RockOm

An interview with Airto Moreira
By Tom Crenshaw, tom@RockOm.net

Airto Moreira is one of the most endearing and influential percussionists in the world today. Born in South Brazil he began playing percussion even before he could walk. By the time he was six years old Airto had won many music contests by singing and playing percussion. He moved to Sao Paulo at the age of sixteen and performed regularly in nightclubs and television as a percussionist, drummer and singer.

In 1965 he met the singer Flora Purim in Rio de Janeiro. Flora moved to the USA in 1967 with Airto following shortly after and began playing with musicians such as Reggie Workman, JJ Johnson, Cedar Walton and bassist Walter Booker. It was through Booker that Airto began playing with the greats - Cannonball Adderley, Lee Morgan, Paul Desmond and Joe Zawinul to name a few.

Mr. Moreira's impact in the drumming world has been so powerful that Downbeat Magazine added the category of Percussion to its readers' and critics' polls in 1973 because of his work. Airto has gone on to win this award over twenty times since then. In the past few years he was been voted the number one percussionist by Jazz Times, Modern Drummer, Drum Magazine, Jazzizz Magazine, Jazz Central Station's Global Jazz Poll on the Internet, as well as in many European, Latin American and Asian publications.

Airto Moreira has been advancing the cause of world and percussion music as a member of the Planet Drum percussion ensemble alongside The Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Heart, master conga player Giovanni Hidalgo, tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, Flora Purim, Babatunde Olatunji, Sikiru Adepoju and Vikku Vinayakram. Airto has contributed to two Grammy Award-winning projects, the album Planet Drum, which won in 1991 in the World Music category, as well as his work with the Dizzy Gillespie's United Nations Orchestra, which received the award for Best Live Jazz Album.

In September of 2002, Brazil's President Fernando Henrique Cardoso named Airto Moreira and Flora Purim to the Order of Rio Branco, one of Brazil's highest honors. The Order of Rio Branco was created in 1963 to formally recognize Brazilian and foreign individuals who have significantly contributed to the promotion of Brazil's international relations.

Also, Airto was a professor for three years at the Ethnomusicology department of UCLA and broke new ground in musical concepts and creative energy.

Currently he divides his time between recording studios, workshops and clinics, and creating new projects as well as researching new materials for future releases and live performances in the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Airto's latest album is Life After That and was released on Narada Records.

Airto: No, not really. It probably has nothing to do with the music. There was no music. My parents didn't sing, dance, or play. [Laughs] My father was a spiritist. He, along with about 10 other mediums, would sit around a table and get in touch with the spirits and the spiritual world. They would talk to the spirits and solve problems for people. The medium, acting as a bridge between the spirit and material world, would talk with the spirit of the person and straighten a lot of things up because there's a lot of people who [after they die] feel good about their [past] lives, but most of us, we don’t. We feel like we wasted a lot of time in our life. We feel, "I shouldn’t have done that," or "maybe I should have done this instead of that." We keep those problems and other problems after life. When I say "after life," I mean after our material life. As spirits, we are immortals. We never die; we just spend some time around the spiritual world (which is actually right here) and is the universe. It's God's universe that he is creating. We might have to come back here to solve some problems we left and to learn to do other things and so on.

When I was about five years old I used to watch my father. We weren't supposed to watch but we watched anyway. [Laughs] I saw my father many times writing prescriptions for people. Some of the things he used to prescribe for others to take were from nature, from the forest. Other things he would write were to be taken from a pharmacy. He used to work with a spirit of a deceased doctor who had died 20 years earlier. My father was illiterate. He couldn't read or write but I saw him writing many times. Later on in his life he had diabetes and he lost his vision and was a blind man for about the last 10 years of his life. But he was completely happy! It was really beautiful to see that - the spiritual part of my family.

My sister does a lot of what my father used to do. She learned a lot from him. She is beautiful and happy as well. When others see her they say, "Wow, she is so nice!"

Now talking about death and music, I am in some ways a medium. I also make the bridge between the spiritual and material world. When I play, I do that. The musicians who play with me - including my wife, Flora [Purim] - they know when that comes on me and it's just a beautiful thing. We are helped by the spirits. The music becomes high as far as energy. It doesn't have to be a very fast kind of rhythm. Whatever we do is really rich in energy - universal energy that keeps all the planets and stars together and balanced. This energy is around us too; it's the primal energy that God uses to create the universe. The more you study the more you know. It's not a complicated thing; it's basic, really. I feel the energy when I change, when I am playing something and right at the beginning when it actually happens. I open up for whatever energy is there and then something happens; it clicks and the whole band knows. We look at each other, laugh and smile and we keep playing. It's a beautiful thing, man.

Tom: It seems you were bound for great things as a musician from early on. You had your own radio program in your home city as a preteen and then at 13 you began drumming and singing in local dance bands. Where did this drive, this passion for music come from?

Airto: I don’t know because we didn't have that many musicians in our family. My mother's side of the family was from Italy. I always loved music and I started playing some percussion instruments that my grandmother gave to me and that was it. I just kept playing. My mom gave me other percussion instruments and I just kept playing. This is what I do today; I keep doing the same thing that I use to do when I was a little kid. Now I have a lot of knowledge about different kinds of music - commercial, non-commercial, playing for money or not. Thank God I don't have to play for money. I did when I was younger but if the music wasn't good, if I didn't like it, I didn't play.

Tom: Your wife Flora moved to the USA in 1967 and you followed soon thereafter. Was that a move you intended to make no matter what or were you waiting to see what Flora discovered as far as the music scene was concerned before you decided to leave?

Airto: I had a plan, you see. I was in love with Flora. Really in love with Flora, mainly because she was a fine human being and she had a good education. She was from a family in Rio and I was from a family in South Brazil and we were very poor in our little village. When I met Flora I had never met a woman like her before. She was incredible! She was like a princess. She liked me and we started taking. It was like “Wow.” In the beginning the only thing I would talk to her about would be music. [Laughs] We used to talk a lot about music; she was a singer already. I was thinking this is something very, very special - this is incredible. I couldn’t believe it. We stayed together two years and she decided to go to the States and spend some time there, meet some people, say hello to her friends from Rio who were already there like Sivuca [Dias de Oliveira] who played accordion and was musical director for Miriam Makeba (a great African singer) and Sérgio Mendes. She told me, "I'm going to go and try and sing for a while. I'm really not sure what is going to happen." I said, "Well, I can't go right now. I’m playing with this great band, the New Quartet, and we're successful." I told her I was sorry but I couldn't go.

She went anyway, so we would write to each other. Sometimes we would talk on the phone, but we would write every day. I was so much in love with this woman that I decided to go to California, stay for a couple of weeks, and then bring her back to Brazil. So, I went - and here I am! I'm not in Brazil. [Laughs] Of course, we went back to Brazil often. I don't like the word "career" because I think music is much more than career - music is a lifetime commitment.

Tom: Who were the first musicians you met upon arriving in the states?

Airto: I met Moacir Santos, who was a master teacher from Brazil and a great arranger and tenor saxophonist. I did some gigs with him and studied with him, but not enough. I never really liked study. Unfortunately I can't read music. I started playing in LA with some Brazilian bands and then Flora was invited to go New York to sing with Miriam Makeba.  A few days after Flora went to New York, I followed her there and we lived in New York for almost nine years.

It was in New York that I met everybody. I met Cannonball Adderley and we liked each other so much, even though we didn't understand each other. I was speaking Portuguese and he was speaking English. He was our mentor and sponsor in the states and signed our working papers and told his manager, "I want Airto and Flora here legally." I started playing with Cannonball, Lee Morgan and Paul Desmond. Then everything started to happen.

Two and a half years later I met Miles Davis. I met Miles through Joe Zawinul, who was very close friends with Miles.  One day Miles said to Joe, "Joe, I’m recording this album - a new kind of music. It’s more electric. I need a percussionist that plays something different." Joe said to Miles, "Well I know somebody that I met at Walter Booker's house." Miles asked Joe what kind of person I was - if I was old, young, or what. Joe told Miles, "He's kind of young, but he has some incredible percussion instruments that no one's seen before. He plays them all, plays jazz, bossa nova, samba; he plays anything. He's able to hear something and just play it." So, I started playing with Miles and recorded Bitches Brew with him.

Tom: Did you believe Bitches Brew was going to be the phenomenon it became?

Airto: No. I knew practically nothing. It was all like a dream to me, a movie that I was in. Everything was happening and I didn't speak English. I came to understand English better soon after. The first three years was like I was on an acid trip and being in a crazy movie. It was a very strange feeling; I was not afraid at all. It was like I knew these musicians for a long time and we were just going to play some music - that was it. All the other musicians warned me about Miles and said, "Listen, Miles can be real nasty but go and play with him. He's going to like you. But never get into any kind of negative stuff with him because he likes to play with you and try and scare you." I was careful in that area. I had two and a half years with Miles. One of the greatest experiences in my life.

Tom: The sidemen on Bitches Brew were extraordinary: Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, and Chick Corea.

Airto: Yeah, I played for probably a year and a half with those guys. Then Miles started changing the sound. He wanted to get into the "funk/wah-wah" thing. He loved Jimi Hendrix actually. They were going to do an album together. Gil Evans was going to write the arrangements but it never happened because Jimi died. Yeah, we used to go down to the Village in New York with Miles, into Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios and jam there. Miles would be talking with Jimi about the wah-wah pedal; He was crazy about it. He wanted to use it with the trumpet.

Tom: Following your stint with Miles Davis, you jumped right into Weather Report with Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, Miroslav Vitous and Alphonse Mouzon.

Airto: Actually it was during my time with Miles. I was still playing with Miles when Joe Zawinul invited me to form the band. Joe said, "This is going to be the best group in the world. You’re going to play with us." But I told him, "I'm still playing with Miles. Some people are leaving the band and I think Miles needs me." Joe said, "No, Miles doesn't need anybody. Come and play with us." It wasn't that I was skeptical about Weather Report, I just didn't want to leave Miles' band. I wanted to go into that change with him and give him my sounds and soul. I never went on the road with Weather Report. I recorded with them and I played one concert at CBS for the release of our first album on CBS Records. I told Joe after that concert that I was not going to leave Miles.

Tom: In our interview with your wife, Flora gave us her thoughts of Chick Corea and Return to Forever. I want to hear from you about your experience with Chick and Return To Forever. You all pretty much made history in this band.

Airto: Chick had a drummer before me. But he asked Flora to ask me to come in on the next rehearsal they had so I could show some patterns to his drummer and I said, "Sure." I met them all, met the drummer and showed him some stuff. The drummer asked me to take a break with him, go next door to a bar and have a drink. When we got next door he said to me, "Do you want to play this gig with Chick?" I said, "Yeah, I want to play drums for Chick but you're already playing with him." "I’m a jazz drummer; I don’t want to play this gig," he said. I told him, "Well, we have to talk with Chick because he never really invited me to play with him." So we went back to the practice and the drummer said to Chick, "Chick, Airto and I were just talking and you've got a new drummer." [Laughs]

Tom: When we interviewed Mickey Hart and spoke with him about the Planet Drum album and his intention in recording it he said he realized on day he was "sitting on top of the mountain" with regards to his percussion friends. You and Flora joined him on the Planet Drum album and were in fact co-producers, along with the other musicians performing on the album. What are your thoughts on how this all came to be?

Airto: Flora and I met Mickey Hart with the Grateful Dead. We went to see the Dead one time at the Oakland Coliseum just to see what everyone was talking about with this band. That was some "down to earth" music: singing, playing and tripping. It was a big party with thousands of people! Flora and I went backstage after the concert and they were like, "Oh, Airto and Flora!" They invited us to perform with them the next two nights, to jam with them. Ornette Coleman was sitting in with them, playing this crazy stuff on saxophone. Flora picked up a microphone and started singing with Ornette Coleman, doing free-form stuff, really beautiful stuff. That's how we met Mickey. Mickey then called me and Flora to play on the Apocalypse Now soundtrack and we worked in the Dead’s studio in Marin County for six days and nights straight.

Tom: Was this the first time you had worked with Zakir Hussain?

Airto: Yes. [Pause] Maybe I played with him in the Rhythm Devils. I wasn't a part of that group; I just sat in with them. Apocalypse Now was the first time we collaborated and it was just beautiful. Zakir is one of the most incredible players on earth.

Tom: We agree, but I must add that when we spoke with Zakir Hussain last year in San Anselmo one of the first things he spoke about was Bitches Brew and how that was so inspirational to him and everyone, and how it changed everything. He was taken with your work as well.

Airto: Zakir told me he was a classical percussionist playing classical Hindu music, and that's what he did. Then he saw me play with Miles Davis and said, "Wow, I can do that too. I can play some other stuff." Zakir can do anything, really. He's an incredible musician. Then Zakir started opening up, playing with different people. He's one of the most respected musicians in the world.

Tom: Tell me about your album The Other Side of This, from 1988. It was an exploration into the healing powers of music and the spiritual world.

Airto: I always have ideas for sound. I have a lot of ideas for things I haven't played yet. I am young; I'm only 67. [Laughs] Some of the sounds I had been thinking about for many years were sounds for healing, for relaxing and for energy. I never really thought of myself as a shaman to be working with spirits. Spirits are free to come and visit when I am playing and each day when I jump in, they are welcome.

One day when were working on Planet Drum with Mickey and all the great percussionists who performed on that album I said to Mickey, "Remember that project that we talked about of co-producing, that healing music album?" He was about to head out of town and said, "Why don't you start it while I'm gone." So, I stayed in the studio and did about half of the album in five days. When Mickey returned we began rehearsing Planet Drum again and he asked, "Well what have you been doing while I've been gone?" So I had the engineer play the recordings in the studio and Mickey said, "What? What is this?" I said, "That's our project that you are producing." [Laughs] He said, "Oh, you bet I am! Let's keep working on this!" So we would rehearse Planet Drum in the day and then work on The Other Side of This until the early mornings.

Tom: How do you see music and especially percussion evolving in the near future?

Airto: Percussion was probably the first ever instrument. People would play and not even know they were making music. I think it is always going to be a part of humanity. Right now there's a lot of synthesized music and percussion, but at the same time there are percussionists and drummers such as Mickey Hart, Zakir Hussain, myself and others who are playing all over the world. There is space for acoustic percussion, for the real thing. It will never die. I think that percussion will always grow together with the music. It doesn't matter what kind of music it is because the percussion will always be there. Percussion evolves with the music and with the human race. One doesn't need to be a professional - you can go and play some with the guys and it's OK. Percussion started the music, in the beginning. Percussion is a beautiful exchange, a melting pot. It will always exist and if they keep sampling, they're going to be sampling forever.

LINKS: www.airto.com

Music is what the good doctor has ordered this week at RockOm, healing us with rhythm and with laughter.

To begin, check out our all new interview with Grateful Dead drummer, world music practitioner and music therapy expert Mickey Hart titled "If There is a Creator, It's a Rhythm". Read Mickey's thoughts on his "shamanistic" role as a drummer and about music's ability to connect us with the infinite, vibratory universe.

Then head over to the right column of the homepage to check out Billy Jonas' amusing and lighthearted song, "God Is In," about finding the divine in everything. Make sure you listen to the whole song to get the depth of what he's trying to say and then head over to his website to find out more and to pick up a copy of one of his albums.

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.

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.

www.mickeyhart.net

www.facebook.com/mickeyhart

Special thanks to Rose Soloman and Dennis McNally

Mickey Hart photo by John Werner

Psychedelic country-rock with a Kingston-inspired Reggae groove accompanying mystic Celtic chant and flute. It's how we roll at RockOm and we're rolling at you with three new RockOm Featured interviews today. Though different cultures separate them, each of these artists are creating music with a united purpose: to spread love, peace and some "righteous" joy.

The New Riders of The Purple Sage, California's psychedelic cowboys of 70's country-rock, have released their first album in 20 years. The New Riders' Buddy Cage joined RockOm for a revealing discussion on the new CD and band, and how it makes all the difference when you "play it in your own spirit."

The Wailers, led now by Aston "Family Man" Barrett continue spreading the message that "we're all Jah people." The band's reggae groove has been the soundtrack to the lives of hundreds of millions across the planet. Family Man joined RockOm before a recent performance to talk about the soul of Rastafari, the legacy of Bob Marley and an upcoming new Wailers CD featuring surprise guest artists.

A Celtic Mass for Peace: Songs for the Earth gives voice and sound to earth's deepest yearnings for peace. These are not just religious longings or Christian longings. These are sacred longings from the heights and depths of humanity's song. In a RockOm exclusive, composers Sam Guarnaccia and J. Philip Newell reveal how music and chant bring out the natural mystic in us all.

An Interview with Buddy Cage and The New Riders of The Purple Sage

By Tom Crenshaw, tom@RockOm.net

The New Riders of the Purple Sage have released their first studio CD in over 20 years. This legendary band’s renaissance began four years ago and continues today with over 100 shows annually to audiences throughout the United States and Canada. The album, Where I Come From, features 12 new songs, seven of which were written by David Nelson and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Included are the songs “Carl Perkins Wears The Crown”, an ode to the rockabilly king written by Michael Falzarano (formerly of Hot Tuna), along with “Something in the Air Tonight”. The album also includes two live show favorites - “Higher” penned by Johnny Markowski and “Olivia Rose” by Ronnie Penque - as well as a cover of the classic “Minglewood Blues”.

The New Riders of the Purple Sage, signed to Columbia Records by Clive Davis, released its eponymous first album in September 1971 to widespread acclaim. In the next 11 years the band toured and released over 12 albums, selling over 4 million records. NRPS began as a part-time spin-off from the Grateful Dead when Jerry Garcia (pedal steel guitar), Phil Lesh (bass) and Mickey Hart (drums) teamed up with John Dawson (guitar, vocals) and David Nelson (guitar). Although early live appearances were viewed as an informal warm-up to the main attraction, the group quickly established an independent identity through the strength of Dawson's original songs.

For the next 13 years the band continued to tour and released over 12 albums, selling over 4 million records. The two bands that helped define country rock as we know it today are The Eagles and The New Riders of the Purple Sage. If the Eagles were the Beatles of country rock, then The New Riders of the Purple Sage were The Rolling Stones - rockin', rowdy and genuine.

RockOm caught up with Buddy Cage, steel pedal guitarist for the New Riders to discuss the new CD, spirituality and music, the music industry in general and much more.

RockOm: How did Where I Come From come about?

Buddy Cage: That is a long answer. That comes out of Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist, and his connection to us goes back to the very beginning, in fact he named the band in a rehearsal with Garcia. I wasn’t there at the time but as the story goes a Hell’s Angel in the rehearsal hall said, “How about Riders of the Purple Sage?” and Hunter said, “No, no man. That’s dumb.” From there it went on, “Well, Nelson you like that 'New Minglewood Blues', New this, New that – how about The New Riders of the Purple Sage?” That stuck. So he is the inventor of the name.

It turns out that almost four years ago when the band entered what we call the Renaissance, he picked up on the vibe and the energy that was going on with us. Not a hell of a lot had been going on since Jerry passed so he just got the bug to write for us. He writes all the time - short stories, poems, songs… it doesn’t really matter. He just writes. Last year he came up with six or seven tunes that he emailed off to Nelson and said, “OK, your turn.” Nelson had the mandate to go to work so they co-wrote these great tunes and that sparked another year of New Riders. Hunter has always been a part of this band. I think if you go back to 1969 he was the first guy that Garcia said to “come on down to the pizza parlor and play with us.”

RockOm: It’s an excellent album. Every song is contagious and melodic. The words just flow; it’s a hit. I really like this CD.

Buddy Cage: Me too man! I didn’t come into this Renaissance, to use that word again, to spin my wheels and play old tunes. There’s no future in that. In fact that’s probably the personal reason I left the New Riders in 1982. There was just no new stuff coming in. And if there’s no new, good stuff being generated, I’ve got to move on to other things. It may have been a twist of fate in one way or another that we got some decent gig offers. Nelson and I had talked about it and we said, “What the hell, let’s take the paycheck.” We got done doing a week’s worth of gigs and he looked at me and said, “I love it!” He’d been doing all those years of David Nelson Band stuff and here was a chance to do some New Riders things and explore its potential again.

RockOm: Did the band feel the need, after 22 years, to say something with this record?

Buddy Cage: To say something? I think we say something if a bunch of us are into a potential project together. There’s no need to sit around and say, “Let’s say something.” Or “I’ve got something to say.” I think recording is just a natural extension of the energy that’s going down at a particular time. There’s a lot of writers – Hunter and all the guys in the band – and it’s another part of the art of playing together. Seeing what comes out of a recording situation is another of those extensions.

RockOm: You guys are touring right now, supporting Where I Come From, and I can only imagine that this tour brings different emotions for each member of the band. Talk a little about how you’re feeling.

Buddy Cage: It’s a shared expression because we’re still together. It’s wonderful. It’s kind of a surprise. Back on the last question, with an old audience, there is no future. It’s just stomping back over the same stuff, time and again and there’s just no joy in that for me. However, with the influx of some new tunes to play, new places to go, we’ve been able to extend the enthusiasm in this band to new people coming in, new blood. There’s a whole astonishing dichotomy in the audience factor in this group. We get the old timers that probably think, “Jesus Christ, I’ve waited 20 years for them sons-a-bitches. Me and the old lady only go out once a year.” Fine, how long does that last? The answer being it doesn’t. But seemingly a new generation has come in enjoying songs again with this formidably banal jam band scene that goes on for the most part, for me, I just find it boring – endlessly and hopelessly “not there.” I’m sure people have shared that along the line – “I’ve had endless years of endless trills and riffing and this isn’t what a meaningful jam is anyway.” So there you go. They’ve inadvertently tuned into their family’s record collections and maybe spotted a cactus [the band's logo] somewhere in the corner and said, “A cactus, that’s cute” put it on and just got attached to good songs. Good Songs just beat the hell out of most of the stuff I know.

RockOm: What’s your favorite track on Where I Come From?

Buddy Cage: I like “Ghost Train” a lot. That’s pretty much - at least in my opinion - Hunter sharing that same feeling that, “Geez, I’m just sick and tired of this Ghost Train since Jerry’s been dead.” It’s been 13 and a half years of stopping around the graveyard and expecting things you can’t resolve. But you can resolve it. I too am tired of that ghost train. I love that song a whole lot. It’s amazing – “a hundred haunted box cars.” I like “Blues Barrel” immensely. It’s got a groove funk to it that I can really get into. It satisfies another one of my playing passions as a pedal steel guitarist to just settle down and just do funk in the background, a rhythm pattern.

RockOm: Most of the songs on your album are very long. That passion is still there to keep a song going for up to 10 minutes.

Buddy Cage: I answered a question the other day that said, “How do you feel about long songs? And what is the difference between what you did 25-30 years ago and what you do now?” And basically what we were doing then was looking for airplay and commercial hits. They were kept to, for the most part, the two and a half to three and a half minute song lengths and patterns. Right now, we just don’t care about that, so there is a difference. We end up with tunes that just play themselves into eight minutes without having to go into extended [jams]. There are a lot of verses to "Ghost Train", for instance, a lot of story to it. You can’t limit it, cut it down, because you want to get special air time out of it.

RockOm: These songs were recorded in no more than three takes in the studio. What has to happen between musicians or a group of friends in order to pull something like that off?

Buddy Cage: I don’t know. From my own standpoint, I’ve been doing this a long time. It’s just a natural thing. I can do one take and say, “Well did you get that?” and know that’s what’s going on the track. That’s how the track’s going to be played. Each of these songs started out in sound checks and trying them out and then eventually they’d just appear on a set list some night.

RockOm: Take us back to the Festival Express. You, the New Riders, Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and others were touring across Canada when you and Jerry sat down together and played steel guitar.

Buddy Cage: Oh, we weren’t sitting down together playing steel guitar. It wasn’t like a “jaaaam”. There was no “we be jamming” stuff about that. I asked him actually, and he said, “No, noo! You’re the guy, man!” It was kind of flattering in one way but in another way I felt I was missing something. You had to know Jerry. He was simply the most attractive, magnetic, personal guy I ever knew. The Festival Express train, the reason that came off at all, was that these two, three promoters had stolen their daddy’s checkbook and cut a few checks here and there. They brought the offer to all the bands they loved at the time and they thought would be the perfect thing to hear. Being three Canadian guys they included Ian and Sylvia (Great Speckled Bird) as their favorite Canadian thing going down, which I was playing with at the time. But it never got further than the managers, because all the managers went “Oh, no, no no! No you can’t tape it, you can’t film it. No audio. We have contracts with…” Nobody could just sign the papers and release forms. Jerry had to call everybody personally, man. With Janice it wasn’t such a long distance call, cause she was a next-door neighbor. But with everyone else he had to call and say, “Are you kidding? You don’t see this as being the best thing you’ll ever do in your freaking career?” And like I said, with his enthusiasm, he just torched off a bunch of guys and they all said, “Ah, screw the taping. We’ll do anything you want. It sounds like a real kick.” Even today if you ask anyone who’s still around about their favorite gig is and they’ll say, “That fucking train, man!” All the people that were there, all the people that didn’t even know each other at the time, had so much to say. We all ended up playing for each other, showing off. “Hey this is what my band does, what do you guys do?” It was one of those charming, amazing things.

RockOm: Did you know it was a career changing tour for you? Did you know something had to happen when you stepped off that train?

Buddy Cage: No, I didn’t actually. Apparently the first leg of that train was supposed to be in Montreal so [the bands] all went there. We boarded the train in Toronto as it was winding its way across country. By that time Jerry had already told the New Riders that were with him, “Guys, I gotta leave the band.” That was a tough place to be, I’m sure. But he had to devote time to The Dead again in writing songs and getting things done, producing the band because they owed two albums to Joe Smith at Warner Brothers at the time.

At that time the New Riders were going, “Jesus, Jerry. Thanks a lot man.” But he said, “Don’t worry; we’ll get you another player. We’ll get you a real player, a guy to take this band up the next few levels.” They heard me playing the first date in Toronto and Garcia said to the guys, “There’s the ringer; go get him.” When they approached me on the train it was pretty amazing and [Jerry] asked if I knew what was going to happen. These guys were a pretty sorry looking lot. I said, “Look at these guys. Look at these freaks.” I was dressed out between a cross of Jimi Hendrix and Cream. These guys, holy Jesus, looked like a bunch of Goddamn bikers. Gerry said, “There are no rules. You’ll never be a side man again.” I ended up getting the rest of my contract and things together during the next six months and jumped right in.

RockOm: The New Riders went on to sign with Clive Davis and Columbia.

Buddy Cage: After Woodstock the major labels were signing these west coast bands. Clive being among the west coast labels was eager to take the pitch for the New Riders. He thought if he signed us the Dead won’t be far behind. Actually, it took a few years for that to come down for him. Yeah, it was a great contract for the time. I’m not a label guy anyway. I don’t work under that kind of the pressure, that kind of rip off is completely unacceptable.

RockOm: Well I don’t know personally, but I’ll take your word for it.

Buddy Cage: You’ve heard of AIG? You’ve heard of Bank of America and Wells Fargo, Citibank? Well there you go. All major labels are the same.

RockOm: The major labels are now defunct and probably not coming back.

Buddy Cage: No, they’re not coming back. Goddamn. Just bury them deep. Bury them upside down so they can’t dig themselves out.

RockOm: What do you think of the digital age and music production? Internet radio and downloads. Is that your cup of tea?

Buddy Cage: Well it’s my cup of tea now, isn’t it? Unless you’ve got some other way of doing it. We talked earlier about the recording process, it didn’t take me long to get over the analog-digital controversy. Digital music is just so accessible. Even now, many years later after digital entered the work force we can drop in to various pockets all over the US. Wherever this band was last year from February to December '08, either coast, beginning or ending of the tour, while we were still all together and without incurring other expenses, we could just drop into little home studio deals. You can record anywhere. It’s just been so easy. For us to own our own stuff from the get-go is the key.

RockOm: It’s also easy for your new fans to access your music.

Buddy Cage: Absolutely.

RockOm: Let’s talk a little about music and spirituality. I’ve been told you are an atheist. Was there ever a time in your life where you were religious or spiritual?

Buddy Cage: Never. Religious or spiritual? What do you mean religious or spiritual? It’s not both. I don’t even really go into that in any kind of detail. It just is. It’s not something I need to record [like] writing a book or a pitch. Like we were talking before where you said you heard [the songs on the new album] were done in one or two takes - yeah, that’s spiritual! The feeling you get out of it, no one has to stand at a lectern and tell you and point to you the reasons why it’s good. There it is! There are spiritual things in all forms. I felt very spiritual of the fact that we actually got those rat bastard GOP fuckers out of our lives to a great degree and got Barack Obama in. We did that on a grass roots level. That’s spiritual.

RockOm: Do you think that perhaps in the 60’s and perhaps to a degree today that people confuse a psychedelic or drug induced experience with something spiritual?

Buddy Cage: Sure there’s confusion! If you’re taking drugs, damn right there’s confusion! If you’re ripped - not that I’m condoning it or tearing it apart - I’m not at all. I wouldn't presume to do that. But sure, there’s some kind of effect. To think of it as some kind of religious or spiritual experience, that’s up to the individual. That’s certainly not what I do. I’ve got this dumb guitar, this weird guitar I sat down to when I was a little kid, and no place to go. Talk about spiritual. I don’t know any other way to place it. What are you going to do with this dumb guitar? You gonna go to Nashville? Hell no! I could see from the time I was 15 or 16 what a dead end street that was. Play it this way or that way or you don’t get the job. Do this, do that; well I ain’t the guy to tell this too. I ended up with a rock n' roll head and with a country and western instrument. I became this weird hybrid at the beginning of the 60’s. By the mid 60’s when the music scene was starting to blossom for a lot of free thinkers and unconventional players, I seemed to fit right in because I knew what to do to serve the song, to fit in without trying to step on everybody. It developed into a style and a form through all these many years. There’s something in that. The time found me or I found the time to fit into whatever was happening. I don’t know if I could ever recreate it or preach it because it just isn’t that way, it never has been. That’s just my personal experience. So, falling through the cracks I fell into a pretty cozy place and a lot of people apparently felt the same way I did. That’s spiritual.

RockOm: What kept you and David Nelson and to a degree Robert Hunter together? You’ve had many lineup changes over the years. What is it about you and David and your association with Hunter?

Buddy Cage: Well, we listened to each other. That’s it. With Hunter and Jerry [Garcia], we always considered them a kind of a guide or beacon because they were always coming up with great ideas we could work with and work into, be part of. As far as Nelson and I go in playing in a practical sense, there you go, it’s the same thing. We listen to each other. I like the combinations we come up with. We always listen to each other. There’s little things, little intrigues going on, some places where we go, “Oh no, no, no. We don’t want to do that again!” And a lot of other places where it’s like, “Oh that’s interesting.” The end product [is] as much of a surprise and a source of pleasure for both of us. We’ve managed to be able to create a sound together that involves listening to each other and caring for what each other played. Nelson is a great guitar player on his own as I am on steel guitar, but together we’ve managed to find our way into something that worked for us.

RockOm: In 2005 when you came back together with Michael Falzarano, Ronny Penque, and Johnny Markowski joined you was it hard for them to fit into the groove you two were in? They have been around and on the scene as well.

Buddy Cage: It wasn’t that difficult. Basically the pitch to us from Markowski was, “Let’s just go out and try it and [see] if you can get Nelson out here. We know these great Marmaduke, these great John Marmaduke Dawson tunes and we’ve learned to do them. We want to present them to you.” Nelson, when he came out for the first rehearsal, he found the energy and the love these guys had for these John Dawson tunes. Nelson was quick to point out (and I stand behind him totally) Nelson said, “Please don’t think you have to copy them like side men. Play it in your own spirit.” That’s pretty much what set it off. I’ll jump into anything pretty much because that’s the way I’ve been all my life as a player. “Can you play reggae man? Yeah, sure. What’s the pay scale?” (laughing) But Nelson is very cautious as an individual about what he gets into and the amount of energy he’s going to [exert]. But when he found out how passionate the guys were about Johns tunes he said, “Think of the guys you are replacing, the rest of the playing with come naturally.” And it did.

RockOm: Is this the most fun you’ve had with the New Riders- making this record and touring?

Buddy Cage: I don’t know about the most fun, it’s the most fun I’ve had lately (laughing). It’s the next thing up and it all worked out so well. This is a whole lot of fun. Think of all the albums and experiences we’ve had; there’s so many experiences it’s amazing. This particular one, it’s what’s happening now and it’s just driving us crazy how good this thing worked out. It means so much to us to have a whole ‘nother future going on, a whole new direction rather. Yeah, I’m getting a huge kick out of it.

RockOm: Any plans for the future?

Buddy Cage: NO! These are the plans, you and I doing this interview. This is the future.

www.michaelfalzarano.com

www.thenewriders.com

When huge audiences voyage together through rock and roll heaven, where are they going, and what does it all mean?
by Ross Robertson
Reprinted by permission of enlightennext.org

Thoughts on the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, and Collective Consciousness

Suddenly people were stripped before one another and behold! as we looked on, we all made a great discovery: we were beautiful. Naked and helpless and sensitive as a snake after skinning, but far more human than that shining nightmare that had stood creaking in previous parade rest. We were alive and life was us. We joined hands and danced barefoot amongst the rubble. We had been cleansed, liberated! We would never don the old armors again. (Ken Kesey, Garage Sale)

Picture yourself on a slope overlooking a broad amphitheater. Sunset. Below you, the tribes are gathering from far and wide. Many thousands make their way into the sanctuary, beating drums, burning incense. It is time for the ritual of return. And you—threads of kinship weave through you as through the others. Unbinding your hair, you run to meet the growing crowd. High priests on the altars strike up the ancient songs, and everyone starts to move in patterns that you've never seen, but that seem familiar. It is a dance whose origins none remember, as old as the tribe itself. But instinct leads you into sync with each other in a sudden togetherness. The music enters you as if in slow motion, flowing with a pulse that both is and is not your own. No, this isn't 15,000 BC on the eve of the summer solstice. Nor is it the Zion orgy scene from The Matrix Reloaded on the eve of the final battle with the machines. You're in twentieth-century America: this is a Dead show.

Religious historian Mircea Eliade referred to shamans as “technicians of ecstasy,” and that's exactly what San Francisco's Grateful Dead were, on a grand scale. Their hands held instruments, but they played the crowd, captivating masses of people into a high that I could only call spiritual. From the beginning, it just came through mysteriously—came through everyone into a life of its own. Even those Deadheads of my own generation, who missed the sixties bus by a long shot, had this same experience. I saw my first show in—get ready—1992, when I was in high school. I grew up in the eighties; I needed to believe in something. And the Dead were astonishing, playing like Titans or gods beyond the borders of the mundane and the everyday. Like magicians, you couldn't figure out how they did what they did, but it worked, and you wanted in on the secret.

Shamans, or magicians—they created an atmosphere of wonder. Their music was a gateway to another mind entirely, a mind with fewer boundaries, full of space and unexplainable inventiveness. At a Grateful Dead show, you weren't who you thought you were. Some startling being was there instead, strangely recognizable. You'd close your eyes and follow where it led. When you opened them, surprise! Somebody else was always there, right next to you, making contact. You'd thought you were in it by yourself, blessed with a private experience, but the Dead proved you wrong. If heaven were a dance party, this would be it—I'd never seen so much joy in my life, surging up through people. It just made you want to move toward others. Joy out in the middle, between everything, that no one could own, but that was there for everyone—there to catch and twist and chase breathless. “What possesses our audience I can never know,” drummer Mickey Hart writes in Drumming at the Edge of Magic. “But I feel its effects. From the stage you can feel it happening—group mind, entrainment, find your own word for it—when they lock up you can feel it; you can feel the energy roaring off them.”

We all felt it, something we'd never felt anywhere else. What was it, though? What was the secret of that magic identity we all took part in, that thrilling, almost unbearable loss of control? Usually, the thought of losing control is terrifying. But the Dead made it easy to jump into the center, extended and vulnerable. They played and our attention leapt away from ourselves; there was a whole world there to meet, to encounter. Most of us are so used to thinking of ourselves as fundamentally independent creatures, with independent psyches, that the mere mention of “collective consciousness” or “group mind” is usually cause for a quick change in the topic of conversation. But with the Dead, these questions became interesting. Who am I really? you had to ask then, as your assumptions fell to pieces and the familiar sheaths of anxiety and isolation dropped from your shoulders. What am I so afraid of? The Dead themselves surely had all the same questions. They were regular boomers, if a bit on the fringes—rebellious kids into the Beats, blues, and jazz, leaning over the cusp of an era. That is, until they stopped playing bars and started playing the Acid Tests.

Actually, the Grateful Dead were taking LSD before Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters organized the first of their infamous Acid Test parties in August 1965. But it was as the Pranksters' house band that they stretched their fledgling wings and took off into the uncharted stratosphere. As Tom Wolfe writes in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, they weren't the only ones going airborne:

Suddenly acid and the worldcraze were everywhere, the electric organ vibrating through every belly in the place, kids dancing not rock dances, not the frug and the—what?—swim, mother, but dancing ecstasy, leaping, dervishing, throwing their hands over their heads like Daddy Grace's own stroked-out inner courtiers—yes! . . . Everybody's eyes turn on like lightbulbs . . . fuses blow, minds scream, heads explode, neighbors call the cops, 200, 300, 400 people from out there drawn into . . . a mass closer and higher than any mass in history.

Indeed, it was these prototypal, expect-the-unexpected hippie raves, presenting a garbage can's worth of dosed Kool-Aid to all comers, that gave the Dead the freedom to play without expectations. Instead of sticking to individual solos over background accompaniment, like most rock bands of the day, they took the lessons of John Coltrane and free jazz to heart, improvising all together, all at the same time. To do that successfully, they had to listen intently to each other, each individual responding spontaneously to the movement of the whole. And it was while jamming this way—having no idea where they were going but intending to go there together—that they stumbled upon the fantastic sense of a creative intelligence far greater than themselves as individuals, an intelligence that enveloped the group. When it was really happening, lead guitarist Jerry Garcia remembered, the music “had the effect of surprising me with a flow of its own.” When it was really happening, they flew as one. “Those hookups are like living things,” bassist Phil Lesh said. “Like cells in the body of this organism. That seems to be the transformation taking place in human beings. To learn to be cells as well as individuals. Not just cells in society but cells in a living organism.”

This collective mind knew no boundaries and created a deep togetherness, not just between the band members, but in the audience as well. “The audience is as much the band as the band is the audience,” drummer Bill Kreutzmann said. “There is no difference. The audience should be paid—they contribute as much.” Even more surprising is the fact that the musicians themselves couldn't enter that space without others there to listen. Jerry confessed that he'd “never experienced the click of great music without an audience. . . . We exist by their grace.” It's difficult to imagine the conscious attention of an audience being that crucial to the performers' ability to perform, though perhaps the Dead could be seen more accurately not as performers at all but as key participants in truly synergistic events. Jerry described it this way, in a 1972 interview with Rolling Stone:

To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe. And I think every human being should be a conscious tool of the universe...

When you break down the old orders and the old forms and leave them broken and shattered, you suddenly find yourself a new space with new form and new order which are more like the way it is. More like the flow. And we just found ourselves in that place. We never decided on it, we never thought it out. None of it. This is a thing that we've observed in the scientific method. We've watched what happens.

Though LSD was the mother that gave birth to this experience of communion, the experience itself gained independent life through the Dead's music. I myself went to a whole host of shows before I'd ever done drugs, and I still came back transfigured. “Music is a thing that has optimism built into it,” Jerry said. “You can go as far into music as you can fill millions of lifetimes.” Many people never, or only rarely, touch into such a “flow state” in their lives—a state that, as religious and spiritual traditions the world over explain, is the ecstatic reflection of a higher level of consciousness and represents the unknown, boundless potential lying dormant in all of us. That's why it's so striking that the Grateful Dead continued providing such experiences to people for thirty years, up through Garcia's untimely death in 1995. Perhaps today they are doing so once again, back together on the road for the first time since then.

And they're not alone. Now, hundreds of so-called “jam bands” formed in the Dead's mold are out there, too, bands whose dedication to collective improvisation is equaled only by their fans' Deadhead-level devotion. “For many people these days,” says Grateful Dead scholar John Dwork, “jam band concerts are . . . the equivalent of church, or at least that's what they go looking for. That's what we need in our lives—community, ecstatic dance, soulful singalongs, communion with something sacred or special, a heroic adventure, a place to hang our hearts.” I saw thirty Dead shows in three years for those exact reasons—the Dead were my heroes, standing resolutely against the tides of superficiality and materialism that threatened to sweep me off my feet. I wanted the myth of the sixties to be real—that idealism, that sense of a higher purpose. I wanted to believe in something, and I found it in the Dead. Fittingly, renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell found something there too. Despite his extreme distaste for popular culture (he only ever saw two movies, didn't read the newspaper, and hadn't attended a pop concert in decades), he went to see the Grateful Dead and felt “in immediate accord” with them. “I just didn't know anything like that existed,” he said—anything like “25,000 people tied at the heart” in a truly contemporary mythic ritual. It was, he felt, the “antidote for the atom bomb.”

What Campbell discovered was something Deadheads have always thrived on: an archetypal spirit of intimacy and ritual celebration, carried through music. In truth, music of all kinds has borne just such a spirit throughout human history. Much of indigenous and shamanic ceremony is based on this very capacity of sound and rhythm to transport individuals together into extraordinary states of consciousness. Classical Indian musicians consciously reach toward their audiences in improvised performance, stretching themselves to meet—and lift—the mind of the whole. Even the simplest song can gather people inexplicably to each other, as in December 1914, when German and Allied soldiers on the front lines in France put guns down and left their respective trenches to meet briefly as friends. These “Christmas truces,” as they came to be known, started in many cases with common carols sung, across the intervening distance, in the troops' different languages.

But it was the sixties, and rock and roll, that elevated this age-old phenomenon to a new scale of popular intensity. At Watkins Glen, New York, in 1973, the Grateful Dead played to some 600,000 people, a crowd that stretched over two miles from the stage. It was an occasion that still stands as the largest rock concert in history. (Woodstock, by comparison, hit roughly 400,000.) “We have four or five times as many people here as we have at our [auto] races,” said the county sheriff, “and we are getting less than half the trouble. These kids are great.” I can scarcely imagine that many people in one place, much less that many people in one place with their minds trained on a single object. If you want to try, consider that the average sports arena holds only 50-60,000—and multiply by ten.

Who knows what unseen influence such gargantuan incidents might have had on the culture at large? Is consciousness a cumulative thing? One person meditating alone can have a tangible effect in a room. Even the Trips Festival of early '66, the largest-ever Acid Test, involved only 3-5,000 people. Up until that point, Phil recalled, “nobody could have guessed that you could give thousands of people acid in one room and not have it blow up from the psychic energy . . . the cords of our equipment were literally jumping out of the wall sockets.” So, 600,000 at Watkins Glen? What unknown miracles of consciousness might have broken forth then, subterranean, invisible?

Of course, the Grateful Dead weren't the only sixties band to work miracles. How about the Beatles, whose fans, admits Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally, “made the enthusiasm of Deadheads look quite demure”? If the Dead can be measured on the Richter scale of their psychic influence on large numbers of people, then surely, so can the Beatles. And by this standard, are the boys from San Francisco even in the same league as the lads from Liverpool? As far out as the Dead were, they never broke free of a relatively marginal counterculture. The Beatles, on the other hand—everybody loves the Beatles. “There was an alchemy in the way they came together that made two plus two equal not four but forty,” journalist Mark Hertsgaard writes. They gave the words “come together” a whole new meaning.

In the summer of 1965, when the Grateful Dead (then known as the Warlocks) were still earning their first stripes in the bars and clubs of the San Francisco peninsula, the Beatles played not the largest, but the first-ever concert held in a sports arena in the U.S., at Shea Stadium in Flushing, New York. This was ten years before I was born (yep, I had to watch it on DVD). But in spite of all the decades in between, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Here were four kids barely into their twenties, caught in the midst of a passion that had everything—and perhaps very little—to do with them. They were at the eye of a cultural hurricane; how could four people alone cause such lunacy? To see otherwise decorous young women unleashed as hysterical, sexual beings—en masse—would have frightened me if it hadn't so furiously held my attention. The marvelous thing was, none of it seemed to be going to the Beatles' heads, though it did go to John's elbows, with which he played a madcap keyboard solo. “We like lunatics, it's healthy,” he quipped. Beatlemania got so big, so fast—bigger than they could handle, really. But for some mysterious reason, they didn't have to handle it, that pressure high enough to launch Paul's Hofner bass to the moon. They just climbed aboard and rode it straight to the center of the unexplainable. At Shea Stadium, I could see the boundaries between them broken and obliterated; and them, sweating, reeling, singing, helplessly amazed. It set the crowd on fire with a kind of innocence I'd never seen at a Dead show, another kind of wonder.

There were 55,000 people there, screaming so loud the Beatles could barely hear themselves playing. At least Deadheads listened to the music; Beatles fans couldn't even get to the first note without succumbing to something like a virus that made them yell till they were hoarse, some sort of “emotional epidemic.” It was as if they were ripping holes clean through the walls between them: Who knows the depth of impact this had? How about when the Beatles first performed on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964, a year and a half earlier? Seventy-three million people were watching. That's forty percent of the U.S. population, roughly equal to the total number of televisions in the country that year. During that hour, precincts across the nation reported the lowest crime rate in half a century—even thieves, thugs, and malcontents took a timeout for the Beatles. Billy Joel thought, “This can be done. I can do that.” He was fifteen. Billy Graham, forty-five, even broke the Sabbath to watch.

Who knows how they did it. “Probably not since Shakespeare has so much intellect been invested in explaining something so simple,” Robert Burt writes in The Beatles: The Fabulous Story of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. “The Beatles were four guys in a pop group who made happy music and gave everyone a good time for a few years.” A few years? The Beatles were still topping the charts at the turn of the millennium with “1,” their album of singles. It had to be more than that. How did they manage to be so fully with each other, in such a way that everyone felt it? Not like the Dead were, not as shamans or warlocks, but as ordinary young men? Simultaneously down-to-earth and larger than life, the Beatles swiftly took on the power of a tidal wave in mass consciousness. “They are very like children in many ways,” producer George Martin said. “They love anything magical.” And the magic of being together, with unusual joy and uncommon trust, fed their music with irrepressible enthusiasm and unceasing originality. As they evolved and matured, a whole generation grew up with them. In the process, they helped chart a course through the changing tides of a turbulent era. From Motown to R&B, straight-ahead rock and pop to wide-ranging psychedelia, the Beatles spanned what seems like eons in a few short years, tugging an emerging youth culture right behind. That speed of change was almost too much to take, but take it young people did—and so did many of their parents. “It was up to you—which is to say, all of us—to make changes, and you could do it,” Hertsgaard writes. “That message resonated deeply and powerfully in the mass psyche, for it put people in closer touch with their higher selves and made them feel part of a larger project of human renewal. The Beatles, in short, brought out the best in people.”

Whatever their secret was, Paul McCartney still has it in spades. “I don't feel like finishing or stopping,” he said recently, after his 2002 “Back in the U.S.” tour, his first in the United States in nearly ten years. And this time, I had the rare fortune to see him in person. Just into his sixties, his talent, sparkle, and poise all seemed only to have grown, captivating whole new generations of fans with the same enchantment that made the Beatles what they were. It seemed impossible; I still can't quite get my mind around it. Even Jerry Garcia, gallant ship's captain, broke slowly under the pressure of a lifetime as a mythic hero, losing the fight after nearly twenty years of heroin addiction. Paul, by contrast, was more in command than ever, playing and singing like a man half his age. Out in front of a band that was tearing and jumping fresh all over his Beatles and Wings songs, he boosted everything he touched into a sort of intimate glory, whether or not you even knew the tunes. Little Gen-Y kids were bursting like popcorn; college students, parents, and grandparents were crying, gasping, dancing, and basking in the sheer generosity of it all. One fan held up a sign, “NYC 1965 Shea Stadium,” and somehow I, as a twenty-eight-year-old, knew why—I felt the same, at the hands of Midas, exhilarated for the first time all over again.

“Listening to his music,” Gen-X actor John Cusack remarks on Back in the U.S., a DVD chronicling this same tour, “is part of the whole fabric of becoming conscious.” The most surprising thing of all is that McCartney is no mere footnote to history, his music no romantic allusion to the timeless relevance of sixties sensibility. Rather, his influence is still active today, still pointing forward in the year 2004. Just last year, for example, he took the residents of Copenhagen somewhere they'd never been before. A Danish friend who lives in sterbro district, near the Idrtsparken where Paul's concert took place, told me the story: “After the show was over, the city was saturated with affection,” he said. “The whole place was humming. We've never had that kind of experience in Denmark, at all.” Crowds that spanned the generations filled the streets, he described. Retailers and merchants across Copenhagen, like the bicycle shop on his corner, opened their doors and put out tables, serving beer and refreshments. Most of the city, it seemed, was out until four in the morning, singing Beatles songs, laughing. “People were just drawn to each other. They gathered in groups. The whole town was one big meeting place.” Though the boomers among them felt a swell of nostalgia for the good old days, it was not accompanied by the usual sense that life was better then than it was now. There were no lamentations for a past lost to the cruelty of time, no sad ruminations on a fall from grace. Instead, he concluded, “It was completely fresh. There was no wrong in this, everything was right. Life is good and love is sweet.” It was as if Paul made everyone young again—not in imagination but in fact, transformed inside their own bodies.

When I was eighteen and a bit younger myself, I went to sing in Russia on a sort of musical peace mission with my United Methodist choir. By then, I was already into the Dead; I remember playing “Uncle John's Band” in Red Square on a five-dollar Russian guitar. Ten years later, in May 2003, Sir Paul put on his first-ever show in Russia, also in Red Square. Meeting with the ex-Beatle before the concert, Russian President and ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin “confessed that in Soviet times the Beatles were considered 'propaganda of an alien ideology,'” CBS reported. When asked if he'd listened to the Beatles anyway, Putin replied, “Yes, of course—it was wildly popular. . . . It was a taste of freedom; a window on the world.” Beatles music, it appears, was strong enough to puncture even the Iron Curtain. And for a hundred thousand Russians—some of whom fit into the storied quadrangle in front of the Kremlin, the rest of whom gathered behind police barricades to listen—this was the chance of a lifetime, the chance to see a hero who, for decades, was only accessible by bad radio or bootleg. “Next stop the moon,” said Paul. And who would stand in his way?

“I like the fame because of what you can do for charity,” Paul comments during Back in the U.S. “And I think if your heart's in the right place, you can do a lot of great stuff.” Yes, indeed, and he has. As for Jerry, whose creative incandescence will undoubtedly stand the test of time . . . to be honest, I'm ashamed of him. “Fame is an illusion,” he complained in one of the last interviews he ever gave, before a junkie's isolation became a dead man's coffin. “It's very hard to take the fame seriously, and I don't think anybody wants me to. What's it good for?” I guess we'll never know. But what are the moral implications of being a hero? If the power of consciousness itself can elevate whole groups of people so dramatically, who's to say it can't push them down with equal weight? “The Dead do something no other musicians of their stature or influence can,” observed the Village Voice in 1987. “They suggest the possibility of utopia in everyday life . . . indirectly nurture humanity, goodness, joy, truth, and solidarity among their devoted audience. . . . [They] do no less through their music than espouse the quaint notion that art can save your life.” Isn't it ironic, then, that Jerry couldn't save his own from whatever demons beset him?

Jerry's bandmate Phil once said, “we were on the tip of the arrow of human consciousness flying through time.” Perhaps the Grateful Dead, or at least their ambivalent leader, fell off that arrow years ago, while Paul fashioned his into a jet, somehow managing to keep the wind in his hair. But what if that arrow itself—the arrow they both pulled and fired—yet flies, gathering speed, about to break the sound barrier? Back at the Trips Festival in '66, back in '67 when the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's, a mass revolution in consciousness seemed just around the corner. Might it still be there waiting, working even? I don't know. Maybe none of us do, yet. Nevertheless, merely the potential these bands suggested—the potential makings of a more lasting, collective entry into higher states of holistic awareness—is enough to make us think twice about who we are and what is possible. Think, and wonder, as we walk out the amphitheater gates after the last notes of the encore, wrapped in a blanket or two, looking at the sky, asking questions the Dead and the Beatles made so compelling.

By Ross Robertson, see bio

EnlightenNext magazine, Issue 25, May–July 2004
© 2004 EnlightenNext, Inc. All rights reserved. www.enlightennext.org

Discuss this article

Even under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which songs of all primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness. In the German Middle Ages, too, singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, whirled themselves from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse. [...] There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from "folk-diseases," with contempt of pity born of consciousness of their own "healthy-mindedness." But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called "healthy-mindedness" looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them. " -Friedrich Nietzsche

The fusion of spirituality and ego-less music isn't a new concept to man, nor has the bulk of society ever really grasped the inner essence of its axiom. Society as a whole operates under a spiritual cloak, in which true spirituality is hidden from man, thus man is ignorant to the functionality of metaphysical reality. The question arises, why do subsets of society discover this hidden gift, while the masses remain numbed by corrupted religious organizations? The answer is complex, but it can be found if one digs through the narcotic rubble of impurity, while the surface corruption does offer an uncanny level of superficial serenity. The inner truth of the soul doesn't even compare in terms of physical, psychological, and spiritual balance; However, this inner truth is hidden because it doesn't coincide with the controlled normality of organized religion. Real spirituality is organic and evolves through ones' life, and it allows the growth of one's mind, body, and soul. Ego-less music is one of the few gateways into this reality, a reality in which man is free to discover his own existentialism.

In modern times, mutually exclusive artists have created music that allows the listener to visit one's soul. The development of progressive rock and improv-based rock both have philosophical commonalities that tend to provide spring boards for metaphysical exploration. Musically, these artists have little in common, but the hybrid of music and lyrics aim for the same concept. A perfect example would be the mutually exclusive development of Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead. The philosophies of each band encourage inner exploration through music, so that the individual may reach a higher level of enlightenment. Like Nietzsche, both bands understood that music can transcend the listener and remove the ego, and the removal of the ego allows the listener to view their reality without bias. Bias is created from the ego, as the human psyche is far too sensitive to comprehend the natural evils of its every day actions. So the ego-less journey allows the individual to understand why ego laden morality does necessitate tolerable immorality. Thus the ego simplifies the complexities of our reality in order to justify our own survival before that of our fellow humans. The ego-less journeyman realizes that all existence is equal, just as the music of ego-less bands doesn't showcase one performer over another.

Thus we need to understand the importance of existence in order to properly gage the role of religion in society. Music provides the perfect micro-model for society. People from all backgrounds gather to reach enlightenment, but remain respectful of each other. No one belief is set above the other, unlike the organized institutions that promote ego based superiority of their own entity. These superior based institutions provide the bulk of problems because of the ego. The institutions fight for their survival without regard to other organizations. Thus, they limit the level of self exploration because self expansion is more important than actual growth of the spirit. These institutions become marketing centers that lose track of the true theme that is unseen by the masses: spirituality can't be defined to a single definition. The face of spirituality is multifaceted and can't be confined to one text either, it is organic like music itself.

I wanted to address what Nietzsche discusses in the Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche draws upon the concept of spirituality and music, and I was wondering if people agreed or disagreed with his point. If I remember correctly, Socrates brought up a similar point too (I can't remember which text).

RESPOND: I was curious to hear opinions on my theory and receive some help in reforming it. Said theory being that music without an ego present is one of the pure forms of spirituality present in our reality.

[By Ramsay Florence of Atlanta, GA]