It sure is. I had a terrific time in the Warfield tonight. Having a good
time qualifies what you hear while you're having a good time as music.
On the other hand...
It was a wonderful conjunction of many things, this celebration of Mardi
Gras, Chinese New Year, Mickey Hart and the Planet Drum, the reunion of The
Tribe, the mix of Deadheads in their 60s and in their teens.
I don't know why the event went under the name of Ratdog (Bob Weir's
continuation of the Dead) when what I saw looked very much like the African
musicians of `Supralingua,' such as Bakithi Kumalo, Giovanni Hidalgo,
Rebeca Mauleon -- but I don't know enough about them to identify individual
musicians... especially through the thick blue smoke.
Standing on the main floor (didn't they do that in the Old Globe?),
squeezed between heaving bodies (and heaving just a bit myself), watching
big red balloons bounced through the thick blue smoke (I didn't inhale once
all evening!), watching Mickey cut loose, the crowd responding with a roar
-- this is choice stuff. And the smoke was thick and blue, but I think I
mentioned that before. Such fun!
On the other hand...
I may be losing some good friends here, but here goes anyway. This
colorful, vibrating, throbbing, passionate stuff is great *while you're
there* -- with the crowd, in the moment, in the blue smoke. When you're
sitting and listening again -- as I do now -- what you may well hear is
early-Glass ostinato, a hypnotic, unvaried rhythm, with little or nothing
under it, in it, beyond it.
Sure, Mickey won a Grammy in 1991 with his first Planet Drum album and I
am glad. He is a phenomenal drummer. But I liked him a lot better when
he played with the SF Symphony, and played some non-situational music,
that is, music with its own power and content.
His `Planet Drum: A Celebration of Percussion and Rhythm' (with Fred
Lieberman) is a fine, curious mix of musicology, mythology, cosmology and
pop psych.
I liked him a lot as the composer of the soundtrack for `Apocalypse Now'
and `The Twilight Zone' (never mind the movie itself...:), but is his
continuing work in rock `really music'?
Yes, but you had to be there.
Janos Gereben/SF
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