Interview with Mickey Hart

Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmanm received the nickname “Rhythm Devils” after one of their famous drum solos while on tour with the Grateful Dead. 43 years later, the duo continue to push the limits of rhythm together in their “sub-lunar” band, The Rhythm Devils. The second stop on their summer tour will be out at The Britt in Jacksonville on Sunday, June 18. Last week I had the chance to have a conversation with Mickey Hart. Due to space constraints, the interview in its entirety can be viewed at RogueRambler.com. Normal 0 0 1 1627 9278 77 18 11394 11.0 0 0 0

SNEAK PREVIEW: Your upcoming tour begins in a few weeks here in Oregon.  I can assume that going on tour is almost second nature to you…

MICKEY HART: Going on tour is a part of the music. You get to meet a lot of people and see a lot of places, which is really cool. But you have to go out there, you just can’t bring them here.  When you sign up, you look forward to this kind of thing, if you don’t it becomes a real hassle. But I like touring, I actually like it.

How do you manage to keep each performance fresh and creative night after night?

That’s a good question. You have to first empty your mind of a lot of things you did the night before, and then open you mind to other things like, the possibilities. So it’s really a Zen thing, you have to really focus on not repeating, or repeating the things that need repeating and don’t repeat the redundant stuff, you know, or else you’ll get into a rut. That’s really a good question. It takes a lot to be able to let it loose and be in the moment, that’s what you’re talking about.  It’s flow and being able to express yourself in the present moment, that of course, is the basis of my music, no matter what music I play.

This is your 5th different decade of playing music with the other Rhythm Devil, Bill Kreutzmann. Can you tell me how creating music with Bill now is different from back in the 60s when you guys started with the Grateful Dead?

We’re better drummers than we were when we were kids, and so we understand rhythm more. This makes it easier and it flows better. But you know, we’ve changed with each other’s styles over the years. We don’t talk about it much at all. We still have the same feeling from the very first moment we played together (in 1967). It’s just a chemistry thing.  We don’t really question it, it just is.

You’ve collaborated with an unbelievably enormous amount of other artists, and because of this, your music seems to grow outside of the usual constraints of genres. How do you keep up with this constant evolution? And have you ever felt like the music has gotten ahead of you?

Well, I play music everyday. It’s a way of life for me, it’s not like a profession. I’m with rhythm everyday; I’m a work in progress. I don’t keep up with anybody and I don’t think of that, ever. I’m not in competition with anybody, I just go for my inspiration and try to ask how I can fulfill my vision, and I have a lot of visions. I’m active—overactive perhaps—in the vision department.  And that’s the hard part: being able to flow with your creative juices on a daily basis.  Playing on your private time, doing recordings, going out and performing, and writing—there are all these different parts to making music. My day is all filled with this and it keeps me inspired. It’s the rhythm of life, my life, the rhythm of things, and I’m sort of coded for that. It’s not about drums or drumming in a way. It’s more about the rhythm of things, the way things move, including music.

Are there times when the reality of the music doesn’t live up to your expectations?

Oh of course, a lot. You have to try to understand what is going wrong, fix it and move on. Those are the only two options you have, unless you just want to stay in a toxic musical environment. Music is very potent spiritual material—sound, specifically, you know, vibration. We were born a vibration. That’s what makes rhythm and music so powerful because we’re in training with the larger rhythms. The beginning was noise, noise begot rhythm, rhythm begot everything else. 13.7 billion years ago the blank page of the universe exploded, creating galaxies, planets, suns moons, earth, us. So that’s why I drum, because it connects you to the vibrations that bore you. It’s very simply, really. All religions deal with the vibratory world. And all spiritual cultures as well.

Next year you’ll be releasing Rhythms of the Universe, what has been called a “musical history of the universe,” is that correct?

Yes, as a matter of fact, that’s where I’m heading. I do very little sub-lunar work these days—the Rhythm Devils happens to be one of them. But most of my work happens in the cosmos now. I take lightwaves and radio waves from the Big Bang and other epic events that happened in the universe and change them into audio, and am using them now in the music. That’s going to be my next project. Playing with time and space and interacting with the beginning of time is just too attractive. That’s what Rhythms of the Universe is all about and I’ve been at it for quite a while.

Do you feel like this project is just an extension of all the work you’ve been doing so far?

It’s absolutely in line with all my books. They have to do with planetary percussion and how we got here and why we’re here and what is our place in the universe and what is it all about.  I always talk in rhythmic terms. Now I’m working with George Smoot at Berkley, he won a Nobel in 2006 for discovering the remnants of the Big Bang. I also work with different physicists around the world, as well as NASA. But they don’t really think of it in musical terms, scientists usually think of it in wave forms. But I think sonically—rhythmically—so since my books all point to the beginning of time and space I thought it would be appropriate to go back there and find out if there was a sound connection to these objects that were rotating into stars, galaxies, the Milky Way, the sun, the moon, the earth. And I found there’s an incredible conversation going on up there because there is a heavenly clockwork—everything has an order up there or else we’d be bumping into everything. It’s a master clockwork, which talks about time, which means rhythm—all this is right up my alley. This is where I wanted to go, and it’s now where I spend a lot of my time.

Bringing you back down to earth, and more specifically Jacksonville, Oregon, Keller Williams will be joining your show at The Britt on July 18...

Indeed, another human.

I was wondering how he ended up on tour with you? And what kind of show can folks expect to see with him joining you on stage?

Keller is a wild fart. He’s going to bring some real magic to the tour. He plays, he sings, he percusses. And then Andy Hess will be on bass—he’s great bass player. And Davy Knowles on guitar, boy he plays a mean string—yeah, I like him. It should be a great combination. And then Sikiru Adepoju on talking drum, he brings the powerful west African rhythms that were brought to us by the slave trade, by the way.  He plays the talking drum like no other. He’s a maestro.  We’ll see if the chemistry is all there.  These guys were all hand-picked and they all know the material so it’s going to really be interesting to see what it sounds like on stage.  We’ve been rehearsing using MP3s. We just have to rehearse in the modern age, because everybody’s so busy, you just can’t find a month to spend together so you have to find inventive ways of exchanging musical ideas, so we’ve been using MP3s rather fiercely back and forth. One guy sends a take to another guy who puts his stuff on it and so forth and so on. And there’s a conversation going. And then there’s the vocal conversation as well. I thought we should have some fun with it this way because we won’t be able to be in the same room for more than seven or eight days. Even though we know the material and know how to play—remember, we’ve studied instruments our whole lives to be able to play music, so we have a skill—the next thing is the chemistry part of it, how it all comes together as a band. I have no doubt about this band. This band is a slam dunk for me, you know, for sub-lunar music.

We’re going to play some Dead songs, and we’ll be playing Rhythm Devil songs with a very powerful electronic component to it.

You’ve played with musicians from nearly every corner of the globe…

And now every corner of the universe!  I love to play with other people and have that connection. It can be a spiritual thing.  It’s a personally thing for me and you know it when you hear it. You say, I can play music with that guy, that guy’s really interesting.

I assume you’ve played with people that don’t speak the same language…

Well, I’ve only been in a couple of places in my life where the people I was playing with were so culturally specific that they couldn’t break out of their tradition and meet me half way. There are times when musicians, especially indigenous cultures from around the world, they’re really not world musicians. They haven’t heard other styles and all they really do is what they do. When they try to go outside their confines, they’re lost. They’re not prepared to improvise, let’s say.  When I played my drums down in the Sudan, or in Eygpt, they were very rigid. They played certain grooves that were part of their daily rituals—a wedding or a funeral—that supported some part of their lives and it was very culturally specific.  They became uncomfortable when they saw the way I approached the same instrument, even though I could play it like they could play it (I always learn their grooves before going to another culture—they treat me differently, not like a musical tourist because I take the time to honor their tradition). But some of them, when I go into a looser, more improvisational world, they’ll stop playing. And they wont start playing until I tell them, or they understand, that it’s okay to do things like that, because their tradition doesn’t recognize it, not that it disallows it, it’s just that they’ve never done it. So I’ve been in places like that where they just do one thing, and that’s all they do.  For the most part, music is universal. Every culture has a music, but not all cultures can mix musics, they’re too rigid.

You've spoken about how you immersed yourself in Mystery Box after Jerry's death... Do you actively process emotions as you play/write?

Absolutely, of course it’s part of my system, my whole way of going. That’s why music is so powerful, you can process those emotions. What you’re doing in music is taking a spirit and changing it into a form.  Music is invisible, you can’t see music, so you’re changing it into a vibratory event.  You’ve changed form here and it’s now a chemical thing if you look at it in those terms. If your really processing your emotions and you have real translating capabilities—if you have skill on your instrument and are feeling a strong emotion—the chances are that you will be able to transform that spirit into sound.

This last question is from one of our editors…and I’ll quote him “Wave to the Wind, in my opinion, is one of the greatest examples of song-craft in American history...What was is like to be a part of that process?”

Humbling. And I’ll leave you with that.