Photo by Frank Lanza
This weekend Mickey Hart returns to the road with his current group for a run of shows that will extend into October. Yesterday he was “sonifying a part of the brain that reacts to sound.” Today, perhaps he’s listening to the sounds of Mars, working on archival matters with the Library of Congress or further exploring the healing powers of music. What can be said for sure is that today marks the 17th anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s death (just 8 days following the 70th anniversary of Garcia’s birth). So Mickey took a few minutes to think about his friend and bandmate. This, however, was preceded by a discussion of the Mickey Hart Band…
MH- The band is fierce. We’ve really grown. It’s turning into one incredible super-organism.
Well, knowing you and looking at that lineup, that’s none too surprising.
MH- Well, you never can tell. We’re playing with something unique here. We’re playing with the sounds of the cosmos, and we’re also adding our music of the whole earth. It’s an interesting combination of universal music, cosmic music. Well, cosmic sound: it’s not music when I get it. When I get it, it’s light waves gathered from radio telescopes from around the world and then brought into the audio world. We change form [with] sonification from light radiation into sound. And then I take that, which is really mostly noise, a lot of collisions. I don’t want to disappoint you: it’s not like 10,000 virgins calling “Dean! Dean!” It ain’t like that. I wish it was, but it’s different. It’s mostly harmonic thumps pulsing. There is some beautiful ethereal stuff. Then I take it and sound design it, take it into what we might call music—something melodic, something harmonic, something rhythmic—that we could at least ponder and understand.
To me, it’s a no-brainer. And it’s very sexy, and it’s a great challenge. It’s everything I love in music. These musicians have now taken this and made it their own, so it’s a whole new circumnavigation of our musical soundscape, which includes everything from the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago to now. I’m interested in the sounds of all that history. It’s the sonic history of the universe. Each star and planet and galaxy—they all sing their own tune. And I’m sort of joining the conversation…and playfully dancing with the infinite universe using the cutting-edge science we have available to us now. My sonification staff is just like fire. These wave scientists who understand the medium and are musicians as well, and, I might add, Deadheads!
But, you know, it’s turned into a real thing. I was just mentioning this to Bill Walton the other night. He loves the band, and I told him in the beginning when I first started telling people at concerts that some of the sounds that you hear are coming from the universe, there would always be the yahoo in the audience screaming “Scarlet Begonias!” … and then it stopped. People would be like “this is what our universe sounds like. Look at that!” You see people really grokking it, really embracing the idea. It’s a serious attempt at training with the strongest grooves in the universe: the vibrations that spawned the sun, the moon, the earth, us.
It started with drum books, trying to find out where rhythm came from. I started researching back from the Neolithic to the Paleolithic, then all of the sudden I thought, where did it really come from? It occurred that it had a start with the beginning of the creation of space and time, the Big Bang. But back then, ’91, we didn’t know much about the Big Bang. We thought it had happened between 10 and 20 billion years ago…until Professor George Smoot found the remnants of the singularity, that arrhythmic moment where the blank page of the universe exploded and the beat began! (Laughs)
So, I’m just sitting here in its wake. And so are you! And so is everybody that’s in existence. So that was my interest in it. But I love to play trance music, you know, I love grooving. I love rock and roll. So what you’re hearing now is that combination. And it feels so good, man. I can hardly talk when I leave the stage. That’s how you know it’s really good, when you really fumble around to speak. Speaking is difficult for a while when you go into those trance states. You don’t want to talk. It’s hard to express your ideas as language. And the power of entrainment, being in sync and playing music, because music is really just a miniature of what’s happening in the cosmos. That’s why music is so powerful and so attractive and so cool. It’s not just because it’s music, but because it connects us to the vibratory universe that we live in. And that’s what music really is: controlled vibrations.
So that’s where I’m at right now with this band. I’m out there on the edge, and I love it there. I’ve always loved the edge, and this is the edge live.
Is there anything that the Mars [rover] Curiosity will send back that will be of use to you? Do you anticipate images or sounds or anything that you could use?
MH- Very funny you should be asking…I’m now acquiring those sounds from NASA and sonifying those sounds—the rocket blast off and any sounds from rover—and using it in a new remix of “Marching to Mars,” a tune that Sammy Hagar and I wrote in ’96. And we were thinking about using the sonifications from rover and bringing it into the tune and remixing it, because I think that was a prophetic song… it’s our first step into the universe. We really stepped on a planet now, not the moon. This is a giant step into the universe. Of course I know what Mars sounds like, and it’s very interesting to know our place in the universe. Because the Big Bang didn’t happen in one place; it happened everywhere. There was nothing, and then there was something.
That notion of creating something from nothing—do you find it a challenge to wrap your head around that?
MH- Oh, yeah. Well, it helps to know the different theories behind all of that, and that’s why…the universe is sacred to some people. And I would think so too, because it’s where we live. We live in the universe, we live on a blue-green spinning rock that revolves every 365 days around the sun. That tells me where I am. But I love the sound of things, that’s my essence. I connect to the whole world my whole life, my wife, my kids, everything that I do all day and night to vibrations. But it took me a while to find the science…but I look at it in a musical way. I’m not a scientist.
In terms of prescience, on your Facebook page, there’s a studio version of “Fire on the Mountain” from the mid-seventies with you rapping, and it’s fascinating to me because it’s so far ahead of the game. What are your memories of that performance?
MH- I remember doing that back then. That was just right on the spot. Jerry and I were playing the tune, and then someone came into the studio—we were in the country, in the barn, we called it—and said “hey, there’s a fire on the mountain!” and we thought, okay someone is just jerking us around here. But we went outside and on the hillside there was a brushfire on the top of the mountain on the other side of the road, and the hillside was starting to be consumed in flame. Not a forest fire, but we watched the firetruck come to the top of the mountain and put it out, and then [Grateful Dead lyricist Robert] Hunter gave me these words and started writing…it just seemed like the thing to do, but you know, I can’t sing! (Laughs)
It’s around the same time that the precursors to modern hip-hop were coming together in New York City.
MH- I don’t think there was rap then or any of that. That didn’t happen till much later. If it was happening, I didn’t know about it. It was a spontaneous outpouring of inspiration. I don’t know if I’ve ever done it live. Maybe I have, I don’t remember.
It just seems to run parallel to what you’re doing now, where you’re just so far out there…
MH- There are so many frontiers for music that haven’t even been tapped yet. I mean, it just lies there. Music as a healing agent, as a diagnostic tool, as a tuning system to reconnect the broken pathways of dementia. It goes on and on. Music as medicine—that’s the most exciting frontier in music now besides performance, which is wonderful. You have to perform, you have to play music, but there is other things that music will be able to do once the science has validated and coded the powers that are innate in vibration. Because music is just controlled vibrations.
I know you have so many interests within music. When you’re not on tour, what do you do?
MH- Today, I’m sonifying a part of the brain that reacts to sound. I have wave forms from the brain that I’m now sonifying and making sound out of. These are electrical stimuli, energy that comes out of the brain when there’s activity. So I’m working in the neurology of sound, today. That’s what today brings. I’m really anxious to find out what the brain looks like before and during and after an auditory experience.
We know music works. We know music does a lot of things. We know it sometimes allows people to speak who haven’t spoken, walk who haven’t walked, relive their pain and suffering for at least a short time. But we don’t really know what its code is. Music therapists are like the foot soldiers now in the field. And then there’s the scientific side, and that’s what I’m doing right now. I’m trying to find out what really—because the brain is rhythm central. What the brain says, happens. So, this is what I’m at now. I wanna hear it, I wanna see it. There’s new technology now. I’m working with neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley out of the University of California in San Francisco in his lab sonifying brain waves. Today I’m going to sound design those brain waves.
What’s the raw data that you work from in terms of doing that? What kind of files do you have?
MH- These are electrical stimuli, so they’ve been transferred from electricity into sound, and then I take the sound and make music out of it.
Once you’ve completed that, where do you intend to take it next?
MH- Music as medicine—examining the sonic make-up of an afflicted person and someone who hasn’t been affected, to determine if there’s some way to bring frequency back or take it out. Or how does sound vibration affect disease? Because disease is when the body gets out of rhythm, gets weak and attacked and is broken. A healthy organism can resist a lot of those kind of diseases that affect the complex organism like the body and the mind. So keeping that tuned is the most important thing, and that’s what music does: it’s the tuning system that keeps you healthy. And when you stop eating right and drinking and partying and doing lots of bad drugs and just not taking care of yourself, you will fall out of rhythm and you will not be healthy.
That’s what I would hope, that music, once we know how to really use it, will be one of the great diagnostic tools and healing tools of this century. Bob Marley said “Music have plenty power.” So The Great Seer, he knew, and so does every other musician who’s ever been caught up in that bliss, that feeling. They know that that’s power, really a lot of power. If you can direct that power back, then you’ve got something of great value. It’s kind of like Tesla. He was wondering, how do you handle electricity? How do you get it to people? And what good is it? We’re at the same place that Tesla was with electricity. There are things we are about to find out now about music that will be amazing. That’s what I hope comes from all of this stuff. And it’s fun! We as humans must have fun. And we really are coded for music, because we have to do music—that’s what makes us human. I’m not gonna do any career change now, though.
Speaking of your career and its scope, one of the reasons I wanted to speak with you today was to talk about Jerry Garcia. Tomorrow [August 9] is the anniversary of his passing. I was wondering if you could share your initial impressions of him?
MH- Jerry? The first time I met him I played with him. It was a joyful musical experience and my first moment being in the Grateful Dead. It was a live performance, of course, and I didn’t really know Jerry. Bill [Kreutzmann] and I went out and got a set of drums from one of Billy’s friends, set it up, and off we went for a few hours. Next thing I know, everyone was looking around, Jerry was smiling and said “We could take this around the world.” Obviously that was meaningful to him. I can hardly remember it. I just remember it was an extraordinary personal experience. It was elevating to say the least. I would say it was wondrous. It was music unborn that was being born right in front of us.
I didn’t really know Grateful Dead music at the time, so it was really an outpouring of inspiration by everyone. It just kind of came together and completed the puzzle I guess. That was my first interaction with him.
In terms of his legacy or ongoing presence on this day in 2012, how would you characterize that?
MH- Jerry means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. That’s why it’s so great. He was an enigma in a way, a mythic figure. You could see yourself in him and you could see perhaps a divine channel because he was like a fountain of music. People saw themselves and related to him and his sound and he was a very sweet person in real life, and that all came out on the stage in his music. But he also was very weird, and had a dark side that you can hear in the music, too. All of those beautiful real places he could articulate and would make a musical journey real interesting. Not only to play with him, but also for people who were observing the experiment that was being created in front of them for their enjoyment and also spiritual upliftment, which we always thought was the primacy of it all. If you don’t have a spirit that’s in working order, then you’re not really alive. So, that’s what the Grateful Dead was created for.
Did you find in the end after you played with him for so many years that he still had the ability night in and night out to surprise you musically?
MH- Well towards the end, he wasn’t really creating new songs. He was revisiting things that he knew because he was losing his feeling in his extremities. The blood wasn’t getting to his heart and he couldn’t move around as fluidly. So he did as anybody else would do in that case and play it on the safe side. So he didn’t go anywhere especially new, but went somewhere familiar to see what perhaps he forgot. It wasn’t really exploratory at the end. He wasn’t healthy. And if you’re not healthy, you can’t play healthy.
Diabetes and doing too many drugs, not taking care of himself. I mean, he was not an athletic guy. He didn’t exercise. Everything was the guitar. It was all his energy. His whole life-force went into the guitar and that’s what came out, and that was formidable. Because he had good feelings. He was a wonderful man, and he had the ability to translate all those human feelings, those traits, directly to your eardrum. And also, it was Grateful Dead. Not only him as a person, but the Grateful Dead as an entity took on a wholly different meaning for many people. Some people saw it as Santa Claus, some people saw it as their drug. Some were really inspired by it, and it was a flawed model, but it was just so charmingly flawed that everybody loved it. (Laughs)
Is there a peak era in your mind?
MH- Each era had its peaks, and they were quite different. To me, my favorite was probably ’68, ’69, ’70, because that’s when the seeds were sown and we were composing what you know now as Grateful Dead music. That was a very catalytic time. It was a great discovery on all of our parts—a new way of playing music collectively. Being able to give parts away, take them, be flexible. Kind of like plasticity. It’s gotta be fluid, it’s gotta be supple, it’s gotta move, it’s gotta be selfless. It’s gotta be a lot of things. That ability forms like a group mind. The organism became powerful. And it set off itself. That’s what makes a great band a great band—those kind of things.
Anyway, Jerry was a big part of all that. Besides, he was funny. Really funny. I mean, he said the funniest things at the best of times. He had great timing. He always wanted to be a drummer. That’s why he picked up the banjo, the closest thing to drums, you know picking, membrane, get it?
Imagine what he would have sounded like if he would’ve been a drummer. Oh man, that would have been great. And then I would of course be playing guitar.
Did he ever get behind a kit when you were in rehearsal space?
MH- Yeah, he did actually! We switched instruments once. For one song, I played guitar and Jerry played drums and Phil I think played keyboard, and we played one rock and roll song. It was just so funny! It must have sounded awful. I think everybody was playing someone else’s instrument [Dead.net identifies the lineup as: Bobby on keyboards, Brent & Jerry on drums, Billy on bass – Mickey on rhythm guitar and vocals, and Phil on lead guitar].
It was an April Fool’s Day show.
MH- Oh really? What was the name of the song?
It was “Promised Land.” Did you rehearse that?
MH- Oh, of course! We rehearsed it for weeks! Don’t be silly. It just happened right there as we walked out on stage. What does it sound like?
I’ve never heard it. I just know that it happened. [It can be found right here on archive.org] Capitol Theatre, April 1st 1980.
MH- That was so funny. I’m not sure how it happened but I know I had something to do with it….
