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- [00:00]
Rich Mahan
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, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season six of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. As always, thank you very much for tuning in. This week we have an encore episode for you, originally airing in season two. A visit to Planet Drum highlights a conversation my co host Jesse Jarno and I had with Mickey Hart. And as it's Mickey's 79th birthday on September 11th. Happy birthday Mickey. And Mickey has a new album out with Planet Drum entitled In the Groove. We thought now would be a great time to revisit this special episode. And stay tuned later in season six because we're working on a special 50th anniversary episode about Mickey's first solo album, Rolling Thunder. Bop on over to dead.netdeadcast and check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons one through five. And you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen where you like to listen. Please help our podcast by subscribing, hitting that like button and subscribe. And if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. Thank you very much. Have you checked out the transcripts that we now have for many of our episodes in seasons one through five? Head over to dead.net deadcast index and click the transcript link on the episode you'd like to explore. And thanks to everyone who has contributed their stories@stories.dead.net a fair amount of you have made it into the podcast, so thanks very much for your input.
- [02:19]
Mickey Hart
Thank you.
- [02:19]
Rich Mahan
Were you at any of the Madison Square garden shows in 81, 82 or 83? Well then head over to stories.dead.net and record yours today. And remember, if you leave a voice recording of yourself versus a text, you're much more likely to get added into the podcast. Speaking of MSG boy, is there a cool new Grateful Dead box set headed our way in and out of the garden Madison Square Garden 818283 boasts 17 CDs, one from six previously unreleased concerts recorded live in New York City at Madison Square Garden between 1981 and 1983. Also available is Madison Square Garden, New York, NY 3981, a three CD set breakout, featuring one full show from the box. Both titles are available September 23rd and are available for pre order now@dead.net also new to explore is the Grateful Dead server on Discord. Download the Discord app on your mobile device or computer and search for for the public Grateful Dead server and click the Join button. Find the Dead Cast channel and chat with fellow heads about the latest episode you just listened to. Jesse and I are on there from time to time so we hope to see you over there at Discord. But wait, there's more. All of you musicians out there are going to love this one. Announcing Playing in the Band an interactive web based mixing board that allows you to jam with the Grateful Dead. You can mute the channel of your choice and fill in for any member of the Grateful Dead or or press the Solo button on any channel to listen and learn or duet. We have five songs from the 8 hours, 27 minutes and 72 seconds Veneto, Oregon show ready for you to explore and jam along with@dead.net playingintheband well, Mickey Hart is our guest today on this encore episode of the Dead Cast, and there's a lot to celebrate, including Mickey's 79th birthday and his new album with Planet Drum in the Groove. Before we hand it over to Jesse, let's sample a little bit of one of the tracks on in the Groove to lead into the episode. Here's Phil de Glass.
- [04:54]
Jesse Jarno
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.
- [05:47]
Mickey Hart
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, take a look at musically what you're doing and where you want to go and so forth. And it's been a season of drones for me. I've been working seriously with drones. I am 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.
- [06:41]
Rich Mahan
Wow.
- [06:42]
Mickey Hart
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, 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 it.
- [07:57]
Jesse Jarno
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.
- [08:21]
Mickey Hart
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. 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 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 feel everybody. And so playing in my studio, no matter how good it is, still not like the get off you get, you know, live when you can. When, you know, people are there and we are vibrating together, I mean, at once. That's a beautiful feeling. People really take that moment to really take account of it all. It gets you really high.
- [11:02]
Jesse Jarno
Mickey immediately answered one of our questions. If he just plays the beam at home, the answer may not surprise you.
- [11:09]
Mickey Hart
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.
- [11:43]
Jesse Jarno
Have you ever gotten to play a beam ensemble? Like have multiple beams playing at once?
- [11:48]
Mickey Hart
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.
- [12:05]
Rich Mahan
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.
- [12:09]
Mickey Hart
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.
- [12:23]
Jesse Jarno
The beam's origins are in the early 70s.
- [12:26]
Mickey Hart
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. Francisco Topeka. Yes. Fantastic triage. Excuse me.
- [12:48]
Jesse Jarno
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.
- [13:29]
Rich Mahan
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?
- [13:37]
Mickey Hart
Pretty good. Okay.
- [13:38]
Rich Mahan
For those who didn't view our past programs physically, what is the cosmic beam? Just tell what this piece of metal is, ok?
- [13:45]
Mickey Hart
This instrument here is called the Cosmic Beam, which is a steel girder from.
- [13:49]
Rich Mahan
A semi truck, and it has electromagnetic pickups there.
- [13:53]
Mickey Hart
If you could see those.
- [13:54]
Rich Mahan
Copper. Gotcha.
- [13:55]
Mickey Hart
I had known about the Pythagorean monochord, but I never saw an electric monochord. And he was a big, giant iron beam. 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.
- [14:36]
Jesse Jarno
The instrument has a fairly wide, entangled family tree ready for beam scholars to chart out. Lupica 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.
- [15:29]
Mickey Hart
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.
- [15:47]
Jesse Jarno
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.
- [16:21]
Mickey Hart
And you see everybody 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. 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.
- [17:35]
Jesse Jarno
Amazing.
- [17:39]
Mickey Hart
You get to do things like that. You can never do that in 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 Defonseca, 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. No, 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 let me be. I think they were afraid. I really do. One time 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 they 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.
- [20:06]
Rich Mahan
How cool.
- [20:07]
Mickey Hart
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.
- [20:16]
Rich Mahan
Did you ever trip out on the effect of different calibers on the cymbals and the different sounds it made?
- [20:24]
Mickey Hart
Yeah, of course. You know, especially if you're high in acid, you know, you can. Everything becomes a whole other reality. But it was the percussiveness of it all 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 was 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's 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 we starting 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 where that came in. On the larger scale, the barn is.
- [22:25]
Jesse Jarno
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.
- [22:33]
Mickey Hart
I think that was in 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 were screwed, 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. Finally. I just, you know, I prevailed on the technical end. We.
- [23:42]
Jesse Jarno
One of the chief sonic realizers was longtime dead engineer Dan Healy.
- [23:46]
Mickey Hart
Reverb and delay was 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 it got 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. And milliseconds. And that was a. That was a lot in those days. So, yeah, Healy was brilliant. He built that and he designed the echo chamber. So Healey was brilliant. He worked so hard on that. You know, he came from Fairfax every day, almost building that. It was really a labor of love.
- [25:04]
Jesse Jarno
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.
- [25:31]
Mickey Hart
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. 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 he made do. And, you know, it was just a wonderful time, you know, 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 songs. I just liked it.
- [26:57]
Jesse Jarno
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.
- [27:08]
Mickey Hart
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 bed sheet over them or something like that taped around them, shape way. I kind of remember that Jerry. It was like he taped me with gaffer's tape.
- [27:50]
Rich Mahan
How did the Sheet affect the way that the drums resonated well, it cuts.
- [27:55]
Mickey Hart
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, you know, 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.
- [28:28]
Jesse Jarno
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.
- [28:41]
Mickey Hart
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.
- [29:32]
Jesse Jarno
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.
- [29:42]
Mickey Hart
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, 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.
- [30:29]
Rich Mahan
I was gonna say, man, who ate it?
- [30:32]
Mickey Hart
That was the big part. He used to come over with drumsticks. They're like chopsticks. Hey. Wow. Oh, man, that was funny. And then. And then there was this moment it didn't get in the pan fast enough, so it wasn't frying. And I put. 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.
- [31:31]
Jesse Jarno
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.
- [31:55]
Mickey Hart
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.
- [32:20]
Jesse Jarno
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.
- [32:30]
Mickey Hart
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's. 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? You're on fire. I started putting out his hair and. And he said, well, you know, they loaded the cannon without telling him 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 of cannons. 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.
- [35:59]
Jesse Jarno
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.
- [36:31]
Mickey Hart
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.
- [38:05]
Jesse Jarno
Mickey Hart man. 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.
- [38:48]
Rich Mahan
We have a bunch of great episodes planned for season six, so make sure to subscribe to us wherever you like to listen to your podcasts. Keep in touch with us by signing up for the official Grateful Dead email list@dead.net and please keep those stories coming, especially any about Madison Square Garden in 81, 82 or 83 by recording an audio message at stories.dead.net and don't forget to check out dead.net playingintheband jam on executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doron Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.