Bob Dylan's Statement on Johnny Cash (2003)

I was asked to give a statement on Johnny's passing and thought about writing a piece instead called "Cash Is King," because that is the way I really feel. In plain terms, Johnny was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him -- the greatest of the greats then and now. I first met him in '62 or '63 and saw him a lot in those years. Not so much recently, but in some kind of way he was with me more than people I see every day.

There wasn't much music media in the early Sixties, and Sing Out! was the magazine covering all things folk in character. The editors had published a letter chastising me for the direction my music was going. Johnny wrote the magazine back an open letter telling the editors to shut up and let me sing, that I knew what I was doing. This was before I had ever met him, and the letter meant the world to me. I've kept the magazine to this day.

Of course, I knew of him before he ever heard of me. In '55 or '56, "I Walk the Line" played all summer on the radio, and it was different than anything else you had ever heard. The record sounded like a voice from the middle of the earth. It was so powerful and moving. It was profound, and so was the tone of it, every line; deep and rich, awesome and mysterious all at once. "I Walk the Line" had a monumental presence and a certain type of majesty that was humbling. Even a simple line like "I find it very, very easy to be true" can take your measure. We can remember that and see how far we fall short of it.

Johnny wrote thousands of lines like that. Truly he is what the land and country is all about, the heart and soul of it personified and what it means to be here; and he said it all in plain English. I think we can have recollections of him, but we can't define him any more than we can define a fountain of truth, light and beauty. If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black. Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul. This is a miraculous and humbling thing. Listen to him, and he always brings you to your senses. He rises high above all, and he'll never die or be forgotten, even by persons not born yet -- especially those persons -- and that is forever.

Bob Dylan on touring (2001)

Emmylou Harris on Bob Dylan (2000)

Q: Do you still feel normal around Bob Dylan?" I ask. (She duetted with him on his mid-'70s album "Desire.")

A:"Does anybody?" Harris answers with a laugh. "I've only hung around with him when we were making a record. And one other time -- a TV show for Willie Nelson. I actually sang on that record they did for Jimmy Rodgers, and the track was already done. And he decided he wanted to re-sing it and I wasn't available to do the harmony." She pauses. "Boy, he's a tough one to sing with. You think it's the most convoluted thing. But then after you actually figure out what he's done, you realize the genius. His phrasing. What he does with a lyric is just astonishing. He comes up with things that are totally unique, and serve the song. It's not like he's showing off."

Bob Weir on Music (2000)

"[music's] got furniture, cities and sub-divisions. It's got aerospace and heaven above and earth below. It's a whole world that we live in. It's every bit as real for me as the concrete world we are touching."

Bob Dylan on the Sixties (1985)

"The Sixties were like a flying saucer. You know, everybody talks about it, but nobody saw it."

Sam Phillips (The female singer, not the producer) on Bob Dylan (2002)

"If there's one person I think everyone should examine, I think it's Bob Dylan. And, if you look at his songs, do you really find out anything about him? The answer is no. I think most songwriters have this urge to confess and it's just ... off-putting. It's not done with any kind of art. There's no humor. It's so serious and not interesting. Dylan is always interesting, whether he's seemingly confessional or just dead simple, or when he really gets complicated. I think the bigger the song, the bigger you can make it, the more room, the more definitions might be able to be drawn from it, the better that it is."

Phil Lesh on Steve Kimock (1999)

``His playing has an indefinable quality I've only found once or twice in my life,'' said Lesh. ``Most of the time he sounds like nothing else on Earth. I've heard him do things I didn't think a guitar can do. And every so often he'll play something that sounds like it's not from any instrument, the voice of music. The voice of St. Cecilia, as you might say.''

T. Bone Burnett on Music (2000)

"We live in an age of music for people who don't like music. The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren't that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music's annoying, or at the very least they don't need it. They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records, so now we have jazz for people who don't like jazz and country music for people who don't like country music."

Bob Dylan (1997)

"Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book," he adds. "All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from "Let Me Rest on That Peaceful Mountain' to "Keep on the Sunny Side.' You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward those songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing "I Saw the Light.' I've seen the light, too." Dylan says he now subscribes to no organized religion.

Tom Waits on Bob Dylan and The Basement Tapes (1999)

Jerry Garcia on Bob Weir's guitar playing

"There are ideas that Weir has that I would never have had, that in fact maybe only he has. That's his unique value-- that he's an extraordinarily original player in a world full of people who sound like each other. He's got a style that's totally unique as far as I know. I don't know anyone else who plays the guitar the way he does, with the kind of approach that he has to it. That in itself is, I think, really a score, considering how derivative almost all of electric guitar playing is.

"I hear my influences, to some extent, in myself. With Weir, I have a real hard time recognizing any influences in his playing that I could put my finger on and say "that's something that Weir got from X and such," even though I've been along for almost all his musical development. I've been playing with him since he was sixteen or so. ...I just don't know where he gets it. He keeps up with other stuff more than anybody in the band, probably. He does an awful lot of listening but he doesn't do much stealing."

Bob Weir on playing at the Pyramids in Egypt in 1978, from RELIX

With so many years of road time under his belt, it's easy to speculate that Bob Weir has many memorable road tales. When the question came up, he instantly recalled something that happened during the Dead's trip to Egypt in 1978.

"One moment stands out, and I don't know why it's coming to me now, but we were in Egypt," Weir laughed.

"The first night of three we were playing at an amphitheater at the foot of the Sphinx at the foot of the Great Pyramid. They light it up really nice. There was a light show and all that kind of stuff. It was pretty spectacular. We were not that far from the Nile River. But anyway, the sun was going down and we start playing, the lights came on, and I hear a mosquito buzz my ear. One lands on my arm and as we're playing, I realize it's dusk and I look around and there's mosquitoes everywhere. I'm figuring okay, this is gonna be a 'Welcome to hell.' I'm not gonna be able to play a note. I'm staring to swat at mosquitoes. And I'm like, 'How the hell am I gonna go this?' and just as I'm thinking that, a shape goes by my head real fast. And the full moon's starting to rise now; it's gonna be an eclipse pretty soon.

"Back lit, you can see on the bluffs on either side of the theater, there's these sand dunes, and these bluffs are now ringed with Bedouins on their horses and camels with their rifles over their shoulders-hundreds of them on either side. They had heard that this was going on and came to check it out. Meanwhile, back on the stage, we've got a cloud of mosquitoes and as it turns out, that shape that flew by my head, another one flies by and then another. I look around again, and there are these bats about a foot-and-a-half across. Big fellas. Lots of them going after the mosquitoes. So if you back off from this, what you see is the Great Pyramid lit up, golden, magenta, whatever color it was at that moment and the Sphinx also lit up, and the theater surrounded by these Bedouins. And on the stage is the band all lit up surrounded by a cloud of bats! It had to have been one of the most sublime moments that's ever occurred. I left my body. (Laughter) If I had to freeze a moment in time, this is it. Take me now, Lord. This is how I want to remember it."

Ryan Adams on Self Portrait (2001)

From Feb 2002 issue of Uncut magazine. The writer has this to say about the parallels(as he sees them) between Ryan & Bob:

"...The hyperactivity, the volcanic edginess about him are reminiscent of the scenes...in Don't Look Back....Dylan of course was soon burned out..making Self Portrait. Does Adams fear a similar fate?"

RA:" I fuckin' hope so because Self Portrait is a great album. What was that review in Rolling Stone? I hope the fucker who wrote that spins in his grave. He missed the point. Dylan called it Self Portrait on purpose because he felt he didn't know any more. He'd already exhumed American culture. Heroes aren't heroic because they win battles. They're heroic for standing up and fighting.."

John Perry Barlow on Deadheads and the universe

"It seems most of you [Deadheads] are what I call 'pronoids'; believing as I do, that the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf"

Bob Weir on the meaning of "Estimated Prophet" (2003)

''I took up music to begin with because it does something that words by themselves can't do,'' Weir said. ''It takes you to a place that words by themselves can't take you to. That said, for most folks, it's experiencing the moment and when they leave that moment, they just know it's there and they know they can go back there in another concert. Or maybe it will come their way in another experience. But there are some folks who aren't prepared to leave that moment and try to take that with them and these are the folks that are walking a very, very perilous path, because ... if you can't let go of that moment ... those people are the acid burnouts who are trying to live in that moment or keep it always and they miss the appreciation, the beauty of the moment -- that it is fleeting. And they think they can live there -- that's something you can't have, it's elusive. If you spend your time trying to reconnect with it rather than being open to visiting it every now and again, you're basically chasing your tail. If there is a message in 'Estimated Prophet,' that's it.''

Mavis Staples (of the Staple Singers) on filming a documentary about Bob Dylan (2003)

"I don't know if they will show this in the documentary, but we got to talking about us recording 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall' [which the Staples covered back in the '60s]. I'd sing, 'Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?' And Pervis would respond, 'I've stumbled on the side of 12 misty mountains, I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways.'

"Man, those lyrics are so powerful. I started crying [on camera] while I was singing the song. I had to ask them to stop. They asked why I was crying. I said, 'Just look at these lyrics.' "

Bob Dylan's eulogy for Jerry Garcia (1995)

"There's no way to measure his greatness or magnitude as a person or as a player. I don't think any eulogizing will do him justice. He was that great, much more than a superb musician, with an uncanny ear and dexterity. He's the very spirit personified of whatever is Muddy River country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal. To me he wasn't only a musician and friend, he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he'll ever know. There's a lot of spaces and advances between The Carter Family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school. His playing was moody, awesome, sophisticated, hypnotic and subtle. There's no way to convey the loss. It just digs down really deep. "

Bob Weir (2003)

"There are some fans who want to hear certain songs exactly as they like to hear it," says Weir. "Those are the people I live to annoy"

Luther Dickinson on the South (2001)

"That's the thing about the South, it's all different but it's got some of the same spirit everywhere you go," Luther says. "Like around here it's hilly, but it's not hilly everywhere in the South. And I have a car, and for me sometimes you just like to drive around. And you have the power lines running everywhere, so you're driving and you've got all these parallel lines running everywhere and you're cruising through the hills, so everything goes whooshing by in every direction. That's part of home for me. But we've got some of the things that everybody in the South knows how to appreciate as well--great music and dancing, pretty girls, dirt, and drunk afternoons."

Bob Dylan (1975)

"I was lookin' for myself in the country store. I was informed. I was told by certain sources that this was the place. I had no idea why, I mean from the outside it looked like any other joint. firewood for sale, stuff like that. So I went inside and asked if they'd seen me. I just asked straight out like that. They sorta looked at me like I was crazy and told me to wait right there. They disappeared into back rooms and there I was. Just standing there. So my body started moving while I was waiting there. Sorta dancing. Looking around. Kickin' the floor. Tapping. Then I started listing things around me. Everything the eyes could see and the ears could hear. Making lists to myself. Chain saws, hammers, cheese barrels, cracker barrels, crackers, rednecks, preachers, panthers, nails, jigsaws, horses, hobbyhorses, sawhorses, outboard motors, rain clouds, lightning, lumber trucks, pig meat, breakfast, tea cups, dancers, Nijinsky, divers, deep seas, oceans, rivers, railroad, rapers, radio, waves, mothers, sons in battle, danger, ideas, magic, warlords, ghost bombs, replicas, machine shops, galaxies, torture, treasure hunts, band leaders, Dixieland, wheat crops, tractors, trailers, engineers, bodyguards, cheetahs, Mexico, badlands, desert life, organs, drum rolls, executions, crucificions, embalmings, ambulances, bloody hands, gimmicks, inventions of the mind, inventions of the body, sporting goods, taxis, rolling pins, ball bearings, working parts, blisters, broken backs, white-face cattle, robber barons, landlords, dressing rooms, diamonds, fast hands, goose bumps, Apaches, dingo dogs, and monkeys in space. And then I just ran out."

"Music is a thing that has optimism built into it. Optimism is another way of saying `space...' You can go as far into music as you can fill millions of lifetimes. Music is an infinite cylinder, it's open-ended, it's space."

-Jerry Garcia

"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best."

-Frank Zappa