THE BEAT GOES ON
“I watched a snail crawl across the edge of a straight razor... that is my dream; that is my nightmare. To crawl across the edge of a straight razor...and survive.” —Marlon “Two-Tub Man” Brando as Col. Walter E. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. CLARKSTON, MI-“Hey, look —I lived with that movie,” said Mickey Hart, percussionist of the Grateful Dead and the Rhythm Devils, the group that supplied Francis Ford Coppola with the necessary abstract soundtrack for the controversial film Apocalypse Now.
THE BEAT GOES ON
Mickey Hart’s Rhythmic Apocalypse
“I watched a snail crawl across the edge of a straight razor... that is my dream; that is my nightmare. To crawl across the edge of a straight razor...and survive.”
—Marlon “Two-Tub Man” Brando as Col. Walter E. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.
CLARKSTON, MI-“Hey, look —I lived with that movie,” said Mickey Hart, percussionist of the Grateful Dead and the Rhythm Devils, the group that supplied Francis Ford Coppola with the necessary abstract soundtrack for the controversial film Apocalypse Now.
“It got me. It got Francis; it ‘Kurtzed’ him, and it ‘Kurtzed’ me too. All of a sudden I woke up in the morning crying and I didn’t know why. There is something really immoral about Apocalypse Now...something really .wrong. Francis wasn’t trying to be pretty, he was trying to answer a moral question. He wasn’t trying to entertain. It’s a monumental work, it stands absolutely above everything else. And it’s not because I worked on it; it’s nothing but history to me. Francis didn’t even need a soundtrack, it was so vivid... and offensive. It was a totally offensive movie. Visually and aurally it was a delicacy...”