
The last chance you had to shock people just by the way you looked...
just by the way you were.
You didn't even have to think about it, or work at it at all.
You could just walk down the street, and people go, "Oh, my God. "
That was fun.
Marty just asked, "Hey, do you wanna start a band?" to a total stranger.
I said, "Sure. " Seemed to be the thing to do at the time.
Here music is blaring forth from the open windows...
of an apartment on the corner of Haight and Ashbury.
While in the street below, a crowd of hippies celebrates the sunny day.
Traffic stops. The crowd grows.
Finally, the police roll in with paddy wagons and nightsticks.
We were much too busy being in the middle of the '60s...
to wonder, even to this day, why San Francisco?
San Francisco's always been a border town, borderland kind of town...
where all the strange people come to do strange things.
Stranger than most things.
Drugs, social experimentation, sexual experimentation...
anti-authoritarian, if you will, experimentation.
It was antiestablishment.
It was the first openly antiestablishment musical scene.
There really was no audience, you know, to speak of.
There was no entertainer-entertained thing.
Everybody was entertaining. Everything there was entertaining.
Every event, everything that happened was entertaining.
The experience was communal in the sense that...
Santana, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother & the Holding Company...
We played many gigs together, benefits, strange gatherings...
of what they call '"the tribes '" for lack of a better word.
It was very pagan, and a celebration of human events.
It was a celebration of humanity around you...
enjoying the people that you were with to the nth degree...
enjoying the herbs and vegetables that God gave to us.
I'm out of drugs.
I don't have any on me. Ask across the room.
- Do you have any drugs? - Excuse us, you have drugs?
We were just another signal that things are changing.
Basic institutions are crumbling about you...
and it's chaos.
The incidents are so bad...
so contrary to our standards of human behavior...
that I couldn't possibly recite them to you here from this platform in detail.
Three rock 'n'roll bands were in the center of the gymnasium...
playing simultaneously all during the dance...
and movies were shown on two screens.
These movies were the only lights in the gym proper.
They consisted of color sequences that gave the appearance...
of different-colored liquids spreading across the screen...
followed by shots of men and women on occasion.
Shots where the men and women's nude torsos twisted and gyrated...
in provocative and sensual fashion.
So music was like the pied piper...
that led kids off the asphalt and out of the suburbs...
and into some other kind of reality.
So we began creating free stores...
where the goods were free and the rolls were free.
Free food, crash pads, free medical clinics.
- Are you a musician looking for a band? - Doing what?
Bass guitar, lead guitar, drums, anything.
- Do they need a singer? - No. I don't think anybody needs a singer.
And by some fluke or an accident...
I discovered I had this incredibly loud voice.
I started singing blues because that was always what I liked.
And you know, I got in a bluegrass band.
Played hillbilly music for free beer.
I first saw Janis Joplin when she sat in with Big Brother at the A valon Ballroom.
We played together at the Family Dog and started falling in love...
and lived together for 4, 5, 6 months, I guess...
at a couple of different locations in the Haight.
The Janis that I knew was not the performer...
the public was familiar with.
She was very relaxed, very intelligent, very creative...
ambitious, but not overly ambitious, and very into her family...
and enjoying the community of the Haight-Ashbury...
which was very small and very affectionate at that time.
What do you think young people are looking for today?
Sincerity and a good time.
Are they finding it?
I don't know about you, daddy...
I'm fine. At least I'm having a good time.
They're looking for people not to lie to them.
Kids today aren't gonna accept what's laid down by the older generation.
They only want you to grow up, get an education, raise children, and die.
There's a whole sense of freedom in San Francisco right now.
And when you have a city that's free and the youth are free...
they'll go in every direction they can.
After the first thing called the Human Be-In...
it was like, yeah, there is all these people, there is a community.
There is this whole, big community.
We're all those people who are the weird ones.
All of a sudden you discovered all these people who are like you.
And they were all people who were influenced by the beatniks.
The beats were into their authentic expression.
They were into living authentic lives that were based on their real feelings...
not their conditioned feelings.
And I think they stood as a kind of beacon to personal integrity, in that way.
So you add psychedelics to that, and you've got the Haight-Ashbury.
The hippies are capable of extremely hard work.
This is the house of a popular local band which plays hard rock music.
They call themselves the Grateful Dead.
They live together comfortably in what could be called affluence.
There are many other similar houses or apartments in Haight-Ashbury...
maintained by hippies who work in places...
where employers do not mind bizarre dress or long hair.
Their concept of a new style of life unites them.
We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life...
a simple life, a good life, you know, and, like...
think about moving the whole human race ahead a step...
or a few steps.
Yeah, or half a step.
Most of the people who are hippies now came to it through drugs.
- Yeah, but it's not a dope movement. - We're not pushing dope.
I think, personally...
that the more people turn on, a better world this could be.
This traveling road show with the Grateful Dead and the Pranksters...
came swirling through called
Can You Pass the Acid Test?
So I was all for that.
I'm looking to always expand my horizons and peripheries...
and saw them off if possible.
Acid became a big part of the thing while it was still legal.
As soon as they saw that people were having fun...
they, of course, made it illegal.
Common hallucinogenic experiences were like tribal harvest festivals...
and the Sadie Hawkins Day.
Total abandon.
Rejecting everything and looking for something positive and new...
a total sexual abandon, drug abandon, dancing abandon.
We had an opportunity to visit highly experimental places...
under the influence of highly experimental chemicals...
before a highly experimental audience.
It was ideal.
It's an interactive event, the Grateful Dead.
We've become one big entity tied at the heart. That's what it's about.
We're not the whole event, but we're an important part.
We're what the event sounds like, and we offer a space to ritualize.
So these were, like, mass excuses for letting yourself go...
without being the spotlight of anything. Even the bands...
Grace used to say, the only reason she enjoyed being on stage at these things...
was because the stage was the least crowded place at the party.
And you could see up over everybody and see what was going on everywhere.
One time I hitchhiked from Austin to San Francisco with this guy.
His name is Chet Helms.
Later, he got involved in promoting the dances in San Francisco.
I loved the acoustic draping in the Avalon...
which gave it a wonderful warm interior...
womb-like sound.
I loved the sprung dance floor, which...
if you got 300 or 400 people dancing on the floor at one time...
the floor would rise to meet you and lift you even higher.
The Avalon and such similar institutions...
are the few socializing institutions...
which teach people how to live and be with one another.
They were experimenting with being loose at the beginning.
It's like, "Oh, my God, it's safe here.
"And I can eat my chocolate cigarettes without anybody catching me.
'"I can hug a girl, or I can put paint on my face...
'"I can put on Goodwill clothes. I can act out cavalierism. '"
There was a very nice feeling of open-airness even though it was indoors.
Well, Chet was the mellow guy.
Bill was the bully.
So Chet did it in a nice, homespun way...
and Bill was really aggressive...
and really wanted to make a home for rock 'n' roll. He had big plans.
There was a jam session. Michael Murphey was playing a Hammond organ...
and Jerry Garcia was playing guitar. Paul Kantner was playing guitar.
I waited for Jerry to finish his solo...
and then they said, '"Go ahead, '" so I jumped on it...
and when I finished, Bill came over and said:
"That's pretty good. You got a band?"
I said, "Yeah, I got a band. "
"Okay. I want you to come on over and open up...
"for The Loading Zone and The Who. "
At that time everybody was playing blues.
Jimi Hendrix, Cream, John Mayall.
Just louder, and maybe a little more adventuresome chord...
but it was still the blues.
We came out with some blues...
but the foundation was Afro-Cuban music.
So all of a sudden, the women could dance.
It wasn't this, "Wanna dance, honey?"
"My name is George. What's yours? Charlotte?"
"Out of sight, Charlotte. "
They would walk in, and if 10 people were dancing...
they'd join the circle. Or they'd see one girl standing there...
and they would just move.
They may not say anything to each other all night...
or they may leave together.
But if they didn't leave together, there was a thank you.
Okay.
It was a fantasy, but it was nice, and it was healthy.
And nobody lost.
And the key to those years for me was that everybody won...
and nobody lost.
The musicians had a good time. The producer had a good time.
The public had a good time.
Taking their social cue...
from the idea of endless summer and California culture...
all of a sudden, almost overnight...
people were growing their hair long...
taking lots of drugs...
and trying their darnedest to all screw each other freely.
Sexuality became less important...
oddly enough.
In the sense that, you didn't have to spend this long courting time...
of the boy always figuring out a way to get inside the girl's pants.
There were no pants. It was the '60s.
Thank you very much.
I'll be doing one of those other things.
A thing dedicated to that little girl over there called Hartley.
Thing called Foxey Lady, look out!
I got woken up at 7:00 in the morning, and I'm really sleepy.
But then I open the door and see somebody that appeals to me.
First of all, I think, "What in the world is she doing here?"
And she says, "Maybe, can I come in?"
And I'm standing there and really digging her.
She's really nice-looking. It's the honest-to-God truth.
She's about 19 or 20, or beyond the age of so-and-so.
And I say, "Oh," and I probably stand there and then...
Physical desire is very normal, and it happens...
and there's nothing wrong with it.
I think that sex is just much groovier when there is love.
There's a lot more happening...
but there's nothing wrong with just sex for sex.
I remember Eric Burdon saying about...
the difference between the way...
I smashed up a guitar, played a guitar, ate a guitar, or set fire to a guitar...
and Jimi Hendrix was that...
with Jimi Hendrix it was erotic, and with me it was rage.
If you always go to a movie, and there's a little screen...
and then all of a sudden they give you Cinemascope...
and that was the music of Jimi Hendrix.
Even on blues changes, his music was very wide.
When I feel like playing with my teeth, I do it 'cause I feel like it.
When I'm on stage, I'm a complete natural...
more so than talking to a group of people or something.
Jimi Hendrix...
had this kind of role of exorcist. He put Vietnam into that amplifier.
He's the great instrumental genius of rock 'n' roll.
There wasn't necessarily just one way that the world was gonna be...
whether it was spiritual power, emotional power, sexual power, or physical power.
Hendrix, all people who just came in and knocked all those doors down.
His guitar-playing spoke of some deep ecstasy that could be had.
Around '66, it was more of the psychedelic.
People would get more experimental...
like Hendrix and the Doors.
I thought it was very dark music when I heard it.
I thought it was kind of mysterious and dark.
I didn't know what to make of it.
I thought the words were really good.
You could tell right away that we got a writer here.
Jim Morrison was a post-Beat writer.
He was absolutely influenced by Kerouac, Ginsberg:
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac.
We tried to find that freedom in art, poetry, and music...
whereas the Beats were all into literature and poetry and jazz.
We tried to combine poetry and music, poetry and rock 'n' roll.
The creation of the Doors, it happened to be in California.
But obviously what was going on was...
a psychedelic revolution was happening in all of the major cities...
and then into the minor small-town college towns all across America.
It was happening in New York and Chicago and San Francisco...
and Seattle and Portland.
I was a perfect age...
to get the full effect of psychedelia.
I was, like, 16 years old, watching Jimi Hendrix play...
and going to Hyde Park to see The Rolling Stones...
and listening to all the American psychedelic bands...
the sort of San Franciscans, sort of odd bunch...
but also the Velvet Underground and the Doors.
The psychedelic craze was in.
We wanted to go against the grain...
as far as the flavor of music at that time.
We turned it back and went more blues...
and more roots music-oriented.
So when we played for Bill Graham at Fillmore East...
that was one of our requests, to turn the light show way down...
if not completely off.
Bob Dylan got us to Woodstock.
We played with Bob for some shows through the United States and Canada.
We followed Bob up to the country...
and started getting together in the afternoons...
and tried to come up with tunes.
Bob and Richard used to have a typewriter...
that sat on the coffee table there in the living room...
and the two of them would go by and type little notes to each other...
and one would read what the other one wrote...
put a couple lines in under that.
A lot of times, by the end of the day...
we'd have a couple or three pages out of that.
Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll...
those are the things that they're using to sell rock 'n' roll...
which seems a damn shame, when you get down to it.
The music is certainly capable of doing that on its own.
The Stones eroticized it.
Made it wild, made it dangerous...
made it revolutionary, made it druggy.
The Beatles were taking drugs but nobody knew.
You only knew if you hung out with them.
But the Stones took drugs in public, on stage.
Yeah, my buddy, old Lucifer.
It went like this.
Maybe we are, I don't know.
It was a lark. Five guitar players.
We're gonna overthrow the country...
and they start to treat us like revolutionaries.
Christ, just smoking a little dope, you know.
And then you got half of Scotland Yard working full time on you.
Surely you've got better things to do, boy.
Keith did his homework very carefully.
Jagger did his homework carefully.
He'd seen Tina Turner. He'd seen Little Richard.
He learned from the best.
Most great artists watch the best person out there...
and they emulate that person...
and then after a while, it grows into their own particular style.
This little break kind of sexually charged the whole thing, really.
I'm just the same as a stripper.
I go out and do the same thing: Bumps and grinds to music...
and take off lots of my clothes.
There's not really much difference between stripping and being a rock singer.
America was a fairyland, and all the best music came from there...
and they had the best cars, and the chicks looked better.
So it was like throwing a load of demons into heaven...
and letting them loose.
The television is boring me.
Let's make sure there ain't nobody there.
Okay, just tell us when.
Okay, now.
I've done worse, I've done far more.
The Beatles and the Stones, obviously.
Cream came over with real challenging musical landscapes...
and pushing what the Beatles opened up...
beyond the three-chord, four-chord kind of songs...
making anything possible.
Cream: Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton. Great group.
One night, Jerry and I went into the Winterland...
and I thought, '"This is the best band in the world. '"
I said, "Is this the best band in the world?" He said, "Tonight, they are. "
Cream, The Who, Jimi Hendrix...
but today, you don't have a handful of bands...
that are so unique in their own right.
Jamming was very important.
This was the residue of Jimi Hendrix and Cream.
That approach involved much more virtuosity as an instrumentalist.
Less emphasis on song structures...
and simple pop structures and things like that...
and much more emphasis on prowess as a musician.
Time when Cream came out, and we were in school...
and we heard the song Spoonful.
So okay, we could figure that two-note riff:
So we could figure that far, and then Clapton just goes:
For me, I went:
"We'll never get that. "
At the time that I started playing...
most guitar players were trying...
to follow other white players.
I was much more racial about it. I wanted to be like a Black guitar player.
Ginger Baker was scary back then, he was so good.
For three pieces, I'd never heard three pieces that were better.
Ginger Baker, Keith Moon.
Keith Moon's another drummer that everybody overlooks.
He was an incredible drummer.
Keith, what's your opinion of your public image?
I think it varies with every record I put out.
I think, sometimes... Could you get on with it?
Will you keep it together?
No, I think I'm very reliant on my management...
and my public relations people.
Everybody's trying to be unique and innovative...
but few really achieve that.
Like, the Beatles had a distinct sound. The Stones had a distinct sound.
When you hear them, you know it's them. The Grateful Dead, The Who.
When you start smashing your guitar on a stage in Germany...
it happened in parts of the States...
a policeman would walk on the stage, put a gun to my head, and say:
"Stop, or I'll shoot you. "
And I would kind of look at him and go:
"Hold on a minute. This is a guitar, not a human being, remember?"
It became hugely important because it was actually perceived to be...
a social statement...
to attack the country in which we'd grown up.
We say, we love our country, but it's decaying. It's going.
There's a new world ahead of us.
Rock 'n' roll was the beginning of the brand new world...
in terms of a generation...
bringing on its own consciousness through music...
to other generations.
Looking out at Woodstock...
something I expected should and did happen.
That was our national celebration...
of multicultural community.
Woodstock was the top of the mountain, the plateau.
We got up there. We were now able to walk across.
We had actually reached a point in time and place...
which could never be erased from the history of the world.
It's really amazing.
It's like some kind of Biblical, epochal...
unbelievable scene.
Suddenly the whole world was indeed watching us...
and we had a chance to show the world what it would be like...
to pull ourselves up by our collective bootstraps...
and let them see how it would be if we ran the show.
I remember being up in a helicopter with the state cops.
One cop said to the other, "Those hippies are smoking dope there. "
And the other said, "I ain't gonna do anything about it. Are you?"
The other one said...
We were just flying in and I suddenly realized:
We could do anything we want.
There's just more of us than them.
There were many messages that we wanted to convey to people...
about civil rights, about pacifism.
But there seemed to be no entry to mass media at all...
and along came the Beatles and The Rolling Stones...
and suddenly we all snapped.
These messages can be put in the form of rock 'n' roll.
We were the rock 'n' rollers who became those radical...
or radicalized kids of the '60s.
Woodstock was not sex, drugs, and rock 'n'roll.
It was civil rights. It was Vietnam War. It was youth power.
It was the nation coming together.
It started in the '50s as part of the Civil Rights Movement.
In other words...
the gains that were made for most Americans...
were not made for all Americans.
How are we gonna tell people in Vietnam how to live...
if we can't treat our own people right over here?
And what about sending people there who are too young to vote on it?
Why is it somebody could go over and get shot for their country...
and can't go and have a beer for their country?
You want a 15-year-old girl sleeping in the field in a tent?
Are you out of your mind? Never should have happened.
You feel bad about the kids who were killed in Vietnam?
- This has nothing to do... - It's the same thing.
Nothing to do with it. There's no comparison.
People got more excited about the kids in Monticello than they do about...
It never should've happened.
Unlike a lot of protest, antiwar songs...
of that whole entire decade...
Fixin' To Die Rag was embraced...
by military personnel in Vietnam, much to my surprise.
You see how they function on their own.
Without cops, without guns, without clubs, without hassles.
Everybody pools together and everybody helps each other. It works.
It's been working since we got here. And it's gonna continue working.
When they go back to the city, this thing is happening.
It proves that it can happen.
Janice Joplin said it best when she was on stage, she said:
"If you have any food left, share it with your brother and your sister.
"And that's the person on your right and the person on your left. "
One of the things that began to happen with the Be-In, with Woodstock...
was a kind of verification...
that there were substantial numbers of people...
interested in new ways of living and a new culture...
and sometimes getting them all together in a big group...
where you can see each other, is the best way to support them.
Jamming is playing hooky. It's really that simple.
When I was in the Mission High School, I played a lot of hooky.
We didn't know what the hell a bridge was or a chorus was or a verse was.
We couldn't care less. We just wanted to play what we heard.
If you stay in your heart, you will always be inspired...
and if you're inspired, you will always be enthusiastic.
There is nothing more contagious on this planet than enthusiasm.
The songs become incidental. What people receive is your joy.
If you wanna grab somebody from their lapels...
and you wanna make them, like, "listen to me," you go...
You're hitting two notes at the same time instead of...
Sounds tame, but if you go...
You have to have real deep convictions before you hit that note.
Most of the time, people go, "Damn!"
Because whether it's Ry Cooder or whoever...
they hit one note...
every hair on your body's going to stand up.
And you feel like you just made love or you just touched God's feet...
or both at the same time, you know.
That's when music is really good.
That's what I learned from Coltrane, Bob Marley, and Jimi Hendrix...
is that music is a complete ocean.
Music is the whole thing, man.
It's an expression of the younger generation.
We have the power, we have the tolerance...
we can go in front of the television camera...
we can go on the air and we can say with definition...
that Hitler was wrong, that people who hate Negroes are wrong.
We can get up there and shout it to the world.
When rock 'n' roll came along, it gave power to the kids on the street.
It gave them something to do.
It gave them a feeling that there was something that was theirs...
that was not a part of their parents' world, and it was beloved because of that.
I was hanging out with Stephen. They had thrown me out of the Byrds.
I was singing harmony with him because he had great songs.
We dragged Nash off someplace and sang with him.
It was an astounding thing, what he did.
How do he do that?
We knew what we wanted to do then.
You got to understand.
Here's three guys that had been and had bad relationships in bands.
David was thrown out of the Byrds. The Buffalo Springfield had broken up.
The Hollies were less than desired by me.
We didn't want to be in a band again, ever.
And we realized that we would have to be in a band...
because we wanted this sound. We wanted to do it.
That's all we wanted to do.
How was the festival in general? Would you consider it a success?
It was incredible.
It was probably the strangest thing that's ever happened in the world.
I still have my mud.
About two nights ago, that place up there was the second biggest city in New York.
People would begin to follow the festivals not so much for the tunes...
but to get together and create these instant cities...
to do this life support, to figure out the food, the garbage...
the whole deal, and to live this...
positive, creative anarchy...
that I think eventually began to terrify the powers that be.
Well, all I can say, I dug it. It was a good festival.
I've been to four festivals now...
and it's about the second best one I've been to.
My favorite was Kickapoo.
It was the worst drug orgy that was ever held in the United States.
This wasn't just camping out...
like sportsmen do...
or even outdoor enthusiasts. This was wallowing.
You bathe like this often?
I just... No this is the first time since I've been here.
Do you feel the festival had some motivation...
in the fact that you're bathing nude?
Definitely. I wouldn't be bathing nude if other people weren't bathing nude, too.
It's in the spirit of the whole festival.
You know, people sharing the water.
We had this incredibly tight harmony sound...
and where was room for somebody else here?
He was just so musical and so good...
that we thought, maybe cramming four...
into a space that's only big enough for three will be explosive.
Neil was something else. What a piece of work he was.
Neil was sharing a room with a gerbil.
Actually, two bush babies.
He was. Harriet and Speedy.
In the Caravan Lodge motel in San Francisco.
You'd walk in and these things would ricochet past your face.
They'd go...
- He'd say, "Don't let them out!" - I'm not kidding.
- Insane.
Harriet and Speedy, the bush babies.
Of course, Neil is the guy with 300 chickens in his basement...
because he'd been given a present of two chickens and couldn't kill them.
Neil has had an incredible career.
The godfather of grunge and all that, whatever they're calling him now.
I was into the rock 'n' roll and the whole hippie concept.
To me, it ended with Woodstock...
and a lot of people thought it was just beginning...
but my interpretation was you're going to have some jive in it.
It used to be '"Share this, share that. '"
That had its own kind of protection...
'cause it was all done, weird as it sounds, out of love, whatever they was doing.
There was a moment there where there was a vision.
There was a very clear, wonderful vision...
but it had to do with everybody acting in good faith.
It had to do with everybody behaving right.
Okay. Everybody knows there's something funny going on.
Your money in your pocket!
- Want to make more money, you prick? - Turn it up!
Man, you got your money! Come on! Let them in!
You're in the revolution, man. Let them in!
The question of kids now wanting everything to be free is hard to handle...
because it's hard to talk to those kids.
- Even you? - Even me, what? Hard to talk?
- Yeah. - Of course. Because...
to them, I represent, among other things, somebody who has money...
and that makes them angry.
The Isle of Wight Festival was the "hate the performer" festival.
It was bigger than Woodstock, and it was international.
It was surrounded by a galvanized fence which went all the way around it.
The audience was rough and unruly...
and they booed and hissed and yelled, "You sold out.
'"The music belongs to the people.
'"Let's bring the walls down.
'"We're sitting here in our own shit and you're back there in your Rolls Royce. '"
None of this capitalist shit! Open the door.
The music isn't revolutionary at all.
It's called big business.
It's a big business trip, that's all.
And if you've come to this country...
at our invitation...
and we have to charge you, through no choice of our own...
$3, right?
If you don't wanna pay it, don't fucking well come!
Listen a minute, will you?
Will you listen a minute?
Now, listen. A lot of people who get up here and sing...
I know it's fun, you know.
It's fun for me. I get my feelings off through my music.
But listen, you got your life wrapped up in it...
and it's very difficult to come out here and lay something down when people...
I think that you're acting like tourists, man.
Give us some respect.
I believe this is my festival!
- Lf I was allowed to go onstage... - Listen to me.
...we may have discovered I'm one of the most coherent people around...
Settle down.
...coming to talk to an old friend of mine, Joni Mitchell.
"We are stardust We are golden
"We've got to get ourselves Back to the Garden"
It was really a moment, it was like a breath there for a moment.
It was like an open door, it was like, "Look!"
Then, bam, it slammed shut again immediately.
Whereas I was a ham on a small scale and I liked the small clubs...
the bigger the stage got, the more isolated you were.
I'd been in the street too long, going anywhere I wanted to by myself...
too long to give it up, you know.
So the idea of being protected and sheltered...
it was excruciatingly depressing to me, the change.
I had no designs to be a star.
Nobody wants to be in the center of the spotlight.
Not in your life.
Maybe in your work, but not in your life.
You read about yourself in the papers...
and people that you're supposed to have slept with...
hotels that you're supposed to have burned to the ground...
and at first, you feel kind of violated, and then you realize...
"Hell, this character is much more interesting than I am.
"I should run with it. "
This whole success thing...
it hasn't yet really compromised...
the position that I took a long time ago in Texas, that was...
to be true to myself, to be the person...
that was on the inside of me, and not play games.
That's what I'm trying to do, mostly...
in the whole world, is to not bullshit myself.
Janis was the money magnet, and I know because I spoke to her.
I knew the pressures that she was under to be a salable commodity...
and part of that commodity was what killed her...
because it had to be this tougher, boozy...
two-fisted broad who always went home alone.
And she was a lonely girl.
She had a problem of getting off-stage...
and unplugging from the business.
So she began using downers and alcohol...
to deal with her loneliness.
She was without the community and without her friends...
and with strangers, essentially.
Passing around this Dutch counterpart to Southern Comfort...
everybody held the last swallow and simultaneously spat into the fire.
There was this blast of light...
and I heard this cackle coming through the smoke flaps...
and I think that was Janis saying goodbye.
It's an absolute tragedy. He was a brilliant poet.
John, Robby, and I loved him like he was our brother.
All four of us were brothers.
We were conquering the universe together.
We were bringing a message of love...
and strangeness to the universe.
He's gone, and it's a real tragedy for me...
a real sadness.
When people talk to me about Keith Moon, you know, the fans...
they have no conception...
of how much I hate him for killing himself.
I love him, but I'm so angry with him for wasting his life.
That's why a lot of people died...
because a whole lot of us, having been so disappointed...
in what life turned out supposedly to be, just turned our backs on it...
and went looking at the other agenda...
the unapproved agendas.
Some killed people, as in any exploration. We had nothing to explore but ourselves.
With the mass acceptance comes a tremendous fear of subversion...
either from the outside or from the inside...
and virtually all rock musicians...
came from the outside of society in some fashion.
All of a sudden, you're the big insider.
Anybody can protest...
and anybody can write beautiful songs and all that.
If you have a talent or if people are noticing you enough...
then you should really try to do as much as you possibly can with it.
Like, what we're going to do now is chop down the words...
and try to make it really tight...
and what we're saying is not protesting but giving the answers...
or some kind of solution...
instead of going towards the negative.
Jimi was quite an interesting man...
completely different than his public image.
He was supposed to be this wild man, when in fact he was very gentle...
very introspective, very bright man.
One of the greatest musicians I'll ever have the pleasure of knowing.
Our last gig together was the Isle of Wight right before he died...
which I had a big conversation with him then, too...
about the problems he was having in the business then...
and I was saying, '"Don't worry about it. It's no big deal.
'"We'll get together. We'll talk about it. I'll be in London. '"
And he never showed up.
Jimi was a great guitar player. I thought he was the best.
I thought he had a really original act, and that's all, man.
I don't know nothing about his business, whether he was a casualty.
I wish he was still here.
Thank you very much and good night.
I'd like to say peace.
Yeah, and happiness.
How well would Hendrix be playing by now?
What would Janis be singing like by now?
We're talking major stuff here.
Genius that got dropped on the floor...
and ground into the dirt.
Look at my life. Look at my generation. How did that work?
Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon...
the list is endless. They're dead people. My life is full of dead people.
My friends are dead. My friends!
They might be your fucking icons, they're my fucking friends!
They're dead.
Janis and Jimi didn't have a family, nothing to go home to...
a family, a group that could really tell them what's really going on.
Here's what you really look like, not what you think you look like.
If you look at the Dead and The Band...
there's two examples.
They're still together and we're not.
'Cause they ended up keeping their own counsel...
and they ended up keeping their family together.
In the last three years, I think...
the Grateful Dead have been the largest-grossing live act in the world.
Amazing.
It's more fulfilling to be a person than a personality.
Most personalities that I've seen...
limousines and suites...
You know, that stuff cannot hug you.
We were right about civil rights.
We were right in that love is better than hate.
We were right in that peace is better than war.
We, it turns out...
weren't right about drugs.
Free sexuality was an interesting experiment...
that failed.
But when I think about the '60s, I think of the antiwar movement...
the Civil Rights Movement, the women's movement.
I call it the "under-the-counter culture"...
and the thing is that we're coming out from under the counter.
There's a buzz going on these days called new volunteerism...
where people are feeling...
they get to the bottom of their second BMW...
and they find it wanting.
That was the point of rock 'n' roll...
to become a new tribe, to bring America...
into a cleaner, purer realm of existence.
You were raising your flag...
and you were screaming aloud and together.
We thought there were millions.
There were only hundreds or maybe thousands of us.
But you can't stop a good idea or a feeling...
and that's what we had.
For, like, two weeks in the middle of 1967 summer...
it was perfect.
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