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Rhythm Devils

What:

The Rhythm Devils with Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart and Keller Williams kick off their summer tour Friday at the Arcata Theatre Lounge. Who’s that?

Well, once upon a time there was a band called the Grateful Dead. Ahead of the curve in many ways, they became the most successful touring band of all time and invented the very notion of the jamband. Legendary sets spun into extended improvisation that would shift from interstellar excursions by guitarist Jerry Garcia and the band into drum jams by Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, dubbed by Jerry, The Rhythm Devils.

My favorite publicist Carrie wondered if I might want to talk with Mickey about the Rhythm Devils, the summer project he’s doing with his old Dead drumming partner Bill Kreutzmann. How could I say no.

A week or so later, the phone rang at the appointed time.

Hello. Mickey here. You’re in Arcata?

I am. And you’re at 360 Studios. [Caller ID told me.]

I’m down here in Sonoma County. We’re getting ready to come up. This will be our first show, so it’s really exciting.

You’ve reformulated the Rhythm Devils again. Do you think of it as something that goes back to the ‘60s?

It originated more in the ‘70s. Garcia started calling us the Rhythm Devils and it kind of stuck. The fans called it ‘Drums in Space’ and Rhythm Devils. The origin was me and Bill playing freeform percussion duets.

And you used that name when you worked on *Apocalypse Now* for Coppola…

That’s right. The actual album of outtakes was called Rhythm Devils Play River Music from Apocalypse Now. I did the underscore for Apocalypse — that was another Rhythm Devil moment…

Fast-forward to a few years ago…

We went out as a rock ‘n’ roll band, kinda, for a very short tour, only 10 days. Now we’ve reconstituted the band and we’re going to play a lot more. We changed it again. We’ve always thought of the Rhythm Devils as a work-in-progress so we wanted to take it to a different place with different people — while honoring the old folks, the original Devils, some of whom we’ll meet up with us on the road. Basically, Bob, once a Devil always a Devil.

Whatever that might mean…

We’re concerned with rhythm, that’s the kind of devilish business we’re into. Not chaos, but rhythmic harmony and rhythmic entrainment. We want people to dance and have some fun.

You talk often of entrainment; can you explain what it is?

The laws of entrainment came from Christian Huygens back in the olden days. He was a scientist in the 1600s. His experiment was, he put two grandfather clocks on the wall and eventually the clocks beat in synch. They tended to move together. So the law of entrainment says that any two objects in proximity will move together because nature is more efficient when it moves together in synch. You have to be musically entrained to make music, of course there are stages of that.

And now you have this mission to get the world moving together in rhythm.

The whole world is in rhythm in certain ways. When it falls out of rhythm, like with the BP spill, there’s chaos, disaster. It’s always pulsing from chaos to order, chaos to order. The laws of entrainment apply to the whole universe. Pythagoras, the Father of Music, postulated that the orbiting orbs — the planets — had some mathematical equation that kept them all in harmony: the music of the spheres. He claimed to have heard the sonorities of the Heavens. And he created the octave, the fifth and the seventh and so forth and so on. It became science. And we know science says the Universe is held together by levels of entrainment. It’s a rhythmic universe — we’re embedded in it.

How does (talking drummer) Sikiru Adepoju fit into the Devils?

Good question. Sikiru comes from West Africa, Nigeria, so he brings the trance rhythms born in West Africa that were brought to our shores, via New Orleans in the 1800s by way of the slave trade. Those rhythms were the foundation of our music here in America. His influence is the powerful West African Rhythm of the Saints or whatever you call it, the juju African feeling.

Did you meet him through Olatunji?

Yeah. He was Olatunji’s talking drummer. Then he played with me in Planet Drum and Global Drum — we won two Grammys together. He’s the best of the best, the Mozart of his instrument. So having him in the band is like having the Yo Yo Ma of the talking drum.

And you have Keller Williams on guitar. He’s an amazing percussive guitarist.

He’ll get a lot of guitar and singing time in. and he’ll certainly be able to wave a stick. Then we have Davy Knowles who plays a mean guitar, pulls a mean blues string, and he sings too. Andy Hess is on bass, he’s legendary, the baddest bottom in the West. It all flows right along. The possibilities are really exciting.

I assume you’re still integrating your electronic rhythm machines. You’ve always been on the forefront of that.

Yeah, yeah. This will be heavy on that. The Grateful Dead songs are the Grateful Dead songs. Then there are the Rhythm Devil songs that take a different turn. It will certainly be electronic heavy and it will be pulsing. I’m using a lot of sounds from my collection, using the computer on stage as well as the drums. I’m able to call up thousands of amazing instruments every night, things that have been in my collection for 40 years. You can’t bring them all on the road, it’s impossible, so if you want them with you, you have to sample them.

You have a bank…

Many banks. It’s called RAMU, Random Access Musical Universe. It’s a creature, a sound droid, kind of like a digital jukebox of all the sounds I love.

Is this another short tour?

No, we’re really going to do this one. We broke it up into two sections, but we’ll be out for a couple of months.

I assume you’re recording.

Of course.

Are you doing anything in the studio, or just recording the shows?

We’ll be recording it; I don’t know how we’ll distribute it. You know I’ll be recording — everything that moves gets recorded. (laughs) I came from that generation.

You guys were certainly ahead of the curve on all that.

We knew it was never going to happen again. Things never happen exactly the same twice, so it was a no-brainer. In those days it was expensive just to buy tape. We were eating nothing but spaghetti for days so going out and buying a roll of tape was a luxury, but we did it. You’re lucky we did.

*Our conversation continued with discussion of his massive rhythm project the Anaconda, about meeting up this summer with the Further tour and other matters, but I’ve run out of time today so that will have to wait for another day. Stay tuned. And stay entrained… *

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