Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 7, Episode 4
T.C.
Archival interviews:
- Robert Hunter, Conversations with the Dead, by David Gans, 2/25/88.
- Phil Lesh, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 7/30/81.
JESSE: Tom Constanten was a full-time member of the Grateful Dead for something close to 15 months from mid-1968 to the end of January 1970. A music school classmate of Dead bassist Phil Lesh, TC contributed to the albums Anthem of the Sun, Aoxomoxoa, and Live/Dead, and appears on more than a dozen archival releases so far. Also, he got to be in the Grateful Dead in 1969.
AUDIO: “St. Stephen” [Live at the Fillmore East, 2/11/69] (2:58-3:20) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I think he was exactly the right guy for that exact psychedelic, primal Grateful Dead time. What TC added to that was magnificent. Listen to a “Dark Star” from August of 1968—let's say from the Shrine or the Fillmore West, the few shows [that were] recorded—and “Dark Star” is good. Everybody’s doing incredible things on it. Pigpen is doing that thing—doo doo do-doo-doo do-doo-doo, doo doo do-doo-doo do-doo-do—but for the whole thing.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Two from the Vault, 8/24/68] (0:09-0:25) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: But then TC joins, and Pigpen steps back from his keyboard duties. And TC brings something to the table that allowed “Dark Star” to become “Dark Star.”
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Live/Dead] (2:13-2:32) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was a bit of the Live/Dead “Dark Star” and, before that, Two from the Vault. Here’s Phil Lesh talking with David Gans in 1981, from an interview now in Conversations with the Dead. Thanks, David.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: His work is just unique. I don't think there's anybody that composes work like him.
JESSE: Henry Kaiser has been a friend and collaborator since TC played in the Henry Kaiser Band in the ‘80s.
HENRY KAISER: TC is a very special human being and a very special improviser and a very special keyboard player. There’s nobody who’s like him. He's a great keyboard player with a wide knowledge of the history of Western music composition for keyboards, and all that informs what he does — no matter what he's doing when he's playing.
JESSE: For the past 30 years, Grateful Dead MIDI engineer Bob Bralove has been Tom Constanten’s partner in the collaboration Dose Hermanos.
BOB BRALOVE: He's essentially a Romantic piano player. He just sent me a Respighi Prelude that he just recorded. It’s like, okay, this is really cool.
Las Vegas
JESSE: Please welcome to the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, Tom Constanten.
TOM “TC” CONSTANTEN: I was born on the Jersey Shore, and when I was about seven years old, we moved to Bergen County. And I sort of threw in with the New York Giants. I saw them play at the Polo Grounds. First game I saw them was against the Boston Braves. Also got to Ebbets Field to see the Dodgers, and Yankee Stadium to see the Yankees. I saw Joe DiMaggio, ‘51 was his last year on the active roster. And I say this as a New York Giants fan — I saw the Yankees back when they were worth hating.
JESSE: Just after Tom turned 10, his father took a job at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and the family moved west. By the time he was 17, he was composing.
TC: I played a piece of my own composition with the Las Vegas Pops Orchestra in May 1961 for piano and orchestra, and that was sort of my debut. Most of my friends were musicians, either on the Strip or downtown. I knew a drummer named Don Farr, and he was on Ogden [Avenue], just a block or so off Fremont Street where all the action was. And so his apartment became Party City. The scene was on the Strip and the lounges, and all the rock bands were knock-offs. There was a Vegas group called The Demon that I sat in with a couple times. It was my one-and-only-ever gig playing bass. I knew how the chords worked, and I could find them on the bass, except I used my fingers and had the biggest callus of my whole life. It took a while to get over that. All covers… it was Vegas. It was a gig at the Student Union building.
JESSE: As a young composer in Las Vegas, TC entered a composition contest. And though he didn’t win, he was soon in touch with the person who did. The fact that most of these names are perhaps familiar to fans of contemporary music is remarkable — and also proof of how cozy the world of contemporary composition was in the late 1950s.
TC: There was a composition contest sponsored by BMI that I entered. And I didn't win, but I found out who did.
JESSE: The winner was a fellow teen composer named Robert Sheff, who would go on to some underground renown as “Blue” Gene Tyranny.
TC: I got in touch with [Robert] and he put me in touch with La Monte Young. I was corresponding with him starting around 1959. And then he in turn put me in touch with Dick Higgins, Ray Johnson, and eventually Terry Riley.
JESSE: Before he’d even left Las Vegas, teenage TC was already in touch with the flourishing new music scene, including soon to be psychedelic minimalist pioneers La Monte Young and Terry Riley. TC landed in San Francisco in the fall of 1961 at an incredible juncture for new music. But that wasn’t why he went to San Francisco.
TC: I was there on a science scholarship. October 4th, 1957: the Soviets put up Sputnik, and suddenly the U.S. was interested in science — different times than now. And so I got a scholarship to UC Berkeley. I was there studying physics and astronomy.
Berkeley
JESSE: Enrolling at UC Berkeley, TC met a candidate for a different kind of space program. Here’s how Phil Lesh described the encounter to David Gans in 1981, part of the bedrock scholarship in David’s Conversations with the Dead.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: That was the same day I met TC, ’cause I was trying to explain to some chick about serial music, [Karlheinz] Stockhausen and that kind of thing. This guy comes up and says, “[mumble mumble mumble],” and I said, “[mumble mumble mumble]” — and then I knew that here was somebody I could talk to! I spent more time with him, and he became my roommate. And we spent more time together than either one of us did in classes.
JESSE: Phil Lesh, for one, didn’t quite take to college.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: I just quit school after the middle of the semester, the fall semester. I just quit, quit Berkeley, and I didn't tell my parents for weeks. So TC and I were raving all together, and I was trying to compose. I actually composed a short piece which I still have the score to for full orchestra. TC was always interested in chamber music, and I was always interested in orchestra. But we did have common interests or loves, like Mahler. So that was one point of contact. We were like two sides of a coin — he was into Bach and more of the constructionist kind of thing, and I was more into the expressive area.
JESSE: By the time they met, Phil had also connected with the raging scene in Palo Alto.
TC: It was September ‘61, and I was rooming with him and he took me down to Palo Alto. Well, I took him — I had the car. He introduced me to Jerry Garcia and some other folks out there [like Robert] Hunter.
JESSE: TC ended up at The Chateau, the communal boarding house that was a nexus for the proto-Dead scene, which we talked about a bit during the first part of our “Adventures of Pigpen” tribute.
TC: 838 Santa Cruz Avenue, Menlo Park. That's the one.
JESSE: Other sources recall it as 2100 Santa Cruz Avenue. Man, that place sounded like a party.
TC: It was a continual party. In November ‘61, there was a special party called the Groovy Conclave, which I went to. And all of the above were there. I think Bill Kreutzmann even showed up. And the usual gang — Gail Rafferty, Susie Mayberry.
JESSE: One semi-resident of the Chateau, who technically lived in the Pump House, was the future Merry Prankster Page Browning, friends with both Phil and TC.
TC: I remember once, Page came by the house and said, “Hey, you want to go for a drive?” We were pretty blotto. And so we went along on this drive to Golden Gate Park and, suddenly, he took an abrupt right turn on a dirt road into the park. And all of a sudden we were in a different world — no people. It was like a maintenance road. And we went through the park that way until we got to the beach, by the windmills.
JESSE: Though UC Berkeley wasn’t quite the right fit musically speaking, TC and Phil connected with the scene at Mills College in Oakland.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: The composers of that time whose music seemed musical—in the sense of that had the same sense of musical flow, like older music had—were Stockhausen and [Luciano] Berio. Berio, it turned out, came to Mills College in the spring semester of ‘62 to teach, and TC went right over there with his pieces. I was chicken — I was scared.
DAVID GANS [7/30/81]: TC took his pieces over to audition?
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: Yeah. Well, for Berio to look at. This was graduate level. And neither one of us had had a full semester of college yet. I had, but he hadn’t. I had 41 units or something like that of college credit. Anyway, he took his piano pieces over there and Berio said, “Join the class.” TC said, “Well, my roommate composes also. Mind if I bring him up? Can he bring some of his stuff over too?” Berio says, “Sure.” And this is graduate level — Steve Reich was in this class, and John Chowning from Stanford.
JESSE: Steve Reich would help pioneer minimalism. John Chowning would help pioneer FM synthesis, leading to the first synthesizers. Phil would reconnect with Chowning at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in the early ‘70s, which we talked about in our “Long Strange Tech” episodes last season. It was all pretty heady.
TC: At Mills College, I was taking the course there from Berio. And Morton Subotnick was there, Berio was there, this was just after Darius Milhaud was there. In later years, Terry Riley and Robert Ashley were there. That was a very exciting place. Margaret Lyon was the woman who brought them all in, and as long as she was there, it was like a golden age of music and incredibly exciting. Rather like Robert Erickson at the San Francisco Conservatory. They used to have concerts at San Francisco Conservatory, back when it was at 19th Avenue and Ortega [Street] in San Francisco. And, gosh, Richard Maxfield was there; I ran into James Broughton, the poet, at one of their shows. Those were exciting times. And in a way, we sort of knew it at the time.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: After the class was over, I wanted more of that, because that was the most stimulating thing I'd ever encountered in my whole life.
DAVID GANS [7/30/81]: Having your piece performed?
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: No, no, no, just being around Berio and that whole world of music. That was the tits for me. Not so much surprised as I was absolutely ecstatic, man. Because here was a guy whose music I’d heard. See, at that time, I was working for KPFA in Berkeley, the Pacifica radio station there. They had access to that music because they had it flown over from Europe.
TOM CONSTANTEN: Stockhausen’s Gruppen, Boulez’s Poesie pour Pouvoir, which I wish I still had, because he recalled it, and there aren’t any that are available anymore. Let’s see, a couple of other Stockhausen, and the European avant-garde — Berio, Pousseur.
JESSE: Though TC and Phil weren’t exactly trading tapes, they were definitely collecting them.
TOM CONSTANTEN: The only thing out at all was, Columbia Records had some avant-garde issues. One of them was Stockhausen’s Zeitmasse, and Boulez’s Le Marteau Sans Maître. Time Records had about a half-dozen releases: Berio, Maurizo Callo, John Cage, Lou Harrison. That was all there was, but it was pretty exciting.
JESSE: In the summer of 1962, 10 years before the Dead’s Europe ‘72 tour, TC and Phil had their first chance to tour Europe.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: Berio was going back to Europe, he was going to Italy to do some festivals and to do the summer circuit in Europe. He invited Tom and myself to come along. Okay… how the fuck am I going to get to Europe? I can barely eat. By this time, [Bobby] Petersen had stolen my girlfriend. Everything was ready; I was ready for a move. So TC and I hammered out a deal — what we thought was a deal. I mean, between us, it was a deal, and nothing ever changed that. The plan was, since his dad… [TC] was from Las Vegas, and his dad was captain of the waiters at the Sands [casino]. The deal was we'd go to Las Vegas, the two of us, and get jobs and work as waiters or busboys or something, and earn enough money to go to Europe in the fall and connect with Berio. Well, what happened when we got there was there [weren’t] any jobs. TC’s parents had enough money to send him, and they kicked me out of the house because I was a “bad influence.” I got kicked out of the house.
DAVID GANS [7/30/81]: And you didn’t go to Europe?
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: I didn’t go to Europe. He did. He kept me informed of what was going on. He got to see the premiere of Berio’s opera, Passaggio, which is a masterpiece. I’ve seen a score. Everybody agrees it’s a total masterpiece. It’s never been performed in this country… well, it’s been performed once in Santa Fe.
JESSE: Along with the silent tidal waves of contemporary composition, other influences began to float into the underground avant-garde.
TC: 1964 is when we… before, back when LSD came in cubes, sugar cubes, there were morning glory seeds. And it caused severe gastric distress, but they worked. When I was in Las Vegas—this would have been also 1964, just before I went into the Air Force—a friend of a friend came back from Texas and purchased a truckload of peyote, all quite legally, which was also starting to circulate among my friends. Interestingly enough, back then nobody associated psychedelics with concert performances. It was Asian philosophy, Zen Buddhism, Hinduism and art, visual arts. And only gradually did the music come in. If anything, it would be some of the music of John Cage, which Timothy Leary described as “classically psychedelic.”
AUDIO: “34'46.776" for Two Pianists” [John Cage, Music from the Tudorfest: San Francisco Tape Center, 1964] (24:57-25:19) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was from John Cage’s “34'46.776" for Two Pianists,” performed in 1964 at the newly established San Francisco Tape Music Center, one of the places where the new music and the new musicians found a home in San Francisco, located roughly between the upper and lower Haight.
TC: 321 Divisadero, yes. That was amazing. I remember a series of concerts there in ‘64, I think, with John Cage. There were five concerts. The programs of the first and fourth were the same, and the second and fifth were the same. Of course, with his music, the music was never the same.
JESSE: The multi-night Tudorfest was a landmark for the evolving music scene, including pieces by Cage for amplified toy pianos, regular pianos, and electronics, plus compositions and participation by other avant-garde heroes including Pauline Oliveros, Mort Sobotnick, and Ramon Sender of the Tape Music Center, Alvin Lucier, David Tudor, and—for good measure—one future member of the Mothers of Invention, Ian Underwood. New World Music has released much of Tudorfest. With the introduction of accessible tape machines, the music was about to change even further.
AUDIO: “It’s Gonna Rain (Part 1)” [Steve Reich, Works 1965-1995] (0:30-0:50) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was “It’s Gonna Rain,” a landmark piece of early minimalism created by Steve Reich using a sample of a street preacher named Brother Walter made on a tape deck he shared with his classmates TC and Phil Lesh. Since we’re mentioning Brother Walter, if there are any old San Francisco heads listening that know anything further about his identity, drop us a line at stories.dead.net — we’ve got a colleague who’s researching him. This was the first music scene of their peers to which Tom Constanten and Phil Lesh belonged. In the spring of 1964, they formed a new music ensemble—that’s what classical musicians call a band—featuring TC, Phil, Steve Reich, and Jon Gibson.
TC: Jon Gibson, the wind player, who we just lost a year or so ago, was in that ensemble. He went to New York with Steve Reich and played with his group, and I think he also played in Phillip Glass’s group.
JESSE: In May of 1964, at the exact moment that Jerry Garcia was on his cross-country bluegrass pilgrimage to see Bill Monroe and collect bluegrass tapes, Steve Reich organized a series of Music Now Koncerts at the loft of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Koncerts spelled with a K, of course.
TC: As part of that concert, I had written a quasi aleatoric piece for prepared piano. Steve had just gotten a Sony Triple-7 tape recorder, top of the line, and I recorded two versions of it. It was a 2-track recorder, which was played at the same time as my live performance. And the score… this is all kind of magical, I don’t know how it worked, but I just know that it worked. Correspondences would occur.
AUDIO: “Piano Piece #3” [Tom Constanten] (6:22-6:40)
JESSE: This is some of TC’s “Piano Piece #3,” as performed one of the nights at the Mime Troupe Loft. It’s a hissy recording, but there are some gorgeous bell-like passages that underscore how beautiful prepared piano can sound — that is, when a player manipulates the strings directly on the inside of the piano.
AUDIO: “Piano Piece #3” [Tom Constanten, 5/1/64] (7:00-7:13)
TC: I would play something live and the tape would then imitate it and pick it up. Even beyond that, I would make a sound at the lower end of the inside of the piano and it would turn into the sound of a car driving by. It actually all started… this was at a location at 20th and Capp Street in San Francisco, and it was downstairs from a judo / jiu jitsu studio. And the concert was interrupted occasionally by the sound of somebody's body being thrown to the mat. Well, we weren't about to go into a bunch of martial artists to knock it off. So I simply found that in the score and continued from there, and that's when the magic began.
JESSE: It’s hard to say for sure if it’s bodies being thrown to a mat, but in between piano figures on the recording, you can occasionally hear a muffled distant thump if you listen closely.
AUDIO: “Piano Piece #3” [Tom Constanten, 5/1/64] (19:18-19:33)
JESSE: Steve Reich moved back to New York. TC and Phil and future Anthem of the Sun cover artist Bill Walker shared a house in San Francisco. But despite the excitement, the world of new music was stuttering slightly in San Francisco. TC worked at the post office with future Dead manager Danny Rifkin before finding himself back in Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, at least, there was a bubbling psychedelic scene as well, thanks in part to TC himself.
TC: In fact, I was, between the Pranksters and a couple of other folks, I was importing LSD to Las Vegas in 1964. My clientele were musicians; dealers; a lot of people at the art department at the university; Jerry Fawful, Bill Bradford.
JESSE: Owsley wasn’t around just yet.
TC: There was somebody from the Pranksters circle that had some of these samples from Sandoz, these little capsules that looked like they were invisible. They had names like the dispensaries now have. There was Blue Lagoon, which was like a blue liquid. So this came to be called the Emperor’s New Clothes, because it looked like there was nothing in it.
JESSE: And then nothing turned itself inside-out…
TC: There's one interesting character who also went off in the desert and tripped — he was a craps dealer and part-time male prostitute. He said, “Hey, you ought to check out this…” We went to a lecture and we followed up a couple of times.
JESSE: The “this” in question was Scientology. It’s a touchy subject, I know. It brushed up against the Dead’s world in a few places. In 1964, Robert Hunter had a fling with it, though discarded it quickly. A few years later, Bob Weir dabbled, though backed away even more swiftly. Tom Constanten had the most extended relationship. It was another part of the ‘60s matrix alongside contemporary composition, psychedelics, improvisation, science fiction, Buddhism, and other forms of experimentation.
TC: There was a lot of overlap there. I wouldn't characterize it or name it with any one of them. But there was a connection. I had done plenty of psychedelic exploration before that, and so there was not a shred of disapproval or dissociation on my part. I was just trying to, as William Burroughs said, make it without any chemical corn. Some of the releases were comparable to psychedelic experiences. The Level 4 release especially — it was so completely natural. I enjoyed that aspect of it. And also I got to keep it — it was much longer lasting. It does pick up and dust the shelf of your mind, in a way.
JESSE: But then came TC’s draft notice.
TC: I was sucked into the Air Force. I came back from Europe, knowing all this stuff about avant-garde music, and there wasn't much by way of employment opportunities for that. And there was a war going on, so I got this notice to report for induction into the Army. And fortunately for me, they would accept enlisting in the Air Force as an excuse.
JESSE: Stationed in Texas, he missed the Acid Tests but caught at least one early show by the Warlocks, probably one of their five-set gigs at the In Room.
TC: I saw them at the In Room, at a hotel in Redwood City. It was a rather tight rock and roll band that did ‘50s material. There was hardly anything new and original yet. I would describe it as two bands, if Jerry was fronting it or if Pigpen was.
Joining the Band
AUDIO: “That’s It For the Other One” (1968 mix) [Anthem of the Sun] (5:16-5:46) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was “That’s It For the Other One,” roughly six minutes into the Grateful Dead’s second LP, Anthem of the Sun, the original 1968 mix — it was the sound of the Dead dissolving into otherworldly weirdness and Tom Constanten’s first major contribution to the band. He’d used a three-day pass he’d won as Airman of the Month to visit the Grateful Dead in the studio in Los Angeles, where they were assembling a new album. He brought along a piece of music he’d made during his period working with Berio.
TC: I was fortunate enough thanks to the good offices of Luciano Berio to spend two years in Europe studying avant-garde music, 1962 and ‘63. And in the summer of ‘62, I was at Henri Pousseur’s electronic music studio in Brussels, and that's where I did that piece of tape music, “Electronic Study #3.”
AUDIO: “Electronic Study #3” [Tom Constanten, 88 Keys to Tomorrow] (0:00-0:30)
JESSE: You can find the original standalone version of “Electronic Study #3” on TC’s 2002 compilation, 88 Keys to Tomorrow.
TC: [Pousseur’s] electronic music studio contained the different sound generators and signal processors that were later assembled by Bob Moog into a box called a synthesizer. We had square wave generators, sound wave generators, bandpass filters, square wave generators. We made simulated reverb by having a tape loop so that the read head was after the record head—excuse me, the other way around—so that it would play the sound that you had just recorded into it, giving it a reverb effect. And by the length of the tape, we could adjust the reverb. All of this could be done very, very much with analog technology. We can do all these things digitally now, things we couldn't even imagine doing then. I did several tape studies there and it was the last and most advanced among them.
AUDIO: “Electronic Study #3” [Tom Constanten, 88 Keys to Tomorrow] (1:30-1:33)
TC: And there was a spot where it fit in quite nicely, along with some prepared piano stuff I was doing at the same time — the same time as the Anthem of the Sun recordings, not the same time as Brussels.
JESSE: TC’s skill sets seemed compatible with the band’s growing interest in the recording studio.
TC: On the “Alligator” / “Caution” part of Anthem of the Sun, you'll hear some speed tweaking done with Pigpen’s voice. The tape gets faster or slower.
AUDIO: “Alligator” [Anthem of the Sun] (1:39-1:52) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
TC: We did a thing with Jerry’s voice where the tape was played backwards into an echo chamber. And the echo was recorded on a different track so that, when it was played forwards, you heard this pre-echo leading up to his voice actually being there. So there are all sorts of effects that we went after.
AUDIO: “Alligator” [Anthem of the Sun] (1:07-1:17) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Anthem of the Sun was one of the few Dead albums whose cover art wasn’t created by Mouse, Kelley, Griffin, or another member of the San Francisco psychedelic art scene. The artist was Bill Walker.
TC: He was my friend from Las Vegas. I introduced him to Phil and Jerry, and they pitched the idea of the cover and he was there for it. He and I used to go out in the desert and take peyote and stuff like that. I remember [him] doing a drawing, and you know how psychedelics… you see these lines all over the place. It was like he was tracing the lines, and I could see the lines he was tracing before he traced them. The Anthem of the Sun cover was something a little bit like that. He would do these Tibetan mandala-style flames.
JESSE: TC joined the band onstage a few times.
TC: On a couple of occasions — once, the Las Vegas Convention Center, and another one in Sacramento where we opened for Cream, which was an experience. They’re one of a few acts which were a lot better live than recorded. The recorded medium couldn’t capture the excitement of their show, or even their sound. Actually, Anthem of the Sun was conceived as an overcompensation, because the rap from the first album was that it didn't come anywhere near to capturing the Grateful Dead experience.
On the way back to San Francisco, we all stopped at… I think it was the Nut Tree [restaurant] between Sacramento and San Francisco and we had waffles ice cream. Phil, Jerry and Owsley were at the same table with Eric Clapton. I was at the same table with Mickey. That was as close as we had to an interaction.
JESSE: The Sacramento show was March 11th, 1968. Dead scholars have been able to pinpoint their 1968 Las Vegas appearance to October 19th, in part thanks to a tourist photo of the marquee at the Las Vegas Convention Center, with the Dead advertised just under the Jaycees Clark County Fair. We’ll send this bit of marquee forensics out to QueenCityJamz. Sometime in 1968, the Grateful Dead offered Tom Constanten a full-time spot in the band.
TC: They sent me tape recordings, which I had been listening to. And here's another thing which we've not spoken about much, and that is that the entire time I was with the band, I didn't have an instrument at home to practice on. I was a very, very quick study when I was on the spot, and I spent a lot of the time improvising. Somebody asked me if I had perfect pitch, and I said, “No, but I have real good catch” — which enables me to pick up on what's going on, and if I guess wrong, I'm a fifth off, and it usually sounds okay anyway.
JESSE: In November 1968, when his service in the Air Force ended, TC joined the band on the road. Another development over the course of 1968, between TC’s first and second appearances with the band, was that they’d upgraded their keyboard setup from a Vox Continental organ to a full-fledged Hammond B3, which instantly added a new dimension to the band’s sound. But it wasn’t an instrument Tom Constanten had spent any time playing.
TC: All of my instruction was at the piano. The organ and also the harpsichord are very different instruments with different approaches, as far as the hands on the keyboard is concerned. But to oversimplify, with an organ for instance, it’s an array of switches. When you take your hand off the key, the note disappears — there's no sustain pedal. So that changes your whole attitude toward playing. Likewise, the harpsichord, there’s no sustain pedal. On the other hand, Laurette Goldberg, the harpsichordist, showed me some technical things about the harpsichord which I had not anticipated. For instance, when you're playing a scale pattern, you don't let go of the notes immediately like you would with a piano or the organ. You would simulate the sustain on the harpsichord. Also, the harpsichord has to be stopped. So, when you press a key, you're plucking not one string, but two or maybe three. That means that the key is that much harder to push down. You're only one step removed from what a guitarist does by picking the string directly with his fingers. Whereas the piano has a hammer mechanism that is miraculously subtle enough, you can feel your way into the keyboard — you can play loudly; you can play softly; pianoforte, that’s why it’s called a piano. You have all sorts of subtle controls, especially like when Henry Steinway invented the middle pedal, the sostenuto, it’s called, which is just a tie-in for “sustained,” which enables you to hold notes and then play notes after it that aren’t held. So there are all sorts of technical things that make it different.
JESSE: Tom Constanten came into the band at a contested point in their history, when they came very close to firing both Bob Weir and Pigpen, a topic we delved into during the conclusion of our two-part episode, “The Adventures of Pigpen.” To briefly repeat something TC said in that episode:
TC: There was a point where even Pigpen’s continuing with the band was in question. I came into the mix just when that was going on. And maybe I provided enough of a diversion that it turned down the amplification of those problems. But they weren't a problem anymore.
JESSE: As he pointed out elsewhere, the band already had two guitarists and two drummers, so what was disruptive about having two keyboard players that occupied different musical spaces? TC’s first month with the band was spent almost entirely on the road, and almost entirely learning on the job. But when they got back to the Bay Area in December, he was able to practice a bit on the B3.
TC: There was what they called Alembic, right next to Hamilton Air Force Base, and everything was set up there. That's where the office was, there were office cubicles. And then the bigger room, which is where the rehearsals happened. It was very, very… actually, it was very, very simple and ad hoc. The most detailed anything ever got was when Phil would bring in a chart with chords written on it, written on legal paper. Jerry was different. He would just start playing and expect you to join in. There were no detailed charts, which, frankly, I would be glad to see, because he has some detailed chord changes. “Doin’ That Rag” was kind of like that also. They come at you thick and fast.
AUDIO: “Doin’ That Rag” [Dick’s Picks 26, 4/26/69] (1:49-2:12) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was “Doin’ That Rag” from the Electric Theater in Chicago, April 26th, 1969, once they’d had a chance to learn the chords a little, now Dick’s Picks 26.
TC: Rehearsal recordings I had, for instance, “The Other One,” “Cryptical Envelopment,” but just the instrumental part because that was my department. That was what I was supposed to learn. I had this discussion with Melvin Seals once, how both of us concentrate on the music, and we don't think that much about the words — it’s like, it's not our department. There were some bands I played with, and it was as if I was hearing the words for the first time. Either the speakers were placed so I could hear them, and the only reason I would pay attention to the words is if there was a cue involved. Like in “New Potato Caboose,” after the first “all graceful instruments” — Okay, time to do something, pay attention.
AUDIO: “New Potato Caboose” [Fillmore West 1969: The Complete Recordings, 3/1/69] (3:23-3:47)
JESSE: That was March 1st, 1969 at the Fillmore West, on the Complete Recordings box. TC came into the band near the start of the Lenny Hart administration, when Mickey’s dad took over the band’s business operations.
TC: He came and the band was in a state of chaos. There was a meeting in Mickey's barn. He came in and sort of gave his “why you have to hire me” pitch, and they bought it. There was one point where there was a windfall of money. He’d say, “Well, this money goes to the old ladies to buy whatever they want” and one wanted to get some furniture and mundane stuff like that.
JESSE: The band had two albums out on Warner Bros., but were still trying to figure out their basic rock and roll operations, which they hadn’t quite done yet.
TC: The economics of that were kind of curious, because the sound equipment added a lot of weight to bring on the plane. I remember for a while that gigs were scheduled so that the band would fly and the road crew would drive a van, and somehow it worked. On rare occasions, usually the economic level that we were traveling at at that time, there wasn't time for many amusements. But we did catch acts occasionally. I remember we watched Yellow Submarine when it came out. We sat in the front row of the theater and looked up at it and it was so big.
JESSE: Yellow Submarine hit theaters pretty much the same week TC joined the band. That sounds like a fun movie theater to be in.
PAUL MCCARTNEY [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: What’s the matter, John, love? Blue Meanies?
JOHN LENNON [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: Newer and bluer Meanies have been sighted within the vicinity of this theater! There’s only one way to go out…
GEORGE HARRISON [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: How’s that?
JOHN LENNON [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: Singing!
RINGO STARR [Yellow Submarine,1968] One —
PAUL MCCARTNEY [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: Two —
GEORGE HARRISON [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: Three —
JOHN LENNON [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: Four!
AUDIO: “All Together Now” [The Beatles, Yellow Submarine]
Aoxomoxoa
JESSE: By the time TC had joined the band, they were fully sunk into the construction of what became Aoxomoxoa, an album they completed twice.
TC: It was like a toy box. We’d have 15 of the 16 tracks filled, and then Mickey would say, “How about a cowbell?” We just had to fill all the tracks it seemed. I was mainly involved with the prepared piano. The Moog was involved in the signal processing, especially of Jerry's voice.
AUDIO: “What’s Become of the Baby” [Aoxomoxoa] (0:54-1:10) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was “What’s Become of the Baby,” with uncredited Moog assistance by Doug McKechnie, who has some fine recent archival releases from this period on VG+ Records.
TC: The mixdown sessions for Aoxomoxoa were performances in their own right. You couldn't pre-program the faders to go up and down; you have to have your fingers on ‘em. We would have run throughs and they have a take and then, “Okay let's do another take.” So who knows how many different versions there might have been. It’s unlimited.
AUDIO: “St. Stephen” [Aoxomoxoa] (3:01-3:16) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: TC got to play an instrument he’d spent time with, the harpsichord.
AUDIO: “Mountains of the Moon” [Aoxomoxoa] (0:10-0:36) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
TC: It was a wonderful instrument. The one for the “Mountains of the Moon” recording session, at the recording session, however… it didn’t have—again, Henry Steinway with his cast iron harp—it could not tune up to concert pitch. That’s why a lot of Baroque orchestras play a whole tone lower. And that’s what we did, which meant that for my part, I was playing the piece in a different key.
AUDIO: “Mountains of the Moon” [Aoxomoxoa] (0:56-1:24) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: About a week after the “Mountains of the Moon” session, both the song and TC made their national debuts at the Dead’s infamous taping for Playboy After Dark — the only time TC was able to play a harpsichord live with the Dead.
AUDIO: “Mountains of the Moon” [1/18/69] (1:27-1:57)
TC: It was fun being there for the whole show though. I'd like to see the whole show sometime. Sid Caesar was on it. Sydney Omar, the astrologer, was on it, and he was fascinating to listen to. And just the sets were good and bizarre. I remember there was one of them… there were several rooms, it was at Television City in Los Angeles, and like they were shooting a sitcom—or I guess even a drama—they had a set with three or four different rooms. One of them for the Playboy Mansion was a library, and it seemed to me that they bought the books by the yard, like at a garage sale, because they didn't care what they were. They just wanted to have books on the shelf. The most interesting one I saw was Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars. Among the others, I don't think they were even worth stealing — they probably got a cheap deal for like 30 yards of books.
JESSE: The Dead’s Playboy After Dark taping is infamous, of course, for the story of how the Dead’s crew dosed the coffee pot on set with LSD, causing the canned taping to transmogrify into a real party. It’s either a funny or horrifying story, but I gently push back at this particular tale, with nobody from the other side having stepped forward to tell it, and only a thank you letter from Hef as material evidence. TC doesn’t remember it.
TC: I've heard some of those stories, and they missed me. I'm sort of surprised because they tried to get me on numerous occasions, and succeeded on a few. But I wasn't included in that particular party.
AUDIO: “St. Stephen” [1/18/69] (2:13-2:40)
Live/Dead
TC: Warner Brothers had sunk close to $100,000 into the production of Aoxomoxoa. We were kids in the candy store with all this new studio equipment, and they were getting impatient to see a product. So, we proposed to them: how about that, plus a double album of a live performance? And they went for that. So we wound up taking the 16-track recorder to our shows, and recording all the shows.
JESSE: TC was drawn into the Grateful Dead in part because of his experience with electronic music, but wound up contributing significantly to Live/Dead, their monumental double-album recorded in early 1969 and released in November of that year.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Live/Dead] (1:32-1:57) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Since we’ve got a member of the 1969 Grateful Dead with us, we’re gonna take the opportunity to walk through Live/Dead a little bit. When Constanten joined the band on the road, they’d built the suite that would constitute the first two sides of the album Live/Dead – “Dark Star” into “The Eleven” into “St. Stephen” — but the map wasn’t the territory.
TC: Things were not chiseled in stone, as far as the way the band did it from night to night. Things would change. Owsley had a Norelco cassette recorder and he would tape all our shows. We would get back at the hotel together and listen to them and critique them, or pat somebody in the head if it was worthy, and make decisions as to future courses we would chart, musically speaking.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Live/Dead] (6:15-6:40) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
TC: Bright spots were acknowledged. As far as an iterative process [goes] – something that works well, you try to keep; and something that doesn't work, you try to get rid of. Theater is like that in general.
JESSE: A week after the Playboy After Dark adventure, they recorded a three-night weekend at the Avalon Ballroom back home in San Francisco, and a month later four more shows at the former Carousel Ballroom, now the Fillmore West. Both were second floor venues. TC remembers watching the crew get the organ up into the Avalon.
TC: It was like a ramp, and they would push it up to this ramp to the second floor, which is where the theater was. Likewise, at the Carousel, the second floor was where the actual showroom was — or the first floor, if you’re from England. But it was elevated above ground level in any event. Actually, for every event.
JESSE: At the Fillmore West, they had their best friend and sparring partner, Bill Graham. He’d done time trying to manage the band before Lenny Hart, but he wasn’t done doing time with the band, as TC remembered their relationship.
TC: Friendly but contentious, especially when Owsley came aboard to work the sound system. They were always at each other. I remember once hearing Bill Graham say, “Okay, guys, I'll play it your way. I'll kill him with kindness. And if that doesn't work, I'll just kill him.”
JESSE: This is from the last night of the four nights at the Fillmore West, where I’m pretty sure Bill Graham walks onto the stage to introduce the band, somebody or somebodies in the band do something that disgust him, and he walks off without saying a word.
JERRY GARCIA [3/2/69]: Oh, okay — he’s not even gonna talk. Look at that! Off in disgust! Off in disgust! Bill Graham…
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Fillmore West 1969: Complete Recordings, 3/2/69] (0:00-0:31)
JESSE: They played it all four nights of that Fillmore West run, looking for a version to use on their live album. “Dark Star” wasn’t the average rock epic in 1969 or any year. For starters, at least as the Grateful Dead played it in 1969, there weren’t really any drums. Both Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart would start the song on hand percussion, sometimes with Kreutzmann switching to kit midway through.
TC: The drum part for “Dark Star” was, how shall I say, gentler. It wasn't your Ginger Baker, Keith Moon, driving-a-Panzer-tank-through-the-supermarket sort of thing. And also, things were a lot more freeform. They hadn't been settled yet, they weren't chiseled into stone. They could be different, and there was much more of a sense of experimentation — like, “Hey, let's try this.” And knowing full well that some of the things didn't work.
JESSE: The four nights at the Fillmore West, now known as the Fillmore West 1969: Complete Recordings box set, offer excellent ways to hear this in action, with four versions of the “Dark Star” suite that are subtly different from one another. Here’s some more of that March 2nd version. I like this TC moment that turns into a little conversation with Garcia. Note the lack of full drum kit, with Kreutzmann on shaker and Hart on a guiro, what the Dead called a scratcher.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Fillmore West 1969: The Complete Recordings, 3/2/69] (2:43-3:13)
JESSE: This is from February 27th, the opening night, used on Live/Dead, the only version recorded for Live/Dead that have Kreutzmann on drums right from the start, and fairly subtly at so, with Hart on scratcher. TC’s a little subsumed in the mix, but he’s part of the conversation, too.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Live/Dead] (2:55-3:25) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
TC: We recognized the places. We didn't name them, but we knew where they were. It's like going for a hike in the forest — you know that there's this tree and then there's this other tree, and there's this cliff and a nice overlook. And you don't know what species the tree is, or what its name is—Steve or Herb or something—but you do recognize it.
JESSE: “Dark Star” was also a different kind of live epic in that it wasn’t primarily extended for the purpose of dancing, as so many of the Dead’s early jams were.
TC: The dance scene kind of stopped except for the spinners and some other spin-offs by the late ‘60s. I don't know if you hear on Anthem of the Sun, you'll hear Weir saying: “Get up and dance, it won't ruin you.” I think what happened is, between the psychedelics and the band's jamming more interestingly, the shows became interesting as a concert more than just background music for dancing with your hopeful sweetheart.
JESSE: The Live/Dead shows are a pretty good place to jump if you’re looking for some examples of TC making great contributions, especially in quiet passages.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Fillmore West 1969: The Complete Recordings, 3/2/69] (8:54-9:18)
JESSE: The songs developed intricate dynamics, rarely verbalized, but important, like this “William Tell” ending to “St. Stephen” just before the start of “The Eleven.” TC’s going to repeat what I just said in a second to clarify that the piece of music we’re about to hear is the coda to “St. Stephen” and not the introduction “The Eleven.”
TC: After “St. Stephen,” “the high green chilly winds,” I played this little sort of bagpipe counting part, and it was just before “The Eleven.”
AUDIO: “St. Stephen” [Live/Dead] (5:23-5:53) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
TC: There's also a transition from that to “The Eleven” where Phil played a bassline going up and then coming down, and finally going dum dum dum bum — and that’s the 1 of “The Eleven.” None of the tribute bands do that particular transition.
AUDIO: “The Eleven” [Live/Dead] (3:14-3:44) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Owsley’s taping allowed the band to focus their ears on their work and pick the versions they wanted to best represent their musical intent.
TC: We’d listen to the show afterwards and, every night, there was something that someone objected to, if they had personally made a mistake or some tune just didn't work. Until one night, this was a weekend at the Carousel Ballroom I think, before it was renamed the Fillmore West. One night, we listened to the recording, and… silence. Nobody complained. And it was suddenly like, “Hey, that's the one, let's send it off before we change our minds.”
JESSE: Live/Dead was finished up in later 1969, just after the summer release of Aoxomoxoa, a representation of a typical night at a San Francisco ballroom. Or, rather, a representation of the Dead’s portion of the night. Though we’re now accustomed to seeing Dead shows labeled as set 1 and set 2, at the Avalon, the Fillmores East and West, and many other psychedelic ballrooms, there were early shows and late shows, with each band playing a single set in each.
TC: It was also really cool because that contributed to the sense of community among the various different bands. We would sit in with one another. I remember with the Grateful Dead any number of people sat in with us — the folks from the Jefferson Airplane, and I remember at least a couple of times that we backed up Janis Joplin. That happened a lot more back then because there were more bands folded into the show. There'd be two or even three. I remember there was a Grateful Dead show at the Avalon Ballroom with the Grass Roots and the Seeds, who had a couple of hits then.
JESSE: It allowed the bands to see each other in action.
TC: I remember one particular time at the Fillmore East I saw most of Country Joe and the Fish’s set. Barry Melton’s playing was exquisite that night. Other times, we would hang around mainly backstage. The show going on there was pretty entertaining in its own right.
JESSE: It also allowed the Dead to catch out of town acts, like TC’s faves, the Bonzo Dog Band.
TC: I loved them, they were wonderful. We shared the bill with them at a place in Boston called the Boston Tea Party on Lansdowne Street, right across the street from the Green Monster of Fenway Park. They were pretty wild and crazy.
AUDIO: “I’m the Urban Spaceman” [The Bonzo Dog Band, Tadpoles] (0:00-0:20) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s wonderful “I’m the Urban Spaceman.” TC was joined by his bandmates in watching Neil Innes and company.
TC: There wasn't a lot of coercion involved. Jerry Garcia was already into them, and making the Grateful Dead do something is [usually] like herding cats.
JESSE: But TC did seem to facilitate a certain weirdness factor.
TC: I was once visiting Bill Kreutzmann at his place when he was living in San Francisco, and we turned on KPFA radio and there was a John Cage piece playing and it totally blew the sound space because everything that came after it sounded like just a continuation. It was one of the sound collages where anything could happen, and definitely did.
AUDIO: “Imaginary Landscape” [John Cage] (5:00-5:27)
JESSE: That was from a 1942 realization of John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape,” a great radio piece that went into rotation on freeform radio in the ‘60s. But the Dead’s weirdness and TC’s weirdness weren’t always compatible in 1969. As a Scientologist, for example, he’d forsworn LSD and other substances.
TC: It was an extreme bit of irony that it was exactly that time that I was playing with the band where there were so many opportunities. And later I’ve since gotten back to the path of searching for the inner mountain.
JESSE: In general, as a head who’d been around the Dead’s scene since long before they were the Dead, TC generally knew what was dosed and could steer clear as needed.
TC: There was one night in particular at the Fillmore West, where the story I heard is three or four different people dosed the apple juice. Phil was talking about images of the fall of the Roman Empire. Afterwards, there's a backstage entrance from the stairs leading down to the street level, and we found Robert Hunter sort of painted onto the stairs.
JESSE: We’ve talked about that incident in our “Black Peter” episode. But other times, TC didn’t escape quite so easily.
TC: There were a couple of times I got dosed during the gig and there was no better person to hang out with [than Pigpen]. Two come to mind right away. One was at Clark University in western Massachusetts. We were sharing the bill with Roland Kirk, and what an amazing way to catch that show.
AUDIO: “Expansions” [Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Left and Right] (7:41-8:04) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That’s the wondrous blind horn player Rahsaan Roland Kirk, from his 1969 album, Left and Right.
TC: It was really pretty amazing. You're watching him playing three instruments at once, stuff like that. I was into outside jazz at that time like John Coltrane's Ascension, and this was even farther out than that.
AUDIO: “Expansions” [Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Left and Right] (17:01-17:22) - [Spotify]
TC: Another time was in Chicago at the Kinetic Playground, at the old location at Adams and North Clark.
JESSE: Even besides occasionally getting dosed on LSD against his will, there were some other problems in the workplace, of a more musical nature.
TC: One of the first things that was happening at Alembic was they would take the guitars and “hot rod” them, so to speak — they would replace all the individual components with the highest quality equipment that they could find. So the ambient level of the individual instrument was jacked up to a much higher degree.
JESSE: That is, the guitars were jacked up to a much higher degree.
TC: While I was with them, Jerry was going through four [Fender] Twin Reverbs turned up to 10. Hard to imagine, but they built upward from there. The keyboard did take a little bit longer to develop. In my day with the band, it was perennially a problem to amplify the keyboard enough to compete with the guitars. And they didn't have a problem with amplification at all. Keyboards were sort of like the fifth wheel of then and now, with the exception of bands where the keyboard player was the leader. Lee Michaels, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Leon Russell — in that case, it was a different story and a different balance. But if you have your regular power trio, like Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Blue Cheer, guitar bass and drums, anything else is window dressing. You've got the whole spectrum covered right there, and so that's where their emphasis was.
JESSE: It’s true, the B3 does tend to disappear under the Dead’s onslaught of bass and drums and guitar, and TC does sound a little out of place at times with the Dead. But as Phil Lesh pointed out, he was into orchestras and TC was into chamber music — and pieces like “Dark Star” and “Mountains of the Moon” were much more like chamber music. “Alligator” and “Caution” not so much, but I love TC’s contributions to the feedback sections. This is from the Fillmore Auditorium, November 8th 1969, Dick’s Picks 16. While everybody else is going ape, TC is throwing strange melodic shapes.
AUDIO: “Feedback” [Dick’s Picks 16, 11/8/69] (0:20-0:43) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
TC: I related to it in a totally different way because I couldn't do the sounds the same way. Actually if I could’ve gotten the organ to feedback, that might have gotten out of control too quickly. But I still could make sounds that would blend in with the melange that came out of it. So, that’s what I endeavored to do. It was mainly clusters, slides and drawbar manipulation, finding weird drawbar overtone configurations.
Late Dead
JESSE: But that wasn’t necessarily the direction the Dead were heading.
TC: We had been under pressure from the record company to come up with your typical three-minute hit single — shorter songs. And if any band was really into extended jams, it would have been us, which ran very much counter to the record company's preferences because they had commercial interests. They wanted to have a 45 RPM, big-hole-in-the-middle record that they could sell. And going on with “Alligator,” “Caution” or “Viola Lee,” another extended jam, their eyes sort of glaze over. A lot of bands, they just would not let them get away with it. I remember the Doors with “Light My Fire,” Ray Manzarek talking about how shocked he was when he first heard it on the radio, because they cut out a lot of his solo in the middle. And Workingman’s Dead was sort of the fruition of that — they wanted to get shorter songs. Now, mind you, I was not resisting. I rather liked the idea, and I’d been playing on those songs and they suited me quite comfortably. So, go figure.
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Dave’s Picks 10, 12/12/69] (4:02-4:21)
JESSE: Over the course of TC’s year in the band, the group had started moving in new and ever-more country-and-westerly directions. That was “Casey Jones” from Thelma in LA on December 12th, 1969, now Dave’s Picks 10, featuring a TC organ part that sounds kind of appropriately like a steam-driven calliope. One could actually program an entire alternate version of Workingman’s Dead with early drafts featuring TC on organ.
TC: There were a couple of licks that I had been playing that Jerry took over. And if you listen to the tapes of the performances, you can hear that.
JESSE: “High Time” was one of them.
TC: “I was losing time,” there's a lead up to that.
AUDIO: “High Time” [Dave’s Picks 30, 1/2/70] (3:39-3:54)
JESSE: That was from January 2nd, 1970 at the Fillmore East, now Dave’s Picks 30. And here it is on Workingman’s Dead, recorded a little over a month later, with Garcia’s pedal steel.
AUDIO: “High Time” [Workingman’s Dead] (2:08-2:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: In January 1970, they finally decided it wasn’t working.
TC: There was always the problem of amplifying the organ sufficiently to compete with the guitar sounds, because the technology lagged behind a bit. It has caught up since, to be sure. But back then, at the time, I was scuffling. Sometimes it seemed like my dynamic range consisted of forte to double-forte, and anything below that was inaudible.
JESSE: With friendships intact, TC and the band decided to part ways in late January 1970. To add one final indignity, TC was very nearly busted with the Dead in New Orleans at the end of the month.
TC: I went to talk to one of the cops who just got out of the military, so we had that sort of stuff to talk about. I've often said if they came to our room first, there wouldn't have been a bust.
JESSE: It was up to them to let Lenny Hart know the rest of the band had been arrested.
TC: I remember Pigpen calling him up to let him know about the New Orleans affair. So he was home then for that one.
JESSE: He and Pigpen had been out looking at antique swords. This time, the non-smoking Pigpen was spared arrest.
Post Dead
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [American Beauty] (3:14-3:33) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: By the time “Truckin’” was written that spring and debuted that summer, TC was gone from the band. Howard Wales played the organ part on the album. TC’s first recorded music after leaving the Dead was an arrangement he wrote for a group that many UK psychedelic heads considered to be the Dead’s proper British equivalent — the Incredible String Band.
AUDIO: “Queen of Love” [The Incredible String Band, U] (1:07-1:36) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was TC’s arrangement for the Incredible String Band Queen of Love from their 1970 album, U. He’d come into contact with them, ironically, through their own dalliance with Scientology — but their roots ran as deep and weird as the Dead’s.
TC: They were so much closer to the British folk scene. They were comparable — they have a lot of their own materials that they generated, and their attitude was very similar. I described Mike Heron as his smile was so wide it's amazing his face can hold it.
JESSE: But TC stayed very much inside the Dead’s orbit, remaining housemates with Pigpen, who served as his best man when TC got married later that year. When it was time for his first post-Dead project to debut—the Rubber Duck Co.—it was opening for the Dead on their home turf at the Euphoria Ballroom in San Rafael, shows that turned out to be Owsley’s farewell before going to prison for three years.
TC: Joe McCord showed up backstage at a Grateful Dead show, and he was talking about this project and invited me to join him. I did, and that was pretty much it. Don Buchla sat in with us once, too, at Mandrake's in Berkeley, playing his synthesizer.
JESSE: That is, the Buchla Box, invented at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. The next year, the Rubber Duck Co. evolved into a theatrical project called Tarot, and relocated to New York.
AUDIO: “The Moon” [Touchstone, Tarot] (0:15-0:48)
JESSE: That was “The Moon” from the album Tarot by the band known as Touchstone, released by United Artists in 1972, with TC playing a somewhat Thelonious Monk-ish piano.
TC: It was pretty much the music from the show. The band became known as Touchstone after the show because we started doing gigs as a band, we started doing other material. But the material that was on the United Artists album was all directly from the show, pretty much in the same sequence that it was on the show. It was originally supposed to be a double album, but seeing as the show didn't take off and go platinum right away, they cut it to a single album and rearranged some of the songs to fit. But all of them were from the show.
JESSE: Jerry Garcia passed through the project very briefly.
TC: He played at several of the rehearsals, as did also Peter Rowan and Richard Greene. None of them were in the Tarot production in New York. It was all on the rehearsals in Mill Valley.
JESSE: When Tarot was open at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the spring of 1971, TC stopped by the Fillmore East to see his old bandmates and ended up sitting in.
PHIL LESH [4/28/71]: We’ve got a former member of the Grateful Dead hangin’ out here in New York. Tom Constanten’s gonna join us on this next tune.
JESSE: One urban rumor about the show is that TC’s appearance happened because Pigpen himself was dosed that night, a story TC quashes.
TC: It happened just spur of the moment. They were staying at the Essex House, a fabled song and story mentioned in the Saturday Night Live pitch because that’s where they put their people. And I went to visit Pigpen there, and the band spotted me and said, “Hey, come join us, we’ll have you on stage for a number or two.”
JESSE: It’s a great “Dark Star” suite, now on the box set, Ladies & Gentlemen… The Grateful Dead.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” (with Tom Constanten) [Ladies & Gentlemen… The Grateful Dead, 4/28/71] (0:00-0:30) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It was the last time he would play onstage with the Grateful Dead proper, but far from the end of his musical adventures.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” (with Tom Constanten) [Ladies & Gentlemen… The Grateful Dead, 4/28/71] (5:00-5:30) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Sometime in 1971, TC departed the Church of Scientology.
TC: A couple of months after I left the band, actually. It was a masterpiece of poor timing on my part. I compared… there’s a Scientology condition formula. I compared the people I knew who were more bohemian, shall I say, and the ones who were playing it straight like Scientology wanted me to. And the ones who were more bohemian were achieving more, and achieving more interesting things. So I said, “Well, I think I'll go in that direction.”
JESSE: He remained friends with Robert Hunter.
TC: I wound up giving him my E-meter. I don't know what use he put it to.
JESSE: In the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, Tom Constanten continued down his own ever-quizzical paths. Here’s a recording of him playing some fusion with a quintet in Buffalo in 1975. This is their version of “The Moon,” the same piece we heard from Touchstone a moment ago.
AUDIO: “The Moon” [Tom Constanten, Art Levinowitz, Murray Cohen, Chuck Hammer, Norman Skeeber, 1/20/75] (1:47-2:20)
JESSE: He taught music in Buffalo, and continued to compose, including a 1983 piece for electric guitar quartet titled “Alaric's Premonition - a gothic fugue en rondeau on a theme by J. Garcia.”
AUDIO: “Alaric’s Premonition” [Electric Guitar Quartet] (0:26-1:02)
TC: It's an academic piece actually. It’s a fugue on the theme of “What’s Become of the Baby.” I figured “What’s Become of the Baby” was about as outside as the band ever got, except maybe “Barbed Wire Whipping Party.”
AUDIO: “Alaric’s Premonition” [Electric Guitar Quartet] (1:26-1:45)
JESSE: In the ‘80s, he worked especially on ragtime piano, too.
AUDIO: “Green and Gold Take the Cake Walk” [Tom Constanten, 6/19/83] (0:37-1:03)
TC: In the ‘80s, I played in a ragtime band in San Francisco. Once, the bandleader—this is in San Francisco—he found out that Donita Fowler, who was Scott Joplin’s niece—was living in Oakland, so he invited her to our concert. And again, I had a solo, I think it was “Peacherine Rag.” And that was the last time I ever had stage fright.
JESSE: Though he didn’t play with the Dead themselves, he moved back into their musical circles, collaborating with Robert Hunter in 1988 on the Duino Elegies, a cassette so rare we’ve been unable to find a copy. If anybody has any leads, get in touch with us at stories.dead.net. Here’s how Hunter described it to our buddy David Gans in 1988, the day after he and TC recorded it.
ROBERT HUNTER [2/25/88]: Last night, I went into the studio with Tom Constanten and did, by my own estimation, one hell of a reading of those Elegies. Boy, they just roared out of me, and Tom was playing Brahms and Chopin and a little bit of Scriabin as background music for it. And I think we've got quite a little number here.
TC: He did the translation in English of the Duino Elegies, of Marie Rainer Rilke, and he invited me to play some music behind it. I had a bunch of Brahms and Schubert and stuff, which tailor fit as the bones, certainly in terms of mood, and most of the time also in terms of length. It was amazing how carefully and closely everything dovetailed together.
ROBERT HUNTER [2/25/88]: It shouldn't be read. It's only secondhand when it's on the page.
JESSE: It did begin a lovely collaboration and there are some recordings circulating. Here’s TC backing Hunter on the poem “Rainwater Sea,” and you can hear the music slipping into Hunter’s voice.
AUDIO: “Rainwater Sea” [Robert Hunter & Tom Constanten, 5/19/90] (1:26-1:56)
JESSE: In 1989, 20 years after Live/Dead, Tom Constanten released his solo debut — Fresh Tracks in Real Time, beginning a solo discography that sprawled to nearly 10 albums in 10 years, diving into playing live at the border of classical, ragtime, and Dead music. For a half-dozen years starting in 1986, he played on the weekly KQED radio show, West Coast Weekend, where he met guitarist Henry Kaiser and began one of the more quietly consequential collaborations of his career.
HENRY KAISER: That was a remarkable live radio show with a really good host and a big studio audience. It was a remarkable show. There was Prairie Home Companion being like that at the time. But it was better than that, and it had a greater variety of things on it. It had art criticism and all kinds of other things in different segments. It was a great show. That's how I met him, and I think I probably played something with him there. And I said, “Hey, we got this band, do you want to play some gigs?”
JESSE: “Dark Star” had returned to TC’s repertoire during his ragtime years, but the Kaiser Band allowed him to get into the song in a way he hadn’t since he was in the Dead with a new improved vocabulary and a more comfortable and better mixed keyboard. Check out his counterpoint to Henry here, subtly quoting “A Love Supreme.”
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Henry Kaiser Band, Heart’s Desire, 10/21-22/89] (12:40-13:10)
JESSE: That was from the 20-minute long “Dark Star” recorded in 1989 that opens the live Henry Kaiser Band album, Heart’s Desire.
HENRY KAISER: You get to hear him playing piano and not just organ, all those percussive elements. But he could do anything — like on the live album, recorded at the Palms, Heart's Desire, he plays a Stockhausen piano piece. And that's just spontaneous: Okay, I'll play the Stockhausen piano piece.
JESSE: And it was in this period that TC began to actually make his way to Dead shows again.
TC: There was a big hiatus, roughly between 1970 and about 1988. I think somebody invited me backstage for one of those shows and they kept on inviting me. I would hang out mainly in Vince's room, although I would see Phil. I saw everybody then. Jerry was kicked up to a higher level — he had an entourage when he walked backstage. There was like a row of security guards seeing to it that no one got to him. But everybody else was quite approachable. And like I said, I spend most of my time in Vince’s room hanging out with him.
JESSE: One of the people that TC met during this period was Bob Bralove, the Dead’s MIDI guru, who joined the Dead’s musical family in 1987 and who we spoke with extensively during our Infrared Roses episode. In some ways, as the Dead’s resident electronic music expert, he served a similar role with the Dead that TC had in 1969. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, Bob Bralove.
BOB BRALOVE: I had this band called Second Sight that Henry Kaiser was in. We had a show at the Great American Music Hall, and Henry suggested that TC join us. He had been, of course, working with Henry and the Henry Kaiser Band. And I thought, Oh, sounds like fun. I didn’t really know him — I didn’t know his full history. I was just trying to keep up with things as they were coming at me. So I called TC and said, “Look, I have access to the studio. So, why don't you come up, and I will set up two keyboards and go over the tunes, and you can make any notes you want, if you need to remember anything.”
We'd play the tunes, and I'd say, “How’s that feel?” He’d say, “Feels good,” and we’d just start jamming. I think both of our eyebrows sort of peaked up — somebody would play something, and the other person might recognize it, because I studied composition. So, he'd play something that sounded like Stravinsky, and I'd start going at it too. And I’d play something that seems like Bartók, and he’d respond to it and go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” And I said, “Well, I felt like I was playing Bartók.” “Me too!” So, that was the initial thing, and he played the gig. It was wonderful.
JESSE: TC was Grateful Dead class of ‘69, and Bralove class of ‘89, but they didn’t become true musical partners until 1995.
BOB BRALOVE: We didn't really meet again until Jerry's funeral. And he leaned over to me and he said, “You know how to get through this, don't you?” And I said, “No, I have no idea.” And he looked at me and he said, “You play through this.” So a week or two after that, I called him up and I said, “I'm ready to play through this. Are you ready?” And he was, and he came over and I had two keyboards set up and I had the computer in record mode. And we just kept playing and playing.
TC: I'd seen him backstage at Grateful Dead shows in the ‘80s. And we got together after Jerry's memorial service. We sort of talked things through when we hashed it out and figured that he would have wanted us to keep playing. We were already getting together just to goof around and improvise, very, very freely. And we said, Hey, let's do that some more, put it on the stage. Next thing we know, we were Dose Hermanos — and that’s dose, d-o-s-e, a measurement of medication, not a number in Spanish. A couple of times, David Gans has joined us to play. And there were three of us, but we’re still Dose Hermanos.
AUDIO: “New York Cup O’ Java” [Dose Hermanos, Live from California] (0:25-0:45) - [Bandcamp]
JESSE: That was “New York Cup O’ Java” from Live from California, released in 1997. And so it was that Tom Constanten formed a new band at the age of 51, who’ve stayed together ever since.
TC: We combine the freedom of improvisation in my time with the band with the electronic wizardry from his time with the band. And we sort of cherry pick the best of both worlds.
BOB BRALOVE: Within that first week, I looked at him and I said, “Well, somebody gave me this bottle of crystal mescaline. Are you interested?” And I was fairly new to dosing at that point. But I had sort of started right around the end of the Grateful Dead. So I remember Tom, exactly what he was doing — he had this big smile on his face, and he said, “Oh, yes, please!” [laughs] So we started indulging in that, and there seemed to be some truth to be discovered in the psychedelic realm. And I'd say, for the first five years, we were psychedelicized every single show.
AUDIO: “Moon Puddles” [Dose Hermanos, Live from California] (1:11-1:45) - [Bandcamp]
JESSE: That was Constanten and Bralove along with bassist Joe Gallant and guitarist Steve Kimock, from Live from California. Dose Hermanos were and are very much a real band, engaging in a range of projects from video synth hookups to turning their improvisations into orchestral pieces for youth orchestras. Along with TC’s solo releases, the Dose Hermanos discography now includes seven albums, the latest released last year, Persistence of Memory. They began recording in mid-2019.
BOB BRALOVE: I converted my entire living room into the studio. There was a grand piano, a Steinway Model A, which was my dad's. And I had a Fender Rhodes 72-key. I had two other digital MIDI keyboards, and then access to a bunch of sounds. It pretty much was, like most of those Dose Hermanos recordings: what do you feel like doing? What instrument do you want to play? We still will describe an emotion.
TC: Occasionally we'll have an idea that will go with going in. There's one called “Cartoon Spy”—I forget what the title of the album is—but we’re trying to think of a combination of James Bond and Daffy Duck. What would that be like?
BOB BRALOVE: That might be the live one, “IRT.”
AUDIO: “IRT - Inner City Rapid Transit” [Dose Hermanos, Persistence of Memory] (2:20-2:43) - [Spotify]
TC: There's a couple of others that are like clearings in the forest that we return to — “Waltz of the Autumn Moon,” and one we've done often called “Shadow of the Invisible Man.”
AUDIO: “Waltz of the Autumn Moon” [Dose Hermanos, Persistence of Memory] (3:01-3:34) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was “Waltz of the Autumn Moon.”
TC: They're both like these clearings in the forest that we return to. They start out relatively predictably, and then we branch out into other realms of sound that neither of us could predict either, at the time. We just go out there and enjoy the ride. We deliberately create avalanches, which we then surf.
JESSE: And then Bob gets to work.
TC: For this new album, there was a fair amount of post production. We had five instruments set up in Bob's home studio, and several of them were MIDI instruments, which means you can change the sound after it's done. All you have is the notes and certain nuances of loudness, phrasing, stuff like that. But it could be a marimba, could be a clarinet, whatever works for the given situation. And Bob had a field day putting that sort of stuff together. With all of his experience, and knowhow, you know it's gonna be pretty amazing. And sure enough, there it was.
Even beyond assigning the various sound patches, he has a feel for laying out the panorama of sound in front of you: left to right, the placement of the sounds front to back, whether it sounds more present, or whether it sounds in the mists of the recession and behind. Pardon my Uranian syntax. But there were a bunch of parameters that he was tweaking.
JESSE: Dose Hermanos has been a true creative partnership.
BOB BRALOVE: He's got this bird's eye view, constantly. He's always able to just lift up to the next level to see it from a different angle. And so it's always sort of a creative response to any problem — well, we could do this, or we could do that. The thing is, Tom is always game. I mean, if you're not game, Dose Hermanos is stuck in the mud. So it's always fun and playful. He makes jokes when we play, right, that I call our time release jokes. He’ll say something like, “You know, Evian is naive spelled backwards.” And there's a little laugh, a little laugh and then all of a sudden it starts to filter into this kind of time release thing — that people are slowly getting his joke. So these things [happen] after conversation with Tom — you’re just like, Oh yeah, wow…
JESSE: Between the puns, TC is also a source of wisdom for his bandmate. Once, Bob told TC about an especially effortless experience he’d had while playing music.
BOB BRALOVE: It just felt like I was playing from my shoulders, like everything down from the shoulders was taking care of itself. My hands knew what to do, my fingers knew what to do. And I just had to create these gestures from my shoulder, and everything would fall into place. Tom talked about playing up the arm — that the higher up the arm that you're playing from, the greater the gesture can be, and the greater the movement, the more confidence you're having as you play up the arm. I find one of the most wonderful parts of playing with Tom and Dose Hermanos can be the point where we move to these really broad gestures that really transcend the notes. It almost doesn't matter what notes you're playing because you're responding in these broad gestures of movement and time and sonorities, and they're just bigger than the individual notes. Then there are times like in “Smoke Rings of My Mind” where every note counts.
AUDIO: “Smoke Rings of My Mind” [Dose Hermanos, Persistence of Memory] (0:20-0:52) - [Spotify]
JESSE: There’s a Grateful Dead axiom that it’s always “Dark Star” somewhere. And if that’s true, and I think it is, it stands to reason that it’s also always beyond Dark Star somewhere, too. Look for Tom Constanten in the outer rings.
TC: We're all in our orbits. We disappear for a while, then we come back, then we disappear again.
AUDIO: “Alaric's Premonition, for keyboards” [Tom Constanten, 88 Keys to Tomorrow] (1:25-1:55)