Grateful Dead Drummer Trips Through Wall Sound

By Ron Baylor

Of the Emerald

"My music gets me higher than any kind of drug you take," says Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead.

He doesn't like the label of "psychedelic," often applied to groups like the Dead, "since it implies that they are drug oriented."

Hart is the protégé of Allarakka, the drummer for sitarist, Ravi Shankar. He says, "we are the Grateful Dead and we play the Grateful Dead. Our music is our music."

The drummer says the San Francisco group has created a phenomena they call the "wall of sound." With this effect they attempt to fill every inch of space in the hall with sound. "We work within the wall. We can work with fantastic volumes, but we can also bring it down, lately, and still keep the wall."

Hart comments that it is not necessarily the volume, but the fact that they must be together, which creates the "wall." He points out that this is along the idea of Indian music. "We are playing only using their (the Indian) example, the way they form their rhythm structure, which no other band is doing." Hart emphasizes that the Dead are not trying to play Indian music, as other bands have done, but their own music using the Indian concept of rhythm.

They use the "tahai," an Indian rhythmical expression, to signal while they are playing. Hart analogizes the "tahai" to the capitalization of the opening word in a sentence. "When we hear this we know where it ends and we're coming to something new."

The Dead, says Hart, have "bowls of fixed composition" that serve as points of departure from which they improvise.

There are two drummers in the group and often one will "split" off in one direction with half of the band while the other half, with the other drummer, goes into a separate theme. From these separate improvisations, the two halves will meet again in another "bowl." Here they solidify themselves and then "take off" again.

Hart claims that the Indian "rhythmic structure is thousands of years ahead of ours." He says that after first hearing Indian music he told himself that he would learn to play Indian music or he was not going to play the drums again. He realized, "I don't know a thing... and I've been playing for 15 years."

Hart says, after talking to "the finest jazz drummers of our day," that "they feel like they are playing on the kindergarten level compared to Indian drummers." He says Allarakka "will play ... things the most advanced jazz drummers ... cannot even attempt."