PARTING SHOT
“I HAVE A RHYTHM-CENTRIC VIEW OF EVERYTHING,” SAYS MICKEY HART, THE Grateful Dead’s former drummer. For years, the percussionist and musicologist has been promoting the healing powers of music. In 1991, the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging invited Hart and the late neurologist Oliver Sacks to testify about the positive impact rhythm can have on Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. And this spring, at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York, Hart performed “Musica Universalis: The Greatest Story Ever Told,” a sonic and visual voyage spanning 13.8 billion years in 30 minutes, from the Big Bang onward. As he played an electric, 8-foot aluminum instrument modeled after Pythagoras’ monochord, a giant MRI revealed the effects of all that sonic stimuli on his brain. “The whole universe operates with rhythm, and we are all rhythmic animals in it,” adds Hart, who spoke to Newsweek just prior to his band, Dead & Company, going on tour.
Illustration by BRITT SPENCER