An Interview with Mickey Hart
By Toni A. Brown

Following their most recent East Coast tour, Relix had the opportunity to meet with Mickey Hart, Grateful Dead percussionist extraordinaire.  Over a late breakfast and the rattle of dishes, we set into conversation.  We discussed his life and love of percussion.  We discussed his life and love of percussion, and his two newly released solo albums, Dafos and Yamantaka.

RELIX:  There are many people out there who put on your solo albums and don’t get what they expect of them.  How do you feel about those people?

HART:  I don’t think of those people.  I don’t know what they expect.  I try to sound like what I feel.  This is what I do, I play music and I would hope that someone would like it.  If they don’t, that would be their misfortune and mine, but I couldn’t play to their tastes—whatever they may be.

RELIX:  Did your Egypt experiences help you transcend the traditional percussive boundaries?

HART:  It started before Egypt.  When I went there, I had learned the instruments of Egypt so I wouldn’t be a gringo—a stranger in a strange land.  I learned their language, their customs, and their instruments.  They knew I took the time to share their culture.  I’ve been into other percussion in other worlds for years.  I knew that the world of percussion didn’t end with a bass and snare drum… I was always attracted to it because I like the sounds.

RELIX:  On Rolling Thunder, your first solo effort, you used a variety of unusual sounds—rain, marimbas, a water pump…

HART:  That’s what “The Greatest Story” started with, my water pump.  I live in an old place, and the pump brought the water out of the well.    Those were early experiments, because everything was sound.  In my life, the early Grateful Dead life, let’s say, everyone was taking acid and smoking pot and doing all kinds of weird and crazy things.  Everything started having their own individual meanings.  It was time to think about things to hear things other than the normal waking everyday sounds.  I’d say we were more aware of our surroundings in the music.

RELIX:  What were your earliest influences, and what drew you to expand beyond tradition and consider yourself a percussionist, as opposed to being a drummer?

HART:  I don’t think I tried to become a percussionist.  It just happened.  I never realized the difference.

RELIX:  But you don’t stay within any confines, as most drummers do.

HART:  Oh no!  There are no rules for me.  The only rules are what I want to sound like and the inspiration I have to go to an instrument.  When an instrument comes into my path, I have to find out if I can feel for it.  I usually pick it up and it will mean something to me.  And if I have a feeling for it, then I’ll sit down with it.

RELIX:  Do you find it easy to pick up a new instrument?

HART:  Sometimes.  If it’s an instrument I should be playing.  For some reason, you’re better suited to certain percussion instruments.  I’m talking about devoting time to an instrument.  I’m not talking about picking it up and playing it for an hour.  I’m talking about bringing it into your home, like a child or a friend.  My home is filled with these instruments, and one by one, I pick them up and I go around playing them.  Some of them wind up way in the back of the barn.  Some wind up right in my bedroom, hanging from the walls.  Those are the instruments that are dear to me.

RELIX:  Do you use the same timing and rhythms with the Grateful Dead as you do with solo efforts?

HART:  It’s really all the same thing.  But I do use different instruments.

RELIX:  What is the strangest instrument you’ve ever played?

HART:  The human skull.  Living human.  His name is Steve Parrish.  I played him in L.A. when we were making Terrapin Station.  I got him into the studio, put a couple of mikes on his skull, and used a giant beater, put it through some processing, and played a human skull!

RELIX: Are you constantly making additions to the Beast?

HART:  All the time!  I added a new one this last time around.  It’s called the Ballaphone from Kenya.  It’s a marimba.  All the bars have been tapped electronically.  So, now it’s an electric ballaphone.  It’s the first of its kind.  A new breed is born.

RELIX: On the Apocalypse Now Sessions, were you given a set of circumstances to work within, or were you given artistic freedom?

HART:  Artistic freedom, I’d call it.  Frances (Coppola) wanted a performance of Apocalypse and I assembled the instruments and myself, Airto, Billy (Kreutzmann), and we played the movie.  He just said, “make it happen,” and we did.

RELIX:  Is there still a Diga Rhythm Band?

HART:  Oh no.  Diga was just a whole group of people.  But that was then.  We couldn’t keep that band together.  I think there were 15 of us.  That lasted for just a little while.  That was a band, a percussion orchestra.

RELIX:  Let’s talk about your newest release, Dafos.  I sense some jazz overtones.  Were the songs pre-arranged and rehearsed, or somewhat improvised?

HART:  Somewhat improvised.  We assembled certain instruments to play, and described it beforehand and talked about it, then played it.  It isn’t overly composed music.  Yes, it has a jazzy flavor because it just turned out that light.  Instead of the Marshall drums, this is a more musical drum.  This is more tune percussion.  It’s really clean.  Then there are Airto, Flora Purim, and Bobby Vega, the bass player.  These people are really accomplished musicians, they really play.  So, it’s percussion, but it’s also got what people call music because it’s got melody in it.  It’s easily digested.

RELIX:  Whose idea was it to bring this particular group of musicians together?

HART:  My idea.  But the idea isn’t as important as the result.  I’ve had a lot of ideas that were good, but this sounds good.  This situation just turned out to be ideal.  The production was done really well.  The people at Reference Recordings are real good people.  The production was flawless.  We had an easy time with a lot of people.  Bill Graham let us use the Bauki Theater in San Francisco.  We moved in there.  There was a real large stage, so we were able to set up the Beast and all the instruments of Batucaje, the Brazilian Players and Keith Johnson, a recordist.  He built his own 3 track machine—2 channel stereo, then he has a bass track in the middle.  He’s a great remote recordist.  He was able to capture and phase correctly the ambiance of the Kabuki Theatre without sacrificing any of the transient responses.  It is quite accurate.  And he has an 8 track mike remote unit.  It’s analog, but it’s so clean, almost digitally clean.  So the percussion was able to live in this environment and sound good in it.  This record travels at 45 RPM.  That’s to enhance the groove depth, or the fidelity.  You remember the 45’s and how they sounded so robust coming off the machine.  That was because of the depth of the groove.  This record shares that.  It’s an LP, but it revolves at 45 because of the extreme highs and lows put on this record.  This record was made as an audiophile record, that means that it was pressed on virgin vinyl using extremely high tech techniques.  A lot of care was taken for quality.  It’s an expensive record.  Each stage of this record was cared after.  It wasn’t something you throw down to the mastering lab and it’s over.  So what you’ll hear is the imagery.  It’s just beautiful.  You can really see the whole band there.

RELIX:  It’s a very exciting record, some very up moments.

HART:  It has moments of up, down and sideways.  I wanted it to be both soft and hard at the same time, quiet and loud.  Sort of a Zen record.  I won’t do another record like it for a while.  The package is also beautiful.  The photo on the cover is by John Werner.  He developed a special process.  Multi-track photography.  He never advances the film and keeps shooting the same frame.  It took him three days to do it.

RELIX:  Is there a special audience you’d like to reach with this album that you haven’t necessarily reached before?

HART:  The audiophile people.  The people have really fine equipment and appreciate frequency response, sonic quality.  Some Deadheads, I imagine, are audiophiles, or will become audiophiles.

            This record was made by listening to the playbacks on really fine equipment so you could hear the extreme lows, the extreme highs.  There’s nothing like a percussion album to let you know what your system really sounds like.  But it’s not a bunch of drummers making sound effects.

RELIX:  When you being to put an album together, are you concerned with commercial success?

HART:  I’m concerned to the point that I’d like the record to make enough money to pay for itself.  The record company should be able to make their money, at least.  This is the record business.  Me, it’s another record.  I’m in the Grateful Dead and I play live music.  That’s how we make a living.  We don’t make our livings selling records.  It’s part of it, thought not a major part.  But if a record could make enough money to enable us to make another record, then that would be commercially successful.  But we’ll go on anyway because we have to make our music.  Some records are just more successful than others.  Now, Dafos is getting incredible reviews and I didn’t expect people to like it as much as they do.  It’s my music, and it’s a very personal thing with me.  But there’s some easiness about listening to this album.

RELIX:  You have another release entitled Yamantaka.  I haven’t heard much about it.

HART:  Yes, that’s another audiophile record.  It just happens that Dafos and Yamantaka were released at the same time.  I didn’t do them at the same time.  Sometimes, it takes a long time to get a record right.  This one was done on Teldec vinyl and they were having trouble with the process, so it took a long time to come out.  This is a record with no membranes.  There are no drums used.  Henry Wolf and myself, he’s the Tibetan bell player, we struck things, metal things, and we rubbed things.  We did so many different things, but we didn’t hit any membranes.  So, this is more of a music record.  Twenty-first century kind of music.  You won’t hear anything you’d recognize on this record.  It’s lighter percussion.  You can meditate to this album.  It’s really out there.

RELIX:  You’re stepping out of boundaries again.

HART:  This is just another part of me, another dream.  This is what the dream sounded like.  This wasn’t made for great commercial acceptance.  I don’t know what people think this one yet.  It was released by Celestial Harmonies.

RELIX:  What does Dafos mean?

HART:  Dafos is a place—Airto and I are into collective consciousness—this is a fantasyland where this record lives.  We painted a picture of a place where things happen, like the “Dry Sands of the Desert,” “The Gates of Dafos.”  Those are physical representations of this land our imagination takes us to.  We sit around and talk about other places, other worlds, other levels of consciousness, and how they would act, how their music would be.  It’s just our imagination running away with us—us having a good time with our imagination.  That’s what Dafos is.  It’s not like anything else, it doesn’t sound like anything.  It’s just a place.

RELIX: A form of concentration…

HART:  Sure.  And sometimes I have to do some superhuman thing, like climb over a building.  I use it if I’m tired, if I have to be sharper, or if I have to remember something.  I use hypnosis in that way in my music.

RELIX:  Where do you see yourself going in terms of future solo projects, film sound tracks…

HART:  I do have a lot of things coming up, but it’s really hard to talk about them because they’re all in the works.  Some will happen and some won’t.  I’ve worked on a film, “The Whales Weep Not,” shot off the coast of Sri Lanka.  It’s a whole family of sperm whales playing under the water.  We’ll be working on another one by the same people.  I’m doing some of the microphoning of the whales.  I’m going to mount some contact mikes in their mouths to analyze their sounds and put them through the computer and see what their frequency response is.  I’m doing underwater recording, digital remote recording.  I’m going out on the weekends and recording everything in sight.  I stay active in the recording world all the time just by recording things.

            I’ve also written a play with Barry Melton about humans and insects.  I’d like to see it brought to the stage.

RELIX:  Where do you see yourself going with regard to the Grateful Dead?

HART:  Upward and onward.  We’re just coming into our own.  Really feeling good.  It takes a long time to really play good music.  I’m enjoying it.

RELIX:  You played St. Stephen on your last tour.  That was a thrill!

HART:  Yes.  It really was.  It’s a good song.  What great words.  Robert Hunter is always with me with those words.  “Writing ‘what for?’ across the morning sky…”