“I think society is moving a little bit, but I think it isn’t moving near that fast. There’s always gonna be a large, huge bulk of straight people that aren’t going for it.”
“Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, they are so subtle. They can milk you with two notes. They could go no further than from an A to a B, and they could make you feel like they told you the whole universe… but I don’t know that yet. All I have now is strength. Maybe if I keep singing I’ll get it.”
“I always felt that way about the blues, even when I didn’t know anything about it. When I listened to it, I always felt there was something there – an honesty that Peggy Lee was lacking. And now the kids are open enough to say, ‘Now, wait a minute, let me listen for myself’, and those kids are getting into Indian music, getting into black music, getting into any kind of music they think is telling the truth to them.”
“This success thing hasn’t yet compromised the position I took a long time ago in Texas; to be true to myself and not play games. To be the person inside me, not bullshit anybody, be righteous, be real. So far, I’m not wearing cardboard eyelashes and girdles and playing in Las Vegas. I’m still being Janis. It just happens to be on a slightly different level.”
“It’s slightly inhibiting, but it doesn’t force a game on me. Because I don’t let it force a game on me.” (The interviewer asks if the camera is inhibiting, and this is her response).
-Janis Joplin
Hunter S. Thompson
“There was madness in any direction, at any hour… you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, we were winning. That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.”
“’You found the American Dream, in this town?’ [he asked]. I nodded. ‘We’re sitting on the main nerve right now’, I said. ‘You remember that story the manager told us about the owner of this place? How he always wanted to run away and join the circus?’ Bruce ordered 2 more beers. He looked over the casino for a moment and shrugged. ‘Yeah, I see what you mean,’ He said. ‘Now the bastard has his own circus, and a license to steal, too’. He nodded. ‘You’re right, he’s the model.’”
“The room looked like the site of some disastrous zoological experiment involving whisky and gorillas.”
“The rear windows leapt up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond.”
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
“She was not only singing; she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song, she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks – not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sings the notes on her face.”
“The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher… the groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wandering confident girls who weave here and there and become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices under the constantly changing light. Suddenly, one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage, and moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform.”
“The wind has blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.”
“Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it if he climbed alone, and once there he could gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. He waited, listening a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.”
Grace Slick
“A startling presence, both visually and vocally. An Oscar Wilde in drag who combined insight and sarcasm that was sometimes light, sometimes dark. A provocateur.” – Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane
Somebody to Love? 1998 Grace Slick Biography
“There’ll always be people who are afraid of living and afraid of dying. And there will always be more of them than there are risk-takers, the people who bring innovation into every area, with our without drugs.”
“Since all changes, no matter how small, are absorbed into and add impetus to the ongoing paradigm shift, nothing ever really slips away. The old themes and styles persisted as stitches in the unfurling tapestry, but they were hard to see. What caught the eye was all the newness.”
“As we lay on our backs in the tall grass on the mountain, each person made a brief awestruck remark about the diversity and synchronicity of the clouds, the air, the trees, and the animals. It was on that mountaintop where I first understood that you and I are only separated by one channel of a limited thought process. If I looked long enough, colors on the same object would slowly change in accordance with my ability to take in the transformation. My usual focused perspective was expanded. Instead of viewing certain things or people as passing scenery, as something inconsequential, the peyote made everything, and everyone seem equally important. Suddenly I could see no isolation, no overabundance. It was just energy exhibiting itself in infinite dimensions.”
“Four gigantic Altec speakers were set up so we could literally feel the playback, the technology could squeeze or explode a sound… there were countless knobs and dials and wires to mold a song into an aural vision, and I was fascinated by all of it.”
“When a band is in sync and everybody is playing well and feeling good, there’s nothing like it. You, both the audience and performers, become the power of the music. It’s a biological as well as spiritual phenomenon and it still happens to me when I’m riding around in a car or sitting at home listening to 130 decibels of speaker-cracking music. An almost tangible shift in feeling happens as I go from thick to weightless.”
“Imagine it’s a Saturday night, and there’s a line of what looks like a bunch of young multi-colored circus freaks waiting to go into the Fillmore Auditorium. The crowd is animated, everybody is talking to each other even though they may have just met for the first time. The only visible sign of color on the outside of the building is a poster drawn in Day-Glo swirls. It reads ‘Jefferson Airplane, The Charlatans, Moby Grape and The Great Society.’ When the door to the building opens, the last of the grey vanishes. At the top of the steps that lead to Fillmore’s main hall there is a wall of bright, intensely colored posters. They’re so numerous that the wall itself is invisible. As you walk onto the dance floor, you have the feeling you’ve just entered seven different centuries all thrown together in one room. The interior of the building is turn-of-the century rococo, and a man in red briefs and silver body paint is handing out east Indian incense. A girl in full renaissance drag is spinning around by herself listening to some baroque music in her head while several people in jeans and American Indian headbands are sitting in a circle on the floor smoking weed. Close by, a good-looking man in a three-musketeer costume is placing ashtrays on the cheap fifties Formica tables that circle the edge of the room. In the corner, people are stripping off their clothes while the acid is taking effect. This is The American Dream (for a few hours) with no color barriers, dress code, moral imperatives, and only one keeper – the show’s intense but smiling dark haired promoter – Bill Graham.”
Jack Kerouac
“But there was a wisdom in it all, as you’ll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street, each with the lamplight of the living room shining golden, and inside the little blue square television, each family riveting it’s attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards, dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels… I seem him in future years stalking along with full rucksack in suburban streets, passing the blue tv windows of homes, alone, his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified to the master switch… the millions of the One Eye.” -The Dharma Bums
“It was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenor man to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor. Everybody was rocking and roaring… boom, kick, that drummer was kicking his drums down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattley-boom! The pianist was only pounding the keys with spread eagled fingers, chords at intervals when the great tenor man was drawing breath for another blast… The tenor man jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around, his hat was over his eyes… he just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high, wide and screaming in the air.” -On the Road
“See, the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, dharma bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming all that crap they didn’t need anyway. All of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work. I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks going up to the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad.” -The Dharma Bums
Wayne Coyne
Some interview. Original Source not recorded in the notebook these are typed from.
“’The good times, it’s hard to make them last.’ – I think what people are hearing somewhere along the way is that the good times don’t just come at you. You almost have to create them. You have to make sure that you’re searching out some sort of meaning and some sort of happiness throughout.”
“It just makes you stop in your tracks and go, ‘What’s it all worth?’ We’re all just hurtling through space. At any moment the whole thing could just run into some asteroid out there and we’re all gonna blow up and how insignificant and meaningless and what a speck of existence our life is, and I think I sing about that a lot. When I sing utterly with fear about how insignificant I am, that’s the only time we sound significant. Isn’t that funny?”
ZeroSpace 