EXCLUSIVE CONCERT REVIEW:
Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart Ponders Disco At the Fillmore
Monday, October 18, 2010

Joel Selvin

Mickey Hart, who likes to check out concerts like field trips, investigated the show by disco remix specialist Paul Oakenfold on Thursday at the Fillmore Auditorium, site of many youthful frolics for Hart and his band of merry men, the Grateful Dead.

Hart is not just another drummer from some famous ‘60s rock band. He has done more than anyone to expose in America drummers from other cultures – India, Brazil, Egypt, Africa, Japan. He wrote – or supervised teams of writers and researchers who produced – three well-regarded books about the history of percussion. He was instrumental in bringing the Gyoto Monks to this country and has made records with the Kaluli rainforest people from New Guinea. He is a member of the board of directors of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. He has recently been working with astrophysicists gathering and using radio waves from outer space. He is a musical omnivore with a restless, insistent appetite.

"This is largely neurological," he said halfway through Oakenfold's first, uh, piece. The British deejay, a major name in his field, was playing a special, high-priced concert at the small hall and drew somewhere around half a house. Surrounded by banks of flashing lights, bass booming through the house sound system, drum machine pounding inelegantly, Oakenfold mixed layers of redundant keyboard figures into the simple, formulaic dance music.

"It exists mostly in the vibratory realm," said Hart. "It has very little musicological content. Someday people will attend events that are purely in the vibratory realm. I know you don't believe me, but we will. We're not there yet though."

"He's pulsing just like the infinite universe," he explained later. "Music is a miniature of the vibratory universe we are a part of and where we came from. That is where this music is going. Expand and contract, pulse and spin."

Oakenfold switches between tracks smoothly. His throbbing wall of sound never pauses to take a breath. He just keeps the beats coming, the lights flashing and the volume turned up. "I don't think we're hearing the best of this kind of music," he said. "Certainly there's better things you could do with it than this. He's … what's the word? … barbaric. It's too monolithic."

Even with this mechanized, programmed clatter pumping through the hall, Hart can't attend shows at the Fillmore without a moment of nostalgic recollection. He remembered proprietor Bill Graham throwing him and Jerry Garcia out as they walked up the staircase because they weren't playing that night and he wasn't letting them in for free.

Hart paused at the youthful photo of the band beside the staircase, taken before he joined, and did a mock genuflect in front of the huge photo of Garcia flanked by panels of roses. "On the Jerry bobblehead," Hart said, "he's lost about 150 pounds. Bobbleheads are all skinny. When you die, you lose about 150 pounds. It'll happen to you, too."

Oakenfold's splashy, high-tech stage production inevitably brought to mind the haphazard, primitive light shows of the hippie days. "The strobes," said Hart, brightening at the thought. "We used to look over in the corners and see people fucking, having sex under the strobes. That's was pretty great – people making love to Bill's vibration."

He yelled at the music from his box seat. "I love this," he screamed, hands cupped around his mouth. "Oh, Paul – that bass drum is killing me." After forty minutes, he abruptly stood up and left. I followed immediately. It had been like watching a DVD where the commentary track was better than the movie.