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Behind the Magic: Bill Kreutzmann & Mickey Hart Talk To Billy Martin

[Bill Kreuztmann joins the conference call.]

Bill Kreutzmann: I’m here

Hart: You were eating your second pineapple.

Kreutzmann: I’m really sorry to be late, it was an accident.

Hart: I just raved about you. So it was good you couldn’t hear it. Think I said it all.

Kreutzmann: Who else is on board here?

Hart: Billy Martin. I’ve been talking to him.

Kreutzmann: Oh, hey Billy. I love your band.

I’m really honored to be talking to you.

Kreutzmann [to Hart]: You really wanna head out?

Hart: Yeah, I said my thing. But if you want me to stay on I will.

Kreutzmann: That’s okay. I can’t wait to play together…

[Hart leaves the conversation.]

So Mickey was just saying how tight your chemistry is and he’s been really poetic in his description.

Kreutzmann: Like I’m an eight-million-armed drummer?... Yeah, we play so differently from each other. I play with a traditional set which I love and I put some different symbols on there and stuff and do some electronic drums on the side where I can get really good jam-based sounds or whatever sounds I wanna do. It’s never really planned out.

I’m interested in your different personalities. You can’t have a good conversation if you’re clones. Did you always have this chemistry or did you work on it?

We worked on it and it evolved. As the music evolved so did the style. We started playing rudimentary stuff together just to make sure we were on the same page, then we’d open it up more. Mickey was really inspirational to me. I was playing with the band and I met him at The Fillmore West and we went outside to the car and he taught me all this great stuff that I put in my bag of tricks. Yeah, it’s all part of your vocabulary. Where did you learn yours?

I grew up in New York City and my first teacher was my brother, who was learning to play drums. When he put them away, I pulled them out. My dad was a violinist, and he had a friend who knew a drum teacher who was a student of [Dave Brubeck drummer] Joe Morello. So that natural technique was helpful in the beginning. From then it got more creative/jazz style.

I listened to a lot of African. I grew up in Palo Alto [California] and would listen to a lot of records in my room and I’d be the first guy at the record store getting the latest record. I had this teacher who was becoming a physicist at Stanford and he lived right by Stanford University on Perry Lane, which was next door to Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I was just 13, so I wasn’t aware of this at the time, he was just another college student. But my drum teacher’s apartment was completely decorated in Hawaiian palm trees and green and there were drums everywhere and after my 30-minute lesson he’d let me play that set for hours and I finally bought a drum set from the cat.