Mickey Hart Talks Dead & Company And Distaste For ‘Long Strange Trip’ Documentary

Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart is currently out on the road with Dead & Company. The band he founded with John Mayer, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Jeff Chimenti and Oteil Burbridge begins a run in Texas tonight as they approach the finish line of their second tour of 2017. Hart talked about Dead & Company as well as the recently released Grateful Dead documentary Long Strange Trip with Steven Hyden of Uproxx.

Mickey’s conversation came in promotion of his new studio album, RAMU. One of the first questions asked was about how long it takes Dead & Company to gel. “For it to really be greased, it takes about a week and a half. Because there are a lot of working parts, especially in a band that improvises. There needs to be a certain kind of magic. There’s a conversation with me and Bill, and me and the rest of the band. and then John and Bob. There’s all these separate conversations that are going and then eventually we’re all able to speak as one voice. That takes time. It’s always been that way,” Hart revealed.

The drummer knows when “it’s working”:

There’s a certain kind of weightlessness that you feel. Everything that you do works, and everybody’s smiling and jumping up and down. There’s magic, and you know when magic happens because then you move through the world in a trance. Once you acquire trance, you’re there. And we’re a trance band. That’s our specialty. We don’t do things right. I wouldn’t say we’re a proper band by any stretch of the imagination. There’s a lot of chaos — a lot of mistakes or whatever you call it, a lot of chance, failure everywhere. But then you set the table and it happens. If you crystallize everything and say this is the way it is, this is what I’m going at, you don’t really leave that much room for magic and that’s the name of our game. It’s not like going up there and playing the tunes.

While Mickey would be surprised if Dead & Company were to ever enter the studio, he does feel they have magical moments on stage. “We’ll have a minute or two or three or five of something really special and then it will leave. Then it’ll come back again later. It comes and it goes. Some nights, you can feel it through the whole evening, but it’s something that’s not easy to find so when you find it, we just try to hold on to it as long as possible,” Hart said. “That’s the art of the trance, it doesn’t happen every night. That’s what brings them back. It certainly not because we do good endings or beginnings of songs. It mostly happens in between the beginning and the ending.”

Hart wasn’t a big fan of Amir Bar-Lev’s Long Strange Trip and even left in the middle of the premiere. “That was a very sad movie. It was mostly a Jerry movie. It was mostly a farewell to Jerry movie, it wasn’t really about the Grateful Dead, the whole Grateful Dead. It didn’t really speak to that. The Grateful Dead isn’t sad, mostly we’re a bunch of bloody yucks and we’re funny. We have great fun. That movie wasn’t fun. It’s not a date movie. That’s the only thing I can say about it. And it’s also one person’s idea of what the Grateful Dead might be. They have no idea. I have a pretty good idea of what the Grateful Dead is. But it’s part of the story.” Mickey added, “See, the thing is, Jerry was dying in front of me all those years, I don’t want to go to a movie to watch it again. It’s not pretty for me. Matter of fact I didn’t even see it at the premiere, at Sundance. I was there, but I left and had dinner and then came back at the end.”

Mickey also shared a fascinating response about the period when he left the lineup in the early ’70s:

You know, once you’re a part of the Grateful Dead, you’re never out of it. You may not be playing with the band for a few years, but I never signed up and I never signed out. It was my elective to leave the band for a while for personal reasons. [Hart left the band in 1971 after his father, who briefly managed the Dead, embezzled money from the group. He returned in 1974.] And then when I decided I wanted to be a part of it, I got my drums and I played and I was a physical part of it again. That’s the way it works. I left because of personal reasons, which had nothing to do with the band really. It wasn’t a very pleasant time for me, it wasn’t a happy time. So I had to work out my situation myself and then one day I decided it was time to become part of the Grateful Dead again. That was it. Just that simple. No big cathartic thing, it was just you don’t sign up, you don’t sign out. There’s no contracts. We just played together. Then of course it became business. But at first it was nothing like that.

Head here for much more from Mickey Hart.