David Gans

Today, Daniel speaks with David Gans, musician, songwriter & music journalist. Dave’s a gifted guitarist and is known for incisive, literate songwriting. He is also noted for his music loop work, often creating spontaneous compositions in performance. He is the co-author of the book Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead, and the host of the weekly syndicated radio show The Grateful Dead Hour. 

Dave goes back to his teenage years as an experimenter with psychedelics & shares with us how his relationship, with especially LSD, had evolved over the years & how this shapes his creative process. 

Dave describes being a teenager on LSD & seeing the Dead as deeply cathartic & inspirational & having long-lasting positive effects with all aspects of his life. He also recommends the Alice Miller book, Drama of a Gifted Child and describes how it helped him connect therapeutically with self-healing. 

Quotes:

Dave: I remember the day when i learned to stop responding TO hurtful treatment WITH hurtful treatment. Instead of attacking back i learned to say ‘hey that hurt!’ It was a life changing moment.

Dave: I had to learn step by step to not be ruled by emotions, to stop, grab the emotion aggressively & address it. I learned how to negotiate my emotions instead of just letting ‘em escalate.

Dave: If I’m doing acid, I want to go somewhere special, internally and make the most out of it, to really ritualize the occasion. When I take psychedelics, I want to accomplish something, to grow from it, not just to use it as a party drug. I’ve always felt that acid was a TOOL not a TOY.

Dave: If you direct attention away from yourself it comes back to you anyway. The less you obsess over getting attention, you get more attention in the long run.

Dave: Henry Kaiser taught me a three word phrase that has served me tremendously well throughout the years: SERVE THE MUSIC. When I was younger, driving people out of band, I just wasn’t sensitive to gestalt energy & was much less able to subsume myself into the group. And now the opposite is what I crave, what I wish for! The best thing of all is when you get to play with really great musicians who crave the same mutuality.