The Grateful Dead was an accident according to Mickey. He says that the pieces fit together in an unusual way, but they somehow worked. They had no leader; they were a group mind. They didn’t really have a lot of rules, and they didn’t have to be anything they weren’t. They were explorers.
“We didn’t have to fill any role,” said Mickey. The band was really not about entertaining in the long run, it was about raising consciousness and taking their listeners into a world of trance the music would create. “It was chaos!” he laughed.
“We gave it everything we had. We would dream Grateful Dead; we embedded ourselves in the lifestyle,” he said.“Personally, I fell in love with the world’s music during that time.”
After the Grateful Dead split up and the members went their separate ways, Mickey continued with his love of music. “Music contains thousands of years of the world and its history,” he explained. Every culture has music, and when one type of music is no longer needed in a culture, it dies and a new type comes in. “The first thing that goes when a culture dies is its music,” he told us.