http://www.southbendtribune.com/article/20090725/Ent/907249845/1043/Ent
By ANDREW S. HUGHES
Tribune Staff Writer
7/25/09
Although The Grateful Dead built its reputation and fan base as a
live act, Tom Constanten always felt more comfortable in the studio
during his tenure with the band.
"I felt better in the studio because I didn't have the sound problems
I had onstage," he says by telephone from his home in Charlotte, N.C.
"The technology of the time couldn't amplify a Hammond B-3 enough to
compete with guitars. The studio definitely worked more to my advantage."
A classically trained composer and pianist who met future Grateful
Dead bass player Phil Lesh in 1961 while both were studying music at
the University of California, Berkeley, Constanten joined The
Grateful Dead in November 1968 to supplement Ron "Pigpen" McKernan's
organ playing.
Just before he officially joined, however, Constanten played prepared
piano on the band's second album, 1968's "Anthem of the Sun." He
remained with the band through January 1970 and also recorded 1969's
"Aoxomoxoa" "It wasn't meant to be pronounced. It's a palindrome"
by Rick Griffin and Robert Hunter and 1970's "Live/Dead."
"It was one wild and crazy way to make a buck," he says about his
time with The Grateful Dead. "Onstage and off it was quite a ride. It
really seemed like time was going at a different rate. … The music
was free and modular enough that it could be different. It wasn't
like we had a set piece that had to be done a certain way."
Not surprisingly, the band's creative process had a similarly
free-form ethos to it.
"Many of them, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter created, and they
brought the song and there it was," Constanten says. "I remember
Jerry Garcia came to the house where Bob Weir and I lived, and he had
'Casey Jones' and 'Dire Wolf,' and they were complete. Other songs,
'Dark Star' and 'Playing in the Band,' evolved over time. We kept
playing them until we got what worked."
That time also included performing at Woodstock in August 1969.
"It was wild," Constanten says about the rock festival. "It was
bigger than anything anybody could get their minds around, the
numbers of people, the problems we had to deal with, even getting
there. On the other hand, it symbolized the culture of the 1960s."
As part of the Jefferson Starship's "Heroes of Woodstock" tour this
summer, Constanten performs Thursday at the Acorn Theater in Three
Oaks with the electric version of the Jefferson Starship.
The keyboardist just doesn't know in what capacity yet.
"I usually find out the night of the show," he says. "We've done
Grateful Dead segments in the middle of their set. Usually, on this
'Heroes of Woodstock' tour, I join them and do a Grateful Dead set."
The acoustic version of Jefferson Starship performed at the Acorn in
October 2008, and although severe sound problems marred the
experience, the quartet gave a spirited performance highlighted by
the powerful and charismatic vocals of singer Cathy Richardson and
founder Paul Kantner's rough, seasoned voice.
In addition to Chris Smith and David Freiberg from the acoustic
quartet, the electric version of Jefferson Starship includes Mark
"Slick" Aguilar and Donny Baldwin.
"It's really a joy to be hanging out with these guys and performing
with them," Constanten says about performing with Jefferson Starship.
"Every time we do it, we reshuffle and re-deal, and it's always brand
new and exciting. Energizing is how we find it."
Constanten left The Grateful Dead to accept an offer to write an
off-Broadway musical "and I would be in a band where I could hear
the keyboards" and return to performing, writing and recording
classical music.
He also taught at the State University of New York Buffalo and the
San Francisco Art Institute and was an artist-in-residence in 1986 at
Harvard University.
Constanten studied piano with Mario Feninger and Edwin Fischer and
composition with Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
"I first read about (avant-garde music) in a magazine in the 1950s
and I had the response, 'That's for me,' " he says about his music
studies. "I knew I had to study that, and I proceeded to do just
that. Boulez tended to be more pedantic. Stockhausen was more like a
science or mathematics course, and he demonstrated it big time."
Constanten's most recent releases include 2006's "Moved to
Stanleyville," a rock collaboration with Ken Foust, and 2006's "Deep
Expressions, Longtime Known," a selection of studio recordings of
piano works by such composers as Bach, Haydn, Brahms, Chopin and
Satie that Constanten had made in the previous 30 years.
"It's one very, very wide canvas," he says about the classical
album's range of eras and styles. "I've taken in a lot of it. I also
like Renaissance and medieval music, so I would go further than that."
As for his tenure with The Grateful Dead, Constanten's Web site
includes his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 as
part of his biography and he says some Grateful Dead fans have sought
out his classical and rock recordings because of his association with the band.
"It reminds me a little bit of the old mythical Irish harper who
could travel to anywhere in the realm and everyone in the room would
know the tunes," he says about interacting with Grateful Dead fans.
"There's this friendly sense of community that has evolved."
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