Mickey Hart was born Michael Steven Hartman in Brooklyn into a family of drummers. Both his parents played, and his father, Lenny Hart, was a champion rudimental drummer. Raised mostly by his mother, Hart took to the drum early and practiced constantly. In 1961 he joined the U.S. Air Force, where he played drums for about three and a half years in bands stationed in Europe. There he refined his technique and started collecting the rhythms and instruments he encountered.
After his discharge Hart moved to California. In 1967 he met Bill Kreutzmann at a Count Basie concert at the Fillmore, and within weeks he was sitting in with the Grateful Dead. He joined as the band’s second drummer in September 1967. His arrival changed the Dead’s rhythm section. Hart brought an interest in odd time signatures and non-Western rhythm, and the band’s late-1960s music, including “The Eleven” in 11/8 time, showed that influence. He left the band in 1971 and returned in October 1974, then stayed until the end in 1995.
With Kreutzmann he formed the Rhythm Devils partnership. Their nightly “Drums” and “Space” segments became a laboratory for percussion and sound design, featuring gongs, talking drums, and The Beam, a large steel instrument strung with piano wire that produces deep, rumbling tones. Hart’s solo album Rolling Thunder (1972), the Diga Rhythm Band (1976) and the Rhythm Devils’ music for Apocalypse Now extended that work beyond the Dead.
Hart became one of the best-known promoters of world music in the United States. His Planet Drum project, which brought together percussion masters from around the world, won the first Grammy Award for Best World Music Album in 1992. He has worked with the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian to preserve and reissue endangered musical traditions, and he wrote Drumming at the Edge of Magic (1990), Planet Drum and Songcatchers, exploring the history and spirituality of rhythm. Later projects, including the Global Drum Project and his own Mickey Hart Band, combined traditional percussion with electronics and even data from space and brain research.
Hart sees rhythm as the foundation of life and consciousness, with drumming as a way to reach altered states and bring people together. After the Dead he performed with The Other Ones, The Dead and the Rhythm Devils, and from 2015 with Dead & Company. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Grateful Dead in 1994.
