Tom Constanten

Born in Jersey and raised in Vegas, Tom Constanten moved to the Bay Area to attend the University of California, Berkeley. It was there, in the summer of 1961, that TC met Phil Lesh. As Phil tells it in his autobiography, he was waiting to take a placement exam in the music department,

when I heard someone say in a clear, confident voice: ‘After all, music stopped in 1750 [the year of Bach’s death] and began again in 1950 [the emergence of the postwar serialists].’ Aha! Someone who knows about the avant-garde!

The two quickly hit it off, became roommates, and promptly dropped out of Berkeley.

Despite leaving the University of California, TC and Phil continued their musical education, taking a course at Mills College with Luciano Berio, an Italian composer devoted to serialism and experimental music. The course deeply shaped their musical outlook. Berio also invited TC to study and play with him across Europe, an invitation that Constanten did not pass up.

Returning to the States, TC reconnected with Phil before, facing the Vietnam Era draft, he enlisted in the Air Force in 1965 as a computer programmer. For the duration of his hitch, TC was stationed at Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. While he took up Scientology in the service and stopped doing acid, TC also began his collaboration with the Dead. On a series of three-day leaves from Nellis, Constanten played piano and harpsichord on Anthem of the Sun, bringing his avant-garde sensibilities to the album. As he recently related to Relix Magazine about some of his contributions to Anthem,

I was using Hawaiian guitar steels on the bass strings to get a glissando sound. I also took a kids’ toy, a gyroscope, pulled the string, gave it a good yank and put it up against the sound board of the piano. It sounded much like a chainsaw.

The day after TC was discharged from the Air Force, on November 23, 1968, he joined the Dead on stage at Ohio University. And from then until he and the Dead amicably split following the New Orleans bust, TC joined the band. Billy, as he makes clear in his autobiography, never considered TC “a card-carrying member of the Grateful Dead.” Instead, he was a “transitional player for us, someone who was able to provide the keyboard parts that Pigpen couldn’t and someone who showed us that that role did, in fact, need to be filled.”

One of the things that may have made some feel TC was not a full member of the Dead was that TC continued to practice Scientology and avoid drugs during his tenure with the band. TC did eventually leave the church and started doing hallucinogens again, but that was after he left the Dead. TC has said simply about the situation, “it was an egregious example of horrible timing on my part.” But abstaining did turn TC into fast friends with Pigpen. The two moved in together in Novato and became, as TC relates, “as close as two heterosexual males could be.”

Some of the criticism of TC’s live efforts, TC more or less shares. TC was, as he himself has said repeatedly, a piano player forced into being a keyboardist. TC didn’t like the sound or action of either the Vox Super-Continental or Hammond B-3 that he had access to and had complaints about the limits of amplification technology for electric keyboards at the time. Still, TC indelibly added to the sound, imparting the characteristic whirly calliope sound to so many Stephens and Elevens (February 22, 1969 is a prime example). And he could be counted on to make a Dark Star all the more trippy (e.g. August 30, 1969) and repeatedly helped send Mountains Of The Moon (check out his dominant performance on Playboy After Dark). Just listen to the second show on March 1, 1969, at the Fillmore West, to get the full TC package. And regardless of his live contributions, TC certainly made made an impact on the Dead’s studio albums that he played on: the aforementioned Anthem and Aoxomoxoa.

After splitting with the Dead, TC did return for one more show. On April 28, 1971, TC played on the Dark Star> Stephen> NFA at the Fillmore East in New York City, where TC was writing and performing on various avant-garde musical projects. During this period, TC formed the instrumental rock band, Touchstone, and, after relocating to Los Angeles, put out an album, Tarot. In the years since, he has continued to compose and teach music, including at Harvard, SUNY Buffalo, and the San Francisco Art Institute. TC has also continued to play both his own avant-garde compositions and Grateful Dead material. And Constanten often plays the Dead in avant-garde fashion, as he has a member of Jazz is Dead, with Bob Bralove in Dose Hermanos, and gigging solo Dead covers that are far-out experimental.