Photo by Keith Griner
Nearly one year after the Grateful Dead said Fare Thee Well with a run of five final concerts in California and Chicago, Dead & Company, the new incarnation of the legendary band, are ramping up their summer tour, the second outing for the group that includes Grateful Dead members Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart along with longtime collaborator Jeff Chimenti and newcomers John Mayer and Oteil Burbridge.
Mickey Hart talks with us about how the band has come together since they started playing last year, What Mayer and Burbridge bring to the musical conversation and how Bonnaroo compared to other shows.
How have Dead & Co. have progressed since that first tour?
Well now that the band is a real band—it’s greased. It’s become a real powerful unit now. There’s no way to bring a band together, no better way than to play. That’s what we’ve been doing, and it has become very liquid, fluid. It’s really a joy to play. It takes a while for it to seep in. Even after a performance, you don’t know exactly what quantity it is, but after doing it so many times, everybody’s relaxed and they can lay into their parts with more confidence, and the conversation now has grown.
A band is about a conversation. We’ve been talking for over 50 years now, but when you bring new people into the conversation, it takes a bit of time before they learn your language and you learn how to communicate difficult ideas for someone who hasn’t been in the conversation for all those years. It takes a while. We wound up really powerful on the last tour. The band has come to a whole new level, and it’s progressing at a rapid speed. Now [John and Oteil] own the music. Now Johnny is really understanding the music at a deeper level. The conversation becomes more interesting, more dynamic, when you know all the words and you know all the chords you can do all of that simultaneously. It’s a lot of stuff. I mean we have almost 100 songs. You know it’s not like we’re going out and playing the same set. It’s a different kind of animal here.
Was there any one moment where you realize that you guys were really coming together?
Yeah, it always happens on stage. There were some times on the last tour when it was definitely on the right path. I mean, you get more and more power, more swing, more fun. Everybody became relaxed in the group, and when that happens, anything is possible. You have an affinity for a person, and then you have to gain each other’s trust, musically speaking. And then you have to be able to throw the conversation back and forth at rapid rates, and people have to respond to your question, to your answer, musically. That takes time, and now we’re there. It feels really good, starting to become inspiring in other way, great ways. You never can tell where a band will go until the band goes there.
Do you feel like you still have more places to go with this band?
That’s the thing about music you keep going back to—there’s no beginning and there’s no end. I mean there’s the beginning, when you start playing, but there’s no end. And the thing about it is that there’s no age. There’s no age or color, it doesn’t know how much you make a year, it doesn’t recognize those kinds of things. It’s much more ethereal, more spiritual. So if you keep the end open, which is really important and we’ve always done—for various reasons. Mostly we didn’t remember what we did the day before. [Laughs] That ‘s how we did it. Then there’s limitless possibilities, as long as you don’t box that music in, you don’t call it and say, “This is it.” There has to be another alternative, another alley you can go down, and that’s what you keep doing, kind of going out there and piercing the veil every time. That’s why it’s so mysterious and interesting. If you go to the stage with that in mind, then you have chance for creativity and the ability to develop musically, personally and with the group. When that kind of chain reaction starts happening, then you got a band. If you’ve got a bunch of people playing a song, that doesn’t make a band. Band-hood is only achieved in certain ways. If he magic isn’t there, you’re just beating shit up. If you’re not listening to who’s next to you and really communicating. There are many conversations going on simultaneously. You got Bob and John, you got Oteil and Bill, you got me and Jeff, you got me and John, you got Bill and John, you got me and Oteil—all of these micro conversations going simultaneously, so if you can keep all these conversations going, then you make great music, you have an amazing conversation. When you get off the stage you just go, “Wow, that was really interesting, that was really great.” You feel like you don’t even have to walk, you’re just being propelled through the universe with no effort.
So that’s why people come back to the idea of being a band that’s really powerful—heading in the same direction, but not speaking necessarily the same thoughts—people don’t always agree on things even in real life, so you can imagine how it is in music. I mean, there’s a lot of things going on that you have to make some kind of decision about in milliseconds, and listen really carefully, not just casually. It’s deep listening. I think our ears have stretched, and if you have a well-stretched ear, then you can approach open-ended music. That’s the only way you can do it. You’ve got to hold onto the song—if you play a song, it has to be sometimes recognizable, but other times, it doesn’t have to recognizable. But you recognize it’s unrecognizable. “Wow, this is great, let’s keep going until we don’t want to do it anymore.” Then we either find a new place or go back to the old place. That’s up in the air, that’s decided in the moment by six people.
In that vein, can you talk specifically about how John and Oteil have integrated themselves into the band?
Anytime anybody enters somebody else’s world or conversation—and we’ve had a conversation going for many years—could do one of two things: they could dominate the rap, come in really powerful and big and blundering into the music, or they could come into the music as a newcomer—being part of it while at the same time being able to understand the nuance and not force your music out. Then it comes naturally. That’s what Oteil and John have, a really a good handle on it. They’re very respectful of the music, that’s the first thing. I mean, you can’t trample the music.
Do you think the addition of those new guys has changed the feel of music at all?
It’s going to change, so you have to be ready for the change. They don’t know how much it’s changed by them being here in the mix, but we do. Everything is happening—it’s very positive. That’s how they approached music, learned a lot—you got to learn a lot, practice, rehearse, listen to the old tapes, and then kind of make your own statement with the music. So all of this has gone perfectly. It’s just a blessing. First of all, we like each other very much. It’s a really wonderful family, and that’s the first thing. And so if you get a bunch of good guys liking each other playing music you like with power and rhythm and intent, then you’re doing what you do best, and that’s the experience of the whole damn thing.
They take the music at face value. They listen to the music, and then they adapt whatever their technique is to the music, and that’s what makes it powerful. There’s no way in the world we’d want Oteil to play Phil’s part—that’s ridiculous. Or for there to be a Jerry sound-alike, a Jerry clone. That’d be ridiculous. I hear Jerry in my left ear all the time, anyway. So I just fill in the blanks. When that’s happening, I just change Jerry up in my left ear and the I cut him out. So I have the ability to do that. He’s been in my ear for all those years, so there’s no way to get rid of it even if I wanted to. He made me deaf to begin with, so I think he earned it. I could see that as an art form, mimicking someone directly, exactly, but it’s something I can’t appreciate at all. It’s not just me. After you hear the real thing, any [imitation] is kind of superfluous. It doesn’t have any meaning, for me, emotionally. It’s just like fumes, you breathe in fumes. I can say that, but not everybody will agree with me. And this has nothing to do with anybody personally—it’s not personal, it’s just musical. All those people might be fine people, doing what they really love and believe in, but it’s not my cup of tea.
Photo by Keith Griner
Can you talk a little bit about how you guys come up with the setlist for your shows and if you ever try to focus on certain periods of the Grateful Dead catalog in those setlists?
No, not really—it’s open season. I think we have 450 songs, something like that, and if we like a song we say, “Let’s learn this,” and we just get the words up and everyone gets to learn it. We usually prepare John and Oteil and say, “Hey man, let’s work on this song,” and John says, “Well I want to sing that, let’s work up that song.” Okay so we’ve got a few days working on it and John goes back to the trailer, back to his camper, and he’s up half the night learning songs, and then the next day or the day after that, it pops up and we perform it, and if it’s not up to par, we practice it again the next day or the day after until it works its way up to being part of the lineup. We know that, so we all make the call—“That didn’t work,” or “Wow, that was a really great, fresh look at it.” It can go anywhere between those two points. We have a lot to choose from, a lot of material. The only thing that really matters is imagination and passion and commitment.
You guys played that free show at The Fillmore in San Francisco recently. How did it feel to come back there?
That was cool, going back to The Fillmore. It’s a small place, and it’s kind of difficult sometimes, playing a small place after playing stadiums, so it’s a challenge. A small room like that, it’s intimate. But we did it. It was a really fine show. A lot of old memories came back, a lot of my brain cells they found there, lying around. I scooped them all up and put them back.
It’s been about a year since the Fare Thee Well shows with the Dead. Can you talk a little bit on how you feel about those shows looking, back a year later, and how that kind of revitalized the Grateful Dead scene around the country?
It was really wonderful. Five amazing days of playing. The energy, respect, the thank yous from both sides—us thanking [our fans], them thanking us—the peace, the love of it all, it was really in the making there. You could cut it in the air, it was so heavy. The music was good, everybody got along and there was no angst, nothing but good feelings that I felt anyway from the stage. And the other thing is we were able to end it the way we wanted to. We could put the period at the end of the sentence, as opposed to a lot of bands that are forced into something, or disband because of turmoil or all those kind of things. We were able to call the dance, and that’s big. You put it to rest, you put it out in the pasture. It served us well. We rode it hard, we put it away wet.
What were your feelings going into this year’s Bonnaroo, one of the bigger festivals in the market?
You know, usually any place we play good, it’s good for us. It doesn’t matter how big or how small—if we play good, we love it. If we play good if front of a rec center, we get off as much as we would with Giants Stadium or something. It’s that way with us now. Once you can relax in front of your friends and just play your music and not get all jacked up because you’re playing in front of 100,000 people, then you have a chance of success, and by success I mean a good musical experience. When there’s no fear, when you’re relaxed in your work—it’s all about being you. It doesn’t matter how big it is, it matters how you play. I don’t really recognize the hugeness of it, because we’ve played a lot of shows over the years, so that doesn’t intimidate us at all. We’re actually playing for friends, the way I see it, and everybody is listening. I look out there and there’s a bunch of guys wanting to help me and really wanting to like it. I don’t see it as a bunch of critics and people that are what they call “haters.” I don’t have any haters. There are no haters for the Grateful Dead—except for the ones that do hate it, but they don’t come to the shows. [Laughs] Why would you go to a show if you hate the music? The Grateful Dead is not for everybody. We knew that right from the beginning. For those who get it, it means a lot. So that’s how it is. If I do my job, and we have fun up there, I know they’re going to love it. I know it. There’s no way they can’t. So I’m not intimidated by Bonnaroo, or any other roo. It’s another place for you to have a great experience.
Have you ever seen Moby Dick with Gregory Peck? These guys are in the rowboat, Ahab is hanging onto the whale, Moby Dick. The whale is going up and down, and he’s beckoning to the crew who’s in row boats to follow him and kill the whale. He’s going down, and the guy, the Scottish guy, he said, “Hey, that’s no devil, it’s just a whale. It’s a big whale, but it’s just a whale.” I’ll always remember that. So Bonnaroo is just another whale. It’s a big whale, but it’s just another whale. That’s our business, that’s what we do—we’re music hunters. We go out and hunt that music, and if we get scared, then we have all of our people there to support us. I won’t mention the person, but recently within the last month, we played something and one person said, “I’m scared,” or something like that, and I looked at him and I go, “Scared? You’re scared?” I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Over this? Over a TV show?” We played on Kimmel or something like that. “I’m nervous,” he said. I laughed, and he saw all the confidence in me and everybody around him, and he became confident too. His nerves had totally calmed down because he had all these people supporting him. And of course this person has played in the band for a long time, and there was no reason to be nervous. That was just his emotion at the time. With all this support around you, nothing can let you down, and everybody’s going to support you in whatever way.
Do you feel any difference between big venues or festivals like Bonnaroo as opposed to doing theater shows like The Fillmore or an even smaller place?
Well that’s a good question, and that’s really the art form. I remember once—and Jerry was the key to it—we were playing our first stadium show somewhere, maybe it was Giants Stadium or RFK or something. When you play your first stadium you’ve got butterflies and everything, it’s not like a shed. We played sheds, but then all of a sudden it was like, “Whoa, this is a big whale.” I played so hard, so hard, all night, and I was trying to reach that guy, way up there in the very far edge of the stadium, way in the back, the last row, in the nosebleed section, we were trying to get into his head. And I came off the stage and I was exhausted, totally, I mean I could hardly walk. I had to sit down before I could even think about putting my feet underneath me. Jerry passed by and I said, “Man, I’m really beat, you know, I played so hard.” And he said, “Hey man, everybody was playing hard. You don’t have to play that hard, let the PA do it.” If we have an intimate atmosphere on the stage and we can get our own stage sound together, that’s all you need, and then you let the PA take it to the back seats, because you could never reach that guy. So the idea was to be able to get an intimate setting where you could talk to each other musically and not be intimidated by the size of it and not overplay. That’s the difference—in the stadiums, you tend to overplay. But if you can get into the secret language and start talking about things musically like you would in a theater, it’s intimate. Then you have a chance of making some superb music. So that’s the challenge in the big ones—to relax. Let the PA do it. And we have the best PA in the fucking world. So use it. That’s what came out of that conversation. He was overplaying it, too. He said, “Me too.” I mean, we had to come to grips with this. We can’t play for that last guy, the PA can help you.
Last question: How far in advance will you plan a setlist for a show Bonnaroo?
We typically figure it out the day before, or maybe the day of. It’s not that kind of thing. We can play a lot of songs. We’ll sit down and say, “Eh, let’s do that.” “Okay, good.” But nothing is in stone. Anything could pop up, anything that’s not on the list. And I encourage that, myself, I love that. I love when stuff comes out of other things, when other ideas and other songs come out of some song that’s not on the list. We have a setlist now—we didn’t used to have a setlist, we just went on there and played, it started and ended—but now we have two new guys, and you can’t be telepathic with new people in the band. But it happens. So that’s what we’re working on now—telepathy. I think that’s one good word to describe what it takes to really play this kind of music. It’s not always in the technique; it’s in the synchronizing and the being able to communicate at rapid rates—I mean milliseconds—all night long, without fading. It’s called the flow state. When you get in the flow state, you get in the moment, and that’s all that really counts. Everything comes after that. Then you just flow into the river, you just bounce around, you go down that river, enjoy every current of that river. Flow and bounce and entrainment, all these words mean the same thing: being in the now, in the moment, all those things are—that’s the currency. It’s worth the whole shot, once you reach that state of mind and you’re all one mind and you can be up there, then it’s thrilling. Then it seems effortless. We try to do that. We try to make it easy, if you know what I mean. It’s hard to make it easy. [Laughs] It can be done. All you got to do is have the goal in mind—what is the goal? Where do you want to go? Do you want to sing a song perfectly or do you want to raise people’s consciousness? Maybe you could do both.
