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.
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.
[1][2] 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.
[3] Faced with the possibility of conscription amid the escalation of the Vietnam War, Constanten preemptively enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1965 as a computer programmer.
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.
[4] 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.
"[5] 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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1995 he conducted a short tour as "keyboardist for hire" with Western Massachusetts jam band yeP!, performing by surprise with them in the parking lot at the June 15 Grateful Dead concert at Franklin County State Airport in Highgate, Vermont.
[17] 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.