2000 MICKEY HART interview by David Gans and Gary Lambert April 25, 1996 (excerpts) from Grateful Dead Hour #400 Mickey Hart: Hunter really delivered on this big-time. This is like a treasure trove of Bob Hunter. David Gans: A lot of food for thought in that stuff -- MH: It really is. DG: -- as I was listening to it. Um, but -- MH: When the girls realized that they weren't just doing "ooh wah diddy wop," and they realized what they were singing, everything really changed. I mean, they realized that they might be even doing something important. I mean, they didn't realize that -- they didn't know anything about the Grateful Dead. They knew, they had *heard* of the Grateful Dead, but they had never heard or knew of the Grateful Dead. So just to watch their expressions as the lyrics started -- they started reading 'em, a little bit, and I could see them off in the corner really reading 'em and then looking off into the -- you know, and saying, "whoa." "This is not like a Marvin Gaye song." No, not quite. Whenever he gives me the words, I always sit back and I just, I let 'em roll over me, many times, you know, before I even start to do any -- I just sit with 'em, like overnight. You know, I mean, there's just *so* many ways you can look at these things, and the thing about Hunter's words, they always mean something for you when you really need 'em, to mean something. DG: Oh yes. MH: When you're in trying times, in trouble, or you're having good times, or whatever, good times, bad times -- these words come and hit you, and there's no better way of describing certain situations than some of Hunter's words, you know. I mean, you could just lift 'em totally out of context and use 'em for anything you want. As well as enjoy them in the song form. Hunter is -- I don't know where he gets this stuff from, you know, I mean it's real genius stuff, you know, it really borders on that. I've known Hunter for a long time, you know, and he's, um -- and I've seen him do it, many times, you know, rise to that level. He's done it this time. Gary Lambert: Yeah, and he speaks of -- how renewing and refreshing it is to write for *your* sensibility. Obviously, primarily his partner was Jerry for 30 years -- MH: Yeah. GL: -- but that writing primarily to these rhythms made him think about the words in a different way. And also writing for the voices of the Mint Juleps -- DG: But it's very much Hunter, boy. GL: Yes. MH: Very Hunter. DG: You know who you're hearing. MH: Oh, it is Hunter. But he also went for the edit this time. You know, everybody needs an editor. But in the old days, Hunter really wasn't good at the editing process, you know. I mean, usually what he wrote was in stone. But this time he allowed for the juxtaposition of verses, changing, throwing out this, bringing in new stuff. We worked, you know, faxed back and forth. We were constantly honing this thing, and making it into clean, lean fighting machine kind of words. A lot of words went by the wayside, a lot were added. In the old days, Bob was touchy about that kind of stuff, and now, you know, we forged a really good relationship. I mean, we worked on -- we did "Fire on the Mountain" together, "Playing in the Band," you know, "Greatest Story," all that stuff. I mean, we've written before, but this has been the most en- joyable writing experience that I've ever had with him. GL: The way he's punctuating the rhythm with words -- it seems to make him use this kind of economy of language. You know, he makes the statements real deep, because they're Hunter, but on the surface, they work with the lyric. MH: But they also feel light, and they're fun, too. You know, they're not just "deep" Hunter, but they're rhythmic Hunter, you know, and they're -- he thought about this stuff, and he let it come out. And the drums just sucked it out of him. I mean, he went to the mountain. The drums took him there. And my only message was to him -- I would just say to him, "let the drums take you there." They will take you there. DG: Did he write to completed tracks, or mostly completed tracks? You had the rhythm tracks all done and laid out, and -- MH: Yeah, all the tracks -- well, not *completed* -- DG: Right. MH: -- no, they were in their formative stages. I didn't have the solos on. There was a lot missing. He wrote to the basic rhythm. He got the basic feel -- I didn't wanna give him a whole bunch of changes, I didn't wanna confuse him with all that stuff, because I didn't know where I was gonna put a bridge, or the verses. It was like going into some uncharted -- you know, it was like uncharted waters, and you didn't want to give him too much stuff to confuse him or to put him on a trip. I just wanted him to get the essence of it and just spill his guts out, you know. Just let it go hang all out, you know, what does this mean to you, what does it say to you, don't get fancy, we don't need to get fancy now, we'll get fancy later, if we wanna dance, you know. We'll dance fancy later. We have to before we release this thing, you just can't keep it on one chord all -- but I mostly gave it to him like that, you know, stretched out, just one chord. And then Vinnie, and Dave Jenkins, came in and fleshed out a lot of the tonalities, a lot of the changes. Not a *lot* of them, but they're real important. They just happen in the right place, and -- I didn't want it to have a whole bunch of verses and choruses and bridges, and do the same old song form. That wasn't really what I had in mind for this. But I did want to make it into a form that people would recog- nize, you know, and be able to dance to and have a good time to, and that the lyrics would fit, too. That was really important, you know, what kind of set- ting do you make, do you prepare for these lyrics. Because Hunter gives it to you raw. Then you've got to make it -- take it to the next step. And you have to translate it into, you know, six parts, five parts, four parts, three parts, whatever. And then you gotta add the solos and you gotta do all the kind of stuff in developing, you know, more sophisticated music. DG: I'm guessing this was a novel, liberating thing for him, too, to be work- ing for an entirely new sonic palette. MH: Of course. I mean, this was freedom to him. This was wide-open spaces, this was new territory, you know, a new horizon was right there in front of us. All we had to do was go out and get it. So Hunter was hungry, you know, because we hadn't been writing very much at the end in the Grateful Dead. The writing was just sort of dripping out, you know, drop by drop. Jerry and Bob weren't seeing much of each other, you know, Jerry wasn't seeing much of anybody, actually, at the end. So, uh, it was problematic for him, because here was a prolific artist, and his partner, you know, he didn't wanna dance, like he used to. Mickey Hart: We have Zakir, okay. He's the Mozart of his instrument. I mean, there is nobody on the planet that's like *Zakir.* He rules, as far as hand drumming, and his tradition from India. And then on stage left is his coun- terpart, Giovanni Hidalgo. Giovanni is the reigning prince of Latin percus- sion. There is nobody on the planet who does what he does. I mean, he's ab- solutely -- he's like, many notches above some of the finest of the players. He's like a prodigy. And over to *his* left is Sikiru. David Gans: Talking drum. MH: Sikiru plays, he's, uh -- there is no better talking drummer on the planet than Sikiru. And, God, I mean, when you have -- and then Airto, he's not too shabby. DG: Is he gonna be on the tour? MH: No, he's not. He's got his Fourth World thing he's doing in Europe. But, um -- DG: Who'd you get to play bass? MH: Habib Faye is on the record. DG: Right. MH: And this fellow Baghiti Khumalo -- Gary Lambert: Oh, he's amazing. 1781 MH: He played with Paul Simon on "Graceland." DG: Yesss. MH: He's that bass player. GL: He's astonishing. MH: You must have heard -- yeah, his bass is the one on "Graceland. And he plays with other people, you know. I think he plays with Estefan, you know, Gloria Estefan, and all these -- he works around, but he is like the god- father of this kind of groove. He knows all the juju, all the highlife, and all the African stuff, and that's what I really wanted. I didn't want a funk kind of bass player, or this kind of bass, I wanted a World bass player, a player that could play the World styles. And my favorite music, of course, mostly is North African. African pop music is sort of the kind of music that I like to listen to. But B.K. does it all. He's as funky as it gets. And Garibaldi will be playing drums, Dave Garibaldi, you know, the old Tower of Power drummer, the guy who started Tower of Power. As funky as it gets. David Gans: Now let's go back to the beginning. This record started, what, four years ago? Mickey Hart: That's what they tell me -- DG: MH: -- I'm really not keeping count. It might have started three or four years ago, you know, I was just starting to get the ideas, for the first year, little kernels, you know. You go out and you look for the "flash." I found the flashes about four years ago, yeah -- the first of them. DG: So what was your original operating principle in creating this record? MH: Percussion. I just took a bunch of drums, you know, different kinds of tuned percussion, and started seeing what felt good, you know, and feeling good, and I started working on 'em and just exploring, um -- it was like "sound safari," we call it, you know. Just go shopping, you know. And, um, I went on a shopping spree. And went out looking for sounds. And feelings. And grooves. And tried to find the strongest of the grooves, the strongest of the feelings that resonated, for me. And then I put 'em away and then went on tour again. See, I just sort of nipped at this, between Grateful Dead. I would be doing this, this would becoming out even if there was a Grateful Dead now anyway. This is sort of, you know, I've been doing this for three years, or four years, and this is sort of a normal progression. After Planet Drum, I really wanted to put voices to it. I wanted to take that brilliant percussion stuff, you know, wonderful tuned percussion, that gamelan kind of, American gamelan kind of a thing, or "world" gamelan, and add *chant.* But most of the time, chant is usually in other languages, 'cause we don't chant that much over here in the West, so -- that's where it first started out with, it started out with a tribal-space kind of a motif to it. And then, you know, Hunter, of course, Hunter came up with these ten gems, and I realized I *really* had to do this justice. I mean, these are some of his finest words. I realized that I was really gonna have to dig in, and reae lyrics just -- it seems like the next step. MH: Yeah, it is the next step. It's the natural progression, yeah. DG: And you have some of the same people from Planet Drum. You have Zakir on here, you have Giovanni Hidalgo, and Sikiru. MH: Mm-hm. Also, we have Habib Faye on this record. Habib is the bass player for Youssou N'Dour, the great, uh, you know, the great Afro-Pop, they call 'em, I guess, World Music player, from Dakar. And he's playing bass. And Jeff Sterling is on keyboards, and uh, synths, some of them, pads and so forth. So it sort of took off where Planet Drum left off, in a way, you know. We just added the girls, really. Airto is on here, he's shaking, and uh, yeah. It's sort of a -- when I played it for Hornsby, he said it sounded like Sade on steroids, with the girls. DG, GL: MH: So the next story about this is that I brought in Robin Millar. Robin Millar was Sade's producer. DG: Ahh. MH: You see, so I realized -- my specialty is not really six voices, you know, this is not really my specialty. But it *is* his, and I always loved those Sade records. Wherever I went, I used to listen -- you know, in elevators, in restaurants -- and you'd hear the relation between the drums and the bass and the voice, no matter what speaker you heard that Sade stuff on, it all sounded beautifully balanced, in tune, you know, and just *right.* So I was looking for someone who could understand drums and voice. And I looked him up and he fell in love with the songs, and he came over and we worked for like three months at the end here to do the final production work and the mix. So Robin Millar was a big part of this as well. He sort of came in the end, when my ears were starting to go south a little bit after three years of nippin' at it. I was getting a little bit removed from the -- you know, couldn't quite hear it, as I could have earlier. This project had to take that long, to get all these people on it, and to get it done so well. I mean, the voices are really in tune, you know, there's three-, four-, five-, six-part harmonies. And we stacked those voices deep and high, you know, it was not one of these backup singer kind of things. GL: It sounds like the timing is just right, like it's ripe, it's ready for pickin'. It doesn't feel like it was overworked -- MH: No -- GL: -- and it doesn't feel like it was rushed to completion. MH: -- we had a lot of spontaneity to it, and we laughed our way through it, we smiled our way through it, we had a great amount of joy making this record. I tell ya, if the Grateful Dead ever had this much fun making a record, they'd sell 80 million records -- DG: Wow. MH: -- we could have sold 80 million records. We never really had that great a time in the studio. It was never really a very happy time for us. . 0