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A
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Good old Grateful Dead cast. We have a special treat in store for you this episode. Our guest is none other than master percussionist and member of the Grateful Dead man Mickey Hart. We hope you've been enjoying this season's deep dive into American Beauty. Make sure to Visit us@dead.net deadcast where you'll find all of the American Beauty episodes we've released thus far, as well as the 10 episodes from last season which focus on Working Man's Dead. Please help this podcast by subscribing Hitting that like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review thank you very, very much. This year marks the 50th anniversary of American Beauty and the Grateful Dead have prepared a 3 CD set reissue of this classic album. It's out now. It includes a pristine remastering of the album's original 10 tracks, as well as two bonus discs that have an unreleased live show from February 18, 1971 at the Capitol Theater. Along with this three CD reissue, there's a new batch of Angelshare audio for American Beauty as well. It's all out now. It has the full band acoustic demos as well as all of the studio outtakes so you really get a fly on the wall perspective. You're there with the boys as they're recording this great album. These are all available at your favorite streaming service or download provider now. Well, Jesse and I had the distinct privilege of talking with Mickey Hart recently and it was obvious to us that this free flowing conversation was perfect for a Dead Cast bonus episode. So let's just get right to it shall.
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Mickey Hart needs no real introduction to most of our listeners. Starting in the 1970s, Mickey created an adventurous discography, an incredible universe of sound that includes ancient percussion, contemporary electronics, field recordings, work with the Library of Congress, noise drones, monks, heartbeat sonification, songwriters, soundtracks, and of course the Beam, an instrument of his own making. Also, he was a drummer for the Grateful Dead. Mickey Hart joined the grateful dead in 1967, adding a second drum kit alongside Bill Kreutzman and soon a whole lot more. He would consistently help push the Dead's envelope. A musical vote for exploration in all its forms. And so we are beyond delighted to welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast Mickey Hart, here to check in on what he's been up to lately and also to travel the spaceways of his many projects, going back to the days of American Beauty.
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C
This is, of course, a different season, not a touring season, but it's a composing and studio season and season to take, you know, just to take a look at musically what you're doing and where you want to go and so forth. And. And it's been a season of drones for me. I've been working seriously with drones. I'm doing some with Deepak Chopra, some drones with him and. Yeah, and working on the next planet Drum incarnation with Zakir Hussain online. So this has been really. This has been really an adventure. We call it the Sonic Tonic club. So it's 100, I think it's the 181st edition of the Sonic Tonic Club today, so. Or 86, 81, something like that. But it's in the 100 and 80s.
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B
Wow.
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C
Yeah, it's a serious thing. So the Sonic Tonic Club meets almost every day and we exchange drones and work on material. Just investigate the rhythm scape more and more and how we use spatial processing in the music. You know, just finding new spaces in music that's really. I love to discover stuff that's the most exciting thing is to create something from nothing or something, you know, that's. That's an amazing feeling. So that's what I've been doing. And also having actually a very fulfilling time with this virus on the loose, actually composing wise. So, yeah, I'm at.
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B
That was Mickey Hart playing the beam, recorded October 16, 1989 at Meadowlands in New Jersey on the Grateful Dead live album Nightfall of Diamonds. The beam is a girder strung with piano wires and set to an open tuning. A giant Pythagorean monochord. For good reason. Mickey Hart is fond of playing it very, very loudly. It's the source material for many of the drones Mickey's been making lately.
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C
It's all about the Pythagorean monochord, you know, it's all about the music of the spheres. It's about Pythagoras who gave us the tempered scale he also studied the revolutions of the sun and the moon, and he gave it numerical equations, and it's all entwined in the beam. And the beam uses low frequency. It moves brain waves into certain states. So this is all about the brain. The brain's the master clock. What the brain says you do. So that's where the beam is headed. It's kind of like a superhighway of senses, if you will. You know, when you hit the drone, you hit the beam, you go into the zone, you go into the now, into the moment. That's where everybody wants to go. But with the drone, it's instantaneous. Yeah. So the depths at which it's going is fantastic. We've gone down to. Well, we can go down to 15 cycles, you know, super low. Yeah, 16. Yeah, it's. It's really low. So it really moves you. Right. It immerses you in it. So it's a new kind of experience. You have to have a super system to be able to even attempt to be able to do it. Like I do it, or I do it in Dead and Company, where I can go down to 16 cycles. 17, 18, 19. Because they read it at the board out there in the arena or the stadium, you never know how low it can go because of the resonance of the place you're in. And so. But it does move you in a way that nothing else does. It just totally takes you into the moment quicker than music actually really does. It just drops you right in. If you let yourself go into it, you just kind of melt into it. You know, I got 3,000 subwoofers out there. Whatever. I can get really loud, you know, so probably the loudest human in the world, I would say. Some people have said, and I don't doubt them, especially at these depths, you know, hearing the arena, hearing the whole place kind of vibrate, and you can feel all the souls with you. You can feel everybody. And so playing in my studio, no matter how good it is, still not like the get off. You get, you know, alive when you can. When, you know, people are there and we are vibrating together. I mean, at once. That's a beautiful feeling. When people really take that moment, to really take account of it all, it gets you really high.
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B
Mickey immediately answered one of our questions. If he just pleased the beam at home, the answer may not surprise you.
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C
Well, I do most of the time, you know, almost every day, you know, I have many beams now. They've had babies, so I'm the fortunate one here. So I have many beams and they all are different tunings, and they're all some small, some large. So Pythagoras was right. Pythagoras came in, he would be dancing and smiling, and he would say, I told you so.
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B
Have you ever gotten to play a beam ensemble? Like, have multiple beams playing at once?
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C
Oh, yeah, I have the ability to do that now. Yeah. They all sync, so you can have them all singing at once. And you get to a place right before feedback, and you just hang in there and they play themselves and they just sustain. Right at that point, you could just walk out of the room.
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A
It's like that scene in Spinal Tap where he goes, yeah, you can go out and have a bite, come back, it'll still be ringing.
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C
Oh, yeah. If you get it at the sweet spot, you know, it's not easy. You gotta. You gotta get right at that crack in the sky. And then the beams sing by themselves, their own song every day. Different.
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B
The beam's origins are in the early 70s.
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C
The beam was. There was a fellow in San Francisco, he played a beam, like a beam instrument. And I had seen it once in Golden Gate Park. I was with Dan Healy, I think, and I'm sorry, I can't remember his name. Francesco Topeka. Yes. Assassin's right. Excuse me.
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Sorry to interrupt. Mickey. We were both remembering the name of Francisco Lupica. Playing as Frank Davis, he drummed for a number of 60s bands, including the Loading Zone, who shared bills with the Dead, and later the group Shanti. He put out a private press LP called the Cosmic Beam Experience. In 1976, he explained the basic principle on the Tomorrow show with Tom Snyder.
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A
Now, from California and from another world, here is Francisco Lupica, who is the creator of the Cosmic Beam Experience. How have you been? As they say, all right.
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C
Pretty good. Okay.
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A
For those who didn't view our past programs physically, what is the cosmic beam? Just tell what this piece of metal is.
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C
Okay?
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B
This instrument here is called the cosmic.
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C
Beam, which is a steel girder from.
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A
A semi truck, and it has electromagnetic pickups there.
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C
If you could see those copper. Gotcha. I had known about the Pythagorean monochord, so. But I never saw an electric monochord. And he was a big, giant iron beam. It would take two or three people. Just, you know, it was huge. And he would set up in the park in Golden Gate park and just, you know, just drift and play around, you know, with bells and things. And so I decided to build a super version of that, you know, a 747 version of it. So it's taken years, and it's. It's probably the most powerful percussive tool drone tool on the planet. It really is powerful.
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The instrument has a fairly wide entangled family tree ready for beam scholars to chart out. Lupeaka actually credits a musician named John Lavelle, of whom I can find little trace. If anyone knows anything else, please get in touch. Mickey developed his own 747 version of the beam to create sound for the Apocalypse now soundtrack in 1978. A few years later, though, a different beam, the blaster beam, as invented by Craig Huxley, would become a Hollywood staple, a source for sound effects and Star Trek adventures, IMAX movies, pop songs like Beat it, and other pieces of blockbuster entertainment. Mickey Hart built his beam at the Barn, his studio and retreat in Nevada.
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C
I was thinking how special it was, Like a crucible, the barn was. I would leave it open and we leave the beam in the middle of the barn. I would just leave it just ready to go all day long. And I would just drift back and forth, you know, smoke a little, go back and play, Smoke a little, go back and play.
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B
In other parts of the good old Grateful Dead cast, we focused on the Dead's work at some of the era's most known classic studios, including Pacific High, where they recorded Working Man's Dead, and Wally Hiders in San Francisco, where they made American Beauty. But over the course of 1970, a new studio was taking shape up in Nevada on the land that Mickey Hart leased from the city for $250 a month. The Barn would become one of the era's classic, almost forgotten studios, with a fairly breathtaking array of projects recorded there over the next years. And it became a place for sonic experimentation.
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C
And you'd see everybody go, come to the barn. You know, just come, jam, leave, you know, everybody. I remember John Cipollina from Quicksilver was there a lot, and David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Jerry, of course, Bob, Phil, you know, the band. And it was just a place to, you know, to go, to experiment, you know, to find new things, new techniques. But also it was the scene of the famous four day and four night drum marathon. We kept it going for four with the Diga Rhythm Band. Four days and four nights. There was a groove going. Wow, that was an amazing moment in the Barn's history. The Rhythm band was in 1975. 74, 75, 73, 74, 75, something like that, yeah. And so we were all together making that record, and then we decided to go long. And once you go long like that, you go into the trance, so you have to expect those kind of situations. Yeah, we kept it going, even if it was a duo. You went to the bathroom, you had to have a tambourine.
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B
Amazing.
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C
You get to do things like that. You can never do that at the studio. It was a crucible. It was an alembec, you know, it was a place for things to be created that could not be created anywhere else. And it was home. And there was this big tin barn over there. Dan Healy actually built it. He was the architect of that, and Johnny Defonsica, those old friends of mine. And I remember, we built an echo chamber with Keen cement, this really rare kind of cement that you had to do for the real echo chamber. And David Crosby came over, and we put him in the echo chamber to play with his guitar, his beautiful acoustic guitar. And he just. Just in the. Just the chamber itself. So we were just in the chamber listening to his big D5 or whatever it was, and, you know, got all kinds of stuff. You know, everybody was there. You know, Hell's Angels, Pranksters, you know, all of the. Everybody who was in the scene kind of just came and went. A lot of people lived there over the years, you know, like Billy and different people lived there. Gee, I don't remember how many years I actually had it, but I never owned it. I just rented it from the city. And they. They let me be. I think they were afraid. I really do. One time they asked us to come out. They asked us to come out, you know, come out with your arms, you know, you know, up. And we said, no way. Crosby had just bought. Crosby had just bought $500 worth of ammo. We were doing target practice, and they thought a militia was happening there, but we weren't going to go out and come in. That was another interesting moment, you know, in the history of the Barn. Everybody, you know, there's a lot of guns around. Let us say, okay, in those days, those wild days, and people wanted to get to use their guns. So there was a big, giant creek bed, and we just started setting up. Well, actually with symbols at first.
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A
How cool.
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C
Yeah, me and Billy set up some symbols. That was the first targets. And so it started getting really popular. And this one day, you know, there were many days.
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A
Did you ever trip out on the effect of different calibers on the cymbals and the different sounds it made?
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C
Yeah, of course. You know, especially if you're high on acid, you know, you can. Everything becomes a whole other reality. But it was the percussiveness of it all. Yeah. And the sound of them. And inside this little crater of a stream, it was. You could really hear it just ring. So it was beautiful. But it also sounded like we were using, you know, giant weapons, but we were just using hunting rifles and shotguns and pistols and so forth with good amplification. Yeah. We meant no one harm, that's for sure. Yeah. That land is sacred land. The Shoshone have been there. So, you know, it was an important piece of spiritual property. So many people saw visions there. I myself saw Rolling Thunder picking this thing called Yellow dock, which he used for infections, to bring out the infections. And I looked out the window and I was kind of sick. And there he was picking yellow duck. And I thought he would come in, and he never came in. And I. I asked, you know, why. Why is RT not coming in and RT is not here. He hasn't been here for a long time. But I was able to see him perfectly. Like, you know, I can. It was just absolute. And I wasn't taking drugs. Yeah. So, yeah, So a lot of things happened there. It was a spiritually based place where people, you know, kind of left their spirit there in some ways. And that's what that place was for. Ritual. Ritual is really important, especially when you. When you have restarting a community. And so we were starting a community, and so you had to have it within your own community in order to give it. So we had to learn to do that. And that's what. Where that. That's where that came in. On the larger scale, the barn is.
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B
Where Fire on the Mountain was born. If you poke around with your favorite tape traders, you can find some recordings of Mickey rapping the original lyrics over the groove.
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C
I think that was 70, 71 or something like that or something. And, yeah, that was. I had done the basic track and Jerry came in and played. I think that David Freiberg might have even played bass from Quicksilver. Yeah. And then I started rapping it, you know, And Hunter was outside writing the verses, and he was handing me verses as I was in the vocal booth. He was. So that was funny. And then it was a fire. There was a fire on the mountain right across from the barn on the hill. There was a grass fire, and all the kids was screaming, there's a fire on the mountain. And they go, oh, come on. You know, so there really was. They went outside and there was a fire on the. On the opposing mountain. That was the rap version. Gary wanted me to sing it. I wanted him to sing it. He said, you sing it. She said, no, you do. I said, no. Finally, I just, you know, I prepared.
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B
On the technical end, one of the chief sonic realizers was longtime dead engineer Dan Healy.
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C
Reverb and delay were really rare in those days. You only had springs and really horrible sounding things. So Healey came up with an idea of putting exponential tubes. I think it was 32ft, 32 milliseconds. One end was. It started with 24, then it got 24 inches and 8 inches. And there was a track running down the whole. The center. And there was a locomotive on the track. And on the top of the Locomotive was an RE15. It was a microphone. So we could. We. So we can control the length of sound by using the locomotive to get closer and closer to the speaker, which was on the other end, broadcasting. So it was a delay. And so we had 32 or 62 and milliseconds. And that was a. That was a lot in those days. So, yeah, Healey was brilliant. He built that and he designed the echo chamber. So Healey was brilliant. He worked so hard on that. You know, he was. He came from Fairfax every day, almost building that. It was really a labor of love.
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B
Some of my favorite albums recorded at the barn were Robert Hunter's early solo efforts, including his 1974 Round Records debut, Tales of the Great Rum Runners, with contributions from Jerry Garcia, Keith and Donna God show, and many other members of the Grateful Dead family. If you like the acoustic palette of American Beauty, I especially recommend it.
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C
Annie laid her head down in the roses she had ribbons, ribbons, ribbons in her long brown hair I don't know, it must have been the Roses. All I know I could not leave her there. We made the Hunter records, too. That's right. Yeah. So I was producer of Tales of the Great Rum Runners with the first one. And I think the second one was Tiger Rose, if I recall. And so me and Jerry did both of them there at the studio with Hunter. Those were good days. They were sweet. You know, Jerry and Bob working together and having fun and, you know, and doing Bob's music. You know, Hunter. Hunter had just a charming musical sensibility. I mean, he wasn't really a musician per se. Like, wasn't like a great player. He played great pipes, Scottish pipes. He played really well, but. But he. He made do. And, you know, it was just a wonderful time. You know, we. I don't know how long it took us to make that. It seems like it was really quick. Yeah, they were great records. And I just loved the Hunter's versions Of those of songs, I just loved it.
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B
Tiger Rose from 1975 features the track Yellow Moon, which I think is the only example of Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia playing alone in the studio on acoustic guitars.
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C
Born, born, born upon the world the restless heart keeps flying Trying to become the heart of home Love, love, love Picks you up spins you round Sits you right back down where you belong I think that was the one, or maybe it was Tiger Rose, where I covered all my drums with a sheet. And I played the drums really dry with a bedsheet over them or something like that taped around them. Shape away. I kind of remember that Jerry. It was like he taped me with gaffer's tape.
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A
How did the sheet affect the way that the drums resonated?
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C
Well, it cuts the resonance down tremendously. So you get a very dry sound. And if you can get tone dry and tone, then you can take that and put it in another processing easily. And you don't have to worry about the sound of the room or the drum ring or any of that. You can get real clean sound going into a signal processor. It's just another way of playing ball with the sound. That's what it's all about. It's a game in a way. You learn constantly, all the time about acoustics. It's never ending.
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B
When he wrote his first book, Drumming at the Edge of Magic, the barn became a site for a different kind of experimentation. As Mickey researched the history of percussion, making notes on index cards in the barn, he began to arrange them.
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C
They were three by five cards, actually, all hundreds and hundreds of them, all pinned to the wall all around the barn. And they were the timeline of the recorded history of percussion dating back to the Paleolithic. So I had a timeline, a storyline on three by five, spin to the walls, and at night I would light it up. It looked like a. We used to call it the Anaconda. It was my information snake. That's how I wrote the books. You know, it was, you know, the gathering of information very much like you work on Pro Tools or, you know, Ableton and all of these digital things. And that was in the analog world before computers. And so you'd have to write it down. I can hardly write now. Been on the computer so long.
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B
Of course, the most visible outlet for Mickey Hart's experimentation was the Grateful Dead. And especially the long segment each night that featured drums, percussion, and a lot of other sounds.
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C
Every night was different. That's one part of the show we don't talk about. You have to react there in the moment. So it's not rehearsed. It never was. We have suggestions sometimes, but not mostly. Back then, we would have the cooks bring out their pans and pots and they would come. God, we fried bacon during the solo. Back in the old days, that was a big solo, was when I fried bacon and I would put the microphone into the fryer. Ramrod used to get a big slab of bacon and put it in my frying. In the frying pan. Electric frying pan, which was on Jerry's app. Or parsley on it. On top of it. Well, Pig Pen used to eat it.
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A
I was gonna say, man, who ate it?
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C
That was the big part. He used to come over with drumsticks. They're like chopsticks. Wow. Oh, man, that was funny. And then there was this moment. It didn't get in the pan fast enough, so it wasn't frying. And I put. Nothing was happening. So I didn't think there was really any juice, you know, any bacon in it. I just turned it and flipped it over. I said, nah, I don't want to. And it all went on Jerry's twin, and it just dripping down Jerry's wind. And I'm looking at Ramrod, he's looking at me, and I'm saying, he goes, that's the end of bacon. And I go, okay. Jerry never said a thing. You know, he never said a thing. I think this is before parish and stuff. You know, this is back in the old days.
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B
It's not entirely clear when the Grateful that Bacon era was. I've not yet detected any obvious frying sounds on tape. Feel free to send us likely candidates if you think you hear any sizzling. There are very few eyewitness accounts to the band's bacon jams, but the ones that exist seem to date from November 1970, which, as we learned in our Dead cast about Ripple, is a particular blank spot for decent sounding tapes.
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C
Then there was the era of the explosive era, where I had 12 gauge shotgun shells going off during St. Stephen. That was. We all thought that was brilliant.
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B
That was from Dixpick 16, recorded November 8, 1969 at the Fillmore Auditorium. I always wondered what the deal was with the cannon or actually two cannons.
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C
Two starter cannons at my left foot, and they were both ganged as one. And there was a strap between them. So when I pushed my foot, I took my. Took my foot and I brought it back underneath the wire. Trip wire. Two starter cannons would go off simultaneously. It was in the St Stephen. One man gathers what another man spills and then so it got out of hand and we stopped that too. Just like bacon. Just like bacon. Now, the story of the cannons were we were playing with Janice out there and somewhere in San Jose, and I was playing, and backstage, it was outside in the park and Janice had played us, and we were playing and I heard this giant in the back behind the curtain, and I thought, oh, they're just playing around, having fun with the. With the cannons. You know, they do that at times. And then I started smelling flesh, burning flesh. And so Ramrod was right there next to me, and he was on fire. His hair and his face was kind of on fire, you know, And I said, what? What? And he was there and he was loading the cannons for me to use them. He was on fire, smelling, burning. And he was there at my feet, still setting the cannons for the song St. Stephen. It was right before St. Stephen. So he came out there on fire, and I said, what is happening? What? You're on fire? And I started putting out his hair and. And he said, well, you know, they loaded the cannon without telling them who used to load the cannon. They thought they were going to be nice, you know, and they loaded the cannon. They didn't tell Ramrod. So when he pulled it off the stack of the equipment, he pulled it by the cord that was retaining both of the cannons, and they both went off right there in his face, like, oh. So he was there burning right there with my feet and putting the 12 gauge into the starter cannons. And I said, that's the end of cannons. I said, that's the end. So that ended there. Like bacon ended. He told me that bacon ended, and I told him that cannons ended and everybody had a good time. But that shows you how great equipment man Ramrod was. He did it, you know, he was. He was doing what he had to do while he was burning. He's still, you know, smoldering and flesh burning. I mean, you gotta really go, you know, to beat that. I mean, like invisible fruit.
- [33:46]
B
That was time beyond reason. For Mickey's most recent solo album, 2017's Random Access Musical Universe. The vocalist was Av Tear, sometimes known as Dave Portner, 1/4 of Animal Collective, a decidedly 21st century psychedelic group influenced by the Dead, among many, many other artists. The lyricist was Robert Hunter, who contributed one of his final batches of lyrics to the album. And the person connecting them was Mickey Hart, who's continued to push music further and further into the future from his vantage in the present.
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C
Every day is a revelation, really. I try to make That a reality. I go into the studio pretty much every day, and maybe not weekends, but I go in there with the expectations of doing something incredible and miraculous and amazing, you know, transformative, something that will lift me and get me higher. And that's what music does. So, you know, that's what I go in there with, that. Trying to make a better world, you know, by making yourself a little better person. That's kind of what music does. So you might say that's, you know, that's my therapist, you know, every day getting a hit of music, you know, you know, at the appropriate level, what you're doing is you're searching around, you're foraging. Think about that, you're hunting, you're going through the woods, you know, that kind of thing, and you see something that's intriguing to you, you go there, you do that. That thing leads you to another, through another, another. So you're jamming all day long. And so that's how you. That's how you want to go through a day. I mean, if you can't go out and do, you know, go play in front of people, you know, which is a wonderful experience. That's nothing like that. But you have to go into your music when you listen to it the same way you say, wow, I'm going in. You know, this experience is going to get me high. It's going to make me better at whatever I want to do. That's best it could be. Stay healthy, and you can do music forever.
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B
Mickey Hart.
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C
Man.
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B
We'll leave with a little more from where we started. The main 10 for Mickey's first solo album, Rolling Thunder, released in 1972. The recording will hopefully get into a lot more with Mickey sometime down the road.
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A
Well, that's definitely something that doesn't happen every day. We hope you enjoyed this special bonus episode of the good old Grateful Dead cast with our esteemed guest, Mr. Mickey Hart. Thanks very much for tuning in. Be well, and we'll see you next episode. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Dorin Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.