"We Camet to the Conclusion"
By David Lindley
In those days (Mid/Late 1960's) there was free form radio, Tom Donahue. You would hear George Jones, Ravi Shankar, and Jean Luc Ponty, and then some more George Jones. It was that way on purpose, which was a statement, a really eloquent statement which is, ‘Music is pretty much the same, for the same reasons.’ It showed everybody that all these people were going through pretty much the same thing. It's all valid....
Anything that sounded good to me, I would go after. I heard Sabicus play Flamenco and that was a huge moment. I said, “I want to do that. I'll try some of that out.” Then I realized I would have needed to start out when I was 17 years old to learn all that complex traditional Flamenco.
I was listening to Ravi Shankar and classical North Indian music; I loved all that stuff. It was during that period that The Beatles came out of all of that stuff. To me they sounded like folkies except plugged in. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" is like The Louvin Brothers, Jim and Jesse, and The Virginia Boys. It all sounded so familiar; it's okay to plug in. That's what happened.
Jerry Garcia and I had a conversation about this one time, and we came to the conclusion that it was pretty much the same thing.
He approached The Grateful Dead stuff as a bluegrass musician. That approach was familiar to me, ‘cause that's the one I use, plus a bunch of other stuff."