Sunday Conversation: Mickey Hart On Dead & Company, Tito Puente And Why He’ll Never Retire

As part of the legendary Grateful Dead, drummer Mickey Hart has built his more than 50-year career on uplifting others through music. And now, at a time when there has never been a greater need for healing, Hart is as busy as ever, knowing his music is necessary.

Having just wrapped up a tour with Dead & Company, where he got to witness tens of thousands of fans joined together on a nightly basis, he has immediately turned his attention to rhythmic unity through a new Planet Drum album.

Into The Groove finds Hart uniting with Zakir Hussain, Giovanni Hidalgo and Sikiru Adepoju to showcase the power of the rhythm. The album leads off with the single “King Clave,” which Planet Drum shared in a special video with charity organization Playing For Change.

I spoke with Hart about how Tito Puente changed his life, the recent Dead & Company tour, the power of music and much more.

Steve Baltin: When you listen to “King Clave,” it’s one of those things where there is such a feeling of unity in it. And at this point in time when we are so screwed as a society did that make a record focused on unity more important?.

Micke Hart: Steve, we’re out of rhythm, we’ve lost the groove and that’s what this is all about. It’s an example of how you can come together in unity, different cultures, playing together. Because music and rhythm has its own language. It brings people together in the groove, in rhythm. And we live in a real big universe. So everything vibrates in some shape or form. And we’re just another multi-dimensional rhythm machine embedded in a universe of rhythm. So rhythm brings people together in life and that’s really what music’s primary focus is, bring people together in life. So, this was a 6,000-person Drum Circle that I directed little north of here, many years ago. It was a world record at the time. And so I use that as the basis because when I call it “King Clave,” the Clave is the key. Clave means key. In many music’s around the world, the clave is what we revolve around. It tells us where we are in the song, in the measures. And it’s a constant thing, normally. And we depend on it as sort of a guide and a signpost. So, having 6000 drummers play the clave, which many people call “Bo Diddley Beat” — Bo Diddley didn’t invent it, but he made it popular — is the spine of that particular song. There was somebody filming in an airplane overhead, and he said he could feel the sound waves rising and it moved his airplane, his wings, and so forth. And he was bobbing above the crowd as he went over and shot it. So it was an enormous sound wave. So, that became the basis of the “King Clave.” And that’s the story on the drum circle.

Baltin: When you get together with everybody and you do these drum circles, and then on the smaller level, when you play with your friends and when you’re doing Dead & Company on the road, does it personally give you hope?

Hart: Of course, the main purpose of the whole thing is to bring people together and raise consciousness. It’s about grouping, whether it be music, musicians grouping, or the fans grouping and interacting with the musicians. At night, when I play, I give it to them and then they give it back to me. Then I give it back to them. So there’s this dance all night with energy moving and rippling through the crowd, onto the stage and back to them. So yeah, it’s a gross rhythmic entertainment moment. And that makes you personally and group powerful. That’s where the power comes from. When you play in a groove and rhythm with someone else, it raises the stakes as far as the healing factor of it, the grouping factor of it, the raising of consciousness part of it, the dance, which goes with all the rhythms. Yeah, they all come into play and that’s what I do in life. I’m a musician, the main goal is consciousness raising. Like, sometimes people ask me “What’s your business?” I say transportation. And that’s how I look at it, because you transport people. Drumming and music is all about what we call auditory driving. You’re driving the neurons in your brain and your brain is the master clock. Everything that the brain says, you do. And music goes through the ears and through the pores, I might add, directly to the brain. Then the brain distributes it in different parts of your body, whether it be your legs, your back, consciousness in general. So I do that for a living, and I also do that as that’s what I do. I play every day, Saturdays and Sundays [laughter]. I never let it go. Sometimes longer than others, of course, but I’m always with the groove somehow, shape or form. So it’s very powerful and it’s an elixir, in a way, of life. The good life, good rhythm, good life. Bad rhythm, war, good rhythm, peace.

Baltin: How does this apply in your everyday life?

Hart: At home and with your family, it’s a rhythmic thing with your spouse, your partner, your kids. You have an argument, you say, “We’re not at rhythm here. Let’s get a grip of this, let’s reform and let’s get back in the groove. Let’s talk about this or let’s put our feelings back into a place that we could deal with them.” That means understanding what you’re talking about or what you’re feeling. There’s no culture without its own music. And there is no culture on the whole planet that doesn’t have a music, and most of it is rhythm driven. And it’s all part of this spectacular thing we call the universe, because the universe was born 13.8 billion years ago, with a big bang we call the singularity, and that has been rippling through time and space, and it’s affected us. We are made of the collisions and the supernovas and the inflation of the universe. That’s who we are. And that’s how I see the universe, in rhythmic terms. And making records, albums, is one thing, and performing is another thing. But they have a lot in common. Like you said, there’s weird s**t on the right, and there’s really weird s**t on the left. And people can come together in the center. And this is so bad for our country. And seeing all these cultures playing together, if it was me and I was looking up at the stage at us, I’d say, “Wow, there is Nigeria, there’s India, there’s Puerto Rico, there’s America,” there’s all these different cultures playing in rhythm and being able to share a common goal, to come together as one throbbing, pulsing, throbbing vehicle. So, that’s how I see it. That’s the short of the long of it.

Baltin: Are you feeling a response from people that they are taking the lesson of unity to heart? And also, with the drum circle, it goes back to such a primal thing where it allows people to feel a little more.

Hart: Correct, all the things you said were absolutely correct. It’s more about feeling than about critiquing of music. It’s how you feel. Music is music if the ear hears it and likes it. If it disturbs the ear, the ear calls it noise, and it brings it to another level. But it’s very individual, and this record was made to dance to. It wasn’t a bunch of virtuoso’s playing virtuoso music. It’s a rhythmic dance band. And that’s why this one was different than the other two Planet Drums. I wanted people to dance. I wanted to get young people into it. And that’s why immediately as soon as Playing For Change went up, there was 500,000 people taking a peak at it. The young people that dance and like to move and they love rhythm. This is all about rhythmic entertainment, playing together and forming something that’s in sync and very powerful. And it’s powerful spiritual material as well, I might add. That’s where you get that jolt, and that’s what keeps you going after a show. Dead & Company are playing three hours and 20, 30 minutes a night. And after I’m done lighting them up, they go home and they take that feeling with them and hopefully do some good with it. And it’s not so much what they do at the concert, it’s what they do after the concert that interests me. And taking that spiritual material and taking it to the next level. Go home, kiss your kids, do something happy because that’s how you felt at the concert. The music exalts consciousness when it’s right, and you come away with that shine, the smile, and you’re moving. And if you take it into your daily life, that is really the big payoff. Besides them showing up and enjoying the music themselves, it’s what they do with this spiritual uplifting feeling at the concert. I want to see what they do with it in the real world, in life. When they leave the concert, what do they leave with and what do they do with what they leave with? And that’s of primary interest to me.

Baltin: Do you remember the first show you saw that gave you that spiritual uplifting?

Hart: Yep. I definitely remember the first band I heard that gave me that lift off was Tito Puente. He was a great Latin percussionist. I worked at a country club when I was very young, high school, and he played upstairs in the dining room. And so at night when he started, I would go in the kitchen area and watch. I got a garbage can, went in the kitchen, and I made two holes in it so I could see and I enjoyed my music inside the can, but that was the first memorable moment. It was the Tito Puente orchestra and everybody was dancing, different cultures there, white cultures, all kinds of different cultures were dancing. So that was good. I was really young. I was like 14 or 13, also the first marching band I heard. I loved him. I finally got to play with him at the very end of his life. One of the last shows he ever played, and we played together on the steps of the Library of Congress, actually. And that was it for me. Meeting my hero, again, and playing with him was woo. And he was playing my song. That was it for me. Once I heard Tito that was it.

Baltin: As you look back and reminisce on these things, do you still feel that Tito Puente influence in you and especially in Planet Drum?

Hart: Yeah, of course. Why do you think I call him King Clave because I first heard the Clave and it embedded in me with Tito Puente? So you’re absolutely right. It’s followed me my whole life in one form or another. And that’s also what kind of made the world’s music interesting for me. And I studied it and recorded it all over the years and just loved it. And it led me from one culture to another culture, but honoring our own American rock and roll, which is in me as well. So I love both sides of the fence.

Baltin: What was the last thing you saw where you felt that same visceral response?

Hart: It was the last night of the tour of Dead & Company. When you see 45 to 50 thousands of people in the stadium moving as one, you know that you’ve created unity, you know you’ve created powerful rhythms that people are reacting to. So that changes people, changes me. So when I see a whole stadium moving up and down to my groove, I go, “You are here, mission accomplished.” Doesn’t matter how good I play or anything like that. It’s the feeling that I give the audience. I make mistakes all the time and I never dwell on them at all. I don’t dwell on if I want something to happen and I can’t execute it or I execute it not the way it should be. I move on immediately. It’s like speed reading, you gotta keep moving and not dwelling at all, not for a split second. And that’s the only way you can stay on trance. And that’s what I do. That’s everything, the trance. So yeah, that’s the goal of my life besides my kids and my wife and my own health, and it also makes me healthy. Remember, I’m 78 years old and I’m driving stadiums ’cause I don’t feel I’m straining, I’m in shape physically and mentally for it. But I don’t take it for granted because many people can’t play when they get to this age the hands hurt. Enough is enough and they quit. There’s no retirement for me, man. The “R” word is not even in the dictionary. So that’s how I feel about what I do. I’m very happy in who I am. I’m a happy person. I’m happy in my own skin and people I play with, as you know, are the best of the best. And that’s how I like it. So playing with these guys its exciting as could be. And it’s a challenge too.