Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart shared how the band’s 1987 album In The Dark was inspired by a practical joke.

“We set up like we would onstage, but it was a serious recording,” Hart told Uncle Joe Benson on the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show. “We actually were looking at each other, but there was no audience. I came up with the idea to turn the lights off. … What I did was, I told my equipment guy, ‘On my signal, turn the lights off.’ I didn’t tell anybody [else], I said, ‘Just turn everything off!’”

“They couldn’t see their fretboards and we couldn’t see our cymbals and our drums, and it was chaos!” he continued. He explained that “that’s how In the Dark happened. … It was a great album. It sounded a bit liver than our sterile studio records of the past.”

The band’s first LP in six years went on to be their most successful album.

Read the full story on Ultimate Classic Rock.