Steve Silberman- Containing Multitudes (originally published just after Jerry's passing in my rag HUMP)
Wherever destiny takes us, we go, willingly or dragged with our heels kicking sparks. And every evening, after we find ourselves having digested an hour of a news program, our global awareness indicator points decidedly north, in an inflated sense of truth, justice and the American way. But is the media our destiny or just various individuals who spin thoughts into our info receptors. After an hour of CNN we think that we are hurky-jerky informed on world events.
Isn’t it true that we never really know what’s going on in the world, but only certain distorted facts that get filtered through various media? Who are these men who call the shots on what is ultimately shown to us? Do they really want us to get all the facts of the story, or just certain facts?
Traditionally, journalists were hard-boiled, martini swilling guys with degrees in Journalism, men with ink in their fingers, who often immersed themselves in stories to find out a good lead, or to get a scoop on a story. But bottom-line, men who were no nonsense and often very conservative in nature. A conservatism that was so ingrained in their character, that their stories often had conservative slants, whether conscious or not.
Imagine what would happen if the swirling gospel of the media, that we call the news, was dictated by a hipster?
What if Dan Rather was a proponent of Earth First or Gay Rights? Chances are that he would find it impossible to write stories that contradicted his deepest belief system.
Just the other night, I saw Ted Koppel defending the interment of Japanese orphans during World War Two. He based the acceptance of American atrocities on knowing the details of history and therefore being aware of the specifics that lead up to our inhumane acts. He said that because the Japanese killed more Chinese than all the Japanese killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that those American’s who threw Japanese children in Hellholes, were justified. This type of logic is the sort of hypocrisy that contributes to the ills that plague our modern soul. Would a hipster ever let this type of spin on revisionist history occur?
Since my first story about the Internet ran four years ago in Synthesis Magazine, I have tried to show you how the Net will transform our lives, and the world we live in. Many of you turned the other cheek in a basterdization of Christian ethics, but like destiny, you can’t escape history. Time and tide wait for no man.
How could a new source for news ever compete with the monolithic dinosaurs of the current day? Well, Wired News is the David ready to slay the Goliath. And at the helm, loading stones into the slingshot is Steve Silberman. Part scholar, part Deadhead and part visionary, please welcome Steve with a high, hearty, HUMP………..
Tell me what it is you do.
I work for Wired News, I write about a story a day, three or four stories a week and a column. Wired News is www.wired.com I seldom write for the magazine because Wired News is so all consuming. Wired News is a very exciting thing that hasn’t really been talked about much in everyone’s eagerness to bash Wired for hubris or to talk about how Wired Digital is “burning money.” Basically, what we were able to pull off, was to launch a news service last year. We’ve not only managed to stay away from the Silicon Valley press release mentality of a lot of the other on-line news services, but we’ve also stayed away from the sort of gee-whiz/hype/capitalist/lust over objects that afflicts Wired Magazine. We’ve also been able to get into the news flow and kind of inject into the media an awareness of stories that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. I wrote a story about the number of blacks getting onto the net being disproportionately higher than what one might imagine and at the same time there is a loss of minority-ownership radio stations. That story was picked up by CNN and turned into a special report. I wrote a story about this atomic veteran who survived being basically marched through ground zero in the early fifties, everyone he knew who was there with him was dead. He put up a web-site and he ended up getting a book contract to tell the story of the Atomic Veterans. So we’ve been able to be an interesting conduit for stories that otherwise would have been not noticed. I think Wired News is cool, it reminds me of a zine in a way or an underground newspaper from the sixties, but because it looks like a straight news service, we end up getting looked at by a lot of straight and mainstream media people. I have a feeling that most of the people who read us are reporters from other media. The New York Times outright stole one of the first stories I wrote for Wired News. They called me up, asked me for the contact numbers of the story I was writing about, and then ran it as if they were breaking the story. I’ve gotten totally used to that now.
Scooped.
Yeah.
In the last issue of HUMP, I asked Steven Johnson who has FEED.COM if he felt that the dinosaurs like Time Magazine or the New York Times felt the new news media biting at their heels yet. He said no. Do you think that they feel competitiveness as to where people feel the source for news might be?
Absolutely, I think people can read a lot of news and it’s not just insidery geeky business news. Allen Ginsburghs terminal illness broke on Wired News half a day before any of the wire services had it, we break a lot of interesting cultural information before the other news services. I don’t think that the owners of the Hearst newspapers are waking up with sweaty palms, worrying that people are going to go to our news service, instead of reading the newspaper in the morning with their sip of coffee. Also, I don’t think that Time Magazine is worried that we are going to go out of business. On the other hand, what I think that is even more interesting than direct competition for eyeballs, is that the on-line world as a whole is becoming an interesting challenger for some of the bullshit in mainstream media. The first time I really saw that was when Time Magazine ran a cover story on Cyberporn, siteing this study by this guy Marty Rin, who is really a student at some East Coast university. The cover was very spectacular, it was a child’s face that had been altered by photoshop so that his eyes were totally wide, he looked like he was looking at split beaver right on his screen. What happened was a group of journalists and smart folks got together on the WELL, and found out through digging a little that Marty Rins study was completely bogus. The figures that he came up with were from surf sessions on porn sites rather than general usenet statistics. The study was completely debunked. Time ran a retraction in microscopic type. Time was made to look very foolish. Even though the publisher of Time Magazine didn’t commit hari cari, it’s important to realize that the study was debunked by on-line conversation on the Well.
So here’s the sense that there are watchdogs for the mainstream media now.
Things like Wired News and intelligent on-line communities like the Well act as an ombudsman for the big media view of things, conventional wisdom. An ombudsman in the old newspaper world was somebody whose job it was to be a little bit cynical. They would take the coverage in a newspaper and say” is this really true?” They were the check and balance for the stories and the spin. Places like Wired News and the on-line community in general are acting like a giant ombudsman for mainstream culture and mainstream media and I think that is a profoundly important development in American History.
The Persian Gulf had media blackout, could that happen again, or is on-line reporting going to change that.
Yeah, I do think it will change the way public response is organized completely. It will massively decrease response time so information will be wildly disseminated on a scale that the sixties mimeographing radicals could have only dreamed. It’s as if you could go back in time and say to SDS “how would you like to have a meeting that’s a) Worldwide, b) very low cost, c) as pervasive as the television networks, and D. you can do images and text?” They would go out of their minds!
What if the Black Panthers were able to arm the citizens of Oakland with laptops and Video Cameras, instead of guns?
Exactly. I also think the ubiquity of video cameras is interesting, but of course it’s a mixed blessing. The story I’m working on now is how whenever a big crime happens, like the Oklahoma City Bombing, somebody comes up with pictures or video of the bombers eating sandwiches, or Princess Di walking through the hotel lobby before the car crash. One wonders if one is ever completely not under watch. But yet on the other hand, if there’s massive police brutality or something, there’s a guy with a video camera. And hopefully that information can get on the net or a television station.
In the case of the Humboldt Cops torturing people with pepper spray, they handed in the goods on themselves.
Around the Tiennaman Square thing, the first thing that the Chinese Government tried to do was to shut down the Fax machines. I think as the Net becomes more pervasive in Third World countries, it will either become harder for the enemies of human liberties to accomplish their deeds or it will just cause dictators and despots to completely crack down on the Net. So I think it will be both, it will be turf wars, where people will be trying to wire their local communities and organizations into the Net and Governments will be coming down on them. And coming down on them in more insidious ways as filtering software becomes more pervasive. So if you’re in country XYZ and the government doesn’t want you to see political sites, when you log on, you’ll just never see them, they’ll be invisible. Imagine if Gary Bower of the American Family Council could put his own filtering software in everybody’s machine, gay kids would never see gay teen sites and there is a lot of information that will be lost as filtering software becomes accepted as a humane replacement for censorship.
Couldn’t all the hype about child molesters on the Web just be a rallying point for filtering software and censorship? Don’t you think that just parallels the censorship of newspapers. Aren’t certain stories kept to regions?
Yes they are, but I see it as my personal job and mission in life to undo that and I have a very clear case in point. A couple of University of Pittsburgh students were recently barred from having any internet access and from even physically appearing in any computer labs, and they were computer science majors, so it was tantamount to expelling them. Their crime was that they had created one of the most useful net security resources for people who wanted to guard their sites against hackers that there is. It’s a site called anti on-line.com and the University simply did not understand what these kids were doing and reacted against it in a very heavy-handed way. For instance one of the first sites to talk about a hack called a windowhack, that allows people to take down windows machines remotely. It’s a very useful site that was referred to by many other sites. But these kids were screwed by not only being barred form the Net and use of any computer equipment on campus but by being barred from communicating directly with the person that was making it all happen. I got a tip from one of the students who said that the only coverage that the story had gotten was in the school newspaper. I wrote an article about it in Wired News and within two weeks, the story had gotten into USA Today, The Village Voice, The New York Times and the associated Press. The school officials, even though the case is still pending, got a heavy message that they were fucking up. I think it’s very possible for Wired News and people on-line who have compelling enough Web Sites to make regional outrages a global concern.
Did you feel that the media adequately covered Allen Ginsbergs passing?
Allen was a friend of mine for twenty years, all of my adult life. The depth and sensitivity of the coverage of like The New York Times impressed me, they put his obituary on the cover. There were some decent stories in the AP about him. Ultimately, the coverage he got, was because he founded a movement that has almost become a cultural trademark, the Beat Generation. Everyone from Starbucks to Levi’s has appropriated it. Granted, a lot of the content that Ginsberg and Kerouac and Burroughs had put across is not appreciated in an ad of slackers nodding, out as jazz plays in the background. But Ginsberg was perennially popular with young people, I know because I went on several different tours with him. And wherever Ginsberg went the halls were packed to capacity and often he would give a second reading to the thousands of people that were outside that couldn’t get in. So he remained, in terms of popularity for a poet, incredibly popular. I can’t say that he was necessarily influential on the current poetry scene in any kind of obvious way. There’s a tremendous bunch of corny, tacky, beatnik poetry out there in zines that I can’t say is really a good thing. But I do think that he was subtly pervasive influence in terms of encouraging public sincerity and honesty in such things as homosexuality and even drug use. I think that even though he was a very famous man, that some of his most enduring influences are part of the woodwork, part of the air that Americans breath that allows them to be a little bit freer then they would had he never lived. Certainly for a subject like homosexuality, he really was one of the first people to open the door at all on any kind of honest dialogue. Although I think what he was really saying about homosexuality is still not appreciated even by his gay fans. I asked him once in 1987 if he felt that it was ironic that he was hailed as the father of gay poetry and that he had hardly any gay friends? He said “well Burroughs and I never really considered ourselves gay, gay was like Castro street, we called ourselves queer.” What’s funny is that this was before the word queer was resurrected by the younger queer people. I said what’s queer? He said “well gay people are like adults trying to have sex with each other and queers like me and Burroughs, we’re trying to have sex with straight teenagers.” I happen to know how often he was very successful in that ambition. I think that Ginsberg and Kerouac also pointed to a truth that even this week America is wrestling with. There’s this little blonde guy who claims that this co-workers on an oil rig were harassing him sexually. One of the lower courts said “well this couldn’t be true because all these guys are heterosexual, so it must be about something else besides sex. The same lower court said it’s only harassment if the people involved in gay, because only then would sexual attraction be going on. That’s ridiculous. One of the things that both Ginsberg and Kerouac pointed to is that the human heart is very complicated. Walt Whitman said “I contradict myself, very well than I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes.” And I think that Ginsberg and Kerouac were pointing to the fact that we contain multitudes, some of our multitudes are heterosexual and some of our multitudes are homosexual and they’re all kinds of different feelings and tenderness. Going with that tenderness is more subversive than going with the idea that gay people are genetically determined and you can’t get mad at them because its genetic. It’s actually more subversive to say that we all have these different ways of relating and loving those around us, and what are we going to do with that?
Science is still looking for a gay gene.
Right and what are they going to do when they find it? What about all those kids that Allen slept with, did they have just a little bit of the gene? It’s easy to say that they slept with him because he’s famous, which is probably true, but they also slept with him because they loved him. The truth is ultimately more subversive than any easy take on it, even a progressive take on it, even a gay positive one.
What about NAMBLA?
Allen was hit with some of the hysteria over pedophilia. I talked to Allen about NAMBLA, and he didn’t know that much about it, but he defended their right to speak. To be frank, I think he had a soft part in his heart for NAMBLA, because he himself was very attracted to teenagers, so he was well aware of the pleasures and the risk of inter-generational sex. As far as I know he did not have sex with minors. I remember talking to someone about Allen not soon after he was dead. This person said “well I never liked Allen Ginsberg and I’m not sad that he’s dead.” I said, “Why’s that?” And he said, “Well he was a pedophile. One of my professors said that he supported NAMBLA.” I asked if he ever read his poetry and he said “No and I don’t want to read it.” Well that’s great, that’s like not listening to John Coltrane’s music because he was a heroin addict at one point. People are so moralistic it’s unbelievable. Or people that said that Jerry Garcia took heroin and wrestled with addiction himself. We’re all wrestling with something.
Exactly. You can always find a reason not to listen to somebody.
It’s more of what you can accomplish anyway despite how confusing and messed up your life is. Who doesn’t have a messed up and confusing life?
I don’t know, I haven’t met them yet.
And those people who pose as those kind of altruistic people are the ones who turn out to be the worst kind of motel room whore mongering drag…..
..J. Edgar Hoover……
I read Rock Scully’s book “life with the Dead,” and hearing about how Garcias would set hotel rooms on fire when he would nod out, didn’t make me lose love for the man. It allowed me an insight to his psychological make-up. If we all didn’t have these quirks and eccentricities, we would lose our individuality.
I find it almost redemptive to read those stories. I’m reading through a much more in-depth biography of Jerry Garcia that’s going to be published in a year and a half by Blair Jackson, long time Dead scholar. Garcia’s relationships make even mine look relatively stable. He often had two girlfriends at once and sometimes three. He was always paying off various ex-wives and was riding a little scooter from one wife to the next. It was obvious that he was unable to make up his mind who he wanted to be with intimately and he probably had big fears of intimacy and yet was drawn into it. And as I read through it and go through my own relationship apocalypses it made me feel better. When I put on a tape now I think, “geez, this guy who’s singing and making this beautiful music, once he got off stage, had to deal with all these ex-wives and problems and all this tzuris, as they say, a great yiddish word that means hassles. And yet he was still able to create this art that had like a primordial majesty to it.” I met Garcia and he certainly was my favorite of the Dead in terms of personality. I mean the Dead are fairly egotistical and isolated guys by now. Bill Kreutzman is an unpretentious and nice guy in terms of my limited contact with him, but I never felt like they were living saints or anything like that. But for so long they were able to speak this musical language and be so articulate in it. They gave so much pleasure and so much ur-education to so many people. Its amazing that they were able to do that and still struggle through their lives as we are all doing. So one of the things about Allen was that he never tried to present himself as perfect. He always presented himself as this lusty, confused, hilariously egotistical goofball. Even though I think he had a tremendous ego, there was something redemptive, and as he might have said, Bodhisvata, about his willingness to be wounded and confused and fucked up in public. He realized that we’re not alone and the thoughts in our head don’t make us the one cursed.
Much of the music we look back on and label as ‘revolutionary,’ is only so in hindsight. Just as so many people say, “rock is dead” today, it will take visionary thought or just the simple [passage of time to see how today’s music related to and contributed to society at large. With that in mind, do you feel the impact of the music of the Dead has yet been revealed?
What’s hilarious and cosmic about this is that this is the second interview in twelve hours where this question has come up. I was reminded last night when the author of this Phish book asked me this question is that in the late sixties, like 69 or 70, I was reading the newspaper at my parents home. My parents were communist and the paper was published by the political organization that my father was in called Progressive Labor. It was accusing the Grateful Dead of being sellouts because they were not singing songs about the war and they were not addressing the political issues of the day. And they certainly were not (sell outs), they were singing these weird transformations of traditional American folk songs and (lyricist) Hunters psychedelic word salad. In a sense they were occupying their own little space and yet if you think back on the more topical music of the day, it’s totally tacky and did not last and was a flavor of the month. Certainly some of the more tacky stuff like “eve of destruction,” is completely forgettable. Some of the more earnest stuff like Phil Oches and whatnot is great, but it’s very much of it’s period. But if you put on the Dead playing Dark Star in 1969, damn it’s still relevant to this era. Their subversiveness was at the level of music and being open to spontaneously emerging forms in the improvistory moment. In a funny way that ends up being more subversive than coming up with some big policy statement about why the government are all pigs. You end up being a little garden where the essential free nature that is the heart of every living being gets to flourish. This is more subversive in the same way that Picasso is more subversive than some of the social realist artists of the Soviet Union. You look at Social realism and you think “oh god, this is just tacky propaganda.” You look at Picasso and there’s vitality and a untameability to his images that could practically over throw a police state. At least in your mind, for a moment when you look at Picasso you’re not living in a police state. That’s the best kind of art.
I guess that’s the difference between being the road, a car or a bumper sticker.
So what this guy was asking me last night, was were the Dead the voice of their generation and the answer is no. They were the voice of something deeper than that. They were the voice of a transcendent, very wild and hairy principle, like the voice of the Tao, which is the voice of every generation.
It’s interesting how the Dead made a point of not making overt political statements on stage while at the same time there were protests and rioting going on right behind the show.
I know that Garcia was personally asked hundreds of times by police and anti-drug organizations to make an announcement at the shows to tell the fans not to come to the shows and take drugs, and he never did. I think it’s too his credit that he wasn’t willing to take on the role of an authority in other peoples lives. And yet, it’s true that a lot of people suffered by going to jail and what not because the government was able to move in and really cut through the dead scene likes wolves through a flock of sheep. Who wants to be caseing out crack dealers, when you can go to Oakland Colesium and bust a bunch of Oberlin Students.
The lot of the Dead couldn’t handle the weight of suddenly being the cool place to be.
The lot was like a wildlife preserve and all of a sudden a lot animals, even those not native to that jungle, came in simply because it was one of the few places where animals could be animals. Also there was a lot of greed by people realizing that they could make some quick bucks selling nitrous or bad drugs. It’ easy to understand how it could develop that way considering the amount of hypocrisy and oppression at large in the American Culture. There was definite feeling in the early eighties that the Dead scene was a little island of sanity in the middle of the Reagan/Bush Bullshit Festival. What’s unfortunate is that after MTV featured the Day of the Dead, it became known as the biggest party going. Al these people who really didn’t care about the music showed up. I mean there was always people who didn’t care about the music. They were filtering themselves in, and then out. Once the music became irrelevant in the lot, it just became a place to: live in a barter economy, a place to not get a job, a place to have a lot of sex, and make some money, and stay high constantly. It became too much of a refuge, I think. A little bit of all that is great, but it really became a bunch of people who weren’t dealing with the outside world much. The thing about the Dead scene that I really miss, is that it was a litmus test and a easy way to see where people were coming from. There were many times I would be in some small town, or on the road, and I would look, and it wasn’t even so blatant as Dead patches on a knapsack or stinking orf Patchouli oil, even if they were dressed in straight clothes, there would be just a look in their eyes and I would say “do you go to shows?” And if they said “what kind of shows?,” you knew you made a mistake. So often you hit though, and it was an instant, if not shallow, brotherhood and sisterhood with other people you might have seen at a show at that moment you were having a revelation. I not only miss it, I think that my life is suffering form the lack of that, and from the lack of having a place to remagnetize the compass needle of my spirit. I’m doing fine with my adult life, like keeping a job and all that. But in terms of the heartfullness and confidence that I need, it’s not as easy to feel at home in the world without occasional visits to Deadland.
I just figure I’ll never dance again.
I know, I’ve put on weight since Jerry died because I don’t dance as much. I feel like I’ve aged twenty years since 1995. I think that the problem with the size and scale of the Dead scene in later years was too centralized and the litter had become too big and there are only so many teats. I do think there has been an upsurge in more local and smaller jamming bands, who take some of the lessons of the Grateful Dead. Although it’s a little too easy too play that way. But local hippie scenes are getting more attention from people, because they have too. They just can’t hitch a ride to Deer Creek and immerse themselves in their own scene, because that place no longer exists. Every Deadheads hometown disappeared like Pompeii under the volcano. Everyone has to find the scene that’s local to them. That having been said, I’m on Phish tour.
Jumping Ship?
No, I love Phish and have since 1992. I don’t feel like it’s jumping ship, I feel like it’s a different ship and it’s floating very well thank you. Phish are doing great things in their own groove. Seeing Phish now is like seeing the Dead in 1973 because their music is so focused and so tight that they can go anywhere with it. It’s a very exciting time to be into Phish and I’m not there because it’s a substitute, I’m there because it’s good music.
I tend to be a snob sometimes.
I remember I ran into someone who saw the Deads last 650 shows, at a Phish show, 6 months after Jerry died and he said “Owww, it’s like the Stepford show! It’s the same people, the same clothes, different band!!” I mean, sure a lot of the cultural forms have been appropriated, but that’s not the point. The point is the music and point is getting off, and the point is psychedelic experience whether you’re tripping or not, and the point is being free for a moment and listening to the spontaneous risky inventions of a bunch of geniuses that are very hooked into one another. So wherever you can find that you should do it, whether it’s at Phish or your own local bar or your own room.
Showing posts with label Grateful Dead. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grateful Dead. Show all posts
Monday, February 2, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Interview with Bill Kreutzmann
Interview with Bill Kreutzman—BK3 (Egyptian Windmill Operators)
I’ve been pretty lucky in my journalistic career to interview many of my heroes: Timothy Leary, Mickey Hart, Ken Kesey, Robert Anton Wilson, Bob Weir, Paul Kanter, Jorma and the list goes on. But it was a real joy to spend a while chatting with Bill Kreutzmann of the Grateful Dead. The focus was on his new band, BK3 (aka Egyptian Windmill Operators) but the ease of the conversation steered us off-course to tales of Hawaii, Obama, and Bette Midler. Like the coolest guy you would ever want to share a brew with, Bill filled the conversation with laughter, positivity and hopeful looks at the future. Eventually I will write a more complete introduction, but in the kindtime, enjoy this transcription of what was one of my favorite talks in a long time----ladies and gentlemen—drumroll please—Bill Kreutzmann!
Bill Kreutzmann---Y’ello.
DNA: Hi, This is DNA calling from Santa Cruz.
BK: DNA. How do you pronounce that?
DNA: You just did my friend. You also spelled it, so you’re ahead of the game.
BK: Right on. How is Santa Cruz treating you?
DNA: Great. I’m looking at the ocean right now, people are playing volleyball, the sea lions are out, the sun is breaking on through.
BK: Right on, right on. You’ve given me the warmest phone call yet. I did two interviews prior to yours and they’re both freezing out there in Boulder. I’m sitting here in 80 degrees Hawaii weather.
DNA: I lived in Maui for several months. What a magical experience.
BK: That’s why I’m here.
DNA: You got yourself an ocean view?
BK: I don’t have an ocean view, but I have a hidden garden which is wear I keep my beautiful flowering plants. That’s my hobby here--growing tropical flowers. Pikaki is used for leis and is the smelliest (that may not be the proper word) in Hawaii.
DNA: Do you still run your organic farm, Grateful Greens?
BK: No, I stopped that. It operated for a while, but then I had to move back to the mainland for several years to do Grateful Dead projects and the farm was loaned out to somebody. But I’m back! I couldn’t stay away. I couldn’t find the happiness in Marin that I find here in Hawaii.
DNA: Next time you have to move to the mainland, try Santa Cruz--it’s not too shabby.
BK: I agree with you. Right now my step-daughter is attending Cabrillo College and then will be transferring the University down there.
DNA: Cabrillo is a great college. There are excellent people that attend there. Ya know, all your archives are stored here in Santa Cruz, at UCSC.
BK: I knew that! I was instrumental in having that happen. UCSC offered us such a deal. They even offered us a room dedicated to the archives. Pretty cool.
DNA: Although I don’t have much knowledge about archival goings-on, I volunteered to help. On my resume I said that I could pick out Jerry Garcia’s underwear out of a pile of laundry. They didn’t respond.
BK: That was a good line though.
DNA: I do stand-up comedy. Sometimes it works--sometimes it fails miserably.
BK: Ah well, that’s life. The thing, DNA, that I really want to talk about is the trio that I have coming your way soon.
DNA: Really exciting man. I’ve seen Oteil Burbridge play with the Aquarium Rescue Unit and besides the Allman Brothers, he’s sat in with God Street Wine. I used to go see Scott Murawski play with Max Creek all the time.
BK: Put me in the mix and you know what the bands like. It’s the best band I’ve played in since the Grateful Dead days.
DNA: I listened to a couple of tracks on your Myspace page. It’s great. Do you see this trio staying together for a while beyond this tour?
BK: I would sure like that. I would like to just keep doing it. As a matter of fact, the three of us just talked yesterday—but we live so far apart. Oteil lives in Alabama and Scott lives up near Providence, Rhode Island and I live in Kauai. So we have a lot of conference calls—it’s the best way to do it. They are all into it--I can tell they are really excited. I think for Oteil, and I don’t think he will mind me saying this—he’s played with the Allman Brothers so much that he has it down in his back pocket—that its fun for him to be in a band where he can be totally open and free. I encourage that with my players. I don’t have rules. I believe in what John Coltrane once said, “Damn the rules.”
DNA: “Damn the rules. It’s the feeling that counts.”
BK: And that’s the same for my trio, or any band I play with. That’s where I coming from. I’m not sitting there thinking the music should do this or do that. I let the music talk to me, rather than imposing my own stuff.
DNA: What a difference to play small clubs where you can see the whole room, as opposed to Madison Square Garden.
BK: I like both you know? But the small club thing actually taught me to hear better. I learned to play softer. I have a jam garage here and it’s the hottest jam garage in the world. Not temperature-wise, it just sounds good. I provide a bass amp and a guitar amp and I have a Noble and Cooley drum set in the back. We’ll play for hours and sometimes the cops will come about 11:30. “That’s enough boys.” They know me by now. They don’t get too pissed off because the music is real good.
DNA: Are you still having trouble naming the band?
BK: It’s the BK3.
DNA: Oh! BK3!!
BK: I didn’t like the word trio, and I have no problem with jazz, but it reminded me of a jazz band. I’d rather be BK3--my initials and 3. That’s the official name. The other name we tried to use but my manager talked me out of it—The Egyptian Windmill Operaters. That’s our name—Egyptian Windmill Operators. It doesn’t have to make sense. Like Aquarium Rescue Unit. She said, “You oughta use your initials.” If you could call us BK3(Egyptian Windmill Operators), I would dig that. See, I’m a little comedian too.
DNA: I always thought you were the funniest guy in the band.
BK: I don’t know how to take that. ( silence followed by laughter)
DNA: You pulled out of being somewhat reclusive from the Dead scene to do this Obama gig. Was it Obama that pulled all of you together?
BK: Well yeah. It was really him. I missed the first show those guys did for him.
DNA: At the Warfield.
BK: Bob wanted me to make it. But I had just flown in from Costa Rico for hours, and the gig was the next day, and it was more than I could do. It went real well for them. Bobby said we could get something together at Penn State and he was like, “Let’s do it.”
I met with Bobby and said, “Well if we’re going to all this trouble to get together for Penn State, let’s get together and do a tour.” And everybody said yes to it. It was kinda my idea, I guess. If you’re going to all this trouble for one gig, why not tour?
DNA: So it’s a show-by-show thing, no future plans, take this tour and see what happens?
BK: Yup. We’re going to practice for 20 days before we hit the road. 20 rehearsal day. Some of those are set-up days. It’s going to different. We don’t want to structure it the way we used to—ya know, four or five years ago—we want to change it up and make it better. I want to talk about that, but I really want to talk about the trio. People who like the Dead will really like BK3.
DNA: You guys play a bunch of Dead tunes.
BK: Not a bunch. We do some really nice covers like “Rhymes” by Al Green, as well as, original songs by both Oteil and Scott. I totally encourage that. Everyone is doing tons of Dead stuff, and it’s a great book to play from, no doubt about it, so that’s being covered. In our band we will certainly do our fair share, but Hunter wrote us 12 original songs. And we’ve played 8 or 10 of them so far. They’re way cool songs.
DNA: How’s Hunter doing?
BK: His writing is incredible. I have a phone call when we are done one to Mickey, and one to Bob. I need to send him a DVD of BK3 from the Culture Room (Ft. Lauderdale, FL.). It will blow his mind. He should be quite happy. If I was him I would be quite happy.
DNA: I look forward to hearing those new tunes played out. Mike Gordon (bass player for Phish) helped curate this band?
BK: We call him the curator. We started over a year ago when Mike invited us down to do a benefit gig down in Costa Rico in a town called Jaco. It’s a surf town about halfway down the coast. The benefit was for the school system and we stayed at Mike’s dad’s house. To cut to the chase, Scott was the guitar player, and about two songs in I knew I had a player on my hands that could go anywhere--we played maybe 5 hours that night, we got really into it. People loved it and we got to give money to the school system, which was the most important thing. The next day I said, “Mike I had a really good time last night, let’s do this more.” He said, “Bill, I’ll do it whenever I can but I’ve got my own band.” I thought to myself what am I going to do, sit at home and audition bass players? I said, “Mike I want somebody who is the best at their instrument and who knows me.” And Mike said, “Lets call Oteil.” Oteil said OK and that’s why we call Mike the curator. We all are having the best time, I just love it!
DNA: Oteil is just a monster bass player, t takes it so many places.
BK: Well they got a drummer who likes to take it many places too. He’s having a lot of fun and Scotts the same way. Scott feels the same way as far as freedom and imagination, he doesn’t play the same thing twice in a row. He takes solos and you think he’s done and he’s only halfway through. He’s building and building and building and doing all these tonal changes and it’s really good music. They trade off all these licks and lines and sides of solos, which is really fun, or they’ll play in unison or harmony parts on the same line and I’m back there laughing. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I know the Deadheads in Santa Cruz, or anyone that loves good electric music will enjoy it. I don’t like to use the word jazz, I like to say free music. It’s not traditional music, if anything it’s close to fusion. Ya know DNA, I love your name, I heard this one track, and I said, “What band is that?” And my girlfriend Amy said, “You nut, that’s you!” She had put on some of the CDs I had lying around the house and I thought I was listening to some fusion band. I was like, “Fuck, that’s us?” That’s’ how happy I am with this band. Onstage they crowd around my bass drum and you have three guys laughing their brains out while their playing. It’s sort of Bluegrassish in this way. We play real close and play tight music.
DNA: You’re kicking off the tour in Santa Cruz, cannot wait! You said that you will rehearse with the Dead for 20 days, will you have anytime to practice with BK3?
BK: We won’t have time. Maybe we’ll get in there that afternoon and play a few songs, but that’s how it goes with the trio, we don’t really need to rehearse. I’m not reallt sure how that sounds to you. . .
DNA: You guys are all consummate professionals. . .
BK: We’ve all played for years. You’re the first interviewer whose known both Scott and Oteil, most people don’t know either, and if anyone gets known it’s Oteil and me. But I’m glad you know Scott, he’s an amazing guitar player. And their voices are great as well and they complement each other. Scott has kinda of a raspy voice and Oteil has kind of a pretty gospel voice, nice contrast of tones.
DNA: I grew up on the East Coast we would go see Max Creek, waiting for the Dead to return. It was cold and we had to stay warm.
BK: I don’t feel like I’m the leader of the band. I like for everyone to be the leader. It’s sorta Obamaish. He said, “I’m your leader, but you all got take a hand in this thing.” That’s how we do it. I don’t tell them what to do, I say, “Here are some ideas, what do you think?”
DNA: Do you have a set list before you start?
BK: We call up a few songs. We have a master list sitting out there and think which key might fit with the next song, tempo or feeling. We don’t have to have a set list at all. One night I got up there at Toads in Connecticut and played a 1/2 hour drum solo before those guys came out and joined me. I brought down a good hard beat and started jamming on the beat and made up another song and played it for an hour and a 1/2 and then started a song off the list. We went into Eyes of the World—it was the biggest meltdown! It’s great to see the audience having that much fun—very reminiscent. Now that Obama is president, I feel better.
DNA: The world is just as crazy, but it’s nice to have a guy at the helm that you don’t hate.
BK: I was in Washington for the inaugeration to play with the band. I was watching television in my hotel room—there was two million people a 1/2 a mile away, I decided, well, my hotel room is safe—so I was watching the swearing in on TV. There’s the old tradition of the president getting in the helicopter and flying away—and I heard a helicopter outside my window, I grabbed Amy and we went to the window and it was Bush flying away—so we gave him a big wave. Good riddance, man.
DNA: 8 years of lunacy.
BK: It felt much longer than 8 years.
DNA: Well there was his Dad as well. I just heard they’re talking about Jeb in 2012. It’s way to early to hear stuff like that. Too soon, too soon.
BK: How about Palin?
DNA: Drill Baby Drill.
BK: Let’s shoot wolves from helicopters.
DNA: She gave a lot of fodder to comedians.
BK: Didn’t do her any good. When McCain chose her I thought he did it because he didn’t really want to be president. I doubt that was his thought but it appeared that way.
DNA: He couldn’t have made a goofier choice.
BK: I know. Thank god.
DNA: Had a question about Hawaii. You guys passed the Lowest Law Enforcement Priority of Cannabis Ordinance, but your police chief recently said that, “anyone who is pro-marijuana is automatically pro-terrorist.”
BK: Blame it on being slow-minded and uninformed. Hawaii is very backward when it comes to things that are fun like marijuana and dancing. The caberet laws are in effect. There are no places on this island where you can go and dance. You can go out and sit-down, but you can’t dance. There has been a ton of corruption politically and it’s the good-old-boy syndrome—which is another word for gangster. The way I deal with it is by living my life in the best way, trying to be an example to other people. There was a guy here, Andrew Kluger, who built a dam that broke 2.5 years ago and killed several people. . .
http://archives.starbulletin.com/2006/03/15/news/story01.html
. . .and the corruption goes all the way up to the Governor. They never inspected the dams, they knew one was leaking and it finally broke. It was 400 million gallons of water, it carved a miniature Grand Canyon—took out the property across from me, which is Better Midlers property. I got the least damage from it, but I lost all my Ag water, so I couldn’t water all my beautiful flowers, and they died. The city water has too much chlorine in it and it’s also very expensive. What I’m saying is that for such a beautiful place it’s amazingly backward.
DNA: To go indirectly back to the Dead for a second. I lived in Maui but realized that to fight the good fight and make a difference I needed to move back to Turtle Island. And I gotta say that it was through touring with you guys for 500 shows that I realized it was through being an activist and community action that you could really help those around you.
BK: You’ve got a good heart. I’ll tell ya, the cops here are just really mean, unduly mean. They take pride in being bullies.
DNA: Well play it safe with that garage of yours.
BK: I don’t do anything that they could get too down on me for. Last Friday night it was a lady cop that came to shut us down. She was very polite and she said, “Wow, that sounds really good, but it’s 11:30 and we’ve been getting complaints.”
DNA: Was it Bette Midler that called the cops?
BK: No..no..Just saying that Hawaii is Obama land, but their policies are not like Obama.
DNA: Corruption runs deep. Look at Blagojevich.
BK: I cannot believe that he is still in the news.
DNA: Hey you screw up at work really bad and it takes balls to keep showing up.
BK: Yup. After the inauguration we played that night. The next night, thanks to Mickey Hart, I got invited to a Power Party. Nancy Pelosi was there, Barbara Boxer was there, Harry Reid was there, Diane Feinstein was there—all the heavys. That asked us a lot of questions and I always promote Green. I pleaded to build solar panel factories, obvious stuff. Let’s take all those Mercedes store in Long Beach that cannot be sold and put electric motors in those son-of-bitches. I was running all this stuff down and the vibe was really optimistic. Those folks didn’t like working for Bush and there was joy I the air and that made me feel better about our country. I wasn’t too happy with Bush and I know you haven’t.
DNA: It’s hip to talk Green, but when is somebody going to thank the hippies for thinking of it all.
BK: we never get thanked, but as long as they take action that will be enough.
DNA: Thanks a lot for the talk Bill. If you ever need a stand-up comedian to open for you guys. . .
BK: You can call me every morning to make me laugh.
DNA: It’s on. Expect a call tomorrow at 6am.
BK: Come find me in Santa Cruz I have a story about John Belushi I want to tell you.
DNA: OK.
BK: How did you get the name DNA?
DNA: In 1990 I was backstage for a Showtime comedy contest. I was backstage, high on acid, freaking out that I didn’t have anything funny to say. And then I remembered that my initials were DNA—which is funny.
BK: Perfect.
DNA: One last thing. The only interaction we ever had in the past. . .
BK: Uh oh.
DNA: In 1986 I was at a Bill Graham private party at the Fillmore. John Lee Hooker was there, Huey Lewis, The Charlatans were playing onstage, it was insane. Everyone knew each other, except for me. I was like an orphan at a family reunion.
BK: Orphan!
DNA: I was standing next to the dance floor, where a bunch of high-class ladies were shaking it. And you pushed me into the dance floor and said, “Get in there and dance young man!”
BK: Great story, I’m not usually that pushy!
DNA: Alright, see you in Santa Cruz. Aloha.
BK: Aloha!
I’ve been pretty lucky in my journalistic career to interview many of my heroes: Timothy Leary, Mickey Hart, Ken Kesey, Robert Anton Wilson, Bob Weir, Paul Kanter, Jorma and the list goes on. But it was a real joy to spend a while chatting with Bill Kreutzmann of the Grateful Dead. The focus was on his new band, BK3 (aka Egyptian Windmill Operators) but the ease of the conversation steered us off-course to tales of Hawaii, Obama, and Bette Midler. Like the coolest guy you would ever want to share a brew with, Bill filled the conversation with laughter, positivity and hopeful looks at the future. Eventually I will write a more complete introduction, but in the kindtime, enjoy this transcription of what was one of my favorite talks in a long time----ladies and gentlemen—drumroll please—Bill Kreutzmann!
Bill Kreutzmann---Y’ello.
DNA: Hi, This is DNA calling from Santa Cruz.
BK: DNA. How do you pronounce that?
DNA: You just did my friend. You also spelled it, so you’re ahead of the game.
BK: Right on. How is Santa Cruz treating you?
DNA: Great. I’m looking at the ocean right now, people are playing volleyball, the sea lions are out, the sun is breaking on through.
BK: Right on, right on. You’ve given me the warmest phone call yet. I did two interviews prior to yours and they’re both freezing out there in Boulder. I’m sitting here in 80 degrees Hawaii weather.
DNA: I lived in Maui for several months. What a magical experience.
BK: That’s why I’m here.
DNA: You got yourself an ocean view?
BK: I don’t have an ocean view, but I have a hidden garden which is wear I keep my beautiful flowering plants. That’s my hobby here--growing tropical flowers. Pikaki is used for leis and is the smelliest (that may not be the proper word) in Hawaii.
DNA: Do you still run your organic farm, Grateful Greens?
BK: No, I stopped that. It operated for a while, but then I had to move back to the mainland for several years to do Grateful Dead projects and the farm was loaned out to somebody. But I’m back! I couldn’t stay away. I couldn’t find the happiness in Marin that I find here in Hawaii.
DNA: Next time you have to move to the mainland, try Santa Cruz--it’s not too shabby.
BK: I agree with you. Right now my step-daughter is attending Cabrillo College and then will be transferring the University down there.
DNA: Cabrillo is a great college. There are excellent people that attend there. Ya know, all your archives are stored here in Santa Cruz, at UCSC.
BK: I knew that! I was instrumental in having that happen. UCSC offered us such a deal. They even offered us a room dedicated to the archives. Pretty cool.
DNA: Although I don’t have much knowledge about archival goings-on, I volunteered to help. On my resume I said that I could pick out Jerry Garcia’s underwear out of a pile of laundry. They didn’t respond.
BK: That was a good line though.
DNA: I do stand-up comedy. Sometimes it works--sometimes it fails miserably.
BK: Ah well, that’s life. The thing, DNA, that I really want to talk about is the trio that I have coming your way soon.
DNA: Really exciting man. I’ve seen Oteil Burbridge play with the Aquarium Rescue Unit and besides the Allman Brothers, he’s sat in with God Street Wine. I used to go see Scott Murawski play with Max Creek all the time.
BK: Put me in the mix and you know what the bands like. It’s the best band I’ve played in since the Grateful Dead days.
DNA: I listened to a couple of tracks on your Myspace page. It’s great. Do you see this trio staying together for a while beyond this tour?
BK: I would sure like that. I would like to just keep doing it. As a matter of fact, the three of us just talked yesterday—but we live so far apart. Oteil lives in Alabama and Scott lives up near Providence, Rhode Island and I live in Kauai. So we have a lot of conference calls—it’s the best way to do it. They are all into it--I can tell they are really excited. I think for Oteil, and I don’t think he will mind me saying this—he’s played with the Allman Brothers so much that he has it down in his back pocket—that its fun for him to be in a band where he can be totally open and free. I encourage that with my players. I don’t have rules. I believe in what John Coltrane once said, “Damn the rules.”
DNA: “Damn the rules. It’s the feeling that counts.”
BK: And that’s the same for my trio, or any band I play with. That’s where I coming from. I’m not sitting there thinking the music should do this or do that. I let the music talk to me, rather than imposing my own stuff.
DNA: What a difference to play small clubs where you can see the whole room, as opposed to Madison Square Garden.
BK: I like both you know? But the small club thing actually taught me to hear better. I learned to play softer. I have a jam garage here and it’s the hottest jam garage in the world. Not temperature-wise, it just sounds good. I provide a bass amp and a guitar amp and I have a Noble and Cooley drum set in the back. We’ll play for hours and sometimes the cops will come about 11:30. “That’s enough boys.” They know me by now. They don’t get too pissed off because the music is real good.
DNA: Are you still having trouble naming the band?
BK: It’s the BK3.
DNA: Oh! BK3!!
BK: I didn’t like the word trio, and I have no problem with jazz, but it reminded me of a jazz band. I’d rather be BK3--my initials and 3. That’s the official name. The other name we tried to use but my manager talked me out of it—The Egyptian Windmill Operaters. That’s our name—Egyptian Windmill Operators. It doesn’t have to make sense. Like Aquarium Rescue Unit. She said, “You oughta use your initials.” If you could call us BK3(Egyptian Windmill Operators), I would dig that. See, I’m a little comedian too.
DNA: I always thought you were the funniest guy in the band.
BK: I don’t know how to take that. ( silence followed by laughter)
DNA: You pulled out of being somewhat reclusive from the Dead scene to do this Obama gig. Was it Obama that pulled all of you together?
BK: Well yeah. It was really him. I missed the first show those guys did for him.
DNA: At the Warfield.
BK: Bob wanted me to make it. But I had just flown in from Costa Rico for hours, and the gig was the next day, and it was more than I could do. It went real well for them. Bobby said we could get something together at Penn State and he was like, “Let’s do it.”
I met with Bobby and said, “Well if we’re going to all this trouble to get together for Penn State, let’s get together and do a tour.” And everybody said yes to it. It was kinda my idea, I guess. If you’re going to all this trouble for one gig, why not tour?
DNA: So it’s a show-by-show thing, no future plans, take this tour and see what happens?
BK: Yup. We’re going to practice for 20 days before we hit the road. 20 rehearsal day. Some of those are set-up days. It’s going to different. We don’t want to structure it the way we used to—ya know, four or five years ago—we want to change it up and make it better. I want to talk about that, but I really want to talk about the trio. People who like the Dead will really like BK3.
DNA: You guys play a bunch of Dead tunes.
BK: Not a bunch. We do some really nice covers like “Rhymes” by Al Green, as well as, original songs by both Oteil and Scott. I totally encourage that. Everyone is doing tons of Dead stuff, and it’s a great book to play from, no doubt about it, so that’s being covered. In our band we will certainly do our fair share, but Hunter wrote us 12 original songs. And we’ve played 8 or 10 of them so far. They’re way cool songs.
DNA: How’s Hunter doing?
BK: His writing is incredible. I have a phone call when we are done one to Mickey, and one to Bob. I need to send him a DVD of BK3 from the Culture Room (Ft. Lauderdale, FL.). It will blow his mind. He should be quite happy. If I was him I would be quite happy.
DNA: I look forward to hearing those new tunes played out. Mike Gordon (bass player for Phish) helped curate this band?
BK: We call him the curator. We started over a year ago when Mike invited us down to do a benefit gig down in Costa Rico in a town called Jaco. It’s a surf town about halfway down the coast. The benefit was for the school system and we stayed at Mike’s dad’s house. To cut to the chase, Scott was the guitar player, and about two songs in I knew I had a player on my hands that could go anywhere--we played maybe 5 hours that night, we got really into it. People loved it and we got to give money to the school system, which was the most important thing. The next day I said, “Mike I had a really good time last night, let’s do this more.” He said, “Bill, I’ll do it whenever I can but I’ve got my own band.” I thought to myself what am I going to do, sit at home and audition bass players? I said, “Mike I want somebody who is the best at their instrument and who knows me.” And Mike said, “Lets call Oteil.” Oteil said OK and that’s why we call Mike the curator. We all are having the best time, I just love it!
DNA: Oteil is just a monster bass player, t takes it so many places.
BK: Well they got a drummer who likes to take it many places too. He’s having a lot of fun and Scotts the same way. Scott feels the same way as far as freedom and imagination, he doesn’t play the same thing twice in a row. He takes solos and you think he’s done and he’s only halfway through. He’s building and building and building and doing all these tonal changes and it’s really good music. They trade off all these licks and lines and sides of solos, which is really fun, or they’ll play in unison or harmony parts on the same line and I’m back there laughing. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I know the Deadheads in Santa Cruz, or anyone that loves good electric music will enjoy it. I don’t like to use the word jazz, I like to say free music. It’s not traditional music, if anything it’s close to fusion. Ya know DNA, I love your name, I heard this one track, and I said, “What band is that?” And my girlfriend Amy said, “You nut, that’s you!” She had put on some of the CDs I had lying around the house and I thought I was listening to some fusion band. I was like, “Fuck, that’s us?” That’s’ how happy I am with this band. Onstage they crowd around my bass drum and you have three guys laughing their brains out while their playing. It’s sort of Bluegrassish in this way. We play real close and play tight music.
DNA: You’re kicking off the tour in Santa Cruz, cannot wait! You said that you will rehearse with the Dead for 20 days, will you have anytime to practice with BK3?
BK: We won’t have time. Maybe we’ll get in there that afternoon and play a few songs, but that’s how it goes with the trio, we don’t really need to rehearse. I’m not reallt sure how that sounds to you. . .
DNA: You guys are all consummate professionals. . .
BK: We’ve all played for years. You’re the first interviewer whose known both Scott and Oteil, most people don’t know either, and if anyone gets known it’s Oteil and me. But I’m glad you know Scott, he’s an amazing guitar player. And their voices are great as well and they complement each other. Scott has kinda of a raspy voice and Oteil has kind of a pretty gospel voice, nice contrast of tones.
DNA: I grew up on the East Coast we would go see Max Creek, waiting for the Dead to return. It was cold and we had to stay warm.
BK: I don’t feel like I’m the leader of the band. I like for everyone to be the leader. It’s sorta Obamaish. He said, “I’m your leader, but you all got take a hand in this thing.” That’s how we do it. I don’t tell them what to do, I say, “Here are some ideas, what do you think?”
DNA: Do you have a set list before you start?
BK: We call up a few songs. We have a master list sitting out there and think which key might fit with the next song, tempo or feeling. We don’t have to have a set list at all. One night I got up there at Toads in Connecticut and played a 1/2 hour drum solo before those guys came out and joined me. I brought down a good hard beat and started jamming on the beat and made up another song and played it for an hour and a 1/2 and then started a song off the list. We went into Eyes of the World—it was the biggest meltdown! It’s great to see the audience having that much fun—very reminiscent. Now that Obama is president, I feel better.
DNA: The world is just as crazy, but it’s nice to have a guy at the helm that you don’t hate.
BK: I was in Washington for the inaugeration to play with the band. I was watching television in my hotel room—there was two million people a 1/2 a mile away, I decided, well, my hotel room is safe—so I was watching the swearing in on TV. There’s the old tradition of the president getting in the helicopter and flying away—and I heard a helicopter outside my window, I grabbed Amy and we went to the window and it was Bush flying away—so we gave him a big wave. Good riddance, man.
DNA: 8 years of lunacy.
BK: It felt much longer than 8 years.
DNA: Well there was his Dad as well. I just heard they’re talking about Jeb in 2012. It’s way to early to hear stuff like that. Too soon, too soon.
BK: How about Palin?
DNA: Drill Baby Drill.
BK: Let’s shoot wolves from helicopters.
DNA: She gave a lot of fodder to comedians.
BK: Didn’t do her any good. When McCain chose her I thought he did it because he didn’t really want to be president. I doubt that was his thought but it appeared that way.
DNA: He couldn’t have made a goofier choice.
BK: I know. Thank god.
DNA: Had a question about Hawaii. You guys passed the Lowest Law Enforcement Priority of Cannabis Ordinance, but your police chief recently said that, “anyone who is pro-marijuana is automatically pro-terrorist.”
BK: Blame it on being slow-minded and uninformed. Hawaii is very backward when it comes to things that are fun like marijuana and dancing. The caberet laws are in effect. There are no places on this island where you can go and dance. You can go out and sit-down, but you can’t dance. There has been a ton of corruption politically and it’s the good-old-boy syndrome—which is another word for gangster. The way I deal with it is by living my life in the best way, trying to be an example to other people. There was a guy here, Andrew Kluger, who built a dam that broke 2.5 years ago and killed several people. . .
http://archives.starbulletin.com/2006/03/15/news/story01.html
. . .and the corruption goes all the way up to the Governor. They never inspected the dams, they knew one was leaking and it finally broke. It was 400 million gallons of water, it carved a miniature Grand Canyon—took out the property across from me, which is Better Midlers property. I got the least damage from it, but I lost all my Ag water, so I couldn’t water all my beautiful flowers, and they died. The city water has too much chlorine in it and it’s also very expensive. What I’m saying is that for such a beautiful place it’s amazingly backward.
DNA: To go indirectly back to the Dead for a second. I lived in Maui but realized that to fight the good fight and make a difference I needed to move back to Turtle Island. And I gotta say that it was through touring with you guys for 500 shows that I realized it was through being an activist and community action that you could really help those around you.
BK: You’ve got a good heart. I’ll tell ya, the cops here are just really mean, unduly mean. They take pride in being bullies.
DNA: Well play it safe with that garage of yours.
BK: I don’t do anything that they could get too down on me for. Last Friday night it was a lady cop that came to shut us down. She was very polite and she said, “Wow, that sounds really good, but it’s 11:30 and we’ve been getting complaints.”
DNA: Was it Bette Midler that called the cops?
BK: No..no..Just saying that Hawaii is Obama land, but their policies are not like Obama.
DNA: Corruption runs deep. Look at Blagojevich.
BK: I cannot believe that he is still in the news.
DNA: Hey you screw up at work really bad and it takes balls to keep showing up.
BK: Yup. After the inauguration we played that night. The next night, thanks to Mickey Hart, I got invited to a Power Party. Nancy Pelosi was there, Barbara Boxer was there, Harry Reid was there, Diane Feinstein was there—all the heavys. That asked us a lot of questions and I always promote Green. I pleaded to build solar panel factories, obvious stuff. Let’s take all those Mercedes store in Long Beach that cannot be sold and put electric motors in those son-of-bitches. I was running all this stuff down and the vibe was really optimistic. Those folks didn’t like working for Bush and there was joy I the air and that made me feel better about our country. I wasn’t too happy with Bush and I know you haven’t.
DNA: It’s hip to talk Green, but when is somebody going to thank the hippies for thinking of it all.
BK: we never get thanked, but as long as they take action that will be enough.
DNA: Thanks a lot for the talk Bill. If you ever need a stand-up comedian to open for you guys. . .
BK: You can call me every morning to make me laugh.
DNA: It’s on. Expect a call tomorrow at 6am.
BK: Come find me in Santa Cruz I have a story about John Belushi I want to tell you.
DNA: OK.
BK: How did you get the name DNA?
DNA: In 1990 I was backstage for a Showtime comedy contest. I was backstage, high on acid, freaking out that I didn’t have anything funny to say. And then I remembered that my initials were DNA—which is funny.
BK: Perfect.
DNA: One last thing. The only interaction we ever had in the past. . .
BK: Uh oh.
DNA: In 1986 I was at a Bill Graham private party at the Fillmore. John Lee Hooker was there, Huey Lewis, The Charlatans were playing onstage, it was insane. Everyone knew each other, except for me. I was like an orphan at a family reunion.
BK: Orphan!
DNA: I was standing next to the dance floor, where a bunch of high-class ladies were shaking it. And you pushed me into the dance floor and said, “Get in there and dance young man!”
BK: Great story, I’m not usually that pushy!
DNA: Alright, see you in Santa Cruz. Aloha.
BK: Aloha!
Friday, July 25, 2008
Mickey Hart Interview
What’s That Up Ahead?: An Interview With Mickey Hart
By DNA
It was with anticipation and deep honor that I got to interview Mickey Hart. There isn’t much that I can tell you about the man that you don’t already know. I mean what can I say, Mickey is one bad-ass mofo!! I do remember two distinct stories about Mickey that might help you understand my fondness for the guy though.
The place was Nassau Coliseum, Long Island during the early eighties. It was that phase of tour when many, and I mean many, people would go in the hallways during drums. Yes fans, you know it’s true. There was a long stretch you treated drums like you treat Dylan. You split till it’s over. (By the way, Dylan rules!) I worked my way to one of those killer seats right behind the drums that always seemed to be open, but yet was one of the best places to watch the band in the Coliseum. Mickey just finished a drum solo that was godly. Parish placed a towel on Mickey’s shoulders and led him off the stage. I realized that this I had just witnessed the best drum set ever, the most tapped in primal rhythm I had ever seen. Of course for Mickey, it was just another night on the road.
The second story actually shows me to be a crazy man. It involved a later eighties show at the other receptacle of huge shows, Oakland Coliseum. I found myself during drums, in the midst of a gigantic DNA strand that was running in opposite directions into infinity. And inside that cockpit of genetic material was Mickey Hart working his magic and keeping it real. Whew! Lock me up and throw away the key. I am certified.
It’s officially one year I have been writing for you all at Jambands.Com, and I want you to know that I think of you all as my friends and that even though I am supremely opinionated in my head, that in my heart, I’m all about “One Love.” With that disclaimer out of the way, let the opinions begin. The Dead were the most important band of the century. They were a group of musicians who wrote awesome tunes, jammed better than anyone since Smuckers, and were brilliant and interesting each in their own right. They were also more than a band. They were midwives to change, they were cheerleaders for weirdness, they were a tribal syncopation that allowed transcendent splendor. These facts are irrefutable and I will openly debate anyone who disagrees. So, bring it on!
Since Garcia died, I have been reticent to make many comments on how I feel about the scene. Basically, if The Dead were a signpost to new space, then the future awaits us beyond the signs, pointing fingers and remnant parts. On that note, enter this interview with an open mind, as I seek to explore the weirdness of it all with Mickey Hart.
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
I was testing the equipment to make sure the tape deck worked.
DNA: Mickey I’d just like to say it’s an honor to be talking with you, I’m a big fan, I’ve always been a big fan and I will continue to be a big fan.
“Well I ain’t often right”
My phone rings:
Mickey Hart: DNA this is Mickey are you ready?
DNA: I thought it was at noon.
Mickey: Well what time is it?
DNA: Uhm, 11:30. I was just writing down a bunch of questions
Mickey: Well that’s close enough--do you want me to call you back?
DNA: No, I’m ready, I’m excited how are you doing?
Mickey: Good, let’s rock.
DNA: Briefly, I followed you around from '78 till '92 and saw about 500 dead shows and side projects.
Mickey: Oh my god, holy Jesus.
“But I’ve never been wrong”
DNA: I was dedicated. I ended up getting my Masters from Sonoma State in Transpersonal Psychology.
Mickey: Do you know Stanley Krippner?
DNA: I happen to have a signed copy of Song of the Sirens right here in my hands. So my first question would be about the ESP experiment that the Dead were involved with at the Capitol Theater back in 1971. And I know that shows get a bit fuzzy over the years…..
Mickey: NO, I remember it quite vividly.
DNA: How was it you got involved in that exactly?
Mickey: Well at the time Stanley was the director of the dream laboratory in Brooklyn in New York City. He was conducting studies in dream telepathy and he was using psychedelics in that research. This was before '71 though…
DNA: It started in 1970 with Richie Havens.
Mickey: Richie was one of the sleepers.
DNA: And the Holy Modal Rounders.
Mickey: That’s right. So Stanley was working there using mind expanding drugs, working Kirlian photography and all kinds of stuff. Stanley was a pioneer, a circumnavigator and he was fond of the Grateful Dead. I met him at a party for the great Indian drummer. That is where we met and we became great friends. Eventually Garcia, Stanley and I got into a conversation where Garcia proposed the experiment. A plan got formulated where there would be a group of sleepers at the Dream Lab and we would ask the audience to concentrate on an image that was presented behind us. Our idea was to send that imagery to the sleepers via telepathy. We did the experiment for five or six nights and got like five direct hits. The sleepers accurately described the image that was behind the wall during REM. It was a very powerful night. The images were selected at random by being pulled out of a hat. It was a great moment.
DNA: Did you ever do anything like that again?
Mickey: No, we never repeated that experiment again. I know that other people have done similar events, but you’ll have to research that one.
“Seldom turns out the way it does in the song”
DNA: I did an interview with Uri Geller (Israeli Psychic) yesterday so I’m on an ESP kick right now.
Mickey: Well it is fascinating. Our main focus was the idea of group mind. We saw the Grateful Dead as a group mind and one in which were able to share with the audience. We were able to take an image and project it into the audience and send it to receptive receivers. It proved a lot on a lot of levels.
“In the strangest of places if you look at it right”
DNA: I attended the Ritual and Rapture lecture that featured you, Garcia and Joseph Campbell. I recall a Deadhead asking Garcia about telepathy at Dead shows. His question was something like, “There are times at a show when my friends and I will think of a certain song and you will play it, and we know you know.” Garcia’s response was, “That’s pee-pee.” (anyone out there have a tape of this?)
Mickey: He said what?!
DNA: He said that people who he knew weren’t crazy had told him similar things. But it had never been proven to him beyond satisfactorily. He said it was pee-pee.
Mickey: I happen to agree with Garcia, though I wouldn’t call it pee-pee. I would call it unproven. My hypothesis is that it’s not impossible, it is within the realm of possibility. And certain people that are connected on one level or another can receive messages, synchronicity, entrainment or being in the flow. I believe that when people’s rhythms are locked they have something deep in common it happens. My question is this, “I know it happens, but can you prove it?” There’s just no conclusive proof. All through my life I’ve had people where I’ve called them up and they have picked up the phone without it ringing. I just had an interesting thing happen with Jean Campbell, Joe Campbell's wife. I hadn’t talked to Jeanie for a year and half or two years, and I just called her up a couple of weeks ago. I was like, “Hi, Jean, this is Mickey.” “Mickey, I just dreamed of you last night.” I was like, “Jean, has that happened before,” and she said, “No.” These are the kinds of things that make you wonder. She said, “I had a dream last night that I should call you.” We just kind of hung there for a moment. It just isn’t that unusual for people that are connected.
DNA: That’s a grounding experience, bad science, but a good anchor.
Mickey: Hunter and I once wrote a song once, completely separate. He wrote the words and I wrote the music, but when we put them together they were completely identical. There was absolutely no way that either one of us could have heard the other's composition. He never played it in front of anyone and I never played it front of anyone. He swore that I stole his music, but we looked at it and it would have been impossible to ever have either of us know what the other was thinking. Things like that happen all the time in a world where people are connected.
DNA: Grateful minds think alike.
Mickey: Definitely Synchronous minds.
“Once in a while you get shown the light”
DNA: I interviewed Apollo 12 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. He said he was having lunch with Uri Geller and was telling Uri that he was disappointed that Uri resorted to trickery so much to prove that ESP existed. When all of a sudden there was a plop in his soup and it was a tie clip he had lost ten years before halfway across the country.
Mickey: I mean c’mon, Uri Geller is a real guy, he definitely is a showman, a circus performer but you cannot deny his psychic powers. That psychic stuff has been totally proven. I met him once and he was a bit of a jerk. Though that does not take away from his talent.
DNA: Would you consider Uri a contemporary Shaman? Or, where do we find people in our society that can link up with the spirit world?
Mickey: He has Shamanistic powers, but does he use it for the betterment of the world, I don’t think so. Mostly I see him as a vaudeville performer. I don’t see him making a better world, do you?
DNA: Not unless he reads my mind and mails me a million bucks. That would make my world better.
Mickey: Is he a healer, a medicine man?
DNA: In his new book, he talks about how his castle in England is often filled with kids from a cancer ward of hospital. Apparently he performs healings on them.
Mickey: Well there you go.
DNA: Where is the contemporary of Rolling Thunder? Is there a war on Shamanism?
Mickey: There has always been a war on Shamanism. It is an edge science, and anybody who is on the edge is always suspect. For the individual who is there, it doesn’t always work. It’s living your life by the seat of your pants. Whenever you deal with non-scientific experimentation you’re going to find Shamans. The word connotes “thinker.” It’s part of the lexicon, he doesn’t have to be a healer, he could be a faker.
DNA: Was Rolling Thunder genuine?
Mickey: Rolling Thunder was the real deal. I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes so there is no question about it. Of course he surrounded himself with a lot of Mumbo Jumbo as well, as all Shaman. So much of Shamans is the show, the act. You have to prepare. Belief is such a big part of Shamanism, you have win the persons confidence to heal. Or invade if it’s surgery, or even if it’s a mental healing, you must prepare the person for induction. Typically, rhythm, song or vibration, or magical charms do it. It’s mental and physical and there are many different approaches to doctoring and each one of them has their own tool kit. Rolling Thunder for the most part was herbal based and it worked. I picked herbs with him and he was a genius in that field. Stanley and I were also good friends with Rolling Thunder.
DNA: So where is the contemporary Shaman?
Mickey: Everywhere. Women are taking a big step forward and coming on strong. Musicians and artists or anyone who deals with the spirit world has potential. We haven’t cracked the code of DNA yet. Sorry, I hate to say that word.
DNA: That’s all right, I get a dime anyone says it.
Mickey: Science is starting to weigh in on this topic though. At a recent conference in New York on Music on the Brain, there was work done on what a brain looks like before and after an auditory driving experience and how vibration effects brainwaves. There is a scientific study being done in Santa Cruz called the Heart Math. What they are finding is that the heart isn’t just an organ that pumps blood, but it also pumps emotional content. And when you find pure science starting to study the physics of vibration, it isn’t long before they find the metaphysics.
DNA: So Science is mapping the human body in how it relates to environment, but also in the way it relates to consciousness.
Mickey: Yes, science is reinforcing and codifying the shaman way. It comes down to how do we create trance on a daily basis. What is the rhythm, what’s the rate? We’re trying to tune into the frequency so we can duplicate the experience and do it twice. Again, at the moment we’re doing it by the seat of our pants, but this century will crack that code.
DNA: If technological advances are often co-opted by the government for the purpose of war, do you see trance being used in that way?
Mickey: I don’t think so. It will be a war all right, but it will be a war of the minds and fight for the spirit world. There will be battles fought, but nothing we’re used to. I see the first application being used for medicine and therapy.
“Rings on her finger and bells on her toes”
DNA: If we presuppose that the Drum is an instrument that elicits trance and can create the environment for time travel, in the sense that it could physically move you to another time, where would you put yourself.
Mickey: I would go back to the Paleolithic. I’m a big fan of first man; I would have liked to have seen what it was like when we first came together as humans. I’ve already experienced the fifties and the sixties; I know what that’s like. Either that or the turn of the century, those are two times that hold great interest for me: The dawn of the Industrial age and the dawn of man. I would also like to go back to Congo Square at the turn of the century. About 1890 New Orleans, that is a fascinating time, for it is the birth of music in our country. Ya know, I would really like to see some Temple caves about 9000 BC as well.
DNA: What I find interesting about Congo Square and your thought about it being the birthplace of our music. Couldn’t’ it be argued that at that time there was great divine intervention and that all our music, Blues, Jazz, Rock and Roll comes from the Spirit World.
Mickey: Absolutely. It was where the Spirit Music of Western Africa came and hit our shore. At the end of the Haitian Revolution at the end of the 1700’s, it ended up in Congo Square, and that was it, baby. That’s where it all started. That’s when the slaves were given back their instruments to play on Sundays. That was the only day they were allowed to go into trance. Where do you think we got Rock and Roll, Big bands and Jazz? It all that came through Haiti and eventually to New Orleans. The birthplace of the cool.
DNA: Is cool more than attitude?
Mickey: Attitude is a big part of it. But they also brought the instruments and the most powerful rhythms on the planet. All of the vodon stuff came with it.
DNA: I find it interesting that if you see divine providence in the thousands of year preceding New Orleans, whether Mohammed, Jesus, Moses or what have you, spirit came in words. But then suddenly it descended through rhythms and it is music that has been the backbone of the last 110 years.
Mickey: Words do not entrance you on a physical level, they can on a mental level. It’s about the vibration.
“The sky was yellow, the sun was blue”
DNA: Well let me ask one final question here.
Mickey: This is the strangest interview I’ve had for while, but it’s nice. I’m OK with it.
DNA: Well I followed you around for so long, this is my shot. Twilight Zone episodes, when are they coming back?
Mickey: Shit, I have no idea.
DNA: I know you pioneered 3D holographic sound for those episodes and now with DVD and home sound systems, the full effects can really be seen.
Mickey: I spent three weeks in a row at the University of Illinois, at Northwestern, trying to make sound move in mono. We had a giant computer that did create sound that had movement in a holographic way. After I did get vertical and horizontal movement, CBS didn’t follow through on the transmission, so it became a mute point. Wow, I had forgotten all about that. I spent three weeks in this little room. Every time I made an update, it took all night for the computers for the main frame computers to crunch it. I had to do it all in little pieces. The theme is actually holophonic. It works great in 5.1.
DNA: When it was first on, I would sit an inch away from the TV set and listen for the sound to move.
Mickey: For a while there we got it to the point where the sound seemed like it wasn’t coming out of the speakers. It was so time consuming and costly back then. It was the first of it’s kind. I really like the episode called Grandma, written by Harlan Ellison. I was the music designer and the set designer on it. I worked on 79 of those episodes. Wow, man thanks for reminding me, we should re-release those suckers.
(all lyrics from Scarlet Begonia. Author Robert Hunter. Copyright Ice Nine Publishing)
DNA is an International Journalist who lives in Northern California with his wife and three cats. He is currently running for Mayor and getting involved in the Green Party.
By DNA
It was with anticipation and deep honor that I got to interview Mickey Hart. There isn’t much that I can tell you about the man that you don’t already know. I mean what can I say, Mickey is one bad-ass mofo!! I do remember two distinct stories about Mickey that might help you understand my fondness for the guy though.
The place was Nassau Coliseum, Long Island during the early eighties. It was that phase of tour when many, and I mean many, people would go in the hallways during drums. Yes fans, you know it’s true. There was a long stretch you treated drums like you treat Dylan. You split till it’s over. (By the way, Dylan rules!) I worked my way to one of those killer seats right behind the drums that always seemed to be open, but yet was one of the best places to watch the band in the Coliseum. Mickey just finished a drum solo that was godly. Parish placed a towel on Mickey’s shoulders and led him off the stage. I realized that this I had just witnessed the best drum set ever, the most tapped in primal rhythm I had ever seen. Of course for Mickey, it was just another night on the road.
The second story actually shows me to be a crazy man. It involved a later eighties show at the other receptacle of huge shows, Oakland Coliseum. I found myself during drums, in the midst of a gigantic DNA strand that was running in opposite directions into infinity. And inside that cockpit of genetic material was Mickey Hart working his magic and keeping it real. Whew! Lock me up and throw away the key. I am certified.
It’s officially one year I have been writing for you all at Jambands.Com, and I want you to know that I think of you all as my friends and that even though I am supremely opinionated in my head, that in my heart, I’m all about “One Love.” With that disclaimer out of the way, let the opinions begin. The Dead were the most important band of the century. They were a group of musicians who wrote awesome tunes, jammed better than anyone since Smuckers, and were brilliant and interesting each in their own right. They were also more than a band. They were midwives to change, they were cheerleaders for weirdness, they were a tribal syncopation that allowed transcendent splendor. These facts are irrefutable and I will openly debate anyone who disagrees. So, bring it on!
Since Garcia died, I have been reticent to make many comments on how I feel about the scene. Basically, if The Dead were a signpost to new space, then the future awaits us beyond the signs, pointing fingers and remnant parts. On that note, enter this interview with an open mind, as I seek to explore the weirdness of it all with Mickey Hart.
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
I was testing the equipment to make sure the tape deck worked.
DNA: Mickey I’d just like to say it’s an honor to be talking with you, I’m a big fan, I’ve always been a big fan and I will continue to be a big fan.
“Well I ain’t often right”
My phone rings:
Mickey Hart: DNA this is Mickey are you ready?
DNA: I thought it was at noon.
Mickey: Well what time is it?
DNA: Uhm, 11:30. I was just writing down a bunch of questions
Mickey: Well that’s close enough--do you want me to call you back?
DNA: No, I’m ready, I’m excited how are you doing?
Mickey: Good, let’s rock.
DNA: Briefly, I followed you around from '78 till '92 and saw about 500 dead shows and side projects.
Mickey: Oh my god, holy Jesus.
“But I’ve never been wrong”
DNA: I was dedicated. I ended up getting my Masters from Sonoma State in Transpersonal Psychology.
Mickey: Do you know Stanley Krippner?
DNA: I happen to have a signed copy of Song of the Sirens right here in my hands. So my first question would be about the ESP experiment that the Dead were involved with at the Capitol Theater back in 1971. And I know that shows get a bit fuzzy over the years…..
Mickey: NO, I remember it quite vividly.
DNA: How was it you got involved in that exactly?
Mickey: Well at the time Stanley was the director of the dream laboratory in Brooklyn in New York City. He was conducting studies in dream telepathy and he was using psychedelics in that research. This was before '71 though…
DNA: It started in 1970 with Richie Havens.
Mickey: Richie was one of the sleepers.
DNA: And the Holy Modal Rounders.
Mickey: That’s right. So Stanley was working there using mind expanding drugs, working Kirlian photography and all kinds of stuff. Stanley was a pioneer, a circumnavigator and he was fond of the Grateful Dead. I met him at a party for the great Indian drummer. That is where we met and we became great friends. Eventually Garcia, Stanley and I got into a conversation where Garcia proposed the experiment. A plan got formulated where there would be a group of sleepers at the Dream Lab and we would ask the audience to concentrate on an image that was presented behind us. Our idea was to send that imagery to the sleepers via telepathy. We did the experiment for five or six nights and got like five direct hits. The sleepers accurately described the image that was behind the wall during REM. It was a very powerful night. The images were selected at random by being pulled out of a hat. It was a great moment.
DNA: Did you ever do anything like that again?
Mickey: No, we never repeated that experiment again. I know that other people have done similar events, but you’ll have to research that one.
“Seldom turns out the way it does in the song”
DNA: I did an interview with Uri Geller (Israeli Psychic) yesterday so I’m on an ESP kick right now.
Mickey: Well it is fascinating. Our main focus was the idea of group mind. We saw the Grateful Dead as a group mind and one in which were able to share with the audience. We were able to take an image and project it into the audience and send it to receptive receivers. It proved a lot on a lot of levels.
“In the strangest of places if you look at it right”
DNA: I attended the Ritual and Rapture lecture that featured you, Garcia and Joseph Campbell. I recall a Deadhead asking Garcia about telepathy at Dead shows. His question was something like, “There are times at a show when my friends and I will think of a certain song and you will play it, and we know you know.” Garcia’s response was, “That’s pee-pee.” (anyone out there have a tape of this?)
Mickey: He said what?!
DNA: He said that people who he knew weren’t crazy had told him similar things. But it had never been proven to him beyond satisfactorily. He said it was pee-pee.
Mickey: I happen to agree with Garcia, though I wouldn’t call it pee-pee. I would call it unproven. My hypothesis is that it’s not impossible, it is within the realm of possibility. And certain people that are connected on one level or another can receive messages, synchronicity, entrainment or being in the flow. I believe that when people’s rhythms are locked they have something deep in common it happens. My question is this, “I know it happens, but can you prove it?” There’s just no conclusive proof. All through my life I’ve had people where I’ve called them up and they have picked up the phone without it ringing. I just had an interesting thing happen with Jean Campbell, Joe Campbell's wife. I hadn’t talked to Jeanie for a year and half or two years, and I just called her up a couple of weeks ago. I was like, “Hi, Jean, this is Mickey.” “Mickey, I just dreamed of you last night.” I was like, “Jean, has that happened before,” and she said, “No.” These are the kinds of things that make you wonder. She said, “I had a dream last night that I should call you.” We just kind of hung there for a moment. It just isn’t that unusual for people that are connected.
DNA: That’s a grounding experience, bad science, but a good anchor.
Mickey: Hunter and I once wrote a song once, completely separate. He wrote the words and I wrote the music, but when we put them together they were completely identical. There was absolutely no way that either one of us could have heard the other's composition. He never played it in front of anyone and I never played it front of anyone. He swore that I stole his music, but we looked at it and it would have been impossible to ever have either of us know what the other was thinking. Things like that happen all the time in a world where people are connected.
DNA: Grateful minds think alike.
Mickey: Definitely Synchronous minds.
“Once in a while you get shown the light”
DNA: I interviewed Apollo 12 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. He said he was having lunch with Uri Geller and was telling Uri that he was disappointed that Uri resorted to trickery so much to prove that ESP existed. When all of a sudden there was a plop in his soup and it was a tie clip he had lost ten years before halfway across the country.
Mickey: I mean c’mon, Uri Geller is a real guy, he definitely is a showman, a circus performer but you cannot deny his psychic powers. That psychic stuff has been totally proven. I met him once and he was a bit of a jerk. Though that does not take away from his talent.
DNA: Would you consider Uri a contemporary Shaman? Or, where do we find people in our society that can link up with the spirit world?
Mickey: He has Shamanistic powers, but does he use it for the betterment of the world, I don’t think so. Mostly I see him as a vaudeville performer. I don’t see him making a better world, do you?
DNA: Not unless he reads my mind and mails me a million bucks. That would make my world better.
Mickey: Is he a healer, a medicine man?
DNA: In his new book, he talks about how his castle in England is often filled with kids from a cancer ward of hospital. Apparently he performs healings on them.
Mickey: Well there you go.
DNA: Where is the contemporary of Rolling Thunder? Is there a war on Shamanism?
Mickey: There has always been a war on Shamanism. It is an edge science, and anybody who is on the edge is always suspect. For the individual who is there, it doesn’t always work. It’s living your life by the seat of your pants. Whenever you deal with non-scientific experimentation you’re going to find Shamans. The word connotes “thinker.” It’s part of the lexicon, he doesn’t have to be a healer, he could be a faker.
DNA: Was Rolling Thunder genuine?
Mickey: Rolling Thunder was the real deal. I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes so there is no question about it. Of course he surrounded himself with a lot of Mumbo Jumbo as well, as all Shaman. So much of Shamans is the show, the act. You have to prepare. Belief is such a big part of Shamanism, you have win the persons confidence to heal. Or invade if it’s surgery, or even if it’s a mental healing, you must prepare the person for induction. Typically, rhythm, song or vibration, or magical charms do it. It’s mental and physical and there are many different approaches to doctoring and each one of them has their own tool kit. Rolling Thunder for the most part was herbal based and it worked. I picked herbs with him and he was a genius in that field. Stanley and I were also good friends with Rolling Thunder.
DNA: So where is the contemporary Shaman?
Mickey: Everywhere. Women are taking a big step forward and coming on strong. Musicians and artists or anyone who deals with the spirit world has potential. We haven’t cracked the code of DNA yet. Sorry, I hate to say that word.
DNA: That’s all right, I get a dime anyone says it.
Mickey: Science is starting to weigh in on this topic though. At a recent conference in New York on Music on the Brain, there was work done on what a brain looks like before and after an auditory driving experience and how vibration effects brainwaves. There is a scientific study being done in Santa Cruz called the Heart Math. What they are finding is that the heart isn’t just an organ that pumps blood, but it also pumps emotional content. And when you find pure science starting to study the physics of vibration, it isn’t long before they find the metaphysics.
DNA: So Science is mapping the human body in how it relates to environment, but also in the way it relates to consciousness.
Mickey: Yes, science is reinforcing and codifying the shaman way. It comes down to how do we create trance on a daily basis. What is the rhythm, what’s the rate? We’re trying to tune into the frequency so we can duplicate the experience and do it twice. Again, at the moment we’re doing it by the seat of our pants, but this century will crack that code.
DNA: If technological advances are often co-opted by the government for the purpose of war, do you see trance being used in that way?
Mickey: I don’t think so. It will be a war all right, but it will be a war of the minds and fight for the spirit world. There will be battles fought, but nothing we’re used to. I see the first application being used for medicine and therapy.
“Rings on her finger and bells on her toes”
DNA: If we presuppose that the Drum is an instrument that elicits trance and can create the environment for time travel, in the sense that it could physically move you to another time, where would you put yourself.
Mickey: I would go back to the Paleolithic. I’m a big fan of first man; I would have liked to have seen what it was like when we first came together as humans. I’ve already experienced the fifties and the sixties; I know what that’s like. Either that or the turn of the century, those are two times that hold great interest for me: The dawn of the Industrial age and the dawn of man. I would also like to go back to Congo Square at the turn of the century. About 1890 New Orleans, that is a fascinating time, for it is the birth of music in our country. Ya know, I would really like to see some Temple caves about 9000 BC as well.
DNA: What I find interesting about Congo Square and your thought about it being the birthplace of our music. Couldn’t’ it be argued that at that time there was great divine intervention and that all our music, Blues, Jazz, Rock and Roll comes from the Spirit World.
Mickey: Absolutely. It was where the Spirit Music of Western Africa came and hit our shore. At the end of the Haitian Revolution at the end of the 1700’s, it ended up in Congo Square, and that was it, baby. That’s where it all started. That’s when the slaves were given back their instruments to play on Sundays. That was the only day they were allowed to go into trance. Where do you think we got Rock and Roll, Big bands and Jazz? It all that came through Haiti and eventually to New Orleans. The birthplace of the cool.
DNA: Is cool more than attitude?
Mickey: Attitude is a big part of it. But they also brought the instruments and the most powerful rhythms on the planet. All of the vodon stuff came with it.
DNA: I find it interesting that if you see divine providence in the thousands of year preceding New Orleans, whether Mohammed, Jesus, Moses or what have you, spirit came in words. But then suddenly it descended through rhythms and it is music that has been the backbone of the last 110 years.
Mickey: Words do not entrance you on a physical level, they can on a mental level. It’s about the vibration.
“The sky was yellow, the sun was blue”
DNA: Well let me ask one final question here.
Mickey: This is the strangest interview I’ve had for while, but it’s nice. I’m OK with it.
DNA: Well I followed you around for so long, this is my shot. Twilight Zone episodes, when are they coming back?
Mickey: Shit, I have no idea.
DNA: I know you pioneered 3D holographic sound for those episodes and now with DVD and home sound systems, the full effects can really be seen.
Mickey: I spent three weeks in a row at the University of Illinois, at Northwestern, trying to make sound move in mono. We had a giant computer that did create sound that had movement in a holographic way. After I did get vertical and horizontal movement, CBS didn’t follow through on the transmission, so it became a mute point. Wow, I had forgotten all about that. I spent three weeks in this little room. Every time I made an update, it took all night for the computers for the main frame computers to crunch it. I had to do it all in little pieces. The theme is actually holophonic. It works great in 5.1.
DNA: When it was first on, I would sit an inch away from the TV set and listen for the sound to move.
Mickey: For a while there we got it to the point where the sound seemed like it wasn’t coming out of the speakers. It was so time consuming and costly back then. It was the first of it’s kind. I really like the episode called Grandma, written by Harlan Ellison. I was the music designer and the set designer on it. I worked on 79 of those episodes. Wow, man thanks for reminding me, we should re-release those suckers.
(all lyrics from Scarlet Begonia. Author Robert Hunter. Copyright Ice Nine Publishing)
DNA is an International Journalist who lives in Northern California with his wife and three cats. He is currently running for Mayor and getting involved in the Green Party.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Interview with BEAR: Sitting on Top of the World
(Originally published in one of my rags, HUMP Megazine)
For those of you who have never heard of Mr. Augustus Owsley Stanley the Third, I suggest that you start reading about recent history in other places other than Government issued text-books.
Owsley has changed the way humanity thinks about things and has been relentless in the way he advocates certain ideas. True to form I found Owsley to be impossible to nail down, but irrefutable in his ideas. If I had to sum up my two years of working on this interview, the one word that comes to mind when I think of Owsley is “persistent.”
Unrelenting in his tenacity Owsley comes through loud and clear as one of the clearest voices to come through the last 30 years, unchanged and focused. For those of you who still don’t know Owsley, also known in legend and myth as “Bear”, let me say these few choice words. Owsley made more quality LSD than anyone else on the planet. Owsley shaped the sound of the Grateful Dead more than any other man who twiddled their knobs. If you credit Gates and Job as reponsible for the way that we know ourselves and as creators of the future, you better add Owsleys name to that dynamic duo. For it was Owsley, who should be given some noble title for his efforts, who took the psychedelic bull by the horns and branded him with the three letters that all tyrannical governments (including our own) fear the most, LSD. But wait kids, Owsley is not here to say that the sugar cube will save the day, no, Owsley believes wholeheartedly that the Ice Age is upon us. It will start in the Northern Hemisphere during a winter season and will quickly, very quickly end our little sham, we call civilization.
So before we continue into our cyber quest let me say a quick statement to Owsley. “I apologize for any inaccuracies that you feel this interview or introduction might have. My genetic (you might call it lazy) inattention to details is prevalent all through my life and while I am trying to overcome this myopic disadvantage, you were caught in my windmill mind. Thank you for your time and I hope these words find you well and healthy.”
And now, like Poncho Villa at Don Quixote’s side, I sidestep towards the leviathan that awaits us at the end of time. A towering grizzely, jaws agape, hunger unsatiated, and ready to HUMP.
DNA- I heard that it was a lucid dream that provided the seminal nugget for your current overview of the
world. How do you feel that man’s role has facilitated the upcoming Ice Age?
BEAR- Sorry to disappoint you, but the dreams of 1982 were the first and the last examples of anything in
my nighttime pastimes that were in any way unusual. I have never at any other time had a dream more than once.
I am confused as to your query : "man's role in facilitating them", as I thought that I made it quite clear that man has no role in the Ice Age cycle, nor does any of his so-called "pollution" impact on the build up to the cyclone in any manner. No matter how much you would like things to be different, you must, if you choose to survive, leave the Northern Hemisphere.
DNA-
Got this from a Graham Hancock book: “Albert Einstein investigated the possibility that the weight of the ice-caps, which are not symmetrically distributed around the pole, might cause a displacement. Einstein
wrote : The Earth's rotation acts on the unsymmetrically deposited masses, and produces centrifugal
momentum that is transmitted to the rigid crust of the Earth. The constantly increasing centrifugal momentum produced this way will, when it reaches a certain point, produce a movement of the Earth's
crust over the Earth's body and this will displace the polar regions towards the equator.”
BEAR- Nonsense!
Einstein would not have said anything of the sort. The mass of the normal polar ice caps is neither unevenly distributed around the poles, nor is it a significant size in reference to the mass of the continental masses. Besides, the continents don't move according to centripetal forces, although 600 million years ago the movement was indeed started by centrifugal forces from the single large continental mass in the south pole, they move by magma welling up in the mid ocean ridges. The continents are approaching the North Pole, not receding from it. Only during the ice age glaciation is the ice mass not evenly arranged around the pole. Even so, we are speaking of masses which are only around a ten-millionth of the mass of the planet, and no way would it affect the rotation.
DNA- Hancock talks about 'flash-frozen' mammoths as well as 90-ft. tall fruit trees locked in the permafrost inside the Arctic Circle. Hancock mentions Professor Charles Hapgoods theory that the landmass of Antartica was 2000 miles further north before the last ice age and was moved to its current
position due to a massive displacement of the earth's crust. Hapgood says that the layer of earth known as
the lithosphere- the thin but rigid outer crust of the planet-could at times be displaced moving as one piece.
BEAR- More nonsense.
Read my essay. The mammoths frozen by a mist of liquid air is an important proof of my storm
mechanism. Their location, which is in Siberia, not Anticarctica, has nothing to do with any shift of poles or ice caps. Antarctica has always contained the South Pole, and the Pole has not moved more than 300
miles in millions of years from where it is now. This is also bogus information you are handing me. Let's call him Hapless rather than Hapgood, if you ask me. Or rather:Clueless.
Excerpt from essay-
I have for the last 17 years been working out the causative mechanism for the initiation of the
glacial advance and retreat which has occurred for the last ~2 million years. I have shared some of
the theoretical musings with George Kukla of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty lab. He believes that
my concept of the causation lying with an atmospheric (meteorological) event is the only currently
believable one. All attempts to model theoretical climatic scenarios such as the Milankovitch have
failed to present any glaciation.
I believe the causation of the glacial masses (which, as we know were not distributed around the
North Pole in a symmetrical fashion, but were entirely confined to North America and Western
Europe--Siberia was essentially ice free, although quite a bit closer to the pole), came about
through a meteorological event, a storm of hemispheric proportions and cataclysmic intensity. I
must warn you: the extreme and unusual weather being experienced everywhere in the world at
this time is part of the build-up which leads into this "storm", which will result in the next period
of ice.
DNA- Well, we've been having our own ice age here in Northern California. We had temperatures 40 degrees colder than ever recorded this past winter. The spring had winter conditions when it's usually over a 100 degrees at that time. We've become the Seattle of California. According to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, "The energy is going from the Earth into the atmosphere. The earth is slowing down." Blame it on El Nino. The heads here are having El Greenio parties.
BEAR-
The bit about the atmosphere changing the Earth's rotational speed is a bunch of hooey. The total mass of
the atmosphere, including the water in the oceans is so small compared with the entire rocky mass of the planet, that no such effects would be possible. Think about it, the entire atmosphere and oceans combined depth is only about 6 miles, and the rock is 8000 miles in diameter, and more than 3 times as dense as water, with a massive metallic core. Somebody is stretching a point pretty far in my estimation. There have long been recognized irregularities in the rotation, but usually they are attributed to the sun and moon's gravitation effects.
DNA- Do you know much about ice caps in Antartica melting? I've read that the Larsens Ice Ledge and
the Pine Island Glacier melting could cause sea levels to raise 20 feet.
BEAR- Of course the polar ice is melting, just as I predicted.
No, there is not going to be any noticeable rise- like 20 feet, the Ice Age Storm will come first.
The floods and "heat waves" you have read about recently are the result of the heat moving to the poles.
The reason there is no global warming (the pan-global satellite readings show a decline in the average
global temp of 0.1C since 1979), is that this heat is melting the ice caps.
The time is growing short...
DNA- Any theories on the Moon harboring life?
BEAR- The Moon is the granite mantle of the Earth's crust, except for the bits left behind, which form the
continents. The amount represented by the ocean basins is identical to the volume of the Moon, and the
Moon has the specific gravity of granite, with no core. The Moon's present rate of regression in orbit, if
calculated back to the point of origin at the Earth's surface, calculates the date at 600 million years ago, at the end of the PreCambrian.
DNA- That was a very pragmatic answer.
BEAR- Is there something wrong with pragmatism?
DNA- The films "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" both deal with asteroids hitting earth. I have a
headline from the NY Times that talks about a Giant Asteroid coming towards earth in 2028. It was the
front-page headline! I recently read Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock, in which he talks about
previous civilizations on Earth being destroyed by cataclysm. Seems we're all heading for a REAL cliffhanger...........
BEAR-
The Headline was the result of a miscalculation. I would not worry about rocks from space, the real story
is in my essay on the Ice Age. Cataclysms have always occurred, but we are still here. TV is
destroying out society, culture and civilization, it is going to be total, and it is happening without any rocks
from space. I outline this in my essay on "Children's TV".
Excerpt from Essay-
There are "windows" of time in which certain skills must be learned by children, and if these windows close, then the child will never learn those skills. So it is that we have all those kids out there who behave as though they were incapable of understanding how to live. They don't, and the scary thing is, it may not be possible now for them to learn. Most people don't understand this. The nearest thing to a description of the effect would be found amongst Marshall MacLuhan's works. So most think I am some sort of ratbag for being against children's TV. They have become dependent upon it to support their lifestyle, like an addictive drug. I have given the whole matter a great deal of thought.
I was a TV broadcast engineer for many years, and still hold the highest class of license the US gov't issues. I am old enough so that I first had a TV in my home when I was 13. NO kids in those days had what is now referred to as "dyslexia". Everybody could read. Of course some were much faster and better readers than others, But... EVERYONE could read. Nowadays they claim up to 40% of kids in the US and 50+% in Australia are extremely deficient in reading skills and a significant number can't read at all.
The Countess Montessori, who developed a complete structure for teaching based on careful observations of babies and small children, first noted the time slots, or windows, for learning different skills, and incorporated them into her system of schooling. The whole picture is sort of MacLuhanesque, in that it is the activity (or lack thereof), rather than the content which is at the core of the problem. Most people are too taken in by content and so don't understand the effect of the media itself, which as MacLuhan pointed out, is totally independent of content (cf. "Gutenberg Galaxy" and "The Medium is the Message").
I am increasingly sure that my ideas expressed in the children's TV essay are the correct reasons for the
obvious and widespread breakdown in society. Mothers neglecting or even torturing their kids, kids
shooting their classmates, various types of mindless vandalism. Basically these people are acting just like
animals, which of course we all are. We are supposed to have a culture laid on over that animal nature
which prescribes our behaviour. There seems to be an ever increasing lack of this acculturation, and I for
one am most concerned. What other causation can there be?
DNA-Since TV is out, are there any books that you find yourself returning to as touchstones?
BEAR- What is wrong with your TV?
DNA- I am pouring over all your essays again and agree that TV neutralizes children into passive
passengers on the bus. Having been weaned on the boob tube, I find myself often returning to its bright
colors for security and a way to kill an hour or two. Chris Carters shows (X-file[s] and Millenium) seem to
make the hour of viewing eventful, but, although not a child, I still feel that crucial social networking is
often wasted for the sake of a "good" show. The only thing "wrong" with my set is that I only get two
channels. I've broken down and ordered Cable and fear that many late nights may now be spent watching
Senate Sub-committee meetings.
BEAR- I guess my essay on kid's TV s is not clear enough. The tube doesn't make them "passive". Quite
the reverse, it seems to make them more active when not in front of the tube, but not in a way which is acceptable to our society (don't fidget, Junior). TV watching itself is indeed passive. It does not teach the very young, it steals the time in each of the child's learning windows from the things which must be learned in that time. This is not inducing passivity, rather it creates an unease, and that leads to increased activity, but without proper purpose. The "toolbox" which makes us human is not full of the tools of culture as the child matures, and the animal which we all have within is not suppressed, hence the vandalism and killings (noticeably without remorse).
Gangs etc. are also the result of increased lack of cultural restraints on behavior. This gang thing has
always been with us to some extent, but was minimal and transitional before the advent of children’s TV.
The TV's content and the violence of video games does not have the same effects on a person who is
completely acculturated. In that situation the violent actions is seen as a fiction (often humorous as in
Schwartzenegger films), and is not taken as a blueprint of a real solution, but as a play with actors. In the
unacculturated, the content and the activity of the games is accepted as viable alternative behavior. When I grew up (before TV), kids gathered in age-related groups and had games specific to that age. Now the only thing which gives a sense of belonging to the TV-damaged kids, who no longer know how to play the ancient children's games, is the gangs.
DNA- By the way, I found a site about politicians who were born or died on May 21st. In it is your
grandfather. They say that he was Governor of Kentucky, while other books that talk about your life only
mention your granddad as a Senator.
BEAR- My grandfather was one of the remarkable men of his generation. Perhaps the last of the true
statesmen, he had one of the most dramatic and accurate memories I have ever known. His knowledge of
the law was awesome. Called by many the "Last of the golden-throated orators of the South", his speeches
were legendary. Elected a member of Congress, he prosecuted the anti-trust case against Andrew Carnegie
of US Steel. Later, in the Senate, while serving on a Senate anti-trust committee, he wrote a new anti-trust act (called the Clayton Act, after the committee chairman). He was also Governor of Kentucky, a family tradition-- his maternal grandfather was Governor Owsley, after whom a county in the state was named.
Although a Democrat (he belonged to the now-defunct conservative "Southern Democrats" absorbed into the REpublicans now), he was appointed by Herbert Hoover in '31 to a prestigious international committee
for border resources between the US and Canada, the International Joint Committee, and was the "father"
of the St. Lawrence Seaway. He retired in 1953 at the age of 86 and lived to 91. He was at the time the most knowledgeable man on the life and philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. His books and papers are archived at the University of Kentucky. I went into court in '67 to remove the A and III from my name to quench the adverse media publicity which claimed I was trading (due to my name), on my grandad's reputation. I was quite fond of my grandfather, but there was no way that I was using him or his name to further my life.
DNA- During the recent election in the States, and here in Chico, certain politicians have chose to cling
to the bible tighter than to the Constitution. Any thoughts?
BEAR - Well, I am not an authority on such things, but you must realize that the Pilgrims (emphasis on
"grim") were the founders of the United States of Prejudice. They were so uptight that they were run out of
England. Anyway, religious bigotry goes back to the early days of Christianity when they burned people
for claiming that Jesus had blue eyes, or some such nonsense. Anyone who hides his or her personal
prejudices under the cloak of religious belief is a terrific coward. So far as I know, any sort of mad
superstition fits in well in the definition of religion, which is mostly about belief in things which the study
of science tells us are falsehoods, so the adherents are immune to any sort of intelligent refutation. I mean, virgin birth? Resurrection? Water into wine? Bodily ascent into "heaven"? if you swallow that stuff, you are ready to add whatever else you like, as none of it has to be provable in any way whatever. It is also a fortress from which to foist your own perversities on others. The best way to deal with people like these is to expose them as pedophiles or some other repugnant aberration. Most of them usually have something to hide, and the quickest way to find out is to hire a private eye to turn it up. One thing heavy Christianity does is twist people up.
DNA- When did you know that the Grateful Dead were to be the monsters of rock we now them as today?
BEAR-When I first heard the Dead, at the Muir Beach Acid Test, I thought: "They're going to be bigger than the Beatles". And they were.
DNA- I am a huge Jorma Kaukonen fan, where do you feel that he exists in the realm of guitar heroes?
BEAR- I am old and close friends with Jorma. I have suggested that he and Jack (why not two bassists? Phil plays
mostly a baritone line anyway) be added to the remaining band members to revive the Dead. In my
estimation he is the best qualified to step into the vacuum left when Jerry died, and is every bit his equal in magic.
DNA- I know you helped design the Steal Your Face logo, but did you design the bear with the third eye?
BEAR- I didn't design the Dancing Bear [or the Three-eyed Bear], Bob Thomas did both as part of the design for the Bear's Choice Album jacket art.
DNA- Do people have garage sales on the weekend in Australia?
BEAR- We have all the same sorts of things like yard (same as garage) sales, but our weekend markets are
unique, a sort of fleamarket and farmer's market combined, which is held in each town in the region on a different weekend. There are more permanent daily ones in the cities.
DNA- How long can one visit in Australia?
BEAR- The longest visitor's visa is six months. I think even if you could get a "backpacker's working visa"
(not the official name), it might be only good for six months, but you would have to ask the Australian
Consulate in LA if you really want to know what sort of visas are on offer at this time. I am a citizen, so I
don't know much anymore about visas. You are not allowed to work on a straight tourist's visa.
DNA- I wasn’t a big fan of the Other One’s.
BEAR-I thought the Shoreline shows were very good, in spite of the poor performance by Kreutzmann.
I personally, I think you missed the whole thing, the show was better, than any with Garcia in it for
at least the last ten years of the Dead. This band is already better than the last years of the Dead, and will
only get better from here on.
For those of you who have never heard of Mr. Augustus Owsley Stanley the Third, I suggest that you start reading about recent history in other places other than Government issued text-books.
Owsley has changed the way humanity thinks about things and has been relentless in the way he advocates certain ideas. True to form I found Owsley to be impossible to nail down, but irrefutable in his ideas. If I had to sum up my two years of working on this interview, the one word that comes to mind when I think of Owsley is “persistent.”
Unrelenting in his tenacity Owsley comes through loud and clear as one of the clearest voices to come through the last 30 years, unchanged and focused. For those of you who still don’t know Owsley, also known in legend and myth as “Bear”, let me say these few choice words. Owsley made more quality LSD than anyone else on the planet. Owsley shaped the sound of the Grateful Dead more than any other man who twiddled their knobs. If you credit Gates and Job as reponsible for the way that we know ourselves and as creators of the future, you better add Owsleys name to that dynamic duo. For it was Owsley, who should be given some noble title for his efforts, who took the psychedelic bull by the horns and branded him with the three letters that all tyrannical governments (including our own) fear the most, LSD. But wait kids, Owsley is not here to say that the sugar cube will save the day, no, Owsley believes wholeheartedly that the Ice Age is upon us. It will start in the Northern Hemisphere during a winter season and will quickly, very quickly end our little sham, we call civilization.
So before we continue into our cyber quest let me say a quick statement to Owsley. “I apologize for any inaccuracies that you feel this interview or introduction might have. My genetic (you might call it lazy) inattention to details is prevalent all through my life and while I am trying to overcome this myopic disadvantage, you were caught in my windmill mind. Thank you for your time and I hope these words find you well and healthy.”
And now, like Poncho Villa at Don Quixote’s side, I sidestep towards the leviathan that awaits us at the end of time. A towering grizzely, jaws agape, hunger unsatiated, and ready to HUMP.
DNA- I heard that it was a lucid dream that provided the seminal nugget for your current overview of the
world. How do you feel that man’s role has facilitated the upcoming Ice Age?
BEAR- Sorry to disappoint you, but the dreams of 1982 were the first and the last examples of anything in
my nighttime pastimes that were in any way unusual. I have never at any other time had a dream more than once.
I am confused as to your query : "man's role in facilitating them", as I thought that I made it quite clear that man has no role in the Ice Age cycle, nor does any of his so-called "pollution" impact on the build up to the cyclone in any manner. No matter how much you would like things to be different, you must, if you choose to survive, leave the Northern Hemisphere.
DNA-
Got this from a Graham Hancock book: “Albert Einstein investigated the possibility that the weight of the ice-caps, which are not symmetrically distributed around the pole, might cause a displacement. Einstein
wrote : The Earth's rotation acts on the unsymmetrically deposited masses, and produces centrifugal
momentum that is transmitted to the rigid crust of the Earth. The constantly increasing centrifugal momentum produced this way will, when it reaches a certain point, produce a movement of the Earth's
crust over the Earth's body and this will displace the polar regions towards the equator.”
BEAR- Nonsense!
Einstein would not have said anything of the sort. The mass of the normal polar ice caps is neither unevenly distributed around the poles, nor is it a significant size in reference to the mass of the continental masses. Besides, the continents don't move according to centripetal forces, although 600 million years ago the movement was indeed started by centrifugal forces from the single large continental mass in the south pole, they move by magma welling up in the mid ocean ridges. The continents are approaching the North Pole, not receding from it. Only during the ice age glaciation is the ice mass not evenly arranged around the pole. Even so, we are speaking of masses which are only around a ten-millionth of the mass of the planet, and no way would it affect the rotation.
DNA- Hancock talks about 'flash-frozen' mammoths as well as 90-ft. tall fruit trees locked in the permafrost inside the Arctic Circle. Hancock mentions Professor Charles Hapgoods theory that the landmass of Antartica was 2000 miles further north before the last ice age and was moved to its current
position due to a massive displacement of the earth's crust. Hapgood says that the layer of earth known as
the lithosphere- the thin but rigid outer crust of the planet-could at times be displaced moving as one piece.
BEAR- More nonsense.
Read my essay. The mammoths frozen by a mist of liquid air is an important proof of my storm
mechanism. Their location, which is in Siberia, not Anticarctica, has nothing to do with any shift of poles or ice caps. Antarctica has always contained the South Pole, and the Pole has not moved more than 300
miles in millions of years from where it is now. This is also bogus information you are handing me. Let's call him Hapless rather than Hapgood, if you ask me. Or rather:Clueless.
Excerpt from essay-
I have for the last 17 years been working out the causative mechanism for the initiation of the
glacial advance and retreat which has occurred for the last ~2 million years. I have shared some of
the theoretical musings with George Kukla of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty lab. He believes that
my concept of the causation lying with an atmospheric (meteorological) event is the only currently
believable one. All attempts to model theoretical climatic scenarios such as the Milankovitch have
failed to present any glaciation.
I believe the causation of the glacial masses (which, as we know were not distributed around the
North Pole in a symmetrical fashion, but were entirely confined to North America and Western
Europe--Siberia was essentially ice free, although quite a bit closer to the pole), came about
through a meteorological event, a storm of hemispheric proportions and cataclysmic intensity. I
must warn you: the extreme and unusual weather being experienced everywhere in the world at
this time is part of the build-up which leads into this "storm", which will result in the next period
of ice.
DNA- Well, we've been having our own ice age here in Northern California. We had temperatures 40 degrees colder than ever recorded this past winter. The spring had winter conditions when it's usually over a 100 degrees at that time. We've become the Seattle of California. According to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, "The energy is going from the Earth into the atmosphere. The earth is slowing down." Blame it on El Nino. The heads here are having El Greenio parties.
BEAR-
The bit about the atmosphere changing the Earth's rotational speed is a bunch of hooey. The total mass of
the atmosphere, including the water in the oceans is so small compared with the entire rocky mass of the planet, that no such effects would be possible. Think about it, the entire atmosphere and oceans combined depth is only about 6 miles, and the rock is 8000 miles in diameter, and more than 3 times as dense as water, with a massive metallic core. Somebody is stretching a point pretty far in my estimation. There have long been recognized irregularities in the rotation, but usually they are attributed to the sun and moon's gravitation effects.
DNA- Do you know much about ice caps in Antartica melting? I've read that the Larsens Ice Ledge and
the Pine Island Glacier melting could cause sea levels to raise 20 feet.
BEAR- Of course the polar ice is melting, just as I predicted.
No, there is not going to be any noticeable rise- like 20 feet, the Ice Age Storm will come first.
The floods and "heat waves" you have read about recently are the result of the heat moving to the poles.
The reason there is no global warming (the pan-global satellite readings show a decline in the average
global temp of 0.1C since 1979), is that this heat is melting the ice caps.
The time is growing short...
DNA- Any theories on the Moon harboring life?
BEAR- The Moon is the granite mantle of the Earth's crust, except for the bits left behind, which form the
continents. The amount represented by the ocean basins is identical to the volume of the Moon, and the
Moon has the specific gravity of granite, with no core. The Moon's present rate of regression in orbit, if
calculated back to the point of origin at the Earth's surface, calculates the date at 600 million years ago, at the end of the PreCambrian.
DNA- That was a very pragmatic answer.
BEAR- Is there something wrong with pragmatism?
DNA- The films "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" both deal with asteroids hitting earth. I have a
headline from the NY Times that talks about a Giant Asteroid coming towards earth in 2028. It was the
front-page headline! I recently read Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock, in which he talks about
previous civilizations on Earth being destroyed by cataclysm. Seems we're all heading for a REAL cliffhanger...........
BEAR-
The Headline was the result of a miscalculation. I would not worry about rocks from space, the real story
is in my essay on the Ice Age. Cataclysms have always occurred, but we are still here. TV is
destroying out society, culture and civilization, it is going to be total, and it is happening without any rocks
from space. I outline this in my essay on "Children's TV".
Excerpt from Essay-
There are "windows" of time in which certain skills must be learned by children, and if these windows close, then the child will never learn those skills. So it is that we have all those kids out there who behave as though they were incapable of understanding how to live. They don't, and the scary thing is, it may not be possible now for them to learn. Most people don't understand this. The nearest thing to a description of the effect would be found amongst Marshall MacLuhan's works. So most think I am some sort of ratbag for being against children's TV. They have become dependent upon it to support their lifestyle, like an addictive drug. I have given the whole matter a great deal of thought.
I was a TV broadcast engineer for many years, and still hold the highest class of license the US gov't issues. I am old enough so that I first had a TV in my home when I was 13. NO kids in those days had what is now referred to as "dyslexia". Everybody could read. Of course some were much faster and better readers than others, But... EVERYONE could read. Nowadays they claim up to 40% of kids in the US and 50+% in Australia are extremely deficient in reading skills and a significant number can't read at all.
The Countess Montessori, who developed a complete structure for teaching based on careful observations of babies and small children, first noted the time slots, or windows, for learning different skills, and incorporated them into her system of schooling. The whole picture is sort of MacLuhanesque, in that it is the activity (or lack thereof), rather than the content which is at the core of the problem. Most people are too taken in by content and so don't understand the effect of the media itself, which as MacLuhan pointed out, is totally independent of content (cf. "Gutenberg Galaxy" and "The Medium is the Message").
I am increasingly sure that my ideas expressed in the children's TV essay are the correct reasons for the
obvious and widespread breakdown in society. Mothers neglecting or even torturing their kids, kids
shooting their classmates, various types of mindless vandalism. Basically these people are acting just like
animals, which of course we all are. We are supposed to have a culture laid on over that animal nature
which prescribes our behaviour. There seems to be an ever increasing lack of this acculturation, and I for
one am most concerned. What other causation can there be?
DNA-Since TV is out, are there any books that you find yourself returning to as touchstones?
BEAR- What is wrong with your TV?
DNA- I am pouring over all your essays again and agree that TV neutralizes children into passive
passengers on the bus. Having been weaned on the boob tube, I find myself often returning to its bright
colors for security and a way to kill an hour or two. Chris Carters shows (X-file[s] and Millenium) seem to
make the hour of viewing eventful, but, although not a child, I still feel that crucial social networking is
often wasted for the sake of a "good" show. The only thing "wrong" with my set is that I only get two
channels. I've broken down and ordered Cable and fear that many late nights may now be spent watching
Senate Sub-committee meetings.
BEAR- I guess my essay on kid's TV s is not clear enough. The tube doesn't make them "passive". Quite
the reverse, it seems to make them more active when not in front of the tube, but not in a way which is acceptable to our society (don't fidget, Junior). TV watching itself is indeed passive. It does not teach the very young, it steals the time in each of the child's learning windows from the things which must be learned in that time. This is not inducing passivity, rather it creates an unease, and that leads to increased activity, but without proper purpose. The "toolbox" which makes us human is not full of the tools of culture as the child matures, and the animal which we all have within is not suppressed, hence the vandalism and killings (noticeably without remorse).
Gangs etc. are also the result of increased lack of cultural restraints on behavior. This gang thing has
always been with us to some extent, but was minimal and transitional before the advent of children’s TV.
The TV's content and the violence of video games does not have the same effects on a person who is
completely acculturated. In that situation the violent actions is seen as a fiction (often humorous as in
Schwartzenegger films), and is not taken as a blueprint of a real solution, but as a play with actors. In the
unacculturated, the content and the activity of the games is accepted as viable alternative behavior. When I grew up (before TV), kids gathered in age-related groups and had games specific to that age. Now the only thing which gives a sense of belonging to the TV-damaged kids, who no longer know how to play the ancient children's games, is the gangs.
DNA- By the way, I found a site about politicians who were born or died on May 21st. In it is your
grandfather. They say that he was Governor of Kentucky, while other books that talk about your life only
mention your granddad as a Senator.
BEAR- My grandfather was one of the remarkable men of his generation. Perhaps the last of the true
statesmen, he had one of the most dramatic and accurate memories I have ever known. His knowledge of
the law was awesome. Called by many the "Last of the golden-throated orators of the South", his speeches
were legendary. Elected a member of Congress, he prosecuted the anti-trust case against Andrew Carnegie
of US Steel. Later, in the Senate, while serving on a Senate anti-trust committee, he wrote a new anti-trust act (called the Clayton Act, after the committee chairman). He was also Governor of Kentucky, a family tradition-- his maternal grandfather was Governor Owsley, after whom a county in the state was named.
Although a Democrat (he belonged to the now-defunct conservative "Southern Democrats" absorbed into the REpublicans now), he was appointed by Herbert Hoover in '31 to a prestigious international committee
for border resources between the US and Canada, the International Joint Committee, and was the "father"
of the St. Lawrence Seaway. He retired in 1953 at the age of 86 and lived to 91. He was at the time the most knowledgeable man on the life and philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. His books and papers are archived at the University of Kentucky. I went into court in '67 to remove the A and III from my name to quench the adverse media publicity which claimed I was trading (due to my name), on my grandad's reputation. I was quite fond of my grandfather, but there was no way that I was using him or his name to further my life.
DNA- During the recent election in the States, and here in Chico, certain politicians have chose to cling
to the bible tighter than to the Constitution. Any thoughts?
BEAR - Well, I am not an authority on such things, but you must realize that the Pilgrims (emphasis on
"grim") were the founders of the United States of Prejudice. They were so uptight that they were run out of
England. Anyway, religious bigotry goes back to the early days of Christianity when they burned people
for claiming that Jesus had blue eyes, or some such nonsense. Anyone who hides his or her personal
prejudices under the cloak of religious belief is a terrific coward. So far as I know, any sort of mad
superstition fits in well in the definition of religion, which is mostly about belief in things which the study
of science tells us are falsehoods, so the adherents are immune to any sort of intelligent refutation. I mean, virgin birth? Resurrection? Water into wine? Bodily ascent into "heaven"? if you swallow that stuff, you are ready to add whatever else you like, as none of it has to be provable in any way whatever. It is also a fortress from which to foist your own perversities on others. The best way to deal with people like these is to expose them as pedophiles or some other repugnant aberration. Most of them usually have something to hide, and the quickest way to find out is to hire a private eye to turn it up. One thing heavy Christianity does is twist people up.
DNA- When did you know that the Grateful Dead were to be the monsters of rock we now them as today?
BEAR-When I first heard the Dead, at the Muir Beach Acid Test, I thought: "They're going to be bigger than the Beatles". And they were.
DNA- I am a huge Jorma Kaukonen fan, where do you feel that he exists in the realm of guitar heroes?
BEAR- I am old and close friends with Jorma. I have suggested that he and Jack (why not two bassists? Phil plays
mostly a baritone line anyway) be added to the remaining band members to revive the Dead. In my
estimation he is the best qualified to step into the vacuum left when Jerry died, and is every bit his equal in magic.
DNA- I know you helped design the Steal Your Face logo, but did you design the bear with the third eye?
BEAR- I didn't design the Dancing Bear [or the Three-eyed Bear], Bob Thomas did both as part of the design for the Bear's Choice Album jacket art.
DNA- Do people have garage sales on the weekend in Australia?
BEAR- We have all the same sorts of things like yard (same as garage) sales, but our weekend markets are
unique, a sort of fleamarket and farmer's market combined, which is held in each town in the region on a different weekend. There are more permanent daily ones in the cities.
DNA- How long can one visit in Australia?
BEAR- The longest visitor's visa is six months. I think even if you could get a "backpacker's working visa"
(not the official name), it might be only good for six months, but you would have to ask the Australian
Consulate in LA if you really want to know what sort of visas are on offer at this time. I am a citizen, so I
don't know much anymore about visas. You are not allowed to work on a straight tourist's visa.
DNA- I wasn’t a big fan of the Other One’s.
BEAR-I thought the Shoreline shows were very good, in spite of the poor performance by Kreutzmann.
I personally, I think you missed the whole thing, the show was better, than any with Garcia in it for
at least the last ten years of the Dead. This band is already better than the last years of the Dead, and will
only get better from here on.
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