Across the Road from Mickey Hart

August 5: Mickey Hart at Napa Valley Opera House

In the 1980s and 1990s, I lived across the road from Grateful Dead and New Riders of the Purple Sage drummer Mickey Hart in Forestville. He is somewhat of an unsung celebrity.

When his book (co-authored with Fredric Lieberman) and the accompanying CD, Planet Drum—a musical atlas of World Beat music came out in 1998, we all trekked to Copperfield's for the booksigning and reading because he was part of our community. Not because he was famous, but because it was an intensely exciting time.

I remember the book cover made for a pretty cool T-shirt. You could always spot Mickey wearing one of his album cover T-shirts walking down Main Street in Sebastopol.

Sometimes musicians would show up en masse at Mickey's place on Mirabel Road. Talk about a harmonic convergence. Especially around the Summer Solstice. It was like a Ken Kesey VW bus cavalcade meets a Star Trek convention. Locals shuffled over to join in on the fun. The surviving members of the Grateful Dead were jammin' again at Mickey Hart's place.

All manner of exotic music would take flight in the night air. Not just New Riders of the Purple Sage/ Grateful Dead music. (Evan Morgan from NRPS was my neighbor.) But traditional folk musicians showed up too.

Mickey Hart is an unsung celebrity—not because of his fame as NRPS and Grateful Dead drummer—but because few know that he is also an avid ethno-musicologist who produced dozens of ethnic and indigenous music albums. (Mickey just donated his entire collection to The Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. See SFR on Facebook).

One time I just stood in the driveway at twilight listening to the music, wild roses in my hand, too shy to go in and crash the party. It was probably far more interesting to stand in the middle of the dirt road and listen to the music from afar than to be inside. 

The comforting crunch of gravel underfoot, the air redolent with night-blooming jasmine, wild Damascus roses, and the myriad warblings of a small creek for symphony. What I remember was the intensity of the indigo sky and Venus hovering on the horizon. 

Ironically, I thought of another near neighbor from Freestone—Tom Waits' calliope music—Innocent When You Dream. Not his street-punky tough guy Romeo is Bleeding music but the way carousel music sounds in the distance, leaving me waltzing alone in the dust at dusk, and filled with an intense longing of something unnameable and undefined. Like a long-forgotten memory rising to the surface. Of a time that you never lived. But remembered through a veil as if escaped from dreams. Something in the air. The music of a vanishing world.

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

Planet Drum: A Celebration of Percussion and Rhythm by Mickey Hart, Fredric Lieberman and D. A. Sonneborn (Aug 1998)


Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey into the Spirit of Percussion by Mickey Hart, Jay Stevens and Fredric Lieberman (Dec 1998)


Top Albums by Mickey Hart (See all 16 albums)

Tom Waits

I once made sweet potato fries with Tom Waits at a friend's 50th birthday party in Sebastopol. His daughter used to take art classes with us at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts. I never really interacted with him much. Seemed to want his space as it were. So we left him alone.

But at the party he was stuck with me as he didn't want to mingle with the other guests as we were appointed the sudden short order cooks. Apparently I was the lesser of two evils. But he was so uncomfortable in my presence that I was uncomfortable too. Even talking about his daughter didn't break the ice. So there we were, starin' mightily hard at the stove, a 1960s model, with its strange coils glowing red like Dr. Caligari eyes, drawing us deeper into the illusion. Discordant Calliope as background music.

But the sweet potato fries, ah, the fries doused with chili powder and lime, were sublime. For a moment we forgot who we were, we smiled and took pleasure in such a simple delight. Tom's sideburns were an odd aubergine hue—a rough henna job. Romeo was bleeding. Sort of like the color of the chili powder sprinkled on the fries. He hid out in the kitchen as the party raged on in the rest of the house. I gave up, and followed the distant music.