From: kmalmber@ub.d.umn.edu (kenneth malmberg)
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: "A Different Concert Consciousness: An Interview with Ken Kesey
Date: 11 Jan 1993 17:34:23 -0600
Organization: University of Minnesota, Duluth
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: ub.d.umn.edu

I noticed a lack positive and/or dialogue on the net as of late.  So I
thought I would type in a little of an interview which appears in the latest
Dpree's Diamond News.  I don't mean to rip them off or anything, so we'll
look at this as a little free publicity.

Most of this issue of DDN is focused on a discussion of the August 27, 1972
Fielf trip which took place in Veneta, Oregon as a benefit for the
Springfield Creamery.  The interview with Kesey discusses the similarities
and differences between that particular show and the "the scene" today.

DDN: Thatis what I loved so much about the second Field Trip in 1982.  There
was so much happening everywhere around the field, with giant inflatable
sculptures and the maypoles and the jugglers.  For mw, it was an important
lesson in how a gathering can be made to be a participatory more than
observational.  For more of a hands-on ritual than seeing the Grateful Dead
at Giants Stadium with 80,000 people.

KEN KESEY:  And this year it took me a long time to get through the business
skull of this operation to let them know that what we're doing up here maybe
is to their benefit.  At first all they could see was a nuisance.  But I've
watched these things long enough to know that if you continue to put all of
your eggs in one basket, pretty soon the basket'd gonna get exhausted.  And
if you can disperse the energy, and have other people who are young and
willing and full of energy to take some of the weight, the Dead don't have to
fill every inch of the space with Garcia's 100.000 licks on the guitar.  And
this means they can take a breath.  And so, instead of doing five concerts
back East that they make a big bunch of money on, I,m thinking of doing five
or ten more years of concerts to keep the band healthy.  When it comes down
to the amount of money that's been lost by the organization, by practically
killing the goose that palyed the golden egg, they're going to begin to look
at another form.  And this is a healthier form.  It means if Montana gets
hurt, they still go ahead and paly the game.  A lot of people thought we
would cancel( the August '92 Oregon shows) because they cancelled. But my
metaphor was: Say you've got a daughter in East LA who's getting married to a
member of Los Lobos and their whole band is going to come to the wedding, and
the drummer gets sick and cancels, so the band isn't going to show up. It
brings the point home: Do you still have the wedding?  The wedding or LOs
Lobos.  And when the group becomes so important that it's more important than
the event, you've kind of been trapped in totalitarian rock and roll.  A
woman called the day after the cancellation and gave me all sorts of hell and
tod me she had bought all this meat and had no way of selling it back,  She
was going to do a booth thing.  She said that if one person can get sick and
stop what 40,000 people were going to do, then it wasn't righteous to begin
with.  And that's why I thought it was really important to continue this no
matter what happened on the other end of it.  Otherwise, it was admitting
that Los Lobos was more important than the wedding.  And it begins to
develop, alot of people started realizing their own potential.  We can put on
a show that doesn't have the quality of the music, but when it comes down to
it, I'm not as interested in the music as I used to be.  I've heard an awful
lot of music, where as there's other things that are more interesting.

End of DDN 

Maybe Kesey should have gone into politics!