Dead Drummer Celebrates Life—The Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart brings Bembe Orisha to York

Dead Drummer Celebrates Life—
The Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart brings Bembe Orisha to York

by Benjy Eisen

For almost 30 years, Mickey Hart played drums for the Grateful Dead. He, along with drummer Bill Kreutzmann, created an unusual rhythm section for the famously unusual band, and the two became known for their duo-drum excursions in the Grateful Dead’s live show. While the setlist changed nightly, the one constant was the “drums->space” jams in the second set. Following the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995, the Grateful Dead broke-up. Despite losing his friend and their band, Mickey Hart continued his fascination with non-traditional rock rhythms using sounds, beats, and percussive instruments from around the globe in various projects, albums, and tours. He’s also well known as an ethnomusicologist, and he does important work with both the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress on their Save Our Sounds project. He’s a board member of the National Digital Registry, created by Congress to identify endangered recordings. His latest band, Bembe Orisha is a world-beat musical celebration of the Caribbean Orisha myths. Featuring an eight-piece multi-national ensemble and an Afro-Cuban emphasis, Bembe Orisha will make a tour stop at the Strand Capital in York on November 15.

MODE Weekly: After the Grateful Dead broke-up, what was your game plan?
Mickey Hart: Music. Same as it is now. Same as it was before. It never changed. I got more intent on the music because the Grateful Dead was over, so I was making Mystery Box at the time and I just went into the studio, and locked myself in and grieved with the music. Music mediated that time in my life, as it does always. Music is a marvelous energy, and it can take care of you in times of sorrow and also when you’re up. Up or down music doesn’t shy from its duty.

MODE: Does everybody have rhythm?
Hart: Of course. If you don’t have rhythm, you’re dead. Rhythm is life. It’s the basis of all your life. I mean, your heart is pumping, your lungs are pumping, and you’re blinking, you’re moving, you’re talking — that’s all rhythm. That’s coordinated rhythmic movement. Does everybody have rhythm? Yes. Can everybody play a complex rhythm on a drum? No. But you asked me if everybody has rhythm? Yes.

MODE: I heard that when people ask you what business you’re in, you say “transportation.”
Hart: Well, that’s sort of a cute answer to a difficult question, but it’s true. The transformative power of music has always been the bottom line for me. It’s always been the base of operations. If you don’t transform consciousness, then you’re just beating stuff up, you’re not really involved in what I would call music. Anybody who knows about or thought about it for a minute would come to the same conclusion. You know, even going down the street listening to the radio, you drift; you go into a sort of puppy trance, and you miss an exit or something, or you space out. That’s it. There you are — that’s transportation.

MODE: On your website, in response to September 11, you wrote: “Music can be an antidote to hatred.” How so?
Hart: You can’t hate anybody you play music with. I’ve never found it possible. And music uplifts the spirit. So if you look at it in those terms, music is an antidote. I mean, I never really heard of any music that after you listen to it, you go out and kill.

MODE: You don’t think that’s almost true for some of today’s more aggressive music?
Hart: No. I think that it does uplift the spirit. It might uplift it to the wrong place. It does certainly heighten your awareness. What you’re doing is raising power, personal power, and group power. How you use that power, that’s your choice. It’s what you feed. There are both sides in your head and in your heart. There’s the evil and there’s the good. It’s the side that you decide to feed that grows. If you feed the hatred, it will grow. If you feed the opposite of it, that will grow. Music has the ability to heighten awareness – hopefully for the good.

MODE: Did your interest in non-western rhythms form while you were still in the Dead?
Hart: Oh no, no, no. It happened way before Grateful Dead. That’s what I brought to the Grateful Dead. It happened when I was like four or five years old. My mom inherited a collection of Count Basie and Ellington records, 78’s, and, in the midst of it all were the old Folkways records. I immediately went to those 78’s and listened to rainforest music. Pygmy music was my favorite. I thought everybody in the world listened to it. So I was listening to Indonesian music, Pygmy music, Caribbean music, Latin music, music from the world’s supply of music as opposed to the western music. But that’s how we got the western music. I was sort of listening to the roots of the roots. Deeper than the blues. What the blues was formed from. We got all of our music from Africa. So I was listening to music from the other continents. It somehow riveted my imagination when I was a baby, and that’s what I brought to the Grateful Dead.

MODE: What’s Bembe Orisha? The name, translated, means something like, “Party for the Spirits?”
Hart: It’s like a party for the spirits of the environment, in western terms. It’s a West Africa term and it came to the United States, it came to the Caribbean, and it was Catholicized. They call it the “orishas” in Western Africa; here they call it the “saints.” It’s the same spirits only with Catholic names. It celebrates the world around you, the environment, and the elements of it.