An Interview with Mickey Hart
By Tom Crenshaw tom@rockom.net
As a child, Mickey Hart used to stand out in thunderstorms listening to the patterns and sounds of the rain as it fell. He recalls some of his neighbors saying quizzically to his parents, "That boy of yours, Mrs. Hart, he's a strange fellow!" That rhythmic inquisitiveness as a child led Mickey deeper into the mysteries of sound as he grew older, becoming one of the world’s most celebrated percussionists and authoritarians on world music and music's healing abilities.
For nearly three decades Mickey has performed on drums and percussion as part of the Grateful Dead (along with fellow drummer Bill Kreutzmann) but his accomplishments don't end there. Through his tireless study of world music Mickey has gone on to contribute more than most any other musician to the study of sound, rhythm and the incredible healing aspects contained within.
Mickey has also written four books documenting his lifelong fascination with the history and mythology of music. These include Drumming at the Edge of Magic, Planet Drum, Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music, and Songcatchers: In Search of the World’s Music. He’s appeared before the United States Senate to discuss the healing powers of music and rhythm and is a member of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function at Beth Abraham Hospital where he continues his investigation into the connection between healing and rhythm and the neural bases of rhythm. Mickey has also been appointed to the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress where he heads the subcommittee on the digitization and preservation of the Center's vast collections.
In addition, Mickey Hart has composed music for movies, television and celebrated events including Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the PBS special Vietnam: A Television History, and The 1996 Summer Olympic Games to mention a few.
RockOm had the extraordinary opportunity to spend some time with Mickey recently to discuss his early initiation into sound and rhythm, his role in the Grateful Dead, his various Grammy Award-winning albums of percussion and world music, and the incredible reality that there are new, healing rhythms being born into the world every day.
RockOm: What are your earliest memories of music and drumming?
Mickey Hart: That all depends on what you call music and what you call drumming. I was always interested in the nature of the rain, loud sounds of the city, trolley cars – so the rhythmic tattoo of New York City first captivated me, the rhythm and the noise of things – buildings being torn down, a lawn mower – pretty much "loud stuff." I love the loud in things. The rain especially was transfixing because it came down so rhythmically. I would stand out in the rain and let it beat on me and it went deep into the subconscious and inner self. It felt really good to be out there. Those were my first thoughts of rhythm and noise.
Then of course the radio would captivate me. My mother had Folkways records tucked in the middle of a Duke Ellington collection. I started listening to pygmy rainforest music and listening to indigenous musicians as the first real turn-on to membranophones, or drums. And Latin music was really taking over at that time in New York City – Tito Puente and Machito – and that was coming out of every radio and every phonograph around the city. Before Rock N’ Roll there was Latin music which was full of syncopation and got my ear. My dad and mom were both rudimental drummers and when my dad had left when I was an infant, he left a practice pad. That practice pad was my key into the other side. When I heard the report of the practice pad, that sealed the deal. There was nothing more beautiful than the short, sharp sound from the pad; I could listen to it over and over again. It became like my radar. That was the beginning of it all. I was a strange, unsettling boy.
RO: Tell us about meeting Babatunde Olatunji and how that impressed upon you.
Mickey Hart: Olatunji came in about 1959 much later; what I’m talking about is the early and mid-50s. But when I heard Olatunji's album Drums of Passion I had never really heard drums played at that level and I certainly had never heard a talking drum – a variable pitched instrument. Here you had the powerful trance loops of Western Africa. I mean people didn’t know that’s what they were experiencing but here you had trance rhythms played in New York City in a fine recording studio with CBS. And Baba was a great vocalist so here you had chant over these powerful, magical rhythms. So when I heard that album that sealed the deal as well as far as the power of raw percussion and voice. It changed my life, no doubt.
Then of course I was fortunate enough to run into him in 1985 and when I asked him to open up for the Grateful Dead, he didn’t know who we were. He said, “Ya, ya, ya…” and left. Someone then must have told him who I was and he called me back. We got to be friends and he opened for the Grateful Dead and the fans loved him. He became my best friend and the godfather of my daughter. So he was another major influence to me as well as to hundreds of thousands of practitioners and musicians from around the world – Coltrane knew him. All kinds of people were being sucked into this powerful rhythm snake.
RO: When did you first recognize your experience with rhythm and drumming going from beyond the ordinary into a mystical or spiritual realm?
Mickey Hart: I didn’t know what to call it when I was young but I was going into trance when I was alone. I played alone a lot and so it became a meditation and I was definitely moving in and out of trance. Looking back on it now I would play for hours and not eat. I was totally in the zone and that is a sure sign of a trance. That was unconscious. But then when I started playing in the Grateful Dead, I started really seeing the ritual unfold. It was out of control. It was a wondrous thing, going into a new soundscape that no one had ever been to. Well, I had never been to it, nor had anyone else around me. So I figure we were moving into realms of consciousness by taking psychoactive drugs simultaneously and playing for hours and hours. Again, this was a deep trance. People would just lose themselves in the groove and dance for hours and copulate and everything. It was a quite a scene. That also made a big impression on me, seeing a new ritual being born – you know, with white kids on the edge of the Western world.
Then as far as the health part of all this, I saw that music reconnected you with the infinite, vibratory universe when my grandmother had Alzheimer’s. She hadn’t spoken a word in six months and I isolated her once in the car when I taking her somewhere. I just happened to play my tar, my single-membrane tar, for her for about 20 minutes. She was looking at it and all the sudden she spoke my name and I thought, “Wow, this is powerful.” This is somebody who was disconnected from speech, who was motor-impaired saying my name. Then when I stopped, she went back into the darkness. That was a moment for me and I realized that rhythm has to do with life and the giving of life and the taking of life. When the rhythm stops, you’re dead. When the rhythm is good, you live a good life. It also can reconnect some of the connections that are broken in the brain using certain rhythms at certain volumes. It was then that rhythm therapy came into view and the music therapists started appearing. I appeared in front of the Senate in 1990 and testified on the power of rhythm in front of Harry Reid on the Committee for Aging. Harry gave me and Oliver Sacks a million bucks to kick-start music therapy here in the West.
RO: You mentioned in earlier interviews that the Grateful Dead were in the business of transportation. What was your role in transporting your fans and listeners?
Mickey Hart: I made the traps. I was in the engine room. Me and Bill Kreutzmann made that feeling that allowed you to go to those places that laid the foundation for the melody and the harmony and the song.
RO: So in a sense of the word do you and Bill Kreutzmann consider yourselves modern day shamans?
Mickey Hart: You could say that. I would say we’re more “seat-of-the-pants” kind of shamans. But we are practicing the art of shamanism for sure. We’re transporting people into other consciousness and that’s what shaman do. Yeah, we don’t have a license [laughs] but we do it!
RO: In your role of being a transporter, where are you wanting your listeners to “arrive”?
Mickey Hart: It’s certainly a state of bliss, of being centered, of happiness – where you can make sense of everything around you. That’s what consciousness is all about. Everybody has a different consciousness but the idea is to elevate the consciousness to a place where you can feel who you are and how you fit in. That’s what spirituality really is – it’s a tuning system, to tune you and the universe. Part of the universe is the people you live with, the people you love, your children, your self! If you can’t have this feeling within yourself you can’t give it to anyone else.
So it’s a constant maintenance and practice. I play every day to maintain a level that I can share with others. How do you share the precious, invisible feeling of spirit with someone? Well you have to change it into a form. In this case, it’s music; it’s vibratory. The universe is vibratory, you are vibratory, the things you create in culture are vibratory. How these rhythm worlds all work together, that’s the yoga of sound. That’s why music is such a great vehicle. It’s not really about the music, it’s what the music does to you and the feeling it creates in you and what you do with that feeling. Music is important!
If you talk to Michael Jordan, he will tell you that going to the basket and being up there for four or five seconds -- that’s God. He’s in an absolutely perfect, rhythmic entrainment with himself, the people around him and the universe. It doesn’t happen all the time; it only happens in moments. It’s not like you can tune yourself in and stay in this place forever, it’s a constant ebb and flow in and out of these wonderful states of consciousness. But if you don’t go for these moments, then you’re just in the music business and I never thought of myself in the music business. It wasn’t about that. When I went after a groove and the music, it wasn’t necessarily to entertain. When I get lost in it, it might not even be interesting on some levels, it may be self-serving. But I’m trying to create some kind of a feeling that’s relevant to the moment.
You can’t really judge these things in those terms of good or bad, you have to judge them in other ways such as what do they do? Are they positive? Are they negative? Like love, compassion, all those good things are positive. War, hate, racism, murder, people who take more than they give – that’s bad rhythm. Health is good rhythm. Disease means you’re out of rhythm. I’m sure all musicians want to play technically good and so do I, but I try to separate the ritual from the technical. You have to be technically good to create good ritual. These are very gray lines – one person’s spirit is another person’s non-spirit. So this is a very individual thing.
RO: You’ve been exposed to a wide variety of spiritual influences from that found in Indian and African music, to Tibetan monks, to the shamanistic spirituality of Carlos Santana to the mythological and bigger picture spirituality of Joseph Campbell. How would you describe your current spiritual worldview.
Mickey Hart: Well I know who my God is. If there is a Creator, it’s a rhythm. In the vibratory universe, the seed sound is the creation of everything. And in that sound, in that rhythm, you find what some people would call spirituality or the sacred dimension. There was nobody up there that said, “make this [life] happen.” This came out an arrhythmic event 10 billion years ago like I write about in the books. Now I’m really starting to really study the planet and listening to what they say through radio telescopes – making music with the universe. It’s led me back to the seed sound and that’s what I’m exploring now – dealing with the fabric of the universe and how to make contact with it and interact with it intelligently.
RO: Last year we spoke with your friend Zakir Hussain and he went into some details about rituals and cleansing before performing. You say you practice every day to stay in shape, is there anything ritualistic or ceremonial in regards to your warm-ups or preparations to perform that you’d be willing to share with us?
Mickey Hart: Sure. I always feel my heartbeat. I work out in the morning doing my cardio routine and then on the way to the studio (which I go to everyday) I start focusing on me and my heart beat, my rate. Even when I’m walking I feel the pulse. That gives me a place to start. Like as I’m talking to you now, I’m feeling my pulse. It’s something that I refer to from time to time. I always try to start there. I warm up a lot for long periods of time before I actually commit to the drum. I prepare myself and warm up really slow and long. I like taking an hour and half in my warm-up before I really go after a drum.
RO: Let’s talk about 1991’s Planet Drum CD where you convened some the world’s finest percussionists and musicians together. What were your intentions in gathering these particular artists to record that groundbreaking album?
Mickey Hart: I knew them all individually but they didn’t know each other. One night in the middle of the night I popped up and realized that I’m sitting on top of the mountain here. This is the Promised Land. I made the calls and one by one I introduced them to each other. They all showed up, turned on the microphones and let it all pour out. It was certainly musical magic. All the tracks were first takes, one person started playing and the next person related to it. I told them the mission was that we weren’t going for solos, we were going for the deep drumming groove and to entrain. They all could relate to that and that was history. That was really percussive history.
RO: Was it surprising the response the CD received?
Mickey Hart: Not in my world! [laughs] I thought everything we did could sell a million records. No… yes, of course it was. Winning the Grammy and being 26 weeks at #1 and touring and selling hundreds of thousands of CDs was gratifying. It also elevated percussion into a whole new realm where it was respected as an instrument equal to melody and harmony. It was musical.
RO: So you repeated it again this year with your Grammy for Global Drum Project?
Mickey Hart: Yeah, we did it again this year and now we’re working on a new one. That’s what I’ll be doing as soon as finish this interview.
RO: Earlier this year the Tibetan Chants for World Peace album you produced with the Gyoto Monks Tantric Choir was at the top of the Amazon and iTunes charts…
Mickey Hart: [laughs] Yeah, can you imagine that! I thought when that happened, I had seen everything. Here we’ve got a choir of monks from Tibet singing three notes each that is on the top of the charts. I never thought I’d live to see this. It made my day!
RO: What did that experience teach you, bringing the monks into the studio?
Mickey Hart: Well I’ve been doing it since 1987 and it’s rewarding beyond words, sitting there letting the chants wash over you. I think it’s very self-serving on my part. In some ways isolating them and listening to them for hours, having the privilege of being with these wonderful people, turns you into a speck of dust. It puts you in your proper perspective in the universe and is always a thrill. But this one was over the top because they allowed me to overdub themselves on themselves. We created a choir of over 110 or 120 voices. That hasn’t been heard outside the monasteries of Tibet since the 50s because there aren’t that many chanting monks now and they don’t do these giant rituals in Dharamsala, where most of them reside. Any day listening to the chants of the Gyoto Tantric Choir is a good day for me.
RO: Do you believe there’s still music and rhythms on the planet that we haven’t been made aware of yet?
Mickey Hart: There are rhythms being born as we speak - new rhythms being born in places we know of and places we don’t know of. That’s the way of music. That’s the way of things – they either grow and become relevant and serve the community or they die. Yes, there are new rhythms being born constantly and they’re mutations actually. Almost all music on this planet is a mutation or hybrid of something else that came before.
RO: What’s next for you, Mickey?
Mickey Hart: I’m after the sound of the universe, that’s where I’m going now.
Special thanks to Rose Soloman and Dennis McNally
Mickey Hart photo by John Werner
Tags: Airto Moreira, Apocalypse Now, Babatunde Olatunji, Bill Kreutzmann, Carlos Santana, Drumming, Flora Purim, Global Drum Project, Grammy, Grateful Dead, Gyoto monks Tantric Choir, Harry Reid, Healing, Joseph Campbell, Mickey Hart, Oliver Sacks, Percussion, Planet Drum, rhythm, Sound, the Dead, Tibet, Zakir Hussain
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