Early career Born in
Long Branch, New Jersey, and known among friends and colleagues as
T.C., Tom Constanten wrote orchestral pieces as a teenager while growing up in
Las Vegas, Nevada. He briefly studied
astronomy and music at the
University of California, Berkeley, where he met future Grateful Dead bassist
Phil Lesh in the summer of 1961. The two became roommates and dropped out; shortly thereafter, they enrolled in a graduate-level course taught by Italian modernist composer
Luciano Berio at nearby
Mills College. Constanten also studied piano with Mario Feninger. In 1962, he lived in
Brussels and
Paris, met
Umberto Eco, and studied on a scholarship with members of the
Darmstadt School, including Berio,
Henri Pousseur,
Karlheinz Stockhausen and
Pierre Boulez. After briefly rooming with Lesh in Las Vegas and returning to the
San Francisco Bay Area, Constanten performed with an improvisational quintet formed by
Steve Reich. The group's unusual style was influenced by both
jazz and Stockhausen. In a 1964 performance, the ensemble played
serialism-influenced compositions by both Constanten and Lesh. Although he walked out from the performance,
minimalist composer
Terry Riley later allowed the ensemble to premiere
In C. However, only Reich and one other member of the group, saxophonist-composer
Jon Gibson, appeared in the performance.
US Air Force service Faced with the possibility of
the draft amid the escalation of the
Vietnam War, Constanten preemptively enlisted in the
United States Air Force in 1965 as a
computer programmer. Although the Air Force was deployed in southeast Asia, he was not given a
security clearance after divulging his past
communist sympathies and remained stationed domestically at
Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas; while on leave, he used
LSD and composed music on military
mainframe computers, including the
IBM 1401. By 1967, he had been promoted to
sergeant. During this period, he first collaborated with the Grateful Dead as a session musician on
Anthem of the Sun (1968); Constanten used several compensatory three-day passes to travel to
Los Angeles to record with the band.
Tenure in the Grateful Dead After sitting in with the band during live performances as his schedule permitted, the day after an honorable
discharge, Constanten made his stage debut with the Dead as their permanent keyboardist on November 23, 1968, at the Memorial Auditorium in
Athens, Ohio. He later remarked that "it was a case of being an Air Force sergeant one day and a rock & roll star the next." He remained with the group for three albums and left by mutual agreement after the band's infamous
New Orleans drug bust following a January 30, 1970, show at the Warehouse. "It was like a magic carpet ride that was there for me to step on," he says. "I would have been a fool not to." Although Constanten nominally replaced founding keyboardist
Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, the latter musician stayed on with the band as a frontman-percussionist; in light of their mutual abstinence from
psychedelics, they became "as close as two heterosexual males could be," shared a house in
Novato, California, and bunked together while touring. While he had successfully contributed to their complex experimental music, his instrumental style was then grounded in classical technique and bore little consanguinity with the
folk,
blues, and
country and western stylings that would largely anchor the band's oeuvre throughout the early 1970s. Although he performed with a full panoply of keyboard instruments (including piano and
harpsichord) on 1969's
Aoxomoxoa, Constanten initially played a double-manual
Vox Continental II
combo organ on stage before switching to McKernan's
Hammond B-3 in the spring of 1969; nevertheless, he was dissatisfied with the comparatively dulcet timbres of both instruments vis-à-vis guitarists
Jerry Garcia and
Bob Weir in a live performance context: "[T]heir sounds ranged from barely acceptable to cringeworthy. For another, I couldn't find a place for the sustained sound of an organ in a guitar band context—ahhh, for a piano! Furthermore, the action of an organ keyboard, electronic or not, was sufficiently different from that of a piano, which was all I'd known until then, to be an obstacle to my getting a feel for the music. Basically, I wasn't an organist. A
Merl Saunders or a
Melvin Seals could've stepped in... but they weren't there. As if that weren't enough, the amplification technology of the times was much kinder to guitars, with their direct pickups, than it was to pianos. All the electric keyboards available then, you might recall, represented some sort of cheesy compromise with the real thing..." According to band manager
Rock Scully, "He was so different. You know, he was like a crew cut. He was like a Marine in a prison camp full of Japanese. He was like our boss in a way. Nobody could go for the hard-wire technology of his brainpower. I was told I was too hard on him, too. But I had no beef." Echoing Scully's sentiments, drummer
Bill Kreutzmann noted in his 2015 memoir that he "got along really well" with Constanten and thought he was "a cool enough guy"; however, he felt that "[Constanten] had this thing where, for whatever reason, he would perform at rehearsals pretty darn well, but then, when we'd be in front of an audience, it was like he froze or something. He couldn't let go... [H]e couldn't trust the music to lead... [I]f you can't do that, you can't be in the band." Although Kreutzmann "felt no animosity" toward Constanten upon his departure, he did not consider him to be a "card-carrying member" of the Grateful Dead. Constanten's last concert as a member of the Dead was on January 31, 1970, at the Warehouse in
New Orleans, Louisiana. He played with the band again on April 28, 1971, at the Fillmore East in
New York, which was released on
Ladies and Gentlemen... the Grateful Dead.
Life after the Grateful Dead After leaving the Grateful Dead, Constanten collaborated with Joe McCord, a mime who performed as "Rubber Duck." This culminated in Constanten writing the music for McCord's
Tarot, a mime play based on the
tarot deck that was performed at the
Chelsea Theater Center in
Brooklyn, New York, in 1970. Although a proposed
Off-Broadway run in Manhattan never occurred, the musicians associated with the project (including Constanten, former
Country Joe and the Fish drummer
Gary "Chicken" Hirsh and composer
Paul Dresher) performed several shows at the
Village Gate before relocating to
Los Angeles, where they continued to perform as Touchstone, an
instrumental rock band. During this period, Constanten worked on a proposed musical version of
Frankenstein for
Hair producer
Michael Butler, who also considered mounting a production of
Tarot. Touchstone's debut album (
Tarot) was released by
United Artists Records in 1972 and contained much of the music intended for the play; however, according to Constanten, "United Artists Records was cool to instrumental bands, though, so they didn't promote the album a whole lot. The fact that the show didn't catch fire during the New York run didn't help. So the second album our contract mentioned (and we had material for) evaporated into the fog on the Hollywood hills." Shortly thereafter, Constanten held a Creative Associate fellowship in composition at the
University at Buffalo's
new music-oriented Center of the Creative and Performing Arts during the 1974–1975 academic year. In 1986, he was an
artist in residence at
Harvard University. He has also taught at the
San Francisco Art Institute. From 1986 to 1993, he was the house pianist for the radio program
West Coast Weekend, playing solo piano and interstitial music. In 1994, he was inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Grateful Dead. In 1995 he conducted a short tour as "keyboardist for hire" with Western Massachusetts jam band yeP!, performing with them in the parking lot at the June 15 Grateful Dead concert at
Franklin County State Airport in
Highgate, Vermont. This was his first time playing Dead-adjacent since he parted ways with them, though he did not interact with the members of the band. Constanten continues to tour as a solo pianist. He has also played with the reconstituted lineup of
Jefferson Starship as a touring member, most notably during the
Heroes of Woodstock tour; several of his performances with the group are showcased in the ''Mick's Picks'' series of live albums. He has also sat in with a variety of Grateful Dead tribute bands, including
Dark Star Orchestra and Terrapin Flyer. In 2015 and 2016 Constanten was a member of
Alphonso Johnson's
Jazz Is Dead, an instrumental Grateful Dead cover band that interprets classic Dead songs with jazz influences. After meeting Grateful Dead sound engineer
Bob Bralove at Jerry Garcia's memorial service, the duo formed Dose Hermanos, a showcase for their improvisational keyboard work; since 1998, they have toured irregularly and released five albums. In 2017, he performed with the Airplane Family & Friends with Live Dead & Riders '69, a band which focuses on the "
San Francisco sound" similar to the Dead. ==Philosophy==