T.C.

Summary

GOOD OL' GRATEFUL DEADCAST – "T.C." (Tom Constanten)

Episode Date: April 13, 2023
Hosts: Rich Mahan & Jesse Jarnow

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Episode Overview

This in-depth episode explores the uniquely storied life and career of Tom Constanten (“T.C.”), the Grateful Dead’s keyboardist from late 1968 through early 1970. Famed for his avant-garde influences and improvisational prowess, T.C. was a musical innovator who helped shape the band’s most psychedelic, experimental period. The hosts, joined by T.C. himself, bandmates, and musical peers, trace his journey from classical composition to Dead collaborations, and his continuing inventive projects into the present day.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Early Life & Musical Roots

• Jersey to Vegas Childhood: Born on the Jersey Shore, T.C. moved to Las Vegas at 10, performing original work with the Las Vegas Pops Orchestra by 17 (07:08).
• Early Scene: Surrounded by musicians on the Las Vegas Strip, he developed versatility, even gigging on bass (07:48).
• Avant-Garde Connections: As a teen, T.C. connected by letter with new music luminaries: Robert Sheff (a.k.a. Blue Gene Tyranny), La Monte Young, Dick Higgins, Ray Johnson, and Terry Riley (09:08), underlining how tight-knit and experimental the 1950s-60s music worlds were.

2. The Berkeley/San Francisco Era

• Science Scholar & Musical Maverick: He moved to the Bay Area for a science scholarship at UC Berkeley, but quickly gravitated towards avant-garde composition (09:55).
• Meeting Phil Lesh: Lesh recalls their first meeting—bonding instantly over serial music, becoming roommates, and diving deeply into composition (10:31).

  “We were like two sides of a coin. He was into Bach and more constructionist stuff. I was more expressive.” – Phil Lesh (10:57)

• Proto-Dead Scene: Introduced to Jerry Garcia and others in Palo Alto, T.C. was quickly swept into the formative Grateful Dead circles (11:46) and the legendary Chateau house (12:06).
• New Music Hotbed: Studied with Luciano Berio at Mills College, alongside Steve Reich and John Chowning, absorbing cutting-edge classical innovation (13:39).
• Tape Music & Aleatoric Experimentation: Worked on prepared piano and tape pieces; played in concerts featuring early minimalism and avant-garde works (22:20, 23:39).

3. Psychedelics, Scientology, and Scene Crossovers

• Psychedelics in Vegas: T.C. imported LSD to Vegas in 1964 before Owsley Stanley’s era; recounts early use of peyote, LSD, and morning glory seeds (25:12, 18:19).
• Scientology Interlude: Experimented with Scientology, describing some experiences as “comparable to psychedelic experiences... It dusts the shelves of your mind” (26:36).

4. Air Force Years, Warlocks, & the First Dead Connections

• Drafted: T.C. entered the Air Force, missing the Acid Tests but seeing the Dead (then Warlocks) at the “In Room” in Redwood City (27:22, 27:54).

5. Joining the Grateful Dead

• Avant-Garde Influence: Used a pass from the Air Force to join Anthem of the Sun sessions, bringing experimental tape music backgrounds (28:42, 29:08).
• Technical Experimentation: Detailed how he and the band manipulated tapes, created backwards/forward echoes, and integrated electronic sounds before synthesizers (30:06).
• Visual Collaborations: Introduced Bill Walker, who designed the Anthem of the Sun cover, capturing trippy “mandala-style flames” (32:15, 32:25).

6. On Stage with the Dead (1968–1970)

• Keyboard Evolution: Transitioned from piano to Hammond B3 organ without prior experience, discussing differences in technique and touch (35:27).
• Band Dynamics: Talks about tensions as Pigpen and Weir’s places in the band were debated, and how his arrival as a second keyboardist stabilized the group (37:02, 37:17).
• Learning by Doing: Lacked a practice instrument at home; honed improvisational skills “on the spot” (34:26).
• Studio as Playground: Describes creative chaos during Aoxomoxoa—“It was like a toy box... We just had to fill all the tracks.” (42:12).
• Prepared Piano & Harpsichord: Played on “Mountains of the Moon,” had to adapt to out-of-tune harpsichord (43:58).
• Playboy After Dark: Only time playing harpsichord live with the Dead; amused by set details, not dosed, and debunks coffee-LSD myth (44:45, 46:47).

7. Peak Psychedelia: Recording & Performing Live/Dead

• Suite Development: TC was integral to the Live/Dead album (1969)—shaping the “Dark Star → St Stephen → The Eleven” suite (47:54, 48:47).
  • Notable Quote: “Things would change. Owsley had a Norelco cassette... we’d get back to the hotel and listen to them, critique, chart future courses... it was iterative” – TC (48:47)
• Ballroom Culture: Describes unique communal feel of 1960s ballrooms: bands sharing sets and sitting in with each other (58:13, 58:50).
• Challenges: Struggled with keyboard amplification drowned out by guitars; his “dynamic range was from forte to double forte” (64:01, 69:07).

8. Parting Ways & Aftermath

• Band Transition: As the Dead moved to more concise, country-influenced Workingman’s Dead material, T.C.’s style and the group’s directions diverged (67:34).

  “If any band was really into extended jams, it would have been us... but the record company wanted 3-minute singles...” – TC (66:27)

• Friendly Split: Left the band January 1970, relationships intact (69:27). Nearly busted with the Dead in New Orleans afterwards (69:39).
• Pigpen & Post-Dead: Remained tight with Pigpen and involved in new projects: arranging for The Incredible String Band and forming Touchstone (71:02), and the Rubber Duck Company (72:02).

  “I was once visiting Bill Kreutzman at this place... and we turned on KPFA, a John Cage piece... it totally blew the sound space.” (60:11)

9. Later Career and Collaborations

• Leaving Scientology: Departed church early ‘70s, realizing “the bohemian crowd was achieving more—and more interesting things” (75:55).
• Hunter Collaborations: Worked with Robert Hunter—Duino Elegies (79:48); supported poems with classical pieces for a seamless, evocative result (80:09).
• Ragtime Phase: Recounted a memorable concert where Scott Joplin’s niece attended—“that was the last time I ever had stage fright” (79:03).
• Henry Kaiser Band and Beyond: Played with Kaiser, expanding on Dead repertoire and improvisational techniques with better-balanced and mixed instruments (81:17, 83:09).

10. Dos Hermanos: Modern Improvisation

• Collaboration with Bob Bralove: Met “Dead’s MIDI guru” in the 80s, but post-’95 (Garcia’s death) cemented a deep creative partnership as Dos Hermanos (85:49).

  “He leaned over and said, ‘You play through this.’ …so we just kept playing and playing” – Bob Bralove (85:56)

• Performance Style: “We’d deliberately create avalanches which we then surf.” (91:09)
• Psychedelic Return: Bralove shared, “For the first five years, we were psychedelicized every single show.” (88:00)
• Technique Insights: T.C. advised playing “from higher up the arm,” facilitating “broad gestures that transcend the individual notes” (94:33).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Differing Musical Approaches:

  “He was into Bach and more of the constructionist kind of thing. I was more into the expressive area.” – Phil Lesh (10:57)

• On Band’s Musical Process:

  “Jerry would just start playing and expect you to join in. There was no detailed charts, which frankly I would glad to see because he has some detailed chord changes.” – T.C. (37:55)

• On 'Live/Dead' Critiques:

  “We’d listen to the show afterwards… Every night something someone objected to—until finally, one show, total silence. That’s the one. Let’s send it before we change our minds.” (57:18-57:48)

• On Band Departure:

  “There was always the problem of amplifying the organ sufficiently to compete with the guitar sounds… my dynamic range consisted of forte to double forte and anything below that was inaudible.” (69:07)

• On Dos Hermanos:

  “We combine the freedom of improvisation of my time with the Band with the electronic wizardry from his time with the band. And we sort of cherry picked the best of both worlds…” (87:45)

• On Stage Fright:

  “That was the last time I ever had stage fright.” (79:03)

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Key Timestamps

• Early Life, Jersey/Vegas: 07:08
• Composing, Connections to Avant-Garde: 09:08
• Meeting Phil Lesh/Berkeley Era: 10:31
• Early Bay Scene & Chateau: 12:06
• Joining Grateful Dead: 28:42
• Anthem of the Sun Sessions: 29:08
• Learning the Hammond B3: 35:27
• Dark Star Suite Discussion: 47:54
• Feedback/Amp Problems: 64:01
• Departure from the Band: 69:07
• Incredible String Band Arrangement: 71:02
• Muon Collaboration & Ragtime: 79:03
• Dos Hermanos Formation: 85:49, 87:45

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Tone & Final Reflections

The episode blends deep musical knowledge with playful asides and a warmly nostalgic tone, weaving stories both historic and personal. T.C.'s wisdom, quirks, and humor shine throughout—he emerges as a key yet overlooked figure in Grateful Dead lore and a continual seeker in the worlds of music, mind, and improvisation.

“We’re all in our orbits. We disappear for a while, then we come back. Then we disappear again.” – Tom Constanten (96:29)

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For committed Deadheads and curious listeners alike, this episode is an essential listen for anyone intrigued by the Dead’s experimental edge and the musicians who fueled their most cosmic journeys.

Transcript

[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, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season seven of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. This episode dives into everything that is TC Tom Constantin, keyboardist with the Grateful Dead from November 23, 1968 to January 30, 1970. You might have known TC was in the band, but you didn't know a lot about him. Well, this is the episode for you. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast and check out all of our past episodes including the complete seasons one through six. And you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen where you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing hitting that like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us. Review thank you very much. It's very kind of you. And you know we have transcripts for a lot of your favorite Dead cast episodes now, right? Well, those of you waiting on season one transcripts don't have to wait any longer. They are up now for your Viewing pleasure at dead.net/deadcast index. Check them out. Announcing History of The Grateful Dead Volume 1 Bears Choice 50th Anniversary Remaster this is the original album, newly remastered by Grammy Award winning engineer David Glasser using plangent processes from the original analog two track tapes recorded live by Owsley Bear Stanley at the famed Fillmore east on February 13th and 14th, 1970. There are two versions, a black 180 gram vinyl edition and a limited edition custom vinyl available [e-mail] Both of these releases are out as of May 5th, but you can pre order any and all of the Bears Choice 50th Anniversary Remaster releases and merch over at dead.net thanks to everyone who has left their [e-mail] we're now asking you to share your stories of Serendipity Miracles and the most unbelievable, craziest stories ever told. Share those stories [e-mail] and you just may hear yourself on a future Deadcast. Tom Constantin, or TC as he's also known, played keyboards with the Grateful Dead in the last part of the 60s. This episode shines a light on all things TC and we'll hear from Tom extensively, learn all about his time with the band, as well as what he did afterwards and what he's up to today. Jesse, over to you.

[B]

Tom Constantin was a full time member of the Grateful Dead for something close to 15 months from mid-1968 to the end of January 1970. A music school classmate of dead bassist Phil Lesh, TC contributed to the albums Anthem of the Sun, Oxamoxoa and Live Dead and appears on more than a dozen archival releases so far. Also, he got to be in the grateful dead in 1969. Grateful led archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.

[C]

I think he was exactly the right guy for that exact psychedelic, primal Grateful Dead time. What TC added to that, I feel was magnificent. Listen to a Dark Star From August of 1968, let's say from the Shrine or the Fillmore West. It's a few shows recorded and Dark Star is good. Everybody's doing incredible things on it. Pig Pen is doing that thing for the whole thing. But then TC joins and Pigpen steps back from his keyboard duties and TC brings something to the table that allowed Darkstar to become Darkstar.

[B]

That was a bit of the Live Dead Dark Star and before that, two from the Vault, here's Phil Laesch talking with David Gans in 1981 from an interview now in Conversations with the Dead. Thanks, David.

[D]

I mean, his work is just unique. I don't think there's anybody that composes.

[B]

Henry Kaiser has been a friend and collaborator since TC played in the Henry Kaiser band in the 80s.

[E]

TC is a very special, both human being and a very special improviser and a very special keyboard player. And there's. There's nobody who's like him. And he's a great keyboard player, you know, with a wide knowledge of the history of Western music composition for keyboards and all that informs what he does, no matter what he's doing, what he's playing.

[B]

For the past 30 years, Grateful Dead MIDI engineer Bob Ralove has been Tom Constantin's partner in the collaboration Dos Hermanos.

[F]

He's essentially romantic piano player. He just sent me a Respighi prelude that he just recorded. You know, it's like, okay, this is really cool.

[B]

Please welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast, Tom Constantin.

[G]

I was born on the Jersey Shore, and when I was about seven years old, we moved to Bergen county and I threw in with the New York Giants. I saw them play at the Polar Grounds. First game I saw them was against the Boston Braves. Also got to Ebbets Field to see the Dodgers and Yankee Stadium to see the Yankees. I saw Joe DiMaggio, who 51, was his last year in the active roster. And I say this as a New York Giant fan, I saw the Yankees back when they were worth hating.

[B]

Just after Tom turned 10, his father took a job at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and the family moved west. By the time he was 17, he was composing.

[G]

I played a piece of my own composition with the Las Vegas pops orchestra in May 1961 for piano and orchestra, and that was sort of my debut. But most of my friends were musicians either on the Strip or downtown. I knew a drummer named Don Farr, and he was on Ogden street, which just a block or so off Fremont street where all the action was. And so his apartment became party city. The scene was on the Strip, in the lounges, and all the rock bands were knockoffs. There was a Vegas group called the Demon that I sat in with a couple times. It was my one and only ever gig playing bass. I knew how the chords worked and I could find them on the bass and. Except I used my fingers and I had the biggest callus of my whole life. It took a while to get over that. All covers. There was Vegas. It was a gig at the Student Union Building.

[B]

As a young composer in Las Vegas, TC Entered a composition contest. And though he didn't win, he was soon in touch with the person who did. The fact that most of these names are perhaps familiar to fans of contemporary music is remarkable and also proof of how cozy the world of contemporary composition was. In the late 1950s, there was a.

[G]

Composition contest sponsored by BMI that I entered and I didn't win, but I found out who did.

[B]

The winner was a fellow teen composer named Robert Sheff, who would go on to some underground renown as Blue Jean Tyranny.

[G]

And got in touch with him. And he put me in touch with Robert. With Lalont Young. I was corresponding with him starting around 1959. And then he in turn put me in touch with Dick Higgins, Ray Johnson, and eventually Terry Riley.

[B]

Before he'd even left Las Vegas, teenage TC was already in touch with the flourishing new music scene, including soon to be psychedelic minimalist pioneers Lamont Young and Terry Reilly. TC landed in San Francisco in the fall of 1961. At an incredible juncture for new music. But that wasn't why he moved to San Francisco.

[G]

I was there on a science scholarship. October 4, 1957. The Soviets put up Sputnik, and suddenly the US was interested in science at different times than now. And so I got a scholarship at UC Berkeley. And I was there studying physics and astronomy.

[B]

Enrolling at UC Berkeley, TC Met a candidate for a different kind of space program. Here's how Phil Lesh described the encounter to David Ganz In 1981, part of the Bedrock scholarship in David's Conversations with the dead. Link [e-mail] deadcast.

[D]

That was the same day I met DC because I was trying to explain to some chick about serial music, you know, Stockhausen, that kind of thing. And this guy comes up and says. And I said, great. Then I knew that here was somebody I could talk to. So I spent more time with him, and he became my roommate. And we spent more time together than either one of us did in classes.

[B]

Phil Lesh, for one, didn't quite take to college.

[D]

I just quit school after the middle of the semester, the fall semester. I just quit. Couldn't quit Berkeley. I didn't tell my parents for weeks. So TC And I were like, raving on together, and I was trying to compose. I actually composed a short piece, which I still have, the Scorgion for orchestra. And DC Was always interested in chamber music, and I was always interested in orchestra. But we did have common interests or common love, like a Mahler. So that was one point of contact. So we were like two sides of a coin. He was into Bach and more of the constructionist kind of thing. And I was more into the expressive area.

[B]

By the time they'd met, Phil had also connected with the raging scene in Palo Alto.

[G]

It was September 61st, and I was rooming with him, and he took me down to Palo Alto. Well, I took him. I had the car. And he introduced me to Jerry Garcia and some other folks out there. Hutter.

[B]

TC Ended up at the Chateau, the communal boarding house that was a nexus for the proto Dead scene, which we talked about a bit during the first part of our Adventures of Pigpen tribute.

[G]

838 Santa Cruz Avenue, Menlo Park. That's the one.

[B]

Man, that place sounded like a party.

[G]

It was a continual party. In November 61, there was a special party called the Groovy Conclave, which I went to. And all of the above were there. I think Bill Grossman even showed up. And the usual gang. Gail Rafferty, Susie Mayberry.

[B]

One semi resident of the Chateau, who technically lived in the pump house, was the future Mary Prankster, Paige Browning, friends with Both Phil and T.C.

[G]

I remember once, once Paige came by the house and said, hey, you want to go for a drive? We were pretty blotto. And so we went on for this drive for Golden Gate park. And suddenly he took an abrupt right turn on a dirt road into the park. And all of a sudden we were in a different world. No people, it was like a maintenance road. And we went through the park that way until we got to the beach by the windmills.

[B]

Though UC Berkeley wasn't quite the right fit, musically speaking, TC And Phil connected with a scene at Mills College in Oakland.

[D]

The composers of that time, whose music seemed musical in the sense that it had the same sense of musical flow that older music had, were Stockhausen and Berrio. Berrio, it turned out, came to Mills College in the spring semester 62, to teach. And TC went right over there with his pieces. I was chicken. I was scared.

[B]

TC Took his pieces to audition.

[D]

Yeah, well, he just took them for barrier to look at. And this was graduate level. And neither one of us had had a full semester of college yet. I hadn't, but he hadn't. I had 41 units or something like that of college credit. Anyway, he took it, his piano pieces over there. And Berrioz said, join the class. And TC just said, well, my roommate composes also. Mind if I bring him? Can he bring some of his stuff along too? He says, sure. And this is graduate level. Steve Reich was in this class and John Chowning from Stanford.

[B]

Steve Reich would help pioneer minimalism. John Chowning would help pioneer FM synthesis, leading to the first synthesizers. Phil would reconnect with Chowning at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in the early 70s, which we talked about in our long, strange tech episodes last season. It was all pretty heady.

[G]

But Mills College, I was taking the course there from Berrio and see, Morten Sabotnik was there. Berrio was there. This was just after Darius Milo was there. In later years, Terry Riley, Robert Ashley were there. That was a very exciting place. Margaret Lyon was the woman who brought them all in. And as long as she was there, it was like a golden age of music and incredibly exciting. Rather like Robert Erickson at the San Francisco Conservatory. They used to have concerts at the San Francisco Conservatory back when it was at 19th Avenue in Ortega in San Francisco. And my gosh, Richard Maxfield Was there. Ran into James Browden, the poet, at one of their shows. Those were exciting times and in a way, we sort of knew it at the time.

[D]

After the class was over, I mean, I wanted more of that man. Because that was the most stimulating thing I'd ever encountered in my whole life until I.

[B]

Having the piece performed.

[D]

No, no, no. Just being around Bereal and that old world of music, that was the tips for me. It wasn't surprised. It's absolutely ecstatic. Because here was a guy whose music I'd heard and see at that time I was working for KPFA in Berkeley, Pacifica radio station there. And they had access to that music because they had it flown over from Europe.

[G]

Stockhausen, Gruppen, Hudesko, Seaport of War, which I wish I still had because you'd be called it. And there aren't any available anymore. Let's see, a couple of other Stockhausen and European Arm Burial Pusser.

[B]

Though TC and Phil weren't exactly trading tapes, they were definitely collecting them.

[G]

The only thing out at all was Columbia Records had some avant garde issues. There was one with Stockhausen, Zeit Nasser and Bules Lemaitre Saint Matre. Time Records had about a half dozen releases. Bereo Mauricio Cogle, John Cage, Lou Harrison. And that was all there was. But it was pretty exciting.

[B]

In the summer of 1962, 10 years before the Dead's Europe 72 tour, TC and Phil had their first chance to tour Europe.

[D]

Barrio was going back to Europe. He's going to Italy and then to do some festivals and do the general summer circuit in Europe. And he invited Tom and myself to come along, okay, and how the fuck am I going to get to Europe? I can barely eat. By this time, Peterson had stolen my girlfriend. Everything was ready. I was ready for a move. So TC and I hammered out a deal. What we thought was a deal. I mean, between us, it was a deal. And nothing ever changed that. And the plan was, since his dad, he was from Las Vegas and his dad was Captain Waiters at the Sands, I believe. And the deal was we'd go to Las Vegas, the two of us, and get jobs and work as waiters or busboys or something and earn enough money to go to Europe in the fall and connect with Barry. Well, what happened when we got there was there wasn't any jobs. TC's parents had enough money to send him and they kicked me out of the house because I was a bad influence. The guy got kicked out of the house and you didn't Go to Europe. I didn't go to Europe. He did. He went and he kept me informed of what was going on. I mean, he. He got to see the premiere of Berio's opera Passaggio, which is a masterpiece. I've seen a score, everybody agrees it's a total masterpiece. It's never been performed in this country. Always been performed once in Santa Fe.

[B]

Along with the silent tidal waves of contemporary composition, other influences began to float into the underground avant garde.

[G]

1964 is when we before, back when LSD came in cubes, sugar cubes, there was morning glory seeds. They caused severe gastric distress, but they worked. And when I was in Las Vegas, this would have been also 1964. Just before I went into the Air Force, a friend of a friend came back from Texas and purchased a truckload of peyote, all quite legally, which is also starting to circulate among my friends. And interestingly enough, back then, no one associated psychedelics with concert performances. It was Asian philosophy, Zen Buddhism, Hinduism and art, visual arts. And only gradually did the music come in, if any. It would be like some of the music of John Cage, which Timothy Leary described as classically psychedelic.

[B]

That was From John Cage's 34 minutes 46.776 seconds for two pianists, performed in 1964 at the newly established San Francisco Tape Music center, one of the places where the new music and the new musicians found a home in San Francisco.

[G]

Located roughly between the upper and Lower Haight 321 Divisadero. Yes, that was amazing. I remember series of concerts there in 64, I think with John Cage there were five concerts. The programs of the first and fourth were the same and the second and fifth were the same. Of course, with his music, the music was never the same.

[B]

The multi night Tudor Fest was a landmark for the evolving music scene, including pieces by Cage for amplified toy pianos, regular pianos and electronics, plus compositions and participation by other avant garde heroes including Pauline Oliveros, Mort Sabotnik and Ramon Sender of the Tape Music Center, Alvin Lussier, David Tudor, and for good measure, one future member of the Mothers of Invention, Ian Underwood. New World Music has released much of Tudorfest, which we've linked [e-mail] Deadcast. With the introduction of accessible tape machines, the music was about to change even further. That was It's Gonna Rain, a landmark piece of early minimalism created by Steve Reich using a sample of a street preacher named Brother Walter made on a tape deck he shared with his classmates T.C. and Phil Lesh. Since we're mentioning Brother Walter. If there are any old San Francisco heads listening that know anything further about his identity, drop us a [e-mail] we've got a colleague who's researching him. This was the first music scene of their peers to which Tom Constantin and Phil Lesh belonged. In the spring of 1964, they formed a new music ensemble. That's what classical musicians call a band featuring tc, Phil, Steve Reich and John Gibson.

[G]

John Gibson, the wind player who we just lost a year or so ago, was in that ensemble and he went to New York with Steve Reich and played with his group. And I think he also played in Philip Glass's group.

[B]

In May of 1964, at the exact moment that Jerry Garcia was on his cross country bluegrass odyssey to see Bill Monroe and collect bluegrass tapes, Steve Reich organized a series of Music now concerts at the loft of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Concerts spelled with a K of course.

[G]

As part of that concert I had written a quasi aleatoric piece for prepared piano. And Steve had just got a Sony triple seven tape recorder, top of the line. And I recorded two versions of it. It was a two track recorder which were played at the same time as my live performance and the score. This is all kind of magical. I don't know how it worked, I just know that it worked. Correspondences would occur.

[B]

This is some of TC's Piano Piece 3 as performed one of the nights at the Mime Troupe loft. We've posted a [e-mail] deadcast it's a hissy recording, but there are some gorgeous bell like passages that underscore how beautiful prepared piano can sound. That is when a player manipulates the strings directly on the inside of the piano.

[G]

I would play something live and the tape would then imitate it and pick it up. Even beyond that, I would make a sound at the lower end of the inside of the piano and it would turn into the sound of a car driving by. It actually all started this was at a location at 20th and Capp street in San Francisco. And it was downstairs from a judo jujitsu studio. And the concert was interrupted occasionally by the sound of somebody body being thrown to the mat. Well, we weren't about to go and tell a bunch of martial artists to knock it off, so I simply found that in the score and continued from there. And that's when the magic began.

[B]

It's hard to say for sure if its body's being thrown to a mat, but in between piano figures on the recording, you can occasionally hear a muffled distant Thump. If you listen closely, Steve Reich moved back to New York. TC and Phil and future Anthem of the sun cover artist Bill Walker shared a house in San Francisco. But despite the excitement, the world of new music was stuttering slightly. In San Francisco, TC worked at the post office with future Dead manager Danny Rifkin before finding himself back in Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, at least, there was a bubbling psychedelic scene as well, thanks in part to TC himself.

[G]

In fact, I was between the Pranksters and a couple of other folks. I was importing LLC to Las Vegas in 1964. And my clientele were musicians, dealers, a lot of people at the art department at the university. Jerry Foffel, Bill Bradford, Owsley wasn't around just yet. There was somebody from the Frankster Circle who had so many Sobers from Sandoz, it was like little capsules that looked that they were invisible. And they had names like legal dispensaries now have. There was Blue Lagoon, which is like a blue liquid. And so this came to be called the Emperor's New Clothes because it looked like there was nothing in it.

[B]

And then nothing turned itself inside out.

[G]

There's one interesting character also went out on dessert and trips. He was a crap stealer and part time male prostitute. And he said, hey, you gotta check out this. We went to a lecture and we followed up a couple of times.

[B]

The this in question was Scientology. It's a touchy subject. I know it brushed up against the Dead's world in a few places. In 1964, Robert Hunter had a fling with it, though discarded it quickly. A few years later, Bob Weir dabbled, though backed away even more swiftly. Tom Constantin had the most extended relationship. It was another part of the 60s matrix alongside contemporary composition, psychedelics, improvisation, science fiction, Buddhism, and other forms of experimentation.

[G]

There was a lot of overlap there. I wouldn't characterize it or name it with any one of them, but there was a connection. I had done plenty of psychedelic exploration before that, and so there was not a shred of disapproval or dissociation on my part. I was just trying to, as William Burroughs said, make it without any chemical corn. Oh, extremely. Some of the releases were comparable to psychedelic experiences, the Level four release especially. And it was so completely natural. I enjoyed that aspect of it. And also I got to keep it. It was much longer lasting. It does pick up and dust the shells of your mind, in a way.

[B]

But then came TC's draft notice.

[G]

I was sucked into the Air Force. I came back from Europe knowing all this stuff about avocado music, and there Wasn't much by way of employment opportunities for that. And there was a war going on. So I got this notice to report for induction into the army. And fortunately for me, they would accept enlisting in the Air Force as an excuse.

[B]

Stationed in Texas, he missed the acid tests, but caught at least one early show by the Warlocks. Probably one of their five set gigs. @ the In Room.

[G]

Yeah, I saw them at the In Room at a hotel in Redwood City. It was a rather tight rock and roll band that did 50s material. There was hardly anything new and original, yet it was described as two bands. If Jerry was fronting it, or Pigpen.

[B]

That was. That's it for the other one. Roughly six minutes into the Grateful Dead second LP, Anthem of the sun, the original 1968 mix. It was the sound of the Dead dissolving into otherworldly weirdness. And Tom Constantin's first major contribution to the band. He'd used a three day pass he'd won as Airman of the Month to visit the Grateful Dead in the studio in Los Angeles where they were assembling a new album. He brought along a piece of music he'd made during his period working with Berio.

[G]

I was fortunate enough, thanks to the good offices of Meccano BERRIOZ, to spend two years in Europe studying avant garde music, 1962 and 63. And in the summer of 62, I was at Henri Pousseurs Electronic Music Studio in Brussels. And that's where I did that piece of tape music. Electronic Music Study Number three.

[B]

You can find the original standalone version of Electronic Study 3 on TC's 2002 compilation 88 Keys to Tomorrow.

[G]

His Electronic music studio contained the different sound generators and signal processors that were later assembled by Bob Moog into a box called a synthesizer. We had square wave generators, sound wave generators, band pass filters, square wave generators. We made simulated reverb by having a tape loop so that the. The read head was after the record head. Oh, excuse me, the other way around, so that it would play the sound that you had just recorded into it, giving the. A reverb effect. And by the length of the tape we could adjust the reverb. All of this could be done very, very much with analog technology. We can do all these things digitally now, things we couldn't even imagine doing then. I did several tape studies there and it was the last and most advanced among them. And there was a spot where it fit in quite nicely, along with some prepared piano stuff I was doing at the same time, at the same time as the Anthem of The sun recordings, not the same time as Brussels.

[B]

TC's skill set seemed compatible with the band's growing interest in the recording studio.

[G]

On the Alligator Caution part of Anthem of the sun, you'll hear some speed tweaking done with Pigpen's voice. The tape gets faster or slower. We did a thing with Jerry's voice where the tape was played backwards into a echo chamber and the echo was recorded on a different track. So that when it was played forwards, you heard this pre echo leading up to his voice actually being there. So there are all sorts of effects that we went after.

[B]

Anthem of the sun was one of the few Dead albums whose cover art wasn't created by Mouse Kelly Griffin or another member of the San Francisco psychedelic art scene. The artist was Bill Walker.

[G]

He was my friend from Las Vegas. And I introduced him to Phil and Jerry. And they pitched the idea of the COVID and he was there for it. And I mean, he and I used to go out in the desert and take peyote and stuff like that. I remember was doing a drawing and you know how psychedelics were. You see these lines and all over the place. And it was like he was tracing the lines. And I could see the lines he was tracing before he traced them. And the Anthem of the sun cover was something a little bit like that. He would do these Tibetan Mandala style flames.

[B]

TC joined the band on stage a.

[G]

Few times on a couple of occasions. Once the Las Vegas Convention center and another one in Sacramento where we opened for Cream, which was an experience. They were. They're one of a few acts which were a lot better live than recorded. The recording medium couldn't capture the excitement of their show or even their sound. Actually, Anthem of the sun was conceived as a overcompensation because the rep from the first album was that it didn't come anywhere near to capturing the Grateful Dead experience. On the way back to San Francisco, we all stopped at the. I think it was the Nut Tree, which is between Sacramento and San Francisco and had waffles and ice cream. And Phil, Gary and Owsley were at the same table with Eric Clapton. I was at the same table with Mickey. That was as close as we had to interaction.

[B]

The Sacramento show is March 11, 1968. Dead scholars have been able to pinpoint their 1968 Las Vegas appearance to October 19, in part thanks to a tourist photo of the marquee at the Las Vegas Convention center with the Dead advertised just under the JC's Clark County Fair. We'll send this bit of marquee forensics out to Queen City jams. Sometime in 1968, the Grateful Dead offered Tom Constantin a full time spot in the band.

[G]

They sent me tape recordings which I've been listening to, and here's another thing which we've not spoken about much, and that is that the entire time I was with the band, I didn't have an instrument at home to practice on. And so I was a very, very quick study when I was on the spot. And I spent a lot of the time improvising. Somebody asked me if I had perfect pitch and I said no, but I have real good catch, which enables me to pick up on what's going on. And if I guess wrong, I'm a fifth off. It usually sounds okay anyway.

[B]

In November 1968, when his service in the Air Force ended, TC joined the band on the road. Another development over the course of 1968, between TC's first and second appearances with the band, was that they'd upgraded their keyboard setup from a Vox continental organ to a full fledged Hammond B3, which instantly added a new dimension to the band's sound. But it wasn't an instrument Tom Constantin had spent any time playing.

[G]

All of my instruction was at the piano. The organ and also the harpsichord are very different instruments with different approaches as far as the hand on the keyboard is concerned. To oversimplify, with an organ, for instance, it's an array of switches. When you take your hand off the key, the note disappears. There's no sustain pedal, and so that changes your whole attitude toward playing. Likewise, the harpsichord, there's no sustained pedal. And on the other hand, Laurette Goldberg, the harpsichordist, showed me some technical things about the harpsichord which I had not anticipated. For instance, when you're playing a scale pattern, you don't let go of the notes immediately like you would with the piano or the organ. You would simulate the sustain on the harpsichord. Also, the harpsichord has these stops, so when you press a key, you're plucking not one string, but two or maybe three. And that means that the key is that much harder to push down. You're only one step removed from, like what a guitarist does by picking the string directly with his fingers. Whereas the piano has a hammer mechanism that is miraculously subtle enough. You can feel your way into the keyboard, you can play loudly, you can play softly. Piano e forte. That's why it's called a piano. And you have all sorts of subtle controls, especially like once Henry Steinway invented the middle pedal, the Sostenuto, it's called, which is just Italian. For sustained, which enables you to hold notes and then play notes after it that aren't held. So there are all sorts of technical things that make it different.

[B]

Tom Constantin came into the band at a contested point in their history when they came very close to firing both Bob Weir and Pigpen. A topic we delved into during the conclusion of our two part episode, the Adventures of Pigpen. To briefly repeat something TC said in that episode.

[G]

There was a point when even Pigpens continuing with the ban was in question. I came into the mix just when that was going on and maybe I provided enough of a diversion that it turned down the amplification of those problems, but they weren't a problem anymore.

[B]

As he pointed out elsewhere, the band already had two guitarists and two drummers. So what was disruptive about having two keyboard players that occupy different musical spaces? TC's first month with the band was spent almost entirely on the road and almost entirely learning on the job. But when they got back to the Bay Area in December, he was able to practice a bit on the B3.

[G]

There was what they called Alembic right next to Hamilton Air Force Base. And everything was set up there. That's where the office was. There were like office cubicles and then the bigger room, which is where the rehearsals happened. It was very, very, actually was very, very simple, an ad hoc. The most detailed anything ever got was when Phil would bring in a chart with chords written on it, written on legal paper. Jerry was different. He would just start playing and expect you to join in. There was no detailed charts, which frankly I would glad to see because he has some detailed chord changes. Doing that rag was kind of like that also. And they come at you thick and fast.

[B]

Lap. That was doing that rag from the Electric theater in Chicago, April 26, 1969. Once they'd had a chance to learn the chords a little. Now Dix picks 26 rehearsal recordings.

[G]

I had, for instance, the other one a cryptical envelopment, just the instrumental part, because that was my department. That was what I was supposed to learn. And I had this discussion with Melbourne Seals once. How well both of us concentrate on the music and we don't think that much about the words. It's not. It's like it's not our department. In fact, there was some bands I played with and it was as if I was hearing the words for the first time. Either the speakers were placed so I could hear them. And the only reason I would pay attention to the words is if there was a cue involved, like a new Potato caboose after the first all graceful instruments. Okay, time to do something. Pay attention.

[B]

That was March 1, 1969, at the Fillmore west on the complete recordings box. TC came into the band near the start of the Lenny Hart administration. When Mickey's dad took over the band's business operations.

[G]

He came and the band was in a state of chaos. And there was a meeting in Mickey's barn, and he came and he sort of gave his why you should hire me pitch. And they bought it. And there was one point where there was a windfall of money. And he said, well, this money goes to the old ladies to buy whatever they want. And mine wanted to get some furniture and mundane stuff like that.

[B]

The band had two albums out on Warner Brothers, but were still trying to figure out their basic rock and roll operations, which they hadn't quite done yet.

[G]

The economics of that were kind of curious because the sound equipment added a lot of weight to bring on the plane. So I remember for a while the gigs were scheduled so that the band would fly and the road crew would drive a van. And somehow it worked. On rare occasion, usually the economic level, we were traveling at that time. There wasn't time for many amusements. We did catch acts occasionally. I remember we watched Yellow Submarine when it came out, and we sat in the front row of the theater and looked up at it, and it was so big.

[B]

Yellow Submarine hit theaters pretty much the same week TC Joined the band. That sounds like a fun movie theater to be in.

[G]

What's the matter, John Love Blue Aminis.

[H]

New and Blue Aminis have been sighted within the vicinity of this theater.

[G]

There's only one way to go out.

[H]

How's that?

[I]

Singing 1, 2, 3.

[G]

Ah.

[B]

By the time TC had joined the band, they were fully sunk into the construction of what became oxamoxoa, an album they completed twice.

[G]

It was like a toy box. I mean, we have 15 of the 16 tracks filled. And then Mickey would say, how about a cowbell? We just had to fill all the tracks, it seemed. And I was mainly involved with the prepared piano. The Moog was involved in the signal processing, especially of Jerry's voice.

[B]

That was what's become the baby. With uncredited Moog assistance by Doug McKechnie, who has some fine recent archival releases from this period on VG Records.

[G]

The Mixtown sessions for Oxa Maxova were performances in their own right. You couldn't pre program the faders to go up and down. You had to have your fingers on them. And we would have run throughs, and they have A take and then, okay, let's do another take. So who knows how many different versions there might have been? It's unlimited.

[I]

St. Stephen will remain all he lost he shall regain he shall watch by the sun and the foam Been here.

[C]

So long he's got to calling it home.

[B]

TC got to play an instrument. He'd actually spent time with the harpsichord.

[I]

Cold Mountain Water the Jade Merchant's Daughter, Mountains of the Moon Electroplate.

[G]

It was a wonderful instrument, the one for the Mountains of the Moon recording. At the recording session, however, because it didn't have, again, Henry Steinway with his cast iron harp, it could not tune up to concert pitch. That's why a lot of Baroque orchestras play a whole tone lower. And that's what we did. Which meant that, for my part, I was playing the piece in a different key.

[I]

Hey, Tom Bancho. Hey. A Long Road More than love More than love.

[B]

About a week after the Mountains of the Moon session, both the song and TC made their national debuts at the Dead's infamous taping for Playboy After Dark. The only time TC was able to play a harpsichord live with the Dead.

[I]

Hey. The world, hey. The city in the rain hey, hey, hey. The wide weed waving in the wind 20 days of solitude 20. All the dancing kings and wolves assembled in the.

[G]

It was fun being there for the whole show, though. I'd like to see the whole show sometime. Sid Caesar was on it. Sidney Omar, the astrologer, was on it, and he was fascinating to listen to and just the sets were good and bizarre. I remember there was one of the. There's several rooms. It's like it was a television city in Los Angeles. And, like, for the. Shooting a sitcom or, I guess, even a drama, they have a set with three or four different rooms. And one of them for the Playboy Mansion was a library. And it seemed to me that they bought the books by the yard, like, at a garage sale, because they didn't care what they were. They just wanted books on the shelves. The most interesting one I saw was Mrs. Pickerel goes to Mars, among the others. I don't think they were even worth stealing. They probably got a cheap deal for, like, 30 yards of books.

[B]

The Dead's Playboy After Dark taping is infamous, of course, for the story of how the Dead's crew dosed the coffee pot on set with lsd, causing the can taping to transmogrify into a real party. It's either a funny or horrifying story, but I gently push back at this particular tale, which, with nobody from the other side having stepped forward to tell it, and only a thank you letter from Hef as material evidence. TC doesn't remember it.

[G]

I've heard some of those stories and they missed me. I'm sort of surprised because they tried to get me on numerous occasions and succeeded on a few, but I wasn't included in that particular. Warner Brothers had sunk close to $100,000 into the production of Oxa Moxwa, which were kids in the candy store with all this new studio equipment and they were getting indicated to see a product. So we proposed to them, how about that? Plus a double album of a live performance, and they went for that. So we wound up taking the 16 track recorder to our shows and recording all the shows.

[B]

TC was drawn into the Grateful Dead in part because of his experience with electronic music, but wound up contributing significantly to Live Dead, their monumental double album recorded in early 1969 and released in November of that year. Since we've got a member of the 1969 Grateful Dead with us, we're going to take the opportunity to walk through Live Dead a little bit. When Constantin joined the band on the road, they'd built the suite that would constitute the first two sides of the album. Darkstar into the 11 into St Stephen. But the map wasn't the territory.

[G]

Things were not chiseled in stone as far as the way the band did it from night to night. Things would change. Owsley had a Norelco cassette recorder and he would tape all our shows and we would get back at the hotel together and listen to them and critique them or pat somebody in the head if it was worthy and make decisions as to future courses. We would chart, musically speaking, bright spots were acknowledged. There is an iterative process of something that works for you try to keep, and something that doesn't work, you try to get rid of theaters like that in general.

[B]

A week after the Playboy After Dark Adventure, they recorded a three night weekend at the Avalon Ballroom back home in San Francisco, and a month later, four more shows at the former Carousel Ballroom, now the Fillmore West. Both were second floor venues. TC remembers watching the crew get the organ up into the Avalon.

[G]

It was like a ramp and they would push it up this ramp to the second floor, which is where the theater was. Likewise at the Carousel, the second floor is where the actual showroom was, or the first floor if you're from England. But it was elevated above ground level in any event. Actually, for every event at the Fillmore.

[B]

West, they had their best friend and sparring partner, Bill Graham. He'd done time trying to manage the band before Lenny Hart, but he wasn't done doing time with the band. As TC remembered their relationship, friendly but.

[G]

Contentious, especially when Elsa came aboard to work the sound system. They were always at each other. I remember once hearing Bill Graham say, okay, guys, I'll play it your way. I'll kill him with kindness, and if that doesn't work, I'll just kill him.

[B]

This is from the last of four nights, the Fillmore west, where I'm pretty sure Bill Graham walks onto the stage to introduce the band. Somebody or some buddies in the band do something that disgusts him, and he walks off without saying a word. They played it all four nights of that Fillmore west run, looking for a version to use on their live album. Darkstar wasn't the average rock epic in 1969, or any year, for starters. At least as the Grateful Dead played it in 1969, there weren't really any drums. Both Bill Kreutzman and Mickey Hart would start the song on hand percussion, sometimes with Kreutzman switching to kit midway through.

[G]

The drum part for Dark Star was, how shall I say, gentler. It wasn't your Ginger Baker, Keith Moon driving a Panzer tank through the supermarket sort of thing. And also, things were a lot more free form. They hadn't been settled yet. They weren't chiseled into stone. They could be different. And there was much more of a sense of experimentation, like, hey, let's try this, knowing full well. But some of the things didn't work.

[B]

The four nights at the Fillmore west, now known as the Fillmore West Complete Recordings box set, offer excellent ways to hear this in action. With four versions of the Dark Star suite that are subtly different from one another, here's some more of that March 2nd version. I like this TC moment that turns into a little conversation with Garcia. Note the lack of full drum kit with Kreutzman on Shaker and Hart on Guero, what the Dead call the scratcher. This is from February 27th, the opening night used on Live Dead. The only version recorded for Live Dead that has Kreutzman on drums right from the start and fairly subtly, it's so with hart on scratcher. TC's a little subsumed in the mix, but he's part of the conversation, too.

[G]

We recognized the places. We didn't name them, but we knew where they were. It's like going for a hike in the forest and, you know, there's this tree and then there's this other tree and there's this Cliff and a nice overlook and. And you don't know what species the tree is or what its name is, you know, Steve or Herb or something, but you do recognize it.

[B]

Darkstar was also a different kind of live epic in that it wasn't primarily extended for the purpose of dancing, as so many of the Dead's early jams were.

[G]

The dance scene kind of stopped, except for the Spinners and some other spinoffs by the late 60s. I don't know if you hear on Anthem of the sun, you'll hear Weir saying, get up and dance. It won't ruin you. I think what happened is between the psychedelics and the bands jamming, more interestingly, the shows became interesting as a concert more than just background music for dancing with your hopeful sweetheart.

[B]

The Live Dead shows are a pretty good place to jump in if you're looking for some examples of TC making great contributions, especially in quiet passages. The songs developed intricate dynamics with rarely verbalized, but important, like this William tell ending to St. Stephen just before the start of the 11. TC's going to repeat what I just said in a second to clarify that the piece of music we're about to hear is the coda to St. Stephen and not the introduction to the 11.

[G]

After St. Stephen, meet the high green chilly winds, I play this little sort of bagpipe sounding part. And it was just before the 11.

[I]

High green chilly winds and windy vines and loops around the twining shafts of lavender they're crawling to the sun.

[G]

Wonder.

[I]

Who will water all the children of the garden when they sigh about the barren lack of rain and troops.

[G]

There's also transition from that to the 11, where Phil would play a bass line going up and then coming down, finally going, dumb, dumb, dumb, boom. And that's the one of the 11 which none of the tribute bands do. That particular transition.

[B]

Owsley's taping allowed the band to focus their ears on their work and pick the versions they wanted to best represent their musical intent.

[G]

We'd listen to the show afterwards, and every night there was something that someone objected to. Either they had personally made a mistake or some tune just didn't work. Until one night. This was a weekend at the Carousel Ballroom, I think, before it was renamed the Fillmore West. One night we listened to the recording and silence. Nobody complained. And it was suddenly like, hey, that's the one. Let's send it off before we change our minds.

[B]

Live Dead was finished up in later 1969, just after the summer release of OXA Mock SOA, a representation of a typical night at a San Francisco Ballroom. Or rather a representation of the Dead's portion of the night. Though we're now accustomed to seeing Dead shows labeled as Set one and Set two at the Avalon, the Fillmore's east and west and many other psychedelic ballrooms. There were early shows and late shows with each band playing a single set in each.

[G]

It was also really cool because that contributed to the sense of community among the various different bands. We would sit in with one another. I remember the Grateful Dead. Any number of people sat in with us. Of the folks from the Jefferson Airplane. I remember at least a couple times that we backed up Janis Joplin. And that happened a lot more back then because there were more bands folded into the show. There'd be two or even three. I remember there was a Grateful Dead show at the Avalon Ballroom with the Grassroots and the Seeds, who had a couple of hits then.

[B]

It allowed the bands to see each other in action.

[G]

I remember one particular time at the Fillmore East. I saw most of Coker Joe and the Fishes set, and they were wonderful. Barry Melton's playing was exquisite that night. Other times we would hang around, mainly backstage. The show going on there was pretty entertaining in its own right.

[B]

It also allowed the Dead to catch out of town acts like TC's Faves, the Bonzo Dog Band.

[G]

I love them. They were wonderful. We shared the bill with them at a place in Boston called the Boston Tea Party. It's on Lansdowne street, right across the street from the Green Monster of Fenway Park. And they were pretty wild and crazy.

[I]

Line me up in Spaceman baby I've got speed I've got everything I need I'm the urban spaceman Baby, I can fly I'm a supersonic that was the.

[B]

Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band's wonderful I'm the Urban spaceman. TC was joined by his bandmates in watching Neil Innes and Company.

[G]

There wasn't a lot of coercion involved. I mean, Jerry Garcia was already into them. And making the Grateful Dead do something is like herding cats.

[B]

But TC did seem to facilitate a certain weirdness factor.

[G]

I was once visiting Bill Kreutzman at this place when he was living in San Francisco. And we turned on KPFA radio and there was a John Cage piece playing. And it totally blew the sound space because everything that came after it sounded like just a continuation. It was one of the sound collages where anything could happen and definitely did.

[B]

That was from a 1942 realization of John Cage's Imaginary Landscape. A Great radio piece that went into rotation on freeform radio in the 60s. But the Dead's weirdness and TC's weirdness weren't always compatible. In 1969, as a Scientologist, for example, he'd forsworn LSD and other substances.

[G]

It was an extreme bit of irony that it was exactly that time that I was playing with the band where there were so many opportunities. And I've later since got back to the path of searching for the inner mountain.

[B]

As a head who'd been around the Dead scene since long before they were the Dead, TC generally knew what was dosed and could steer clear as needed.

[G]

There was one night in particular at the Fillmore west where the story I heard is three or four different people dosed the apple juice and Tyler was talking about images of the fall of the Roman Empire. Afterwards, there's a backstage entrance from the stairs leading down to the street level. And we found Robert Hunter sort of painted onto the stairs.

[B]

We've talked about that incident in our Black Peter episode, but other times Tisi didn't escape quite so easily.

[G]

There were a couple of times I got dosed during the gig and there was no better person to hang out with. Two come to mind right away. One was at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. We were playing sharing the bill with Roland Kirk. And what an amazing way to catch this show.

[B]

That's the wondrous blind horn player Rahsaan Roland Kirk from his 1969 album Left and Right.

[G]

It was really pretty amazing watching, playing three instruments at once, stuff like that. I was into outside jazz at that time, like John Coltrane's Ascension. And this was even farther out than that. Another time was in Chicago at the kinetic playground at their old location that Adams and North Clark.

[B]

Even besides occasionally getting dosed on LSD against his will, there were some other problems in the workplace of a more musical nature.

[G]

One of the first things that was happening at Alembic was they would take the guitars and hot rod them, so to speak. They would replace all the individual components with the highest quality equipment that they could find. So the ambient level of the individual instrument was jacked up to a much higher degree.

[B]

That is, the guitars were jacked up to a much higher degree.

[G]

While I was with them. Jerry was going through four twin reverbs, turned up to 10, but hard to imagine, but they built upward from there. The keyboard did take a little bit longer to develop. In my day with the band, it was perennially a problem to amplify the keyboard enough to compete with the Guitars, and they didn't have a problem with amplification at all. Keyboards were sort of like the fifth wheel then and now. With the exception of bands where the keyboard player was the leader. Lee Michaels, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Leon Russell. In that case, it was a different story and a different balance. But if you have your regular power trio like Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Blue Cheer guitar, bass and drums, anything else is window dressing. You've got the whole spectrum covered right there. And so that's where their emphasis was.

[B]

That's true. The B3 does tend to disappear under the Dead's onslaught of bass and drums and guitar. And TC does sound a little out of place at times with the Dead. But as Phil Lesh pointed out, he was into orchestras and TC was into chamber music. And pieces like Darkstar and Mountains of the Moon were much more like chamber music. Alligator and Caution, not so much. But I love TC's contributions to the feedback sections. This is from The Fillmore Auditorium, November 8, 1969. Dick's pick 16. While everybody else is going ape, TC is throwing strange melodic shakes.

[G]

I related to it in a totally different way because I couldn't do the sounds the same way. Actually. If I could have got the organs to feed back, that would have been. It might have got out of control too quickly, but I still could make sounds that would blend in with the melange that came out of it. So that's what I endeavored to do. It was mainly clusters, slides and drawbar manipulation. You know, finding weird drawbar overtone configurations.

[B]

But that wasn't necessarily the direction the Dead were heading.

[G]

We had been under pressure from the record company to come up with your typical three minute hit single, shorter songs. And if any band was really into extended jams, it would have been us. Which ran very much counter to the record company's preferences. Because they had commercial interests. They wanted to have a 45 rpm big hole in the middle record that they could sell. And going on with Alligator, Caution or Viola Lee was another extended jam. Their eyes sort of glazed over. And a lot of bands, they just would not let them get away with it. I remember the Doors could Light My Fire. Raymond Zarach talking about how shocked he was when he first heard it on the radio. Because they cut out a lot of his solo in the middle. And Working Man's dad was sort of the fruition of that. They wanted to get shorter songs. Now, mind you, I was not resisting that. I rather liked the idea. And I'd been playing on those songs and they suited me Quite comfortably. So go figure.

[I]

Trouble I trouble behind.

[B]

Over the course of T.C. s year in the band, the group had started moving in ever more country and westerly directions. That was Casey Jones from Thelma in LA on December 12, 1969. Now Dave's picks 10, featuring a TC organ part that sounds kind of appropriately like a steam driven calliope. One could actually program an entire alternate version of Working Man's Dead with early drafts featuring TC on organ.

[G]

There were a couple of the licks that I've been playing that Jerry took over, and if you listen to the tapes of the performances, you can hear.

[B]

That High Time was one of them.

[G]

I was losing time. There's a lead up to that.

[B]

That was from January 2, 1970 at the Fillmore East. Now Dave's pick's 30. And here it is on Working Man's Dead, recorded a little over a month later with Garcia's pedal steel.

[I]

I was losing time. I had nothing.

[B]

In January 1970, they finally decided it wasn't working.

[G]

There was always the problem of amplifying the organ sufficiently to compete with the guitar sounds because the technology lagged behind a bit. It has caught up since, to be sure, but back then, at the time I was scuffling. Sometimes it seems like my dynamic range consisted of forte to double forte and anything below that was inaudible.

[B]

With friendships intact, TC and the band decided to part ways in late January 1970 to add one final indignity. TC was very nearly busted with the Dead in New Orleans at the end of the month.

[G]

I want to go to one of the cops. I just got out of the military, so we had that sort of stuff to talk about. I've often said if they came to our room first, there wouldn't have been a bust.

[B]

It was up to them to let Lenny Hart know that the rest of the band had been arrested.

[G]

I remember Pigpen calling him up to let him know about the New Orleans affair. So he was home then for that one.

[B]

He and his roommate Pigpen had been out looking at antique swords. This time the non smoking Pigpen was spared a rest.

[G]

Busted down on Bourbon Street Sit up.

[I]

Like a fallen pen Knock down against the wind they just won't let you be.

[B]

By the time Truckin was written that spring and debuted that summer, TC was gone from the band. Howard Wales played the organ part on the album. TC's first recorded music after leaving the Dead was an arrangement he wrote for a group that many UK psychedelic heads consider to be the Dead's proper British equivalent. The Incredible String band Teachers of Greek.

[I]

You beg from the thief I will not carry home your sacks of sorrow But I will pay the fiddler.

[G]

Good.

[I]

Silver if you smile, pray God he see tomorrow.

[B]

That was TC's arrangement for the Incredible String Band's Queen of Love from their 1970 album you. He'd come into contact with them, ironically, through their own dalliance with Scientology. But their roots ran as deep and weird as the Deads.

[G]

They were so much closer to the British folk scene. They were comparable. They had a lot of their own material that they generated, and the attitude was very similar. I mean, I described Mike Heron. His smile is so wide, it's amazing his face can hold it.

[B]

But TC stayed very much inside the Dead's orbit, remaining housemates with Pigpen, who served as his best man when TC got married. Later that year, when it was time for the first Post Dead project to debut the Rubber Duck Company, it was opening for the Dead on their home turf at the Euphoria Ballroom in San Rafael, shows that turned out to be Owsley's farewell before going to prison for three years.

[G]

Joe McCord showed up backstage at a Grateful Dead show, and he was talking about this project and invited me to join him, and I did, and that was pretty much it. Don Buchla sat in with us once, too. He's at Mandrakes in Berkeley playing his synthesizer.

[B]

That is the Buchla box, invented at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. The next year, the Rubber Duck Company evolved into a theatrical project called Taro and relocated to New York.

[G]

Sam.

[B]

That was the moon from the album Tarot by the band known as Touchstone, released by United Artists in 1972, with TC playing a somewhat Thelonious Monkish piano.

[G]

It was pretty much the music from the show. The band became known as Touchdown after the show because we started doing gigs as a band. We started doing other material, but the material that was on the United Artist album was all directly from the show, pretty much in the same sequence that it was on the show. It was originally supposed to be a double album, but seeing as the show didn't take off and go platinum right away, they cut it to a single album and rearranged some of the songs to fit, but all of them were from the show.

[B]

Jerry Garcia passed through the project very briefly.

[G]

He played at several of the rehearsals, as did also Peter Rowan and Richard Greene. None of them were in the Turo production in New York. It was all on the rehearsals in.

[B]

Mill Valley, when Tarot was open at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the spring of 1971, TC stopped by the Fillmore east to see his old bandmates and ended up sitting in.

[D]

We got a former member of the.

[G]

Grateful Dead hanging out here in New.

[D]

York, Tom Constant, gonna join us on his next tune.

[B]

One urban rumor about the show is that TC's appearance happened because Pigpen himself was dosed that night. A story. TC quashes.

[G]

It happened just for the moment. They were staying at the Essex House, a fabled song and story mentioned in the Saturday Night Live pitch, because that's where they put other people. And I went to visit Pigpen there and the band spotted me and said, hey, come join us and we'll have you on stage for a number or two.

[B]

It's a great Dark Star Suite now on the box set. Ladies and gentlemen, the Grateful Dead. It was the last time he would play on stage with the Grateful Dead proper, but far from the end of his musical adventures. Sometime in 1971, TC departed the church of Scientology.

[G]

A couple of months after I left the band, actually, it was a masterpiece of poor timing on my part. I compared, actually, there's a Scientology condition formula. I compared the people I knew who were more bohemian, shall I say, and the ones who were playing it straight, like Scientology wanted to, and then the ones that were more bohemian were achieving more and achieving more interesting things. And so I said, well, I think I'll go in that direction.

[B]

He remained friends with Robert Hunter.

[G]

I wound up giving him my E meter, and I don't know what use he put it to.

[B]

In the 70s and 80s and 90s, Tom Constantin continued down his own ever quizzical paths. We've posted links to all of these [e-mail] Deadcast here is a recording of him playing some fusion with the Quintet in Buffalo in 1975. This is their version of the Moon, the same piece we heard from Touchstone a moment ago. He taught music in Buffalo and continued to compose, including a 1983 piece for Electric guitar titled Alaric's Premonition, a gothic fugue on Rondo on a theme by Jay Garcia.

[G]

It's an academic piece, actually. It's a fugue on the theme of what's become of the Baby. And I figured what's become of the baby was about as outside as the band of regard to, except maybe Barbed Wire Whipping party.

[B]

In the 80s he worked especially on ragtime piano, too.

[G]

In the 80s I played in a ragtime band in San Francisco. Absolutely. Once the band leader, this was in San Francisco, he found out that Donita Fowler, who was Scott Joplin's niece was living in Oakland, so he invited her to our concert. And again, I had a solo. I think it was Peacherine Rag. And that was the last time I ever had stage fright.

[B]

Though he didn't play with the Dead themselves, he moved back into their musical circles, collaborating with Robert Hunter in 1988 on the Duino Elegies, a cassette so rare we've been unable to find a copy. If anybody has any, you know, leads, get in touch with [e-mail]. here's how Hunter described it to our buddy David Ganz in 1988, the day after he and TC recorded it.

[H]

Last night I went into the studio with Tom Constantin and did, by my own estimation, one hell of a reading of those elegies. Boy, they just roared out of me. And Tom's playing Brahms and Chopin and a little bit of Scriab and as background music for it, and I think we've got quite a little number here.

[G]

He did the translation in English of the Duino Elegies of Reiner Maria Rilke, and he invited me to play some music behind it. And I had a bunch of Brahms and Schubert and stuff which tailor fit the poems, certainly in terms of mood and most of the time also in terms of length. It was amazing how carefully and closely everything dovetailed together.

[H]

It should be read. It's only secondhand when it's on the page.

[B]

It did begin a lovely collaboration, and there's some recordings circulating. Here's TC backing Hunter on the poem Rainwater Sea, and you can hear the music slipping into Hunter's voice.

[H]

Memory of Memory Last spring, or was it the first fall of Forever Candid Is all innocence without mercy for me or my circus of antique blue, you were the fury of witness Slamming the door of a cloud to awaking the sleeping sky and wash me away like rain.

[B]

In 1989, 20 years after live Dead, Tom Constantin released his solo debut, Fresh Tracks in Real Time, beginning a solo discography that sprawled to nearly 10 albums in 10 years, diving into playing live at the border of classical ragtime and dead music. For a half dozen years, starting in 1986, he played on the weekly KQED radio show West Coast Weekend, where he met guitarist Henry Kaiser and began one of the more quietly consequential collaborations of his career.

[E]

That was a remarkable live radio show with a really good host and a big studio audience, and it was a remarkable show. There's not, you know, there was Prairie Home Companion being like that at the time, but it was better than that. And it had a greater variety of things on it. And it had, you know, art criticism and all kinds of other things in different segments. It was a great show. That's how I met him. And I think I probably played something with him there. And I said, hey, we got this band. You want to play some gigs?

[B]

Darkstar had returned to TC's repertoire during his ragtime years, but the Kaiser Band allowed him to get into the song in a way he hadn't since he was in the Dead, with a new, improved vocabulary and a more comfortable and better mixed keyboard. Check out his counterpoint to Henry here subtly quoting a Love supreme that was from the 20 minute long Dark Star, recorded in 1989, that opens the live Henry Kaiser Band album Heart's Desire.

[E]

You get to hear him playing piano and not just organ. So all those percussive elements, but he could do anything. Like on the live album at the recorded at the Palms, Heart's Desire, he plays a Stockhausen piano piece. And that's just spontaneous. Okay, I'll play the Stockhausen piano piece.

[B]

And it was in this period that TC began to actually make his way to Dead shows again as well.

[G]

There was a big hiatus roughly between 1970, about 1988, and I think somebody invited me backstage for one of those shows. And they kept on inviting me. And I would hang out mainly in Vince's room, although I would see Phil, I saw everybody. Then Jerry was kicked up to a higher level. He had an entourage. When he walked backstage, there was like a row of security guards seeing to it. The Known got to him, but everybody else was quite approachable. And like I say, I spent most of my time in Vince's room hanging out with him.

[B]

One of the people that TC met during this period was Bob Braylove, the Dead's midi guru, who joined the Dead's musical family in 1987, and who we spoke with extensively during our infrared Roses episode. In some ways, as the Dead's resident electronic music expert, he served a similar role with the dead. The TC had in 1969. Please welcome back to the Dead cast Bob Bralove.

[F]

I had this band called Second Sight that Henry Kaiser was in, and we had a show at the Great American Music hall. And Henry suggested that TC join us. He had been, of course, working with Henry in the Henry Kaiser Band. And I thought, oh, what sounds like fun? And I didn't really know him. I didn't know his full history. You know, I was just trying to keep up with things as they were coming at me. So I called TC and said, look, you know, I have access to the studio, so why don't you come up and I will set up two keyboards and go over the tunes, and you can make any notes you want if you need to remember anything. We'd play the tunes, and I'd say, how's that feel? This feels good, you know, and then we just start jamming. And I think both of our eyebrows sort of of piece peaked up as somebody would play something and the other person might recognize it because I studied composition. So he'd play something that sounded like Stravinsky, and I'd start going at it, too, and I'd play something that seemed like Bartok, and he'd respond to it, and he'd go, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I said, well, I felt like I was playing Bartok. Me too. You know, it was like. And so that was the initial thing, and he played the gig. It was wonderful.

[B]

TC was grateful that class of 69 and Braylove, class of 89, but they didn't become true musical partners until 1995.

[F]

We didn't really meet again till Jerry's funeral. And he leaned over to me and he said, you know how to get through this, don't you? And I said, no, I have no idea. And he looked at me and he said, you play through this. So a week or two after that, I called him up and I said, I'm ready to play through this. Are you ready? And he was. And he came over, and I had two keyboards set up, and I have the computer in record mode. And we just kept playing and playing.

[G]

I'd seen him backstage at Gretel Dead shows in the 80s. And we got together after Jerry's memorial service, and we sort of talked things through. When we hashed it out and figured that he would have wanted us to keep playing, and we were already getting together just to goof around and improvise very, very freely. And we said, hey, let's do that some more and put it on the stage. The next thing we know, well, we were dose hermanos. And that's dose. Dose. It's a measurement of medication is not a number in Spanish. And a couple of times, David Gansas joined us to play, and there were three of us, but we were still Dose Herman.

[B]

That was New York Kappa Java from Live in California, released in 1997. And so it was that Tom Constantin formed a new band at the age of 51, who've stayed together ever since.

[G]

We combine the freedom of improvisation of my time with the Band with the electronic wizardry from his time with the band. And we sort of cherry picked the best of both worlds within that first week.

[F]

I looked at him and I said, well, somebody gave me this bottle of crystal mescaline. Are you interested? And I was fairly new to dosing at that point, but I had sort of started right around the end of the Grateful Dead. So I remember Tom exactly what he was doing. He had this big smile on his face and he said, oh, yes, please. So we started indulging in that. And there seemed to be some truths to be discovered in the psychedelic realm. And I'd say for the first five years we were psychedelicized every single show.

[B]

That was Constantin and Brelove, along with bassist Joe Gallant and guitarist Steve Kimmock from. From Live in California. Dos Hermanos were and are very much a real band, engaging in a range of projects from video synth hookups to turning their improvisations into pieces for youth Orchestras. Along with TC's solo releases, the Dos Hermanos discography now includes seven albums. The latest released last year, Persistence of Memory, which we've naturally linked [e-mail] deadcast. They began recording it in mid 2019.

[F]

I converted my entire living room into the studio. There was a grand piano, Steinway Model A, which was my dad's, and I had a Fender Rhodes 72 key. I had two other digital midi keyboards and then access to a bunch of sounds. So it pretty much was like most of Dos Hermanos recordings is what do you feel like doing? What instrument do you want to play? Do you have an idea for? You know. And we still will describe an emotion.

[G]

Occasionally we'll have an idea that will go with going in. Like there's one called Cartoon Spy. I forget what the title on the album is, but we're trying to think of a combination of James Bond and Daffy Duck. What that would be like.

[F]

That might be the live one, irt.

[G]

There's a couple of others that we're. They're like clearings in the forest that we return to, Walls of the Autumn Moon, and one we've done often called Shadow of the Invisible Man.

[B]

That was Waltz of the Autumn Moon.

[G]

They're both like these clearings in the forest that we can return to. They start out relatively predictably and then we branch out into other realms of sound that neither of us could predict either at the time. We just go out there and enjoy the ride. It's like we deliberately create avalanches which we then surf. And then Bob gets to work for this new album. There was A fair amount of post production. We had five instruments set up in Bob's home studio, and several of them were MIDI instruments, which means that you can change the sound after it's done. All you have is the notes and certain nuances, loudness, phrasing, stuff like that. But it could be a marimba, it could be a clarinet, whatever works for the given situation. And Bob had a field day putting that sort of stuff together. And with all of his experience and know how, you know, it's going to be pretty amazing. And sure enough, there it was. Even beyond assigning the various sound patches, he has a feel for laying out the panorama of sound in front of you, left to right, the placement of the sounds front to back, whether it sounds more present or whether it sounds in the midst of the recession, behind, pardon my Iranian syntax. But there were a bunch of parameters that he was tweaking.

[B]

Dos Hermanos has been a true creative partnership.

[F]

He's got this bird's eye view constantly. He's always able to just lift up to the next level to see it from a different angle. And so it's always sort of a creative response to any problem. Well, we could do this or we could do that. The thing is, Tom is always game. I mean, if you're not game, Dos Hermanos is stuck in the mud. So it's always fun and playful. He makes jokes when we play, right, That I call our time release jokes. He'll say something, you know, like one of his lines is, you know, evian is naive spelled backwards, and there's a little laugh, a little laugh, and then all of a sudden it starts to filter in. It's this kind of time release thing that people are slowly getting his joke. So after a conversation with Tom, you're just like, oh, yeah, wow.

[B]

Between the puns, TC is also a source of wisdom for his bandmate. Once, Bob told TC about an especially effortless experience he'd had while playing music.

[F]

It just felt like I was playing from my shoulders, like everything down from the shoulders was taking care of itself. My hands knew what to do, my fingers knew what to do, and I just had to create these gestures from my shoulder and. And everything would fall into place. And Tom talked about playing up the arm that the higher up the arm that you're playing from, the greater the gesture can be, and the greater the movement, the more confidence you're having as you play up the arm. And so I find one of the most wonderful parts, playing with Tom in Dos Hermanos can be the point where we move to these really broad gestures that really transcend the notes. It doesn't really it almost doesn't matter what notes you're playing because you're responding in these broad gestures of movement and time and sonorities, and they're just bigger than the individual notes. And then there are times, like in Smoke Dreams of My Mind, where every note counts.

[B]

There's a Grateful that axiom that it's always Darkstar somewhere. And if that's true, and I think it is, it stands to reason that it's also always beyond Dark Star somewhere as well. Look for Tom Constantin in the Outer Rings.

[G]

We're all in our orbits. We disappear for a while, then we come back. Then we disappear again. SA.

[A]

That was Alaric's premonition for keyboards from TC's compilation 88 Keys to Tomorrow. Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode, Tom Constantin, Bob Braylove, Henry Kaiser and David Lemieux. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast, David Ganz, for contributing audio from his interview archive. We couldn't do it without you, David. Thank you. Thanks very much for tuning in. Don't forget to like and subscribe. And keep your tour stories coming by recording yours [e-mail] 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.