INTERVIEW WITH THE GRATEFUL DEAD FROM TheCelebrityCafe.com ARCHIVES
DM) I think what struck me and initially prompted my desire to do this interview was the fact that you've lead two separate lives: one being an infamous member of the Grateful Dead, and the other being part of the whole "world music drumming scene."
MH) Two separate lives, huh? (Laughs)
DM) Okay, maybe not separate...
MH) I wouldn't say they're separate. They are very similar in some ways.
DM) Between the two musical career paths, which came first?
MH) I'd say world music came first. When I was a little guy, my mom had the Folkways catalog in the house when I was five, six, seven years old. Well, I was turning on to rain forest music and pygmies way before The Grateful Dead was even a twinkle in our eyes.
DM) You wrote, "Spirit into Sound The Magic of Music," coming out this month. To summarize, what is the book about?
MH) Well, it's about the mystery of music, and how different people are trying to explain the unexplainable. How we have been playing with and using this music throughout history--from Pythagoros to Plato to Carlos Santana, throughout the ages and cross culturally.
DM) In doing some research for this interview, I found some articles which were rather critical about your musical knowledge because you were also a member of The Grateful Dead.
MH) Critical? These people must not be educated in knowing who I am. How could they be critical? I've spent most my life studying about the music world. Their criticism has no effect on me one way the other.
DM) One of the quotes that struck me, and possibly shows that lack of knowledge you mentioned, says, "How could somebody from the Grateful Dead hippie '60s movement talk about music in an intellectual fashion?"
MH) I've studied the texts for many years. For over 20 years, I've read serious, scholarly works on the subject, so I've researched it quite well over the years. Yes, you could be skeptical unless you've done your own homework, which I have. Anyone who knows my work and anyone who knows what I've done can't be a critic because my work is well researched.
DM) So it sounds like any critics are more ignorant of what you've done in your life...
MH) Yes, it's possible they are ignorant. There are a lot of new critics, and other people out there are my friends. And I'm not really interested in criticism because it means nothing to me. And the thing is, I don't get that. My work has been so well accepted by the ethno-musicologists and the scholarly community that if I get any kind of flak from the lay people, which I never do, there's no consequence.
DM) A lot of the other articles also seem to focus more on "Grateful Dead, Grateful Dead" than on your work itself.
MH) Well, you see, you hit it on the head at the beginning. I have a dual role, a dual life. I have a scholarly pursuit. My books are used as textbooks in colleges and universities around the world. I'm not just in The Grateful Dead. I don't just play the drums. I have another world which allows me to go deeper into more archane subjects like music and trance, ritual and rapture. These are my enthusiasm; my passions are my studies.
DM) How much of the "studied" view of music did you bring into the Grateful Dead music?
MH) It helped it. With my studies, I tried to explain what I was doing in the Grateful Dead...what this ritual and rapture thing was all about. Because we weren't left with a lot of literature on the subject, I knew I was in deep water as it was with the Grateful Dead. We had sort of stumbled onto something. I couldn't really explain it because we weren't left with the code. The code was written by a white anthropologist at the turn of the century. So had to go back to all the scholarly work on the subject.
DM) You said, "the code?"
MH) The code, which is the books, the actual work. If you were a doctor, you'd have a code. You have your texts on how to become a doctor and on what it's all about.
In music, very little of that it was written in English. So had to go back and translate more archane texts. In French, in German, Hungarian... different cultures that wrote on the subject. I found experts in the fields, but let me do the work. That's how I research from a new at-the-end-of-planet drum. This is not seat-of-the-pants stuff. You can't really make that stuff up; it's not psycho-babble--it's stuff based on research, in fact. It's based on serious work that had come before.
So once I've found it and devoured it, I was able to reinterpret it in my own way. I put my slant on it basically. Coming from a ritual percussion viewpoint of it, the people thought of me as just being the Grateful Dead. Perhaps we have some criticism, but if they that followed the route I've traveled, it would be quite difficult because I took the time, 25 years, on this. And that was working with scholars as I was doing this. Fred Lieberman, my co-contributor and partner-in-crime, is one of the leading music anthropologists in the world, and he let me do the text. And if we couldn't find it, we went and found the sources that would lead us to the grail.
DM) To learn more about...
MH interrupts, saying each word slowly, and with emphasis:
Music, trance, and healing. That's really the thing I've always been interested, and that's the thing the Grateful Dead did. That's what we call, "the grail."
DM) You talk about the music and the healing...
MH) Well, we know the auditory driving force is the physiology of rhythm. We know that when the body is driven with an audio signal of vibration, and it reacts in a certain way. How exactly it reacts, science does not know yet, but it's beginning to.
We know all cultures use music and rhythm in healing ceremonies, ritual, rapture, and to contact the deities, the sacred deities... So this is what my search will eventually wind up in--a scientific study of brain wave.
DM) I've read a lot of studies how music has the ability to heal people physiologically. How true is that?
MH) Very true. We know it works. All cultures have records of it, but there is no hard science quite yet. Like the Mozart effect.
DM) I've heard about the Mozart effect, which basically said listening to Mozart will help you study better..
MH) Well, it was debunked and was poorly studied. It was not well documented. There were a lot of holes in it.
DM) So the theory is not true anymore?
MH) That study's not true. It's partially true, but not completely true. It was sort of slanted, and a lot of things in that study show it was poorly conducted. A lot of it was hyped. The big part of it is that science is really trying to look at this. That's the good part of it. It was poor science, but yet again it was science that did it.
Now with MRIs and brain wave machines, we are able to look of rhythmic stimuli because there's movement. And when there's movement, machines freak out. They can really read the stuff, and machines are being developed that can read brain waves, yet still taking into account the physical movement it takes to drive the auditory system.
So that's really big key in all of this: the legitimate use of rhythm. Redundancy is the basis of trance. Rhythm is the best way to lay down the groove. A groove seems to be what's at the bottom of the art of healing and therapeutic uses.
DM) So you're saying, "the more rhythmic the music, the better healing properties it has?"
MH) That's what it seems to be. It seems to be more rhythmic music than trance. The trance is more driven; it drives the system. Trance and ecstasy are quite different, and trance seems to be the energy that when he says, "the energy in the body," it gives you a sense of well being to overcome the illness. That's what it's all about. A higher state of consciousness and an altered state of awareness that allows you to conquer whatever the problem may be with the use of rhythmic stimuli. Music therapists are using it more and more...in old-age homes for Alzheimer's and dementia, and for different kinds of problems and diseases.
Stay tuned. We're living in the golden age now where the code is about to be cracked. Within the next five or ten years, we'll be able to reproduce trance on a daily basis.
DM) And will be the results of that?
MH) Then you will have healing. Then you'll be able to reproduce it, and create it at will. Right now, it's very spotty because we don't know the ingredients. It's a hit-and-miss kind of thing... but it's more like a seat-of-the-pants thing now.
DM) What specifically could it heal?
MH) (Laughing) We don't know. We know that works with Alzheimer's. We know it gets them out of the darkness even for small time. We know that people who can't walk or dance and get around, sometimes with a rhythmic stimuli, can gather wheelchairs and can feel a heightened sense of awareness; but when the music stops, they go back. And we know that it's culturally specific.
People will perk up with music and react to it more. We know very little about it right now, but we are really just trying to find out if it might work. It seems to have an effect on the raising of consciousness and the healing of soul. It invigorates the whole body and takes one to a happier time, and then we're able to deal with the difficulties much better.
So we don't really know what this power is; it's sort of like Tesla and electricity. When Will was trying to deal with electricity, he didn't really know how to get into the house. It was a magical invisible energy. So we're dealing with something else now, which is invisible. You can see music; you can hear it, and can feel it. It's a big mystery. It's a very fluid concept we're circling with the wagons, and we're closing in on it--that's for sure.
DM) Now how much of it could be psychosomatic?
MH) Much of it. Hopefully we'll find out. We don't know if it's rate dependent or frequency dependent; it's hard to tell, but seems to have to do with all of the above. All we do know is that we're learning more about it every day.