If a daughter or sister was about to go on a date with a guy in a rock band, the stock advice always was: ”Don`t bring home the drummer.”
Drummers were bad news. Primitives. Savages. They beat on things for a living.
It`s a bad joke that Mickey Hart, one of two drummers in the Grateful Dead, has been living down for decades.
In typical fashion, Hart laughed at the stereotype in a recent conversation from San Francisco.
”Slobbering animals-yeah, I know the look,” he says.
But there`s a spiritual side to the beast, as Hart discovered during a years-long, worldwide search into the roots of his craft.
The results were recently published as ”Drumming at the Edge of Magic”
(HarperSanFrancisco, $19.95), and further illuminated by a compact disc,
”At the Edge” (Rykodisc), in which Hart taps the rhythmic potential of everything from rainwater to the most high-tech equipment with the help of master percussionists such as Zakir Hussain of India and Babatunde Olatunji of Nigeria.
”For me, the discovery of the percussive possibilities of skin ranks right up there with the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel,”
Hart writes.
Hippie hyperbole such as that will likely send shivers through nonbelievers: those folks who don`t understand the Dead or their subculture. But Hart`s book, though loaded with cosmic pronouncements, is also a bounty of information about the evolution of percussion, and it offers many moving observations and anecdotes about its impact on human behavior.
Rhythm is what all of us do with time, Hart says, and its mysteries have been tapped by cultures all over the world to achieve a deeper understanding of their humanity.
”Percussion and transition: What does percussion do to the human body;
that`s what I was after,” Hart says. ”Every culture seemed to understand this. We were all talking in different languages about the same things:
entertainment, rapture, trance.”
These states of mind are community affairs in many non-Western cultures. The idea of rhythm-sharing, of fitting one`s own personal rhythms seamlessly into the flow of the whole, is the underpinning of most African percussion rituals, Hart writes.
Percussion and rhythm play a smaller role in Western culture, perhaps because the music we revere most is built on the European precepts of melody and harmony.
So Americans have traditionally regarded the percussion-based music of Africa as primitive, as somehow less worthy than European classical music.
This attitude can be traced to the day nearly 2,000 years ago when the Romans, newly converted to Christianity, banned percussive music as
”mischievous and licentious,” Hart writes.
Similar words were used to describe another rhythm-based music when it emerged in the `50s: rock `n` roll.
In the `60s, funk brought rock even closer to its African root, and rap finished the job, stripping away all melody in favor of rhythm. No wonder the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which bestows the Grammys, didn`t recognize rap-a 15-year-old art form-as a musical category until two years ago. Many of the academy`s members simply didn`t consider it to be musical.
Hart`s ”Drumming at the Edge of Magic” shows how narrow-minded that notion is.
”Why not just say that musically Africa represents an alternative evolution to that of the West, a musical culture whose emotional strategies may be different from but not less successful than European art music?” he writes.
In the same way, the Grateful Dead represent an alternative evolution to most rock music, guided by the need to explore and improvise as much as the desire to write concise pop songs.
Hart chuckles at the notion.
”It was amazing when I discovered how many people use drums to help them focus worldwide,” he says. ”It validated my own thing, because that`s what the Dead is all about.”
Hart views himself as a ”sound sharer,” carrying on a conversation on stage with five other sound sharers. On the good nights, the audience becomes part of the sharing, and one gets at least an approximation of what an African percussion ritual must feel and sound like.
”It makes you realize what a powerful force we`re playing with,” he says. ”I found literally hundreds and hundreds of percussion instruments down through the ages. It awes me to think what great lengths people went to to make something that is invisible: music.”
