Drumming at the Edge of Magic

 Mickey Hart, Jay Stevens, & Fredric Lieberman. Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey Into the Spirit of Percussion,  HarperSanFrancisco, 1990.

     For a long time I thought I would walk into a bookstore and come out with a book explaining all of this.  I finally sought guidance from several of my more learned friends who suggested I try a good research library.  Have you ever been to a major research library, like Harvard’s Widener or Berkeley’s Doe? They’re imposing stone structures, every inch of which hammers home the message that this is a very serious building.  The first time I went into the library at Berkeley I felt as if I had entered a strange kind of church that was both very busy and very quiet – a kind of hushed, scurrying place.  Everywhere you looked, serious people were praying over piles of books.

      I couldn’t wait to get my pile.  I felt the same excitement that I remembered feeling when my grandfather took me to see the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History – this was where the answers were kept.

     My guide was a brisk, no-nonsense type with a Ph.D. Astonished that I’d never been inside a big library before, she was enough of a teacher to be moved by my sudden and naïve eagerness for knowledge. Leading me over to a computer terminal, she punched in the topic – percussion—and scrolled quickly through the entries, jotting down numbers.  I was captivated by the process, particularly by the fact that inside this immense medieval stone building pulsed a heart of high technology.  In a minute we were trotting toward the stacks, zipping past aisles, checking numbers as we went.

     We made a right turn down between two of the stacks and halted in front of a squared-off section of maybe two dozen books.  The mother lode? I gazed at the titles.  Blades was there, of course, along with Curt Sachs’s History of Musical Instruments and John Chernoff’s African Rhythm and African Sensibility, but there were also a few volumes I had never seen before.  Eagerly I skimmed some of the tables of contents, my excitement fading as I went—there didn’t seem to be much here.

     Why were so many of the drum books so thin? And why, now that you mention it, were there so few? Why were there shelves full of books about the violin and walls full of books about the piano but only a dozen or so about drums, most of them monographs on obscurities like the gong in fourteenth-century Manchuria or gigantic tomes on narrow subjects like the mbira (the thumb piano in Zaire).

     I wheeled to question my guide, who nervously backed away murmuring something about there always being gaps in the scholarly record; if there weren’t gaps there’d be nothing for aspiring Ph.D.s to do.   [p. 29]

COMMENT

     This is my favorite library research story of all times.

     The drummer for the Grateful Dead walks into a library in Berkeley and... the librarian fails to recognize him. Then she gives him wrong advice.  Only in a moment of zen it turns out to be exactly the right advice.

     As things transpire, if you are Mickey Hart you have connections. Not long after this library incident, Hart's friends invited him to dinner with Joseph Campbell who literally wrote the book on The Power of Myth (1988). After chatting for a while about drums, Campbell (who like the librarian had also never heard of the Grateful Dead band, but knew the folktale)  offered the same advice  the librarian had given. He told Hart to write a book. 

   Micky Hart did what any respectable cult-band percussionist would do and hired a writer to help him write and a music professor to help with library research.  The book they wrote together is a marvel.

    It occurs to me that the reason that Hart failed to find books about shamanic drumming in the first place is because he was looking for indigenous knowledge.  The root problem is, most shamans don't write books.