Psychedelic Soundscapes: Bob Bralove on Sharing Space with the Grateful Dead, Supporting Stevie Wonder and Debuting Dose Hermanos
Dean Budnick for Relix on April 24, 2023
“It’s about being in that psychedelic moment,” Bob Bralove says of Dose Hermanos, the fully improvisational keyboard duo that he created with Tom Constanten in 1995. “We don’t look back. We don’t look forward. It’s pretty much, ‘How do I feel right now?’”
Some of that collective ethos draws on their (un)common experiences with the Grateful Dead.
Constanten met fellow music student Phil Lesh at UC Berkeley in 1961, and the two became roommates. Later in the decade, while stationed in Las Vegas serving as a computer programmer for the Air Force, Constanten spent some of his weekends on leave recording Anthem of the Sun. Following his discharge, he joined the group in the studio for Aoxomoxoa and on the road from late-1968 through early-1970 (with his apogee perhaps being the transcendent “Dark Star” on Live/Dead).
Bralove first worked with the Grateful Dead in 1985, while helping music director Merl Saunders capture and create keyboard sounds for The Twilight Zone reboot. This led to a similar role on the Dead’s In the Dark, after which Bralove began touring with the band, initially providing assistance with MIDI technology, and eventually contributing live sounds to the musical collages during both “Drums” and “Space.”
Bralove and Constanten began their creative partnership shortly after Jerry Garcia’s passing in 1995. The pair not only drew on their Dead connection but also on common reference points in the realms of classical music and the avant-garde.
Their latest album, Persistence of Memory, blends studio recordings and live cuts, all of which capture their efforts to remain entirely improvisational. The following conversation with Bralove focuses on his work through the onset of Dose Hermanos and a subsequent interview with Constanten will continue the narrative.
You have a master’s degree in composition and also worked behind the scenes for many years as a sound tech. Can you recall a transition point when you began to think about becoming a live performer?
It started when I was working in the Silicon Valley area doing computer stuff. The company I’d been working for had gone bankrupt, everybody was splitting off and I was at this party where I was being offered all of these computer jobs.
By this point, I’d had an interaction with Stevie Wonder over the computer stuff and it looked like there was a possibility of continuing a little more. It wasn’t a conscious decision that I was going to be a performer at that time. I just realized that I could see myself holding onto the rope of having straight-gig security and I had been shown something that was so much more commanding of my attention. It drew me in, and I realized I was letting go of that rope and just seeing where it would take me. That was a significant moment.
Then the other big moment, in terms of moving toward performance, was at the end of the Grateful Dead. I felt like I had achieved a level of success in working with the Grateful Dead that was not really going to be matchable in another support kind of position. They were so musically generous and welcomed me into their creative spheres as a creator, but still providing support for them. I realized, at that point, that I wanted to be writing and playing my own material and other people’s material instead of being behind the scenes. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be in front of the audience, but I wanted to connect to the fluid expression that provides— where I would have to take the risk to commit to playing and being in control of the musical environment in order to share it with other people.
I saw the vision while I was taking acid and realized, “This is one option and here’s another, but this is the one that’s calling to me.” I had all my own insecurities about it but Stevie and the Grateful Dead had believed in me enough to pull me in. So I had to accept that and take all the emotional and personal risks that are involved in performing.
