Why did drummer Mickey Hart leave the Grateful Dead in the early 1970s?
For most bands, a drummer suddenly leaving with dozens of tour dates to fulfil would spell a crisis. But not for the Grateful Dead, who spent most of their 30-year existence with two drum kits on stage. Founding member Bill Kreutzmann was behind one of them, while fan favourite Mickey Hart sat behind the other.
As Hart observed in an interview with CBS around the time of the Dead’s ‘Fare Thee Well’ shows, having two drummers allowed the band to emit “absolute power” from the stage in a way that others just couldn’t. What’s more, Hart and Kreutzmann could play two different rhythms at the same time, especially during one of the Dead’s famous jams, in which each member of the group improvised their part. Hart called these multiple drum parts “polyrhythms”, which resulted in half the band going with his beat while the other half followed Kreutzmann’s.
One of the things that made the Dead great was the endless experimental possibilities opened up by having two drummers, particularly during their off-piste live performances. Except for a three-and-a-half-year period between February 1971 and October 1974, when Hart decided he no longer wanted to be part of the band. He rejoined just in time to play in their final shows before a hiatus from live performance that lasted almost two years, but he was sorely missed in the meantime.
Even though the rest of the Dead could make do with Kreutzmann as their sole percussionist during the intervening period, it still must have come as a shock to them all when Hart left. He’d been in the line-up through thick and thin since he joined in the period immediately following the release of their debut album, which many Deadheads now refer to as the ‘primal Dead era’. They didn’t need him to carry on with the show per se, but he was still an integral part of what made them the Grateful Dead.
So why did he quit?
Hart’s leave of absence from the Dead is clearly a touchy subject for him, and all mention of it was noticeably absent from the band’s 2017 documentary about their career, Long Strange Trip. When this was put to him in an interview with Uproxx to promote the film, Hart didn’t go into any detail about his reasons for leaving.
“It was my elective to leave the band for a while for personal reasons,” he simply stated.
Those personal reasons were actually incredibly close to home, as they pertained to Hart’s father, Lenny. As the Dead’s former accountant, Lenny Hart had robbed them of $155,000 and made a run for it in March 1970. This incident proved to be the inspiration behind the band’s song ‘He’s Gone’, and the famous Deadhead expression “Steal your face” that originated from it.
He was eventually caught in July of the following year, convicted and sent to prison. And while Mickey Hart had absolutely nothing to do with the crime and had no prior knowledge of his father’s bad intentions, he wrestled with feelings of guilt about the terrible bind a close family member had put his band in. “It wasn’t a very pleasant time for me, it wasn’t a happy time,” he reflected. “So I had to work out my situation myself.”
Luckily, Hart got himself out of the vicious cycle of self-blaming and shaming that had apparently forced him to take his leave of absence. “One day I decided it was time to become part of the Grateful Dead again,” he remembered. “That was it. Just that simple. No big cathartic thing, it was just you don’t sign up, you don’t sign out. There’s no contracts. We just played together.”
He was welcomed back into the fold with open arms and appeared on every one of the Dead’s subsequent albums. And there wasn’t a Deadhead around who didn’t appreciate his return. As Hart put it, “You know, once you’re a part of the Grateful Dead, you’re never out of it.”
