Bill Kreutzmann Quotes

The music comes alive when you actually perform it in front of a crowd.

I like doing theaters. I like being up close and personal with the fans. It's really cool.

One of the main reasons for wanting to perform live again was to have contact with that audience.

I just feed off the energy of the audience.

When I performed at 'Open Mic U.K.' I had this connection with the audience that I'd never felt before, and I loved it. It was my first big thing, and looking out into the crowd... was just amazing.

But I always communicate with the audience. I never pretend like I'm just in my bedroom making a track. The whole point of doing a gig is, like, a feedback thing between you and the audience.

There is nothing to compare with the instantaneous feedback a singer gets from the people sitting in front of him. That is where it all comes together - all the rehearsing and working to get everything just exactly right.

I feed off the audience a lot, their energy.

The greatest feeling in the world is performing and connecting with the audience.

It's awesome to play 1 1/2 -hour shows because it's so much fun, and we enjoy every single minute of it.

We spent night after night out there learning the art of entertaining a crowd.

Some guys like myself, we like to play off the crowd.

I'm just a singer/songwriter and entertainer and I miss people and the energy of the crowd. When I play live it's a lovefest with me and my audience. It's how I get my rocks off.

To get up on stage with a band is fantastic. To play songs to an audience is mindblowing.

I'd say it's harder to play with an acoustic guitar strapped over your shoulder for a few hundred people than it is to play in front of thousands with an entire bombastic band behind you. After all these years, I still get nervous in front of people. I can't help it.

I love performing live: it's my very favorite thing to do.

Performing onstage is all about reacting in a grand way. You're playing an arena of seventeen or eighteen thousand people and it's your job to make sure the person at the back feels as cool as the person all the way in the front. Being on stage is a bit of a façade. You get to walk out there and be the coolest version of yourself that you could possibly have imagined and then you come off stage and you're just like everyone else.

Once I'm performing the show, I think that hour show has a certain intimacy with our audience. And that intimacy is through the lens and the live audience is a witness to that, whereas the audience at home is actually the object of my efforts.

The nice thing about live performance is that I've never, ever been let down. Partly I'm lucky that my audience self-selects itself. Generally they know what they're in for, and generally we all just like each other and get along. But I always find one or two or a dozen really interesting people in the audience who make the show different. And that's one of the things I really like about performing.

I think I'm better at live shows than I used to be because I'm way more comfortable with the uncomfortable pauses between songs.

Sometimes I'll go out into the crowd and keep singing, but I'll get maybe seven rows out and I'm out of synch, I'm a couple seconds behind the band and then it becomes chaos.

The process with the play, obviously, it belongs to you by the time you're stepping on stage in front of that audience for the first time. You can change it by just a look or things you're not even conscious of, but it's such a full immersion.

It's good to do stand-up. It kind of wakes you up and makes you feel like you're doing something. You got the crowd right there. That's all fun.

When you're playing live, those people who you're trying to please and reach, they're right there giving you feedback. And you don't get that feedback in the studio.

I always call performing live "giving the people the medicine," because when you're engaged in it, you can feel the sort of soul magic being exchanged between the performer and the audience.