On tour, Mickey Hart spreads the word on the benefits of rhythm
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By L. KENT WOLGAMOTT / GZO
Mickey Hart will turn 65 in September, but retirement is the furthest thing from the mind of the former Grateful Dead drummer.
Instead, he’s out on the road with a new version of the Mickey Hart Band that is working with a set of new songs written by Dead lyricist Robert Hunter.
When he’s not performing, recording or just tapping out rhythms for fun, Hart is working to preserve the world’s oldest recordings and spreading the word about the health benefits of rhythm.
What: The Mickey Hart Band
Where: Slowdown, 725 N. 14th St., Omaha
When: 9 p.m. Wednesday
Tickets: $35 at onepercentproductions.com or at the door
Hart, who will be at Omaha’s Slowdown on Wednesday, keeps himself in good shape so he can play the two-hour-plus shows that feature long, improvisation-rooted songs that catch a groove and flow on the interaction between the players.
“I stretch a lot,” Hart said. “I keep moving. I’m active. I work out every day and I warm up — that’s a big key. When I was 11 or 12 years old, the best instruction I ever got was to warm up. I warm up for three or four hours before I hit the stage. The key for me is preparing for the concussion, for constantly being vibrated. You have to warm all your muscles up to do that. I’ve never had any lasting pain. If you’re my age and you’re going to play drums, you’ve got to have a system.”
The new Mickey Hart Band is becoming a tightly fused unit, a process that Hart clearly enjoys.
“It’s all a work in progress,” he said in a telephone interview. “That’s the way I see it all. I formed the Rhythm Devils because Hunter agreed to write a slew of new songs. That’s the original concept. … We know more songs, more Hunter/Hart songs. But it’s based on the new canon. I think it’s some of the best work he’s done in years.”
The Hunter songs were initially used in 1996 when Hart put together the Rhythm Devils, which included Hart’s Grateful Dead drumming partner Bill Kruetzmann, former Phish bassist Mike Gordon, the Other Ones guitarist Steve Kimock, Nigerian talking drum master Sikiru Adepoju and vocalist Jen Durkin.
That’s the group that’s featured on “Rhythm Devils Concert Experience,” a new DVD that captures a 2006 Chicago concert that incorporates some animation along with more standard performance footage.
In the new version of the band, Kruetzmann and Gordon are replaced by The Meters’ bassist George Porter Jr., keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth of the String Cheese Incident and Latin drummer Walfredo Reyes Jr.
“The (new) band is starting to have its own life,” Hart said. “That’s very interesting. I know that. That’s why I change things up. The major part of it is if there is a group mind. It really happens at the beginning, when you’re learning the songs and each other. In the beginning, it’s the most fun.”
Like all the groups with which he has been involved, The Mickey Hart Band goes from structured song to improvisation and back. The improvisation, Hart said, is as natural for musicians as eating.
“You don’t want to eat the same meal every night,” he said. “You have to change it up. You have to play through all the things you know very well to find some space. It’s a challenge every day.”
The only way the improvisation really works is when a band shares a common vision, Hart said.
“It’s a certain kind of dream,” he said. “It’s a dream that’s shared and intelligible. What you’re doing is building up trust. You have to have a strong belief that you’re OK. When people develop that trust, which is part of group mind, then they develop their flight of fantasy. They start going where we call ‘out.’”
The Mickey Hart Band also incorporates his philosophy of bringing together people around the world through rhythm.
That effort was most widely recognized in 1991, when Hart won the first Grammy for Best World Music Album for “Planet Drum,” which brought him together with drummers such as Nigeria’s Babatunde Olatunji and India’s Zakir Hussain.
World music was new to the music business 17 years ago. But it was old hat for Hart, who discovered rhythms from around the globe when he started listening to pygmy music off the Folkway recordings when he was still in elementary school. Then the Latin music of the ’50s worked its way into Hart’s musical diet.
“The short of it is that since I was a little kid I was listening to the most powerful trance music on the planet without knowing it,” Hart said.
He brought that trance music sensibility to the Grateful Dead, which he joined in 1967. In the next three decades he and Kruetzmann became known for their polyrhythmic drumming, influencing generations of jam band musicians.
“You are what you eat, you know,” Hart said. “All of a sudden all that is exploded when you meet a bunch of crazy guys who want to take a trip someplace way out there. All your precepts are shattered. But you still have your skill. The skill was part of it, but it became a spirit music.”
Hart left the Dead in 1971, recorded the album “Rolling Thunder” the next year, then returned in 1974. He was with the Grateful Dead until the band dissolved in 1995 following the death of guitarist Jerry Garcia. He continues to play with the other surviving members of the group in The Dead, most recently doing a concert for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
When he’s not making music, Hart is a proponent of rhythm as a source of healing, serving on boards and even testifying on it before the U.S. Senate.
Since 1999, he’s been a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. He heads the sub-committee on the digitization and preservation of the center’s vast collection of old, rare recordings done on media, such as glass, wire and wax.
Many of those recordings are deteriorating so badly the sounds will be lost if they are not transferred to a digital medium very soon.
“It’s taken thousands of years for that music to come to us,” he said. “That’s my mission — finding that music and preserving it and giving access to it to everybody.”
Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.
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