June 27, 1990 interview with Jerry Garcia (& Bear)
(transcript by Speechpad)
June 27th, 1990.
HR: …in case gremlins erase the tape. I’ll just try to remember it. I usually try to check quotes with people just to make sure things work out, so I will try to check any quotes through Jon for you.
JG: Excellent. He’s good for that.
HR: I thought you had seen the VPL one.
JG: No I haven’t. I am still waiting to see it. It is just one of those things that just hasn’t happened.
HR: I was motivated to call you because I ran into a fellow who I know who is involved in this, named Mike Miller. He ran into you at a party and that you were very interested in it.
JG: Yes very much, yeah.
HR: So back to what I was writing there, how can we shed some light on this issue?
JG: Well I think the real problem is going to be the thing of avoiding making it look like too much fun. I mean, there is already some crackling around the edges, I’ve heard, of people that are afraid that the whole notion is going to be treated kind of like a drug. And there will be certain limitations, possibly, or possibly legislation or something. That’s the whole thing. That is where this gets really interesting, I think. The whole idea, the virtual reality idea, if you progress it far enough, starts to transcend things like language. It is going to take experience beyond intellect, on some levels. Do you know what I mean?
HR: Yes.
JG: The thing of being able to share somebody’s reality, which has so far been a matter of what communication is about, you know. Now it has gotten a whole new leg. It has gotten a thing of being able to actually step in somebody’s reality and walk through it like they do, experience it the way they do, specifically. The implications, to me, are immense. I mean, how far can it go? If you go into a complete, like a cyberspace model of some type, in which… you know the discussion about the mind and the interaction between the mind and the universe as a holographic phenomenon.
HR: Yes.
JG: That sort of Marilyn, what’s her name’s, you know?
HR: Ferguson.
JG: Marilyn Ferguson’s been sort of monitoring that discussion on the Brain News and stuff. I remember where the headline was, “Is primary reality a numerical realm?” or something like that. And the idea that for example, some hypothetical, technology is getting smaller like this, eventually there will be this thing that you put on that you would wear that would translate all of the material out here into some other kind of language possibly, other visual language, so that things would look the way you wanted them to. Reality would behave the way you wanted it to. Whether it did, whether it really did or not, sothe whole question of what is real and isn’t starts to get real mushy right there. If everybody is experiencing completely subjective realities based on their own temperament or whatever they want, you know. Including however far you wanted to take it. Now this, as far as, if you think of the drug experience as getting away from something or getting towards something, like getting away from something if you are a ghetto person.
HR: Yes.
JG: You know a nice soft experience like heroin, you know.
HR: Right.
JG: The objection there seems to be the idea of getting away, you know what I mean?
HR: Right.
JG: Like what is it all about? So, I see basic objection about going on with this virtual reality, if you take it apart… the whole thing is that it eliminates a lot of the need for all the other things that we put so much energy into all this time. Communication on every other level starts to be unnecessary. I mean, I’m a musician. I recognize that as a musician there is a certain chauvinism attached to it, which is the thing of, “I spent my time learning how to play. You didn’t spend time learning how to play, therefore, you are not a musician.” Well, in reality everybody has got musical thoughts. If you are able to overcome the part of it which is muscle training, which is what most musical playing actually is, performance actually is, is muscle training, and you are able to convert your ideas directly into music, you’re a musician, too. There could be, I mean how many Beethovens are there that just for lack of the training, the world doesn’t get exposed to.
HR: Right.
JG: That’s, that’s looking at it from my point of view. In other words, the whole idea of professional musician, we could lose that somewhere along the line, if this stuff pans out far enough, so that people would produce their own music and people would have music that would fit their subjective reality. They would have their own background music which they carry through with them through life. Adding to it, or subtracting from it, and so on.
HR: Yes. There are also performances in which the people who have the best muscle skills and musical history may be on the stage, but it’s not — like a Dead show is not like a usual sit-down performance; the audience does participate.
JG: They are involved, right. Well that involvement could get deeper and deeper, I mean like the performances in the future would be like an audience wired to somebody who was sort of instigating, and then moment-to-moment creation would be transmuted individually. I mean, the satisfaction of producing a work of art is the thing of getting off on it on some level. This again makes it so that the whole idea of it, well, for me the thing of being able to see notes and see musical landscapes is obvious, relatively obvious part of this experience. The thing of being able to sort of fly.
HR: So when you tried it out, that was sort of like what you extrapolated from this?
JG: Well, yeah, to me it was obvious. I mean, if you can create a reality that is entirely fictitious, it doesn’t owe anything to this stuff out here, but you interact with it on your own terms. I mean, if you took it to the point where finally you get, say, tactile feedback, so you were wired in in terms of the whole nervous system. The sensorium. You would have the ultimate art form. I mean, any painter would want it, any filmmaker would want access to it you know, any musician would want access to it. It would eliminate the need for the divisions between what we describe as the arts, converting the whole thing to experience.
HR: Yes.
JG: See. But that takes a lot of baggage along with it, and that means that there is a lot of stuff that you don’t need any more particularly. I mean, it’s revolutionary in a big, big way.
HR: Well that is where the threatening part is.
JG: That’s it. It’s because somewhere along there you are starting to bump into chaos now. As the lines between hearing and touch are blurred, you know. Now you are starting to get into this kind of chaos.
I remember in some kind of, part of that automatic writing kind of psychic literature stuff about Lemuria and ancient Egypt. There was something in there about the fall of the early magical, magically oriented societies, pre-Atlantean. Something about that they had control over form, and that there was just too great a variety of forms. You know, people were just becoming anything they wanted to, any animal or anything like that. Part of the process, part of the reaction to it was the desire to restrict the forms to the few forms that we are familiar with now. This stuff is all stuff that bubbles out of the subconscious of people. I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know. It doesn’t have any relation to real historicity, but it is part of the mythos you know. There is a metaphor in there somewhere about that thing of losing the, losing some sense of what the balance of reality are. You know, what your experience is. I think the basic threat of drugs, psychedelics specifically, is somewhere tied into that. And that this virtual reality stuff is the technological equivalent, really, of psychedelics. I can see that, I think that part of it is going to be the thing of being able to make this look like something else, you know. Just to avoid that kind of interference. Did you read Barlow’s thing about, he has just been handing it out, do you know John?
HR: I saw him last night in fact.
JG: Yeah. Did you read his thing about these people who are getting busted, the hackers that are getting busted?
HR: Yeah. I am involved with the Electronic Frontier Foundation which is what they have decided to call it.
JG: Well, you know all about it then.
HR: Yeah.
JG: Well that’s, that’s not even, I mean here we are not even talking about how the experiences, how it’s affecting consciousness, but just the idea that you can move around freely seems to be scaring the shit out of something, you know.
HR: Yes.
JG: Something. Some authoritarian, shadowy, you know, deal is out there.
HR: The world is restructuring, and all of the enemies that used to exist are kind of gone, so now they are looking out for new enemies.
JG: Absolutely.
HR: See technology used to be our friends. But now, nobody is quite so sure.
JG: Right, absolutely. Like all tools, it cuts both ways. It works for you, and it works against you. The guy that is working on the nanotechnology, discussion… his concept of cage technology I think is good. If you are going to develop beast technology, you want to start by having cage technology. You want to make the rules first, you know.
Bear: Keep the sucker from getting out and eating you alive.
JG: Absolutely right.
Bear: If you think about giving the government computers.
JG: Absolutely. Well that’s the nanotechnology that is the capacity for disaster there, is incredible. You know, I think that is an appropriate -
HR: It’s too late by the way, with virtual reality. You can’t put the genie back into the bottle.
JG: Yes you can’t go back.
Bear: Virtual reality might be able to give you a way of doing hands-on to construct ideas in a computer.
JG: Well that’s the whole, that’s what I think it was originally for in the simplest sense. My understanding was that it was originally an architectural aid, you know so you can build a building and walk through it before you have to actually put it up.
HR: Yes. There actually are buildings that existed in cyberspace before they built it.
JG: That way you can look around the corners and make sure the doors open correctly.
Bear: I have always wanted some way that you could make a surface in a computer, like you pick up a piece of clay and make sculpture. How to you make a surface in a computer without being able to put your hands on it?
JG: That is happening now with the hands, and now you’ve got the hands. So you reach into cyberspace and you grab some cyber stuff, build it up, and the computer will give you a 360 of it.
Bear: I love it.
JG: Yeah.
HR: The other possibility is that it’s the doorway to a singularity, in the sense that if you look at where have we been aiming all this time. You know, that section I sent you was from the beginning of the book, I am really saying that human beings were human beings anatomically for several hundred thousand years, wandering around, hunting and gathering. And then suddenly, at the same time they started painting in caves they started multiplying. This paleontologist that I quoted has the theory that the first art in caves were really psychedelic experiences, and the reason that they were is because the tribal encyclopedia, the amount of information that people needed to know in order to move to a new way of life, suddenly increased over that period of time.
JG: Right. Yeah. That’s right, yeah. That’s a good notion. The point is there is more information now then you can pass along comfortably in an oral tradition, say a strictly speaking culture. That is a problem.
Bear: Nobody is delineated, nobody is concentrated. There is a lot of extraneous stuff. Like for instance, the satellites that measure in the atmosphere, there is billions and billions and billions of bytes of data, only maybe 2% of which are actually useful. They don’t know what the rest are for, they don’t know what good they are.
HR: That’s right.
Bear: And anyway, who knows for sure how complex or how uncomplex the ancient people’s lives were.
JG: I don’t think there is any reason to assume they weren’t. If you at look at some of these cultures now, and there are still a few of them.
HR: No, that’s true, you see, but that is what I mean about the singularities. The entire human race faced a singularity when one small group discovered, ooh, technology. We can live a different way. Eventually, that spelled the death of the old way of life.
JG: Inevitably.
Bear: Well don’t you think the fact that this discovery came to a feudalistic society meant that it had a different impact then if it had come through society that was organized.
JG: Well technology is another blurry line though. Technology didn’t just go, clunk. It was this early disease, starting with a plow, I guess, or something like that, the first tool that made it so you could do more things. The first domesticated animal, or the first wheel.
HR: It turned from where you paid attention to from the outside in.
JG: Right.
HR: If you depend on where the chestnuts are going to be, and where the deer are, you have to be attuned to the outside world.
Bear: Which plants can cure which diseases, and which are going to, what is best for finding your stone heads for your knives.
JG: That kind of information you can hold up, I guess.
Bear: A lot of things. People learn a lot of things.
HR: Well that’s knowledge of how the world works. Technology is knowledge of how the universe works that enables you to change the world.
JG: Manipulate the world.
HR: There are these two strands, the Dionysian and the Appollonian, and in the same theater grew up from these folks who during the day were just ordinary citizens, and at night they would sneak off to the woods and party.
JG: And get crazy. Right.
HR: And they would party in these natural amphitheaters. And, when the Appollonian strain took over in Greece, they made them into theaters and the original dramas. Now of course like, you know fancy go to the opera and see drama and they regard them as high culture. And these, are really people for the most part who get uptighter. The idea that people you know might take their clothes off and dance in the street.
Man: Do you think psychedelics had a part of it?
JG: Absolutely. That is the Dionysian concept.
Bear: The Elysian mysteries, according to a conversation that I had with Albert Hofmann when I met him a couple of years ago, he said that the Elysians always drank a preparation made from grain. And so for a long time, people thought it was alcohol. More recent investigations is that it was not made from an ordinary grain, it was made from the seeds of the Paspalum grass.
JG: Do you guys know each other?
Bear: People call be bear. My name is Owsley Stanley.
HR: Oh yeah. I remember you.
Bear: He said that the Paspalum grass has a fungus that grows on it, Clavacepts fungus, this Clavaepts Paspalei. It is used mostly for the culture and cultivation of water-soluble alkaloids based on lysergic acid. It has a lot of ergotamine. It is the one that they make lysergic acid from, because it is easiest to cleave. Unlike ergotamine, which is only about 40% lysergic acid, this stuff is like 75 or 80%. And he said that one of the constituents of it, which was not discovered right in the beginning, was lysergic acid methylhydroxylamine, which he says is very, very similar to LSD in its effects. But doesn’t, the extraction and testing processes that they used, they used a lysergic acid amide. When it is prepared in the way in which they prepared that drink, it would have been the principal constituency. So in other words, they were drinking a drink that was very rich in an almost identical physiological substance to LSD.
HR: Well now, remember when Joseph Campbell did that talk with Mickey at the Palace of Fine Arts.
JG: Sure, I was there.
HR: They found this plate that had these kind of coded icons on it, and they went through it, and his version of it was that the initiate drunk this stuff that was maybe psychedelic. They went through these symbolic actions that had to do with death and life, life and death, the body is just the vehicle for something else. And then they reached the climax of it, they had a virtual reality device. They had this polished bowl, the curve of the bowl was such that if they held it in front of you and put a skull back here, you would see your image with a skull’s face right at the climax of the ceremony.
JG: Excellent.
HR: It’s sort of the same story.
JG: Yes it is. It definitely is. Yeah, right.
HR: So the question is OK, now two things are happening. Technological civilization has now dominated the earth to the point where there is a big question what is going to happen next.
JG: It’s a threat.
HR: It’s a threat. And it’s a challenge because if we are going to continue it has to be in some completely new way.
JG: Right. It’s a test.
HR: And we are given this portal…
JG: Well, that’s part of the test. Part of the test is, well I have always had this basic biological question in terms of evolution, if the drive to evolution is to like survive. An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.
HR: That’s right. All you have to do is mate.
JG: Yeah. The shark or anything. There are any number of things that survive great, and don’t need any kind of, so why bother going through all the trouble of evolving monkeys that don’t run very well or climb very fast or have particularly sharp teeth, but have big heads.
Bear: Big brains, right?
HR: Well of course Terence [McKenna] has this theory it was because the monkeys started eating mushrooms.
JG: Well that is an interesting theory. It could be true. You know, it could be true.
Bear: How did the dolphins and whales get such big brains? They obviously don’t need such big brains to catch fish.
JG: They don’t even need…
bear: Fingers, hands. But they have a brain that is actually bigger in proportion to their size than we do. They are very complex. They are thinkers.
JG: I am sure that they are thinkers, but they are also operating in three-dimensional space, and the navigational gears on board must be tremendous.
Bear: Well so is the bat. They would have similar complicated navigational gears.
JG: Brain weight to body weight is probably pretty similar.
HR: There is a fellow that wrote a book called The Throwing Madonna, in which he claims that the areas of the brain that have to do with speech are very connected with the same parallel processors that have to do with the kind of ballistic calculations you need to hit small game with a rock.
JG: Aha!
HR: So he says, back in the really early days, the men went out hunting, the women stayed home with the kids, and would hold the kid in one arm against the heart, so that’s the left, and with the right arm they would throw. And it turns out you cannot make that calculation in real time. You have to have an algorithm set up. So these brain mechanisms evolved in order to do that, and when they evolved, the thing is that where there is a useful capability it often adapts to places it wasn’t evolved for. Like dinosaurs grew feathers for heat regulation, but the ones that started flying started becoming birds. He said speech involves exactly the same kind of sequencing. As I’m talking to you, I am lining up all these railroads in a marshaling yard in my brain. Which ones I choose, how I move my tongue -
JG: Gotcha. So it’s a side-effect of being able to throw a rock and hit something.
HR: It’s interesting because computers were originally invented to do ballistic equations.
JG: Yeah, Right.
HR: So we are seeing this kind of tension between the Darwinian competition part of it and this gee, it really looks as if we are going towards something.
Bear: Computers were used for cryptography during World War Two.
JG: That, too. Well, cryptography is also a linguistic thing. Part of the same thing, problem solving.
HR: So it’s a language machine. Humans are language machines, computers are language machines, and this artificial reality is a …
JG: A hyper language in a way.
HR: Right.
JG: In a way, it is a hyper language based on experience.
HR: See, it is always frightening to the folks who are going to be left behind when they see new things popping up.
Bear: That is why you need to keep taking psychedelics. Keep your mind up. You know, your body gets old but your mind can always accept that. First time I ever took acid and got really high, as I was walking around I thought “Gee. The world looked like this when I was a little kid.” I remember seeing the sparkling reality and three-dimensionality of things. Sort of like a renewal, every time you do it is a renewal, it is a renewal. It keeps your head young. It lets you keep that being able to accept the new thing just as easily as a kid would. Most people get all this stuff in their head like an old library, no room for the new volume to go on the shelves.
HR: Well it part of the reality construction business. It’s that we are taught what reality is in all kinds of ways.
JG: Mostly by language. The names of stuff
Bear: You see the little guys in the corner of your room, your mother tells you they are not there.
JG: Right. Something like that, yeah.
Bear: But yet in all of the mystical — certainly, … reading Castaneda — all that stuff is there just isn’t part of your consensus, so you ignore it. It is an enhanced awareness that you were talking about.
HR: But there may be a jump on electronic LSD with virtual reality, and the problem just with saying LSD, enough time has gone by that there is no distinction between psychedelics and other drugs.
[SS]
HR: I don’t know if you saw Jon Carroll’s column the other day about Valium, benzodiazepam. For some reason, that’s not a drug. I mean Nancy Reagan probably takes Valium. It is the most, the worst…
Bear: It’s a serious drug. It’s bad, like reds [seconal].
HR: We have this big denial problem in our society.
JG: I’ll say.
HR: And when you, as you know, threaten someone in who is in denial, they will either cut you off or seek to destroy you.
JG: Absolutely.
HR: At the same time that there is this electronic LSD potential, there are actually anti-cancer drugs using this to [?] molecules. There are actual communication systems being built to enable eye surgeons to get inside the eye, and vascular surgeons to get inside the arteries. You could see a social reaction in which people would want to regulate this technology because they are threatened by it, and thereby cause a lot of harm. There are several scenarios that are happening at once. The other scenario is that the Japanese are going for this in a big way.
JG: Well of course. They have the cultural bias, maybe. The Japanese are hard to figure out.
HR: They count on that.
Bear: It is the way they write. It’s because they don’t write in alphabetic writing; they write in pictographs. So they never became visual, they stayed in the oral world, which is, everything is part of reality. Which means that they can accept any new technology — it’s not threatening to them, and they can still continue to maintain their traditional culture, even in the face of high technology.
JG: I know but the thing is, they also don’t seem have to any conscience about destroying stuff.
Bear: Well, I think that that is a matter of staying alive really. Like the fish in the sea and stuff.
JG: It’s odd that there is also a high level of appreciation of nature. There is the aesthetic side that really loves nature and beauty.
Bear: Nature and beauty and proportion.
HR: Well ,what the Japanese are, are the Americans of the 21st century. Essentially what is objectionable about them is what was objectionable about Americans when we had the ball. However, they are committed in a way that American technology is not.
JG: It never was.
HR: I have talked to people in Washington, and I have talked to people at big companies here. Every big company has some little guy who is an enthusiast off in the corner working on this. In Japan, it is integrated into their high-level strategy. They see it as a communication medium, because for them, just the words — and this is the problem that they have with Americans — just the words they say to you is not the complete message. Their facial expressions, their body language, there is a lot of context. Also, their written language doesn’t translate to keyboards well. So they have problem communicating with computers, so they really feel that what’s missing from telephones and computer interfaces is this ability to move around in three-space. So they are really spearheading this.
Bear: Also, they probably want a verbal interface for the computer much more than we do. It is what would really unlock computers for me.
JG: Well, I have got one. Yeah you have to train it to recognize your voice.
HR: So that works?
JG: Oh yeah. You go through all the files and the menus, and pull things down. I haven’t tried that, because I don’t have many word programs, and I am just getting into it. I have the headset and everything. The thing is that you have to train it to recognize your voice. That is the kind of funny part.
Bear: What I want is one you can just have a conversation like you would any other person.
HR: I don’t think that is going to happen in our lifetimes. I don’t ever, I think the one thing humans are is language wizards.
Bear: I think fuzzy logic is going to do it. Fuzzy logic will produce a computer that will even seem to have a personality. It will seem to have a character. It will be able to talk to you. It will be able to translate from one language to another instantaneously. You will be able to give it instructions. You will be able to tell it stories. If it doesn’t understand something, it will ask you…
HR: If such a computer ever exists, it probably won’t be designed; it will grow.
Bear: You can’t separate the two. I think it is a process rather than a method.
HR: The old approach to AI was lets design an intelligence, and they ran up against the problem that we don’t know what intelligence is. However, we can design things that learn, so you can grow an intelligence by creating an environment and creating things that just do it a million time faster than we do. So when I was at Fujitsu, who are planning to do artificial reality adventures, they showed me something called the neural drummer. The neural network is this kind of technology that is not an algorithm, it is a network that has weights on it, and you can adjust the weights so that it learns. You teach it through trials. They are trying to teach it to do what drummers do. A drummer will drum a riff, and then another drummer will drum a riff back that fits into it somehow. Not in a mathematically algorithmic way, but in a way that fits the guy’s taste. So a drummer will sit down with this machine, and drum a riff, and the drum machine will drum a couple of riffs back at it, and then the drummer will drum one that shows it more. After 50 of them, it seems like a human being. So what they want to do i,s they want to build these into their artificial reality systems, so that your artificial reality system learns how you perceive the world.
JG: Right. That’s part of that thing of transcending languages. Every person will have their own language.
Bear: There is no reason why something like that couldn’t become perfectly conversational…
JG: Absolutely.
Bear: It would seem to be a person when you talked to it.
JG: If you choose for it to seem that way, sure. It could seem whatever way you wanted it to seem.
Bear: That’s the kind of computer I want. I don’t like sitting at a keyboard.
JG: No, I am not a keyboard person. The mouse is better. I use it for mostly for graphics so even the mouse is a little bit…
Bear: It is like drawing with a cake of soap.
JG: That is a good metaphor for it. There is a new digitizing pad that works with a pencil like a stylus. The harder you press the wider the line is, so you can get a dynamic line which you were never able to get.
Bear: What’s that called?
JG: I don’t know. I saw it in a catalogue. I don’t even know. It may be glitchy to beat the band. I have tried a few pads, and they are a little weird.
Bear: It is hard for me to drawing with something that comes out with little jiggy jaggies.
JG: Well that also has to do with the resolution of what you are looking at. There is lots of things that have anti-aliasing now, so if the line is a little out of true, it doubles the line and kind of fuzzes it. It is much smoother. The graphics stuff is way better than it even was last year.
HR: Well that’s all moving really very fast. Since I started following the story about a year and a half, the first one I saw was at NASA and it just had wire-frame graphics, and I thought “Wow. This is great!” The next one was the one that you saw at Autodesk, and it’s got shaded polygons and colors, but they have a machine at the University of North Carolina where they have 250,000 separate CPUs, one for each pixel. Every picture element has its own computer. So you know Alvin Ray Smith is they guy at Pixar that is the computer graphics wizard, his statement is “reality is 80,000,000 polygons per second.” So the question is, are we going to reach a threshold? Like film is 24 frames a second; you reach that threshold, and and all of a sudden it’s a reality.
JG: 70 frames. Have you seen this stuff? Showscan, they call it. Doug Trumbull, well he discovered that the smallest discrete event you can perceive is 1/70 of a second. So they have a film stock and a camera that runs at 70 frames second, and I mean it has so much more information.
Bear: Because it doesn’t double show each frame then.
JG: No, it’s 70 frames per second. Everyone is different.
HR: So if 80,000,000 polygons per second is reality, what happens to you when you live in a world 160,000,000?
JG: Maybe it’s more than enough. Maybe you perceive more, or maybe you don’t.
Bear: Maybe it’s a little less fuzzy. It’s like the faster you can sample sound when you are digitizing it, the higher the frequency, the less phase ambiguity at the higher frequencies.
JG: Right. That’s the way it is with sound stuff. The information is there, you may not perceive it, but it does affect the lower orders. There are places where it just peaks out. It is like the color spectrum, it just simply goes beyond where you can perceive it any more but it is still going on. If you decide that the invisible continuation of the color spectrum is important to your sense of what reality is about, then you would want to extend it. Extend it as far as you could, as an aesthetic.
HR: Don’t you think that it gets beyond aesthetics?
JG: Then you are starting to get truly metaphysical. That amounts to fiddling with the fabric of reality.
Bear: It is like you can’t see a pistol bullet and you can’t see a M14 bullet. One is traveling at 800 feet per second, the other is traveling at 4000, where you get to the point that you can’t see it, that much faster than something you can’t see is not physiologically interesting to you.
JG: No, not necessarily. Right. Only insofar as one of them hits you before the other one.
Bear: You can’t see it. And how much faster is faster? It doesn’t matter.
JG: Well you know, there is also the harmonic stuff. Seeing sound, the high order stuff that’s not audible still affects how everything else behaves. There might be a visual metaphor for that somewhere.
HR: This thing about how much information is in the reality space that you are in.
JG: With sound, it crosses over into sensation. When it goes below 12 cycles, it starts to be something you feel rather than hear. I don’t know if there is a visual metaphor for that, except that in this universe the top end is light and the bottom end is real hard stuff. You know, that is another way of looking at it.
Bear: It’s all vibrations.
JG: It’s all vibration, right.
HR: You know back when there were light shows, there was this thing for people to sync into together. And the more people got synced into it, the more sync started happening. I guess it’s just the size of the venue, and traveling around and so forth that it doesn’t happen anymore. I don’t know why.
Bear: There are probably a couple reasons, but one of the reasons was that back in 1969, all of a sudden the light show guys who were paid enough money to keep themselves going, decided that they were as important as the bands. And led by a guy named Jerry Abrams, they held a strike.
HR: He did some of the best shows.
JG: He did do some of the best shows.
Bear: I know. But he struck us out at the Great Highway, the Family Dog out there. Part of the way through it, Ram Rod and I went out and talked to him and said, “People don’t come to the light show, they come to hear the band. We like having you there, it is like a part of this whole thing that has kind of grown up, and we will pay you a reasonable amount, but we can’t meet your demands there is just no way. What we will do is we will just go to theatrical lighting, and you guys will just be cut out. Break it off now and we will try to work it out.” He wouldn’t do it. That was the end of the light shows; there was virtually none after that.
JG: Like Bill Ham used to do a light show that was a light show where you went to the light show. You didn’t go see the band. The Light Sound Dimension — Jerry G____ and those other guys — played music for the light show, and you didn’t see the musicians. You went into a place that was real comfortable, and you sat on pillows and carpets, the room went absolutely black, and they had a really nice screen, and it was a real quality experience. But it was also one of those things where you had to extend yourself to some extent — it is not like going to a movie or a concert where something is coming out and getting you, you have to sort of go into it. I think, because light shows are sort of a meditative kind of experience, you know. It is not like a shock.
Bear: That shifted the focus away from standing there and watching the band like you would stand there and watch a play or watch an opera. Which was good in itself, because when we went to the theatrical setup the band became more of a central thing, and for the most part people stopped dancing as much.
JG: The whole thing changed.
HR: But that changed again.
JG: It keeps changing.
Bear: Now it is going back to where there is more dancing and people wandering around and interacting.
HR: I remember at the McCartney show, our little line of Deadheads stood up and danced, and everyone around us was tremendously uptight. Until Paul McCartney said, “Those of you who are out there dancing, here is a really good one to dance to.” And suddenly it became OK.
JG: That is probably an experience that he didn’t get enough of. He didn’t get to play for people dancing. I mean they had the people shrieking and screaming, and 14 year old girls when they were playing. He never really got to really get out there and play for dancing.
HR: But see, as opposed to a religious gathering that has a theology about the way the universe works, this is something that is reaching towards something. Everyone comes to it with the feeling that whatever is going to happen, I don’t know what it is.
JG: Right. That’s Right. That’s what makes it good.
HR: And that’s what this virtual reality gives us for all of reality.
JG: Oh yeah. Absolutely.
HR: So can you see a Grateful Dead concert 10 years from now taking place in cyberspace?
JG: Absolutely. Are you kidding? Sure. I think it is an ideal place for it. Part of the whole Grateful Dead thing is that there is no dogma, there isn’t anything about how the universe works, and people are free to hear it as they want, you know, they’re free to experience it as they want. And we don’t push it around.
HR: Right.
JG: It has some of that kind of… each person makes their own decision about what it is that is happening, whether they like it or don’t like it, whether they want to lend their energy to it or not or what, you know. It is an open-ended experience, and I think cyberspace is ideal for that. If anything, it requires more participation on the part of the observer, so that the uniqueness of their particular experience remains that way. Not only the event itself, with the Grateful Dead each show is unique, but further within that, each person’s experience with each show is unique.
Bear: It’s like a hot medium.
JG: In that definition I would put in in the hot side, not a cool medium. Like the Grateful Dead is hot. It is participatory. That’s part of why Joe Campbell liked us so much.
HR: He’s been going to regular concerts.
JG: He had no idea that there were people out there celebrating, that there was current magic.
Bear: It’s not quite as intense as it was. I was watching that film that Zane made, the old acid test film, where he was interviewing you where you said that what you liked about the acid test was that you could play or not play, you could be stoned or straight it didn’t matter, and if something happened that was all right, and anything that happened was all right.
JG: I mean at the Grateful Dead shows, we are required to play. But how we play is wide open. But whether we play or not, that is the only difference. At the Acid Test, sometimes we didn’t play.
Bear: You didn’t play?
JG: At Muir Beach, we played for about 5 minutes and then left.
Bear: You played long enough to really impress the living shit out of me, man.
JG: We played long enough, but we all came completely unglued. But the thing was that the option was there.
SIDE 2
HR: They would come and take us all away. Now it is 1990 and the world has gone back to normal, in a weird way. This weird little traveling circus.
JG: It is trying to pretend that it never happened. The wave is still on its way out. The wave from the ’60s is now banging into Eastern Europe. A lot of what is going on there, they owe that to the ’60s, and they even admit… people that would talk about it.
HR: Vaclav Havel: clearly an old acid head.
JG: That’s right. Absolutely.
HR: And they made great acid there.
Bear: Czechoslovakia where was where the stuff used to come from
JG: The very best.
Bear: Some of the early syntheses that were improvements were from Russians, as well as Czechs.
JG: That wave is still going out, it just took way longer than anybody expected. I mean, back when it was exploding on the streets it looked like it was going to take over the world in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, American society has gone completely into denial.
HR: Yes. Yes.
Bear: I don’t know that it is so much of a consensus, what’s going on. I think that there are a few people that are power manipulators that have gotten control of things.
JG: I don’t think it is a consensus at all, in fact I don’t think there is much support for it. It really is a kind of wire frame deal. The reality which is pretending be reality right now, impersonating reality, is just a pretty flimsy structure. There is not a lot of substance to it. You can’t find people who are actively involved of affected by it. What you see is a completely different world, what you see is the world of the homeless, and so forth. I mean the world that you can go walk outside and walk around the block. That’s reality. The reality that’s being talked about is something else entirely.
HR: Well also, there is the global teenager hypothesis, that what happened in the ’60s in America was that there was, the baby boom cohort grew up at the same time that television and popular music grew up, so that we had this carrier frequency that we all tuned into that gave us the feeling of a common culture, even though I was in Phoenix and someone was in Des Moines. That now we are getting the global cohort at the same time we have our first global communications. MTV is everywhere.
Bear: There is a 30 year resonance, too. Even that guy [Robbie Vocker??] talks about the 30 year resonance. The things that were happening 30 years ago are now very interesting to people, now very much in style again. There is some kind of 30 year resonance that goes through human culture and expresses itself in different ways. When I was down in Australia, everybody down there was saying it’s just like the ’60s. It seems like ’65 or ’66 or something like that. Which was kind of interesting, because it is really not quite like that, but there is a certain degree of whatever that openness was that we just heard about. It was like an essence in the culture. In some ways it was restrictive, everyone was real careful about not showing their pot to the man and all that sort of thing, but at the same time a lot of things were open. There weren’t many controls on drugs. We didn’t have thought police like we have now.
JG: Things were open. They certainly weren’t looking out for you to be weird. And if you were weird, you were only weird. You were only acting weird, you weren’t necessarily taking drugs. That was the thing. That was part of how we were able to get around and be so weird.
Bear: So it’s like theater to me?
JG: Yeah. It didn’t look like something else. Yeah it looked like theater if it looked like anything.
HR: Well, this of course is technology. Technology is always — Americans love technology, like jet planes and hot rods and televisions. It’s a real conflict between the denial of, “gee this is going to break people out of their regular frames,” and “gee it’s a new technology I have got to have it.”
JG: People will love it. It’s like video games.
HR: See ya, nice to meet you.
Bear: I hope I didn’t interfere too much in your conversation. My ear kind of drug me in. Nice to meet you.
HR: Nice to meet you, too. Well, this stuff can go on and on. I got into… that stuff that I showed you confronts the question of what’s this electronic LSD stuff without writing a book about denial in America. So, that quote of yours, I flt needed to be put into a larger context.
JG: My feeling is that it would be a good idea to not talk about it in that context anymore because it is like calling attention to it, “hey look this is the next thing to bust. This is the next thing to look into.” It would be nice to not let them govern, or govern us on an electronic level. One of the things that’s attractive about cyberspace is that it can be construed as no threat. If you see it through the video game keyhole, the amusement keyhole, the entertainment keyhole, it is no threat. If you see it through the LSD keyhole, the consciousness-expanding keyhole, it’s like electronic drugs: it is a threat.
HR: Well that’s the keyhole that the popular press has watched. They have not been able to avoid it so far. Including the Wall Street Journal.
JG: It’s a little too obvious, I’m afraid.
HR: My mission is to try to get a lot more global view, and this is part of it. Sex at a distance is part of it. I don’t know if I sent that to you too, the teledildonics piece. OK I’ll send that along.
JG: That sounds fascinating.
HR: The idea is that you would put on a body suit, like a body stocking or something, and plug in. Your partner is plugged in somewhere else, with this high bandwidth communication. The mistake most people make is thinking, “gee you are having sex with a machine.” No, you are having sex with another person, but it is mediated by a machine.
JG: That’s interesting.
HR: So you see this representation if three-space, and that representation could look like anything your partner wants it to look like, or anything that you want it to look like. You reach out and touch it with your virtual hand, and the sensors and the actuators in your partner’s body suit will transmit that feeling of touch, so they will feel your hand. So what is it about sex? Is it the sensations, or is it the meanings and the communication game that’s tied into that.
JG: Yeah. Well it is the whole package probably.
HR: Well you know, people who have phone sex can put these symbolic tokens through a line and unpack them and create a whole experience.
JG: That’s right. An awful lot of it is in the mind, you know? Most of it, probably.
HR: Now this is an appalling idea to a lot of people. We’ve got a planet in which we don’t want to have everybody having sex, and most people are lonely anyway.
JG: That’s right. Really lonely.
HR: There is sort of a continuing problem of putting a moral template on the future that is based on the morality of today.
JG: That’s the problem. That’s precisely the problem with the moral template. First of all, who is evolving the moral template, and then where are they evolving it from? I think part of what has to happen, somewhere, pretty soon, is that a human template has to come up. We have to start with, OK let’s throw out all this other stuff, everything we have thought about it before, throw out all our models, and start with a human. What is a human?
HR: That is the ultimate question.
JG: Because you can’t make rules regarding the moral behavior of something unless you know what the hell it is, and what it’s capacities are. What it can do, what it can’t do. I think the Muslim religious is a little too tight. It doesn’t fit humans. Humans can’t possibly fit into it, so there are a lot of really unhappy people, terribly repressed. It is a religion that works against you because the template don’t fit. It’s not human, you know. What we need is something, a definition of a human, starting from the ground up, so that the suitable moral structure that goes around it makes sense. The context has to come from the human first, rather than bits and pieces of fragments of old religion and all of the old moral superstructure, whatever it used to be. I mean we are experiencing a real confusion here in the United States, you know. Why is it OK to drink, but it’s not OK to take drugs? Blah, blah, blah. What’s a crime? What’s criminality? What can you do, what can’t you do, and so forth. All these things are really confusing. A lot of it is really contradictory; it doesn’t really make sense. Rather than ending up with more law than anybody can ever deal with, something so cumbersome, the brush needs to be cleared away and a whole new structure needs to be set up there somehow. I think, anyway. I think that is one of the problems that is making things so weird.
HR: Well, one of the things we know now that we didn’t know then, is that revolutions are very painful to a lot of people. And that at the stage that we have evolved to now, a revolution would be extremely painful.
JG: Real painful.
HR: We don’t have a revolution, and we don’t have the time for evolution, where does it come from? It must come from some kind of shared experience that everybody agrees with.
JG: That’s it. That’s got to be it.
HR: So here what we are talking about with this evolution that goes back to the caves, is well, how the heck do you get everyone to share an experience?
JG: You have to try to recreate an objective experience, first of all. I think you have to start there. The Gurdjieffian definition of objective art — the notion that there is some art that says the same thing to everybody. WE need something like that. What that is, I don’t know. But virtual reality may be the key to it.
HR: Yes. Maybe there is no objective experience, but there is a certain way of interacting with all the subjective experiences.
JG: That’s right. There is a consensual agreement to something that is relatively comfortable. Like the template, the moral template, we are going to feel every human, every Eskimo, everybody, every culture can fit into this template regardless of what they believe, or what they think about themselves, or how their languages are constructed, or what the quality of their life is like. Something along those lines.
HR: Isn’t music related to that?
JG: Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural. Western ears have a hard time hearing anything that isn’t in four-four time. A lot of cultures experience music in five-eight, for example, five-four. If you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects. In that sense most musicians, regardless of what culture they come from, can get together and agree on some stuff about music. As there is going to be a common ground. And I think that’s true: music is a universal language insofar as you don’t need to know anything else about a musician that you are playing with other than that they can play music. It doesn’t matter what their music is, you can find something that you can play together, with what their culture is. The dialect part of it comes into play, but nothing like the differentiation that language sets up, for example. In the last 100 years since the invention of sound reproduction, music has really taken off and it is much more a common language because of records and transportation.
HR: Yes. Now we are beginning to hear about world music.
JG: Absolutely. Now there is no place you can go where you don’t hear certain types of music. When we first went to Egypt, it didn’t matter how small the village was, there was somebody there playing disco music, which was big at that time. That was the first surprise, you know. Well, the first surprise was the technology; I mean, Walkmans were everywhere.
HR: The metaphor I always use is, I don’t know if he still does it, but Ali Akbar Khan. Go to one of his concerts 20 years ago, and he would spend 20 minutes tuning up his instruments. It always seemed to me it shouldn’t take that long to tune your instruments.
JG: No, but he’s tuning the audience, too.
HR: Yes. He is tuning the audience.
JG: Absolutely.
HR: So what, every time you play a concert you and Bobby get space. Every time for the last 25 years, you get up on stage for 25 minutes, you reach out there.
JG: Well we want to maintain some area that is absolutely unstructured. Absolutely and totally unstructured.
HR: This is my interpretation of it, is that you have this kind of carrier wave that you continue to put out there, and the more sensitive you get to it being unstructured and you don’t know what it is, the more attuned it is to something in the air.
JG: Well it finds structure. It finds expression, you know. If we’re lucky. If not, this is one of those totally subjective kinds of experience — there are times when you are really clicking into something here, you know, but you definitely have to be alert in a certain way.
HR: Yes.
JG: You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.
HR: So everyone around the earth, maybe, is going to have this little console that can switch them into somewhere.
JG: It will be the free channel. The consensus channel on video, or cable TV or whatever.
HR: So there might be where we find out what humans are for.
JG: Yeah. It may take that to do it, yeah. That’s exactly right. I can visualize something like that, where it’s the input channel as well as the output channel. Where you take from it, and give to it, and take from it at the same time. Like a free, two-way kind of deal. And it would constantly making decisions microsecond to microsecond. You know, switching around and doing stuff of its own, so you would enter yet another random element in there, and then see what comes through the spaces. My feeling is that there is a coherence there but it’s not recognizable through normal frameworks, so you need a hyper normal framework. You need to jump to hyper-normalcy. [laughs]
HR: Well there are always a few people who are hyper-normal.
JG: Absolutely. That is exactly right. I think everybody experiences them here and there, we just don’t have good language for speaking about them really.
HR: That’s right. But that’s what a lot of the symbiotic soup that Deadhead culture has, is that there is a lot of language people are using to refer to things.
JG: That’s right. It’s being invented. That’s right, and Deadheads are inventing it pretty well.
HR: What’s interesting thought is how similar it is to what Campbell was talking about, with his very symbols. Well I could go on and on, but I only asked for about an hour, and I have taken about an hour, and I really appreciate it.
JG: Yeah, my pleasure. Totally enjoyed it.
HR: Thanks a lot.
