Photo by Kelsey Winterkorn
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. – Marcel Proust
Mickey Hart’s music has been an integral part of the soundtrack of our lives for a very long time—from the Grateful Dead and beyond to his numerous projects like the Diga Rhythm Band, Planet Drum, and the Rhythm Devils. The man has not stopped creating music, and he is ready to not only take his act on the road yet again, but explore a universe or two, in the process. Hart’s current band recently played several tour dates, and they are also in the studio creating a new album, which is planned for a 2012 release. Hart is leading his band back to the sounds of the Big Bang, creating music from an ethereal place that brings together all of the elements of time and space into a sonic form.
The legendary percussionist is also set to release the Mickey Hart Collection on Smithsonian Folkways via digital and on-demand formats on October 11. The formidable collection culls 25 albums from ‘The World’ series, which was previously released under Hart’s supervision from musicians around the world, as well as his own solo albums. Whereas, the taper of live shows had a great role in exposing the Dead’s music to legions of followers, Hart was also doing his own field recordings, traveling throughout the planet, always seeking that new sonic jewel. Much of that adventurous spirit is captured on these essential albums in this timeless collection.
Jambands.com sat down for a long and exploratory discussion about the nature of Hart’s art, his music, and views on the universe—whether they are rooted in science, or nestled within the realm of speculation based on current theoretical observations. His search for new music, rooted in a deep knowledge of what makes things tick and spin and magical, creates an infectious desire to listen to what he has to say, and join in the music, too.
PART I – Intrepid Travelers
The power of music is still young, its energy is only partly realized. – Mickey Hart, Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music, Hart and Fredric Lieberman
RR: Let’s begin with the current configuration of the Mickey Hart Band.
MH: Over the top band. The band is electric. It’s got all the elements that I really love in the band. It listens to itself, it’s an organism that is growing constantly on the stage, and it’s becoming something that’s really vital. It’s magic and energetic and it’s new.
It’s also playing with the sounds of the cosmos. It was built for that. It’s got great new songs with lyrics from Robert Hunter. We’ve been working on this for a couple of years now, so this is not just a little work in progress; we’ve really been working at this. The people in the band have been chosen very carefully, and they are intrepid travelers. (laughter) They are very enthused. It’s the best band I’ve had in all the years.
RR: The studio work will appear on a new album that comes out in 2012. You are sampling light waves going back to the Big Bang?
MH: That’s correct. I’ve been sampling the history of the sonic universe, and sonifying them. It’s called sonification. We read these light waves, to gather them through radio telescopes, and you change them from light into sound into our spectrum of hearing, and you sound design them. You make everything nice, and get a nice little gumbo going, and then make it part of the music, so we’re dancing with the beginning of space and time, the moment of creation, the sound of that, and all the other epic events that come from the beginning of the universe—and, also, from the sun, the moon, the Earth itself, tectonic plates, and earthquakes.
Matter of fact, right now, I’m working on a wave form on this latest earthquake that just hit in Virginia, so this sonification is really becoming very important to me because it’s not just the world’s music, the music of the globe that I’m interested in, I’m interested in universal music, the music of the universe—it’s all part of the same thing; our music is just a miniature of what’s happening out there in space. So, there is a direct relation to the galaxies, the planets, to pulsars, to supernova stars, black holes, and all of the events that have occurred since the beginning of time 13.7 billion years ago. It’s a continuum, and we’re just pieces of that continuum. Much of the work I’m doing now is not sub lunar.
RR: Recently, I was listening to various tracks from all the multiple combinations of groups you have played in over the years, including a three-CD compilation that was released in the 1990s, ironically, called The Big Bang, which also featured other outstanding drummers and percussionists. But what immediately struck me about what you just said is that I feel that the thread of that sonic philosophy dating back to the Big Bang has extended out through your entire career as a musician, which emphasizes what you said earlier that this is nothing new for you.
MH: No, the only thing new about it is the instruments now that can measure the wave form. In 2006, something very important happened. George Smoot, the Nobel laureate, discovered the Big Bang, the remnants of the Big Bang. That’s how he won his Nobel. Here we have an actual time and date. When I was writing my book, we thought it was varying between 20 and 10 billion years—it was an enormous guess as far as when the Big Bang occurred and where it occurred. Now we know it occurred everywhere, and it occurred exactly 13.7 billion years ago. George measured what is called the cosmic background radiation, CBR, and that pinpointed the origin of the Bang. Actually, his readings came from 400,000 years this side of the Big Bang, so it is like the after effect of the Bang, and with that, we could calculate exactly when it did happen. He found the fluctuation in the radiation.
As I was researching my book, and I was starting to go back, half of it was me trying to investigate the origin of percussion, and going back, back, back to the Neolithic and the Paleolithic, and I found evidence, whether it be actual membranes of cylinder drums or percussion-related instruments that went back, but there was nothing before 19,000 B.C., and I realized that something must have happened before that that allowed this to happen. What could that have been? Once you start thinking about that—it had to be the beginning of space and time and the first vibrations of the universe. And what would that be? The Big Bang. There was no evidence of the Big Bang, and there were no instruments that could read that far back in time, but there were a lot of theories, so until George Smoot pinpointed, specifically, and pinned the tail on the donkey, we didn’t know exactly where it was and what it was and when it was. That’s what made everything possible, and then, I started to investigate the cosmic sounds and it took me back, back, back until I was able to translate these early universe wave forms.
PART II – The Heavenly Clockwork
The birth of the cosmos, a child, a new form of energy—all of these are musical events… – Mickey Hart, Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music, Hart and Fredric Lieberman
RR: Going back through the layers of time makes me think of one of the defining cinematic experiences of my life, Apocalypse Now. What I didn’t realize at the time was how much the soundtrack would have an impact on me over the years. I could never quite place the “time” of the music, and I think that is why I always loved it, and it still continues to interest me. The music in that film subconsciously pushed me into areas of general philosophy that I might not have imagined existed before. That soundtrack music places me in a time that appears outside of time.
MH: It was beyond time; it was beyond, out there somewhere where there lives parallel universes and multi universes and other options besides our own time and space. By choosing the right instruments and the right instrumentalists and creating that kind of space, I was able to create that aura, which is always the thing. The way the astrophysicists in modern physics talk about the universe is that it is this giant vibrating membrane—drums, in a way—that expands and contracts, and that’s how the universe is able to have its rhythm and stay together and what the heavenly clockwork is all about.
That is what Pythagoras was trying to describe in 500 B.C. when he gave mathematical equations to all of the spheres. Back in the ancient days, they used to call it the ‘music of the spheres’ and Pythagoras claimed to be able to hear the sonorities of these planets. He couldn’t, but he was right. Then, of course, with the monochord, it’s called a beam now, but it is just a Pythagorean monochord, he discovered the octave, the fifth, the seventh, and so he gave musical equations to the heavens, to revolving spheres. He was the father of the science of music.
What I’m doing is taking science and using it in the musicological context. I’m playing with real wave forms, which were emitted millions and billions of years ago, and dancing with them. Back to this band, that’s what this band was built for, and that’s what makes
this thing so damned exciting—a rock ‘n’ roll band that is playing with the elements of space and time and the themes of where we are and what our place is in the universe. That’s what it is talking about; those are the themes.
RR: When you talk about music and its relationship with various elements, I have to turn to your book, a collection of quotes about music, Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music, which were all talking about the same thing in a different way.
MH: Well, music is life, life is music because we’re vibrating, and anything that’s alive or moves in the universe, there’s a vibration, it has a vibration, it has a sound, and if it has a sound, we might just recognize that as music. It all depends on how close it is to the earth. It’s really, when you start thinking about it, it’s not a big stretch. I’ve always loved quotes because quotes describe things—they’re epiphanies. They are moments when the light goes on for anyone that explains the unexplainable. That’s why quotes are so amazing. And they all kind of talk about the magic and the mystery of it because music’s invisible. You can’t see it. You can hear it. You can feel it. You can’t touch it; not unless you take music and transfer its form into a vibratory form like the vibration from a plate, or something that vibrates something else and you feel it vibrating. You might call that another form of music.
Vibration is at the key of all of this—so, it’s a vibratory universe we live in; we’re vibratory; we’re animals, mammals that vibrate right down to our DNA, to the subatomic levels of the universe. It’s all vibratory. And we’re connected to that. It’s all about connection. The big connecting energy is vibration. Music is just controlled vibrations. That’s simple; that’s very simple to understand. The heartbeat, the lungs, the eyes, the nose, the talk, the combing of the hair, the farting—all of that is vibratory in nature.
Would you call farting musical? Well, some people wouldn’t. There are people that might. There was a fellow, Le Pétomane in France of 200 years ago that used to go around and play parlor games farting. He could actually make melodies by farting—putting out candles at 20 feet. He had his own strict diet, so there were no odors, or anything, and he was using his butt as an instrument. So you can even go as far as once you hear the trained butthole, as it were, it even could become an instrument, it could become music, but that’s a little bit off the track. (laughter)
RR: There are people that may say some of my writing comes from the same source.
MH: (laughs) Yeah. You know what I mean. The world of vibration—I don’t mean to trivialize it, but Le Pétomane was quite a sensation in the parlors of Europe in France and England and Germany and all of that. The idea that the human is a vibratory animal, and were embedded in the Universe of Rhythm. Look around you. Everything you can see and not see is moving. You can’t see matter because it’s not in the realm of sight, but it’s moving. Everything that is holding things together—neutrinos and all the particles—are constantly moving.
PART III – It’s the Rhythm, Stupid
All we need is a groove to move our feet, and songs to raise our spirits. – Mickey Hart, Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music, Hart and Fredric Lieberman
MH: They are looking for this one thing called dark matter, which is the last element that we can’t find, and that takes up most of the matter in the world. That’s the grail now—finding dark matter. But that also moves, as well, so trying to find the Higgs Boson, which is the very element that is responsible for life, in CERN in France, is all vibratory in nature. They’re using a cyclotron to find that. When it’s all said and done, it’s the vibration. It’s the rhythm, stupid. It’s all about rhythm—the vibrations of rhythm. If you can understand the vibrations, and you can recognize it. If the ear recognizes it, it calls it rhythm. If it can’t, it calls it noise. If you look at a tree, or leaves, long enough, you can start to see a rhythm. If you look at the ocean long enough, you can start to see a rhythm. They are wild sounds, you can’t predict them. They are not in a regular rhythm, but they all have rhythm. When you see somebody walking down the street, that’s a recognizable rhythm. When you see someone calculating the next step, just like in music.
Music has to have a meter, a time, and that’s how we form and compose music, whether it be rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic—those are the three elements of music, but it’s all vibratory in nature. This band plays with that concept. It’s not science fiction. A lot of people over the years listened to the earth and they had no way of really knowing. Even Pythagoras, it’s really hard to say that he heard the sonare of the universe because I doubt he could hear it, or had a sensitive enough ear to hear the sun. It was impossible, but somehow he claimed that he did, and he was right. All those calculations are perfectly correct, so I assume it was something like mystical flight, or something. Now, scientists verify many of the ancients—Kepler, Brahe, Socrates, Confucius, and any great thinker in the ancient world had to go through sound, through vibrations, to explain the unexplainable, the mysteries of the universe. Now, those mysteries are explained through science, so I go to science. And that’s where we’re at now. I’m not a scientist; I’m a musician, but I use that real science in my music. That’s really the short of the long of it.
Photo by Kelsey Winterkorn
RR: When you said “it’s the rhythm, stupid,” I suddenly thought of your relationship with the late Joseph Campbell.
MH: He thought the same thing. He was one of my greatest pals. Joe realized through the shaman traditions because the shamans always used rhythm instruments whether it be rattles or drums to go to the other worlds, and to heal, and to prophesize for crops, or where the herds were. They went into trance using rhythm because the rhythm’s redundancy is the basis of trance. So that is how Joe really understood the mythos of the human condition—it was all based on rhythmic stimuli, and that was our bond right to the very end.
RR: You brought up the spirit world, which leads me into a natural segue to bring up the forthcoming Mickey Hart Collection on Smithsonian Folkways. About the release, you said, “Music is our talking book, our portal to the spirit world.” Obviously, on this diverse collection, the music supports that excellent point.
MH: Yeah, that pretty well says it. That’s a good quote because this is how we deal with the mystery of life, and this is where we store all of our stories. This is our talking book. Songs are just not like la la la, ya ya ya; they tell a story. Some are more intelligent than others—[Hart sings] Louie Louahh…yeah yeah yeah. That doesn’t necessarily tell a literal story, but it does tell a story. Most folk songs and most songs that are written tell about the human condition—the fears, the hopes, the dreams, love, hate. All the ideas of the subconscious coming up to the top, rising to the top, are turned into vocalization, or rhythm, or musical, or melody, or harmony that tell a story. If you look at it in those terms, these little tidbits, these little sound bites called songs really represent thousands of years—millions of years, perhaps—of evolution because songs are the containers of these stories. That’s how music is mostly passed on until the recorded age, which is just a little over a hundred years old. We’ve only been recording since 1877. Before that, there was no way of actually imprinting sound, so that is really recent, a recent discovery. Edison’s patent was 1877, and the first field recording was 1890. That’s 121 years ago. That’s really not a long time in the evolution of our species.
So how was all that information forwarded, do you suppose? Of course, through songs and dance, and that’s how we learned to write—the Gutenberg press, and all the inventions—forwarded the history of the world like in Alexandria on scrolls, on parchment. People wrote things down, and there were tablets. Tablets don’t make a sound, but they do tell a story, so does the parchment and papyrus, which was gathered at the great libraries of Alexandria. We’ve been transferring information and stories through these different media for many years, and now we have a recorded medium.
That’s where my Smithsonian Folkways collection, my recordings from around the world, come in. They’re an extension of what I just spoke of. These recordings are made at the highest resolution. In those days, when I started recording, those kinds of music were Third World, Fourth World music—they weren’t really considered worth recording, or keeping. Most people didn’t recognize them as great jewels. I thought they were immediately. There was no guessing game for me. I thought these were the real jewels. Popular music was about popular music. It was famous, as well. That was everywhere. This wasn’t, but I knew that it would become very valuable and I loved it.
So I started learning to become a remote recorder back in ’67, my first. It just went from there to my access to the world’s music by going around the world and recording, and the world coming to me. With both cases, I always had my instrument with me, whether it be a Nagra tape machine, or a digital device, whatever the circumstance allowed, I
recorded it and put it away in the archive. Now, I’m very proud to be part of the greatest collection of indigenous music in the world, the Folkways collection, which is at the Smithsonian, and I’m on the board there, as well.
It comes full circle because that was the collection that turned me on when I was 6, 7 years old. I was listening to Pygmy music when I was a kid. I found a Pygmy collection inside my mother’s Count Basie and Duke Ellington collection that she inherited from a relative. There was a bunch of pygmy music there. Aturi rain forest music. African music.
PART IV – No Particular Way But Our Own
The ability of music to open doors and make connections among people from different cultures is both quite common and at the same time extraordinarily powerful… – Mickey Hart, Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music, Hart and Fredric Lieberman
RR: The discovery of the pygmy music was an accident? The wrong records were in the sleeves?
MH: Yeah, it just happened with no explanation; there was some pygmy music, and that’s what started it all, and I just fell in love with those beautiful high-pitched voices. Had no idea what they were saying; it didn’t matter. It was speaking to me. I loved it. Still love it. Matter of fact, yesterday, I listened to some. Every once in a while, I’ll just go back and listen to that rain forest music. Yeah, it was just captivating, it turned my light on, and I started exploring more music from around the world, and still loving the music of Latin America, Tito Puente, was big and rock ‘n’ roll started happening, and what they called “race music”, which is all the Delta Blues and Robert Johnson. The blues was really big for me, too. I like fiddle music, back porch music. I like all kinds of music, but it was folk music, people music— spontaneous music. It wasn’t necessarily studio music that really fascinated me; music that wasn’t written, oral traditions really taught me.
The Grateful Dead was a jugband. It then based its whole repertoire on the blues. Appalachian music, banjo music, blues—we tease on the blues until we got good enough to play Grateful Dead music, our own music, a new kind of music based on the old. That’s why preservation is so important. Anybody who learns an instrument, or falls in love with music, usually practices that music. If that music isn’t there to turn you on, then where do you get the music from? You have to get it from somewhere. You have to learn something; you just can’t pick up music and come up with completely new music. That doesn’t happen. It usually starts with something that you love. You learn a few scales, a couple of rhythms, and then, if you practice and get a skill, you develop your own style, your own music that is a hybrid, or a fusion, of the music that came before you. That’s how it works.
Somebody doesn’t come up with completely new music. The only non-fusion music on the planet is the overtone singing of Tibet. The triphonic singing of the Tyuto monks is probably the only music that has not been fused—those celibate monks who live in monasteries in Tibet for thousands of years. No music came in; no music went out. Then, when recorded sound happened and radio, everybody started listening to other people’s music, and it started to fuse and become a global music.
Now, with this band, it becomes universal music. Now, it becomes not just the world’s music, but the universal music, the sounds of the universe, because the global music is just a part of the universe. There’s the music of the sun, there’s the music of Saturn, there’s the music of Jupiter, there’s the music of pulsars, there’s the music of the seed sound, the Big Bang. These are all music. What I’m doing is I’m taking them and sometimes fusing them, and making them into a new symphony, like a universal symphony. That’s what we did here on Earth with our sounds, our Earth-borne sounds. I’m doing the same thing with the sounds of the universe.
RR: It is interesting what you are saying about creating new music, specifically in terms of what you also did with the Grateful Dead. Many times, I would skip ahead on tapes of a live show so I could hear the “Drums” passage—there was patience to tell a certain story that was being told within those sequences that you played with Billy [Kreutzmann], and there were, obviously, no words, no lyrics, just a piece of rhythm, or almost a chunk of history being conveyed through music.
MH: Once you start to use words and literal translations then you go some place specific. The idea was not to do that, it was never rehearsed. We never even talked about it, so it was really moment music. That was why it was self-formed, and that’s why it will always stay that. It didn’t crystallize anything; it just left up to the imagination, not only ours, but yours. That was what that the Rhythm Devils was all about.
RR: And you’re still doing that to this day.
MH: Oh, yeah. That’s what this new creation is all about. I throw things at the band that they have no idea are coming. They don’t have any idea, but they’re young, they’re corruptible, and they smile. I have aligned myself with people that are not really jaded, not carrying a bunch of baggage, and they actually like what I do. They think it’s really great, and they can’t wait to hear what the next night is going to bring. But I don’t tell them. I just make it happen. I bring it up on my computer, and they don’t know what part of the universe they are going to, so that’s a great adventure for me and for them. I like to see how they react and how I react. Sometimes when you get too jaded, you start thinking of music in different terms, and not experimenting as much. This band is not about that.
PART V – Across the Multiverse
Before you can share your music with others, you must reach for it inside yourself, in solitude. It is a form of meditation that sometimes takes many hours and sometimes comes in a flash. – Mickey Hart, Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music, Hart and Fredric Lieberman
RR: What happened before the Big Bang, and how would you play that?
MH: Nobody really knows what happened before the Big Bang, and there is no way to measure it yet, so we’re getting back to where we will be able to find out what happened before the Big Bang. Right now, the common wisdom is that there was nothing, and the Big Bang happened everywhere. That’s what physics and science say. So you can speculate about anything, about any theory you want. Was there something before the Big Bang? Perhaps. Eventually, we will be able to know that, but right now, the only thing that we do know is when the Big Bang was created and how it was created. We’re getting to the point where we can actually identify the matter, the actual matter, physical matter that created the universe and that’s that Higgs Boson, which is being looked at in France at CERN in the cyclotron. We are getting closer and closer to identifying it every day, and that will happen quite soon. When we know that, then we will be able to find out if there is a multiverse, if there are other universes out there similar to ours or different that are operating at the same time like a parallel universe.
Are there other universes like our own? We don’t know that right now, but we will. It seems to reason, to my reason, that there is, and that there could be a multiverse, there could be another universe existing outside our perception, a parallel universe. The wormholes and all of this we know of that have different perceptions of time and space that you go through and there are different realities to them. These theories are yet to be totally proven, but we’re starting to know that they exist. That’s where science is now.
This is what’s exciting. This is the frontier in music. There are two frontiers for me—this one that we’ve been talking about—universal music—and the other is music as a healing agent for the human condition. Music therapy—how music can reconnect a person’s neurologic function, their brain function, and allow them to be able to experience music as a medicine, very much like a drug. We use it in cases like dementia, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s, or autism, where the connections have been broken. For one reason or another, they’ve been injured—whether it be a war, or a fall, or some neurologic mishap. The vibrations that are apparent in music reconnect those broken connectors, and they allow them to function again. That’s the second most interesting frontier of music.
Besides playing live, which is the get off, I’m used to it because I’ve been put on this planet for that reason. I love to play music and people love to listen to music and that’s the way I make a living. But these other frontiers—and I’ve been doing that for a lot of years—kind of spring out of that—the performance aspect of it allows you to play with these songs, to explore the universe and what made us us and what created us. These wave forms are still washing over us, influencing everything—the tides, the heavens, the revolutions of the planets, being able to enhance consciousness, elevate the consciousness, or be able to reconnect with things that are diseased or not working in the body—that’s music medicine, music as therapy. Those are the two big frontiers. I know how to play now. I know how to perform and I love it and I will continue to do that, but these other two fields are tangential in a big, big way. Yet, these are the real frontiers of this century.
RR: You used the word “jaded” before. What is very refreshing is that you are still seeking, you are still exploring, and you are still trying to get through barriers to understand things and how they work, and that is downright inspiring to me.
MH: MH: Aw, shucks. It’s not like I can really help doing what I do. I can’t imagine doing anything else. (laughs) But, yeah, I appreciate that. I really do. I don’t get puffed up by any of that because, you know, it’s the work I love to do. Yeah, I mean, I couldn’t imagine doing anything more worthwhile because music is such an important element in the existence of humans. The human brain is coded and wired for sound. We’re not wired for math, we’re not wired for science, we’re not wired for geography, but we’re wired for sound. It’s human-specific. It’s human designing; it’s part of the way we’ve evolved as a species, so it’s just one of those natural things. Luckily, I fell into music through fate or DNA, which I believe mostly it was all about because my mother and father were musicians, so I’m coded for it, as well, through my DNA. It’s just what I do, and I’m really glad that I can be of service, not only to myself, I can be very selfish about it, but it makes me extremely high and it makes me extremely happy. When I do this, it makes me feel that my life is worth living, and all of the above. It is very gratifying on a lot of levels and it also brings a lot of joy to a lot of people. I don’t see people walking away hitting each other, or being mean and hateful. I see them filled with pure energy. And, yeah, that’s a great thing. I also make my living making music, so it’s a profession, it’s a joy, and it’s a service to provide. It’s everything. It makes me very, very happy and very satisfied. I feel great about where I am now in life.
