Mickey Hart

Michael Hart Born: September 11, 1943, Brooklyn, New York. Drummer for The Grateful Dead.

Legendary drummer of the Grateful Dead, Mickey Hart, brings us his first solo album in four years with "RAMU". The title refers to his workstation, the "Random Access Musical Universe" which he uses to access a dizzying array of samples for creating his music. Exploring difficult themes, Hart builds an atmospheric and texturally dense sonic world.

Planet Drum, the voice to Hart's book of the same name, represents a musical atlas of the World Beat. Hart and company extend the sonic territory traversed in his album At The Edge for a powerful and passionate journey.'It had long been a dream of mine to bring together great drummers from around the world to make a recording based entirely on percussion,' says Hart.

Mickey Hart: Random Access Musical Universe (RAMU) takes audiences on a unique journey into the world of Mickey Hart, illuminating the creation of RAMU, featuring collaborations with Zakir Hussain, Sikiru Adepoju, Giovanni Hidalgo, Tank Ball (Tank & the Bangas), Dave Portner (Animal Collective), Michal Menert (Pretty Lights), Oteil Burbridge (Dead & Company), and Steve Kimock. While most albums function as a snapshot of a place and time, RAMU is more like a photo album, containing samples and recordings from around the globe, originating between 1944 and 2017.

Workingman's Dead is the fourth studio album (and fifth overall) by American rock band Grateful Dead. It was recorded in February 1970 and originally released on June 14, 1970. The album and its studio follow-up, American Beauty, were recorded back-to-back using a similar style, eschewing the psychedelic experimentation of previous albums in favor of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's Americana-styled songcraft.
In 2003, the album was ranked number 262 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, 264 in a 2012 revised list, and 409 in the 2020 list. It was voted number 371 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums.

On June 14, 1970, the Grateful Dead released Workingman’s Dead, an album that was unlike anything they had ever done, one that showed the world a new side of the Dead. It was clearly the same band as before, but now with a distinctly different sound and approach to the music, pivoting from psychedelic improvisation to folk-rock storytelling for the “everyman,” as the album’s title suggests.

For Planet Drum, Hart convened some of the world's finest drum talents for a momentous collaboration that won the very first Grammy for World Music. He brought together Nigerian drum legend Babatunde Olatunji, Indian tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, Nigerian talking drum ace Sikiru Adepoju, and Puerto Rico's master conguero Giovanni Hidalgo, among others. The cornerstone 1991 album spent an unprecedented 26 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard world music chart and continues to sell as a perennial favorite to this very day.

This hi-res collection of the Grateful Dead's studio work has been painstakingly produced from the original master tapes of each album, using their original mixes to produce a work that is truer to the original sound than any previous release. Included in this collection are the band's 13 studio albums, spanning three decades and containing over 8 hours of music, lovingly rendered in hi-resolution…

Like a super-stoned campfire jam with an A-list of Cali hippie-rockers – including Joni Mitchell and most of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and CSNY – this hazy solo project by the altered-consciousness overachiever sounds like it was pretty much made up on the spot. The album included in the Rolling Stones' 40 Greatest Stoner Albums. he album gained new recognition in 2010 when it was listed second on the Vatican's "Top 10 Pop Albums of All Time" as published in the official newspaper.

Sing Out! features a stellar line-up of acoustic performances by Bay Area folk heroes, including Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, Country Joe McDonald, Kate Wolf, Rosalie Sorrels, and a percussion set by the Dead’s drummers – billed as the Rhythm Devils. The event was described by Wavy Gravy as a “mini-Woodstock,” and it is the last major show to be mixed and recorded by famed Grateful Dead soundman Owsley Stanley, aka “Bear.” It is also the final live recording he made of any members of the Grateful Dead.