The Deadcast is honored to welcome Tom Constanten to discuss his remarkable tenure as Grateful Dead keyboardist from late 1968 through early 1970, his work on 3 classic albums, & his adventures before & after the Dead, including his current band Dose Hermanos.
by Jesse Jarnow
Tom Constanten performed with the Grateful Dead for 15 months from late 1968 through early 1970, and his work with the band spanned three classic albums and the beginnings of a fourth. He’s also spent more than a half-century making his own music and working in various orbits around the Dead. Dose Hermanos, his wonderfully outré duo with ‘80s/’90s Dead MIDI wizard Bob Bralove, put out Persistence of Memory last year. His 1988 memoir, Between Rock and Hard Places: A Musical Autobiodyssey is out-of-print but not hard to seek out.
Friends and roommates with Phil Lesh during their student days in the early ‘60s, Constanten was an enthusiastic attendant at the multi-night Tudorfest, presented by the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1964, a landmark event featuring performances of John Cage’s music by Pauline Oliveros. Morton Subotnick, and many others, released by New World Records. In that same period, Constanten was a member of a new music ensemble with roommate Phil Lesh, Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, and Gwendolyn Watson, and participated in the Music Now Koncerts organized by his Reich, performing his “Piano Piece #3.”
June 1964 ~ “S.F. Improvisation Group” ~ Phil Lesh, Steve Reich, Gwendolyn Watson, Jon Gibson, & Tom Constanten pic.twitter.com/0l07OnzDAQ
— Britton Powell (@britton_powell) February 20, 2019
TC’s music has been performed by a variety of ensembles, such as the Electric Guitar Quartet’s version of “Alaric's Premonition - a gothic fugue en rondeau on a theme by J. Garcia,” based on “What’s Become of the Baby.” After the Dead, TC continued to perform in a variety of settings, including the stage project Tarot (becoming a 1972 studio album, credited to Moonstone), various small groups (such as this one from Buffalo in 1975), as a solo ragtime-adjacent performer, with the Henry Kaiser Band (notably on the Heart’s Desire live album), accompanying Dead lyricist Robert Hunter in the studio and live, and especially with Dose Hermanos.