by Christine Natanael
LINKS:
He is a man known to many predominately as one half of the rhythm section for The Grateful Dead, but this by itself is a description that does him a great disservice, for he is also a recordist, an archivist, an author, and humanitarian. Before his recent performance at NYC’s Fillmore at Irving Plaza with The Mickey Hart Band where he would be performing to promote the new DVD titled Rhythm Devils, we got a chance to fill in the long gap since our last conversation. The man has taken up amazingly in-depth projects, continues to contribute more to the legacy of the musical lexicon than just your average “drummer”, and in more ways than you can imagine. So, no Deadhead stoner references, please…
CHRISTINE NATANAEL: Hi, Mickey. How are you?
MH: I’m fine. How are you today?
CN: I’m good. My neighbors have cranked up the living room disco next door. So, I’m gonna have to speak a little loud.
MH: That’s fine for me.
CN: It’s fun living in Spanish Harlem. What can I tell you?
MH: [laughs]
CN: So, it’s been twenty years since our last discussion.
MH: Only twenty years?
CN: Only twenty years. I think I’ve been a little remiss, but only twenty.
MH: Time flies.
CN: It does. It seems like just yesterday that I was sitting speaking with you about The World for Reflex Magazine. [The World is Mickey's record label.]
MH: What was I doing twenty years ago?
CN: I remember going to the NY Open Center and going to the Cathedral [of St. John the Divine] for the Monks… [I’m speaking of the The Gyuto Monks Tibetan Tantric Choir.]
MH: Yes! Oh, actually, we’re putting out a new Monks CD right now. I’m working on the cover.
CN: Are you?
MH: You should mention the Monks. I just worked out the new cover.
CN: Oh really?
MH: Oh, it’s a beauty. It’s a hundred voices. It’s the grandest recording I’ve ever made and it’s coming out next month.
CN: Next month? Oh, that will be wonderful.
MH: Yeah, it will be.
CN: I always loved listening to them chant. It’s so great. I haven’t seen them in a while, actually.
MH: Yeah, they’re coming back. They’re coming back.
CN: So you’ve been doing a lot of stuff since the last time I talked to you.
MH: That’s correct. I try to do a lot of stuff.
CN: You are a busy man. But, I like the things that you have done. Let’s see, where can I start? The American Folk Life Center…
MH: Right. That’s where we are in, I guess, a battle, a race that we can never win against the deterioration of all these amazing recordings from around the world.
CN: Yeah. The Library of Congress has quite a few.
MH: The idea is to get to these recordings before they decompose. You know, for each medium on which sound has been imprinted, there are reasons for it to become dust sooner or later. So I’ve got to find the rarest and the most endangered of the collection, is what we do there. And also at the Smithsonian and archives around the world, but my main focus is the American Folk Life Center and the Folkways Collections at the Smithsonian.
CN: Right. So, how did you become involved with those? How did it all happen for you?
MH: Well, I’m a remote recordist, myself, and when the Smithsonian, excuse me, when the Folkways catalog was given to the Smithsonian, they called on me to supervise in the digitization process—how to transfer, at high quality, you know, all these different LPs and wax cylinders, etc., into digital domain and make CDs out of them. So that was my original contact with Washington, and since then I’ve became a Trustee of the Library of Congress for two terms now. So, it kind of snowballed from the, um, Smithsonian thing.
CN: Wow. So, how many hours do you spend doing that? I mean, when you’re not touring?
MH: I don’t know, but it’s been years. [laughs] I haven’t counted the hours, but you know, it’s never-ending. As much time as you want to put in on it, you can. It entails listening to large collections. You know, I might sit down with a collection of a hundred hours from Indonesia, and if you’re editing that down into one hour, you have to listen to a hundred hours and then you just bring that down to fifty hours, and twenty, and ten, five, and then one. And so, that takes months, just to make one CD sometimes and put it all together. It maybe takes six months of work.
CN: Sure. And there’s so much of it.
MH: These are thousands of years of civilizations of history in these songs. And so, it’s not like losing a song, You’re losing the whole history of a culture. That’s the really interesting thing in Washington, D.C., but what’s really happening now is the science of music and rhythm. That—it has nothing to do with the art—now the neurology of music, music as medicine…
CN: Yeah, because you’re doing the Institute for Music and Neurological Foundation? I’m very interested in that, because I work with Musicians on Call, which is somewhat similar, but you work with Oliver Sacks, correct?
MH: One of the most exciting frontiers of music is now this of “music as medicine”. Music and the Brain, which is located at Beth Abraham in the Bronx, is a forerunner in mapping the brain and what it does when it’s exposed to an auditory driving experience like music. And we find that it is helpful Alzheimer’s and Dementia and motor impairment, especially.
CN: Now, I read somewhere that you became interested in this because of the personal experience with your grandmother. Is that correct?
MH: That is absolutely correct. That is actually how it started personalizing it for me because, I mean, I saw large crowds moving in and out of altered states, you know, but on a one-on-one basis with my grandmother who had advanced Alzheimer’s, I played the drum for her and she spoke my name. And she hadn’t spoken in about a year.
CN: Wow!
MH: So, that was an amazing, amazing revelation. Then when I stopped drumming, she couldn’t speak anymore, and she went back into that zone. And that was what really, really sealed the deal.
CN: Yeah, I can imagine. I know my grandmother had advanced Alzheimer’s as well, and she had regressed to the point where she only spoke in German, I think.
MH: Yeah, yeah. If you really want to read a good book, read a book called Musicophilia. It’s a book by Oliver Sacks, the neurologist. You know, The Awakenings neurologist.
CN: I’m very familiar with him.
MH: Yeah, so Oliver did a beautiful book called Musicophilia. It was on the best-seller list, actually, on the New York Times Best-Seller List about two months ago. Pick it up because it talks all about what we’re talking about—about the rhythm of things, and why drums and drumming are an important part of that cycle of connecting with your musical roots.
CN: So you’re on the Board of Directors there at the Institute of Music and Neurological Function, then?
MH: Right.
CN: And do you actually go in there and involve with the patients?
MH: Oh, I do! I do! We have just major drum sessions with the chairs, you know, the patients there—just fantastic! We drum with them, we give them drums and rattles, and attach some very simple noise-makers to their chairs sometimes and have these sessions. They do these on a weekly basis, but I drop in from time to time. They’re on a serious mission there.
MH: You should! Now, that’s a story, boy. That’s a story. That’s the frontier. Call up the director of it and tell her we had this conversation, and you’ll get your mind blown.
CN: I bet! I will have to do that. I currently donate all the CDs after I review them for my magazine to the Musicians On Call program, which has a similar thing where musicians go and play for the patients who can’t leave their rooms.
MH: Well, soon a doctor will be able to prescribe a
musical prescription that will—once the code has been broken, once
we find out exactly how to repeat this on a daily basis as medicine, then
this whole thing changes. Then you’ll see music as entertainment,
music as medicine, and it’ll become part of a lifestyle as well.
CN: I firmly believe that it does help for Epilepsy, very much so, because I do have Epilepsy and I find that it does help. And I have photosensitive Epilepsy, so sometimes it’s difficult for me to photograph rock shows with the strobes, but I make it through. I make it through, if I just kind of focus on the drumming
MH: Yeah, yeah. Well, have you seen this movie, The Visitor?
CN: No, I haven’t seen that one.
MH: It’s in theatres now, and it’s about someone with a motor problem, but it’s an elderly person. The drums enter his life and the rhythm starts taking him over. He’s attracted to the rhythm and he doesn’t know why. I’m finding that a lot now with elderly people, that they really want to start tapping on a drum and making a sound and a rhythm of their own. And they are totally self-motivated. I have a friend who is 92, and you know, he has nothing to do with modern music, but his living room is filled with drums now and anybody who walks through the door must play with him. It’s really interesting. This person is a very well-known person, a very famous person, and he has nothing to do with modern music. But he has an amaaaaaazing attraction to the rhythm of things and he’s starting to play on drums. All day. In and out. You know, he eats, wants to go out, then goes to a drum. Fascinating!
CN: It’s a different form of communication. I mean, we all vibrate at certain levels and we’re attracted to people who vibrate at similar levels, so I guess that’s a way of getting your vibration in sync with someone else as soon as they walk in the room.
MH: If you’re alive, you’re vibrating. We got into the vibrating. Where were we? We were talking about Irving Plaza…
CN: Yeah, everything goes in circles. We’ll get back to Irving Plaza. You did the Global Drum Project again last year.
MH: Yes, that was great. That, we had a great time with Zakir [Hussain], and Sikiru Adepoju, our talking drummer, is with us in this band, so…
CN: Well, yeah. But he was from Baba’s band [meaning Babatunde Olatunje], originally, for a while. I think I remember him from that.
MH: Yeah, man! Wow. You really know this stuff…
CN: Yeah, I went to see Baba.
MH: Well, Sikiru’s here, and he’s doing great.
CN: I thought that it was very interesting that you did the technological manipulation with it, taking it other places. People do it, you know, the industrial music does it with guitars and things like that, but not many people have done it with world music, so I kind of thought it was more, about time…
MH: Mmm-hmmm.
CN: …that somebody did, and of course, what better person to do it than you.
MH: Yeah, it was a neat job.
CN: I enjoyed that a lot. So, now you’ve got the DVD out for Rhythm Devils.
MH: Well that was real interesting and I take no credit for that. I take the music, but Jeff Glixman, who has StarCity in Pennsylvania, in Bethlehem, he did—he was the vision behind all this. He put it together, and when I saw it, I couldn’t believe it. [laughs]
CN: So he’s the madman with the cartoons, huh?
MH: That was really funny. I mean, he put it together in a beautiful way. The guy’s deep. I love his work. So, yes, it’s really exciting. It’s not—I mean, it’s really difficult for me to watch concert footage. I mean, how many angles can you see the drums, and the pick, and the grimacing face, or whatever? But these cartoons take it into a whole other entertainment world, and it excites the visual component and it connects with the music, you know? Everything that he has on there has certain kinds of limitless connections. But he’s great. Jeff Glixman.
CN: I liked it a lot because it broke it up for me. I mean, being someone who does this all day, I enjoyed it for that reason.
MH: Yeah, I saw it once and liked it.
CN: It’s kind of like that same reason that you put on music and watch cartoons. It kind of felt like I was doing that, and I enjoyed it very much. Yet, I could still go back and see the concert at the same time without having to flip channels, and that was great. Now the way you put the band together was a pre-Jammys thing, so I hear?
MH: Yeah. It actually came together with me and Billy Kreutzmann and Steve Kimock and Mike Gordon. And we just jammed and I asked [Robert] Hunter to write a bunch of songs, and so we put the Rhythm Devils around, we wrapped the Rhythm Devils around the songs, the canon of new material that Hunter had just wrote. Basically, in a way, we formed the band just to play these songs, among other things, but that was a really great reason.
MH: Yeah, “7 Seconds” is a great song. It’s terrific.
CN: Those two really jump out at me a lot.
MH: I think it’s some of Hunter’s best work in a long time. And, he pulled away for two or three weeks and just focused on these songs, so it was a very powerful experience.
CN: How long did it take you guys to rehearse it before you decided to put it on the road?
MH: Well, once we got the songs, then it was just a matter of rehearsing them for a short tour. And so, a lot of these songs really weren’t completely born, I mean, these were works in progress. But Glixman wanted to shoot the tour, and it turned out that we played well enough that it turns out to be, you know, an interesting project. That band has morphed into this band, The Mickey Hart Band, without Bill, of course, and without Mike Gordon. Mike Gordon has been replaced by George Porter, The Meters bass player, and Billy has been replaced by Wilfredo Reyes, Jr. But, it’s the same body of work. And everything else in the band is the same, BUT we added [Kyle] Hollingworth from [The] String Cheese [Incident]. He’s playing keys, so it’s a really powerful band. And of course the songs have matured, we’ve got rehearsal time, and now it’s been on the road, so it’s got—it’s starting to have “band head”. It’s started to get good “find”. It’s growing. They can leave the song and explore great musical spaces and then come back. And so it’s starting to get a certain kind of freedom.
CN: How did you guys come upon Jen [Durkin] as a vocalist?
MH: Jen popped out of nowhere. I saw a YouTube kind of a thing, and she had the pipes, alright. And she had the right material. I said, “You know, she would really sound great on these songs.” And she does.
CN: Yeah, because she’s from out here, so I was wondering how you guys came across each other. Then again, in this day and age of digital everything, it’s not like it used to be where you’d have to travel to find someone. I mean, you can just go online and everybody’s right in your living room.
MH: Oh, yeah.
CN: So, your books…are you going to do any more books, Mickey? I liked your Songcatchers book.
MH: A book is a serious thing, you know?
CN: That’s why I haven’t done one yet. Are you kidding me?
MH: When I do books, that’s usually a few years of my life, you know? It’s almost like writing a Ph.D., so…yeah, there will probably be another book. Yes, but I’m concentrating on performing now and staying active. You know, when you write a book you stand still a lot. You think. You write. So… You know, I’ve written four books. Each one of them, they were like a campaign. You know, to write a good book, and to write a history book, and the books I write are history books, you have to be good at history. And the subject I write about is pan-human. You know, it’s everywhere. It’s in every culture. And then I took—on the Songcatchers, which was a wonderful project, which I enjoyed so much, but you know… Again, you’re having to tell the narrative from 1877 to the present day. You know what I mean? That’s a lot of history, with men and women travelling all over the world, seeking out and capturing the world’s sounds and bringing it back and putting them in archives. I mean, it’s a great story, but it takes a lot of reading to make sure that your history is accurate history. Because, I assure you, there is a lot of bad history out there. My books are good history. I write good books. Historically correct, anyway.
CN: A lot of fact-checking has to go on, that’s for sure.
MH: Absolutely. Because, I mean, I knew a lot about the subject to begin with, but that’s not exactly my field. I mean, I had to corroborate and check out a lot of history to make sure that what I knew what the absolute best. Then you had to write the story. It’s very interesting, writing books, very interesting. But probably I have one more left in me, at least.
CN: So you’re doing a new Monks record, any more records after that?
MH: Oh, there’s always more records.
CN: Do tell. Do tell.
MH: There’s always more recordings. I love to record. And it’s a great way of passing on any kind of legacy and information and feeling, so it’s a great medium for me. I love to do live. And there are other things I’m doing around the world that will be known soon.
CN: Oh, yeah?
MH: A secret project.
CN: Any intriguing travels?
MH: Intriguing travels? Well, I’m looking forward to going to Dubai. But I’m just focusing on doing Mickey Hart Band right now and what I’m doing right here. And that’s really the way to do it. You can’t think too much in the future. But I have a great staff and they keep me on track and keep me focused on what my mission is. So, that’s also an important part of being able to live at this speed is having good personal management—time management. I’ve found that’s really the only way to kind of do all this—books, tours, this and that.
CN: That and staying healthy. I hear you have a little health regimen that you do. Jen was saying on the DVD that you made them do calisthenics, or something? So, what’s your health regimen these days, Mickey?
MH: Oh, my health regimen. Oh, God. Well, I stretch every day, seven days a week. I spend about 45 minutes in some kind of stretching. Then I usually go and get some aerobics, run a little bit, and do calisthenics, you know, crunches, all that kind of stuff. Then, I play during the day, so I stay active like that because drums are very aerobic. So that keeps you young. I have no aches and pains and I can still do what I love to do, so I’ve very lucky that it’s really smooth.
CN: I think also, because not only are you physically active, but you are mentally active.
MH: Yeah, I like to think so. I read…
CN: No, you not only read books, but you write them as well.
MH: Well, when you write the kind of books that I do, you do a lot of reading—hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books. Maybe a thousand books…so when working on a book, I tend not to read. If you have to cover a huge amount of territory, it’s not unusual for me to walk out of the library with 80 books, 60-80 books.
CN: Wow.
MH: Yeah. You just sit them there in that room—and you don’t read them all cover-to-cover. There are certain chapters in books. So, that’s the sort of stuff that I like to do, but it takes an enormous amount of time. And you know, my eyes are not getting any better, so, you know what I mean.
CN: This is true. Tell me about The Endangered Music Fund.
MH: The Endangered Music Project lives at the Library of Congress. I started it for a number of reasons. First, the music, itself, was endangered. Just like endangered rainforests, this was endangered music, where cultures were being wiped out, and with those cultures was the music. And also, the second meaning, was that the medium that these music were recorded were endangered by decomposing and turning to dust. So, we located the rarest and most endangered of those recordings at first at the Library of Congress and curated it. I think the first one was Music For The Gods from Indonesia, pre-WWII. Uh, interesting story: The music really had not been played since the war, it was just wiped out, and all the people who played it pretty much were wiped out. So, we curated it, and it became the first in the series and it was given back by America and the Library of Congress to Indonesia—to Bali, the musicians in Bali—and it was like musical repatriation. The monies that were made selling that CD went back to the music schools in Bali. So, it was a perfect handshake. And that’s what Endangered Music Project is about. We have six releases since then.
CN: That’s wonderful. It’s actually the perfect thing to do, because, who are we to keep the royalties from that?
MH: I think so! We’ve tried to find creative ways to get the money back into the communities because a lot of the musicians were nomads or not known or long gone and you can’t find their relatives. So we really wanted to have to do this. We put lightbulbs back in museum in Alexandria in Egypt from music in Egypt, and it’s just a wonderful project. But giving the music back to them is really a big thing. I mean, I went over there myself, and they didn’t know who I was until they found out from the authority that it was me. It was a wonderful feeling to be part of that.
CN: I could imagine.
MH: You know what? I’ve got to run. I’ve got soundcheck happening. But thank you very much for the really great questions. Good questions. Good answers.
CN: Thank you.