A Long Strange Trip (68 page)

Late in July Arista released its first Dead album,
Terrapin Station,
complete with a full-page ad in
Rolling Stone:
“A NEW DEAD ERA IS UPON US.” The Kelley-Mouse cover mixed turtles by Heinrich Klee with a hobby shop model railroad station to general Dead Head approval. Olsen’s mix met a more varied response. He had deleted Mickey Hart and Garcia’s timbales-guitar duet, “Terrapin Flyer,” and replaced it with strings; in fact, he had erased the passage, presumably so that the band would have no choice but to accept his decision. Hart’s reaction was predictably explosive, but Garcia agreed. Olsen had crossed the line, and Hart and Garcia redid the passage. The strings by Paul Buckmaster with the Martyn Ford Orchestra were certainly unique, and on the whole they worked, although Garcia did remark that Olsen had “put the Grateful Dead in a dress.” The use of the London Chorale, thought Lesh, was “incongruous.” Olsen also had Tom Scott play saxophone on “Estimated Prophet,” and Weir liked it. Lesh’s “Passenger,” a take on the Fleetwood Mac tune “Station Man,” came out without the funk it demanded, and the shameful responsibility for the disco version of “Dancing in the Streets” was the band’s. The critical reaction to the album was generally tepid. And if Dead Heads thought that strings meant the band was selling out? “Fuck ’em,” said Garcia, “if they can’t take a joke.”

One of the Dead’s dumber decisions that year was to resume touring in front of what they knew would be an audience of at least 100,000, which turned out to be more than 150,000. John Scher had created a September gig at the Englishtown Raceway in New Jersey that would make up for their missed summer in a hurry, but it was the height of chutzpah to make it the first show after three months. Just a few weeks before, Mickey had proudly shown Garcia he could lift his arm about halfway to his shoulder, and Garcia cried, distressed at the weakness rather than pleased at the progress. Recovering from surgery, Donna Jean would sing sitting down. The performance site was surrounded by a barrier made of railroad boxcars, and although traffic backed up about eight miles, there were no crowd control problems. It was a hot day with leaden skies, but no rain, and the performance went well. For a change at a large-scale outdoor concert, everyone could hear. Healy had brought in three sound companies to construct twelve delay towers, and they were effective. Scher had told the civic authorities that he expected 50,000, and his deception would win him no local friends, but it was a production success. As promotion, it was instantly legendary. After a nearly two-year hiatus and an album that would sell decently but was no hit, the Dead had pulled off the largest East Coast concert by any band in years. They were indeed back, and Arista ran a second ad in
Rolling Stone
proclaiming “A NEW DEAD ERA” over a picture of the crowd.

Theirs was a peculiar popularity. At the beginning of 1978 the Dead were capable of selling many tickets, but only in certain places. Critically, they had sunk below the waterline. The focus of the music industry, if not always the record-buying audience, was punk music, which had begun in 1975 at a New York City club called CBGB & OMFUG with Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and the Ramones. And then from England came a band called the Sex Pistols, “so rude, so outrageous, so vile to their audiences,” wrote one critic, “that they literally begged to be despised. Of course, they were loved by the press and public alike.” Their tour brought them to Winterland on January 14, 1978, for what would prove to be their final concert. That night the Dead played Bakersfield, and Dan Healy got caught up defending some Dead Heads from the police and was hauled off to the pokey. Bob Barsotti, from Bill Graham Presents, called Winterland to report on events and could hear the Sex Pistols, clearly more exciting than life in Bakersfield.

The Dead’s—and the Dead Heads’—sense of what was exciting was perhaps a little more subtle than that of Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten, et al. Their tour continued up the coast, and on January 22 they played at MacArthur Court, on the University of Oregon campus in Eugene. Toward the end of the space segment, Garcia slipped in a fragment of ambient music, the tocsin five-note signature of the film
Close Encounters of
the Third Kind,
and his choice of riffs came at the end of what some might call a series of coincidences but that he chose to call synchronicity. The previous November Garcia had seen
Close Encounters
“about six times.” After all, he thought, weird events like close encounters with aliens were far more interesting than so-called normalcy. Though he was interested in esoteric lore, he retained a solid skepticism about UFOs, thinking them most likely of local origin. What fascinated him was the struggle of an ordinary person to communicate an extraordinary experience, epitomized by Richard Dreyfuss and his mashed potato sculpture. Between viewings, Garcia read an article on coincidence by Jacques Vallee, the real-life model for François Truffaut’s role in the film, in which Vallee spoke of studying a biblical character named Melchizedek. That month Garcia flew to Los Angeles and got into a cab, and when he looked at his receipt the next day, discovered that his cabbie was named . . . Melchizedek. Vallee had also written about the coneheads of
Saturday Night Live,
comic alien characters who claimed to be from France, Vallee’s own home. While in New York, one of Garcia’s business decisions was to okay a conehead poster because one of them wore a Dead T-shirt. He’d not heard of them before the article.

As the year wore on, much of the memorable news was bad.
Cats
Under the Stars
was released in March and disappeared without a trace, perhaps permanently destroying any desire in Garcia to ever work in a studio again. In April his old friend Emmett Grogan was found dead on a New York City subway train, the victim of a heroin overdose. In May, the Dead canceled the last show of their tour, at the Uptown Theater in Chicago, because Kreutzmann had gotten into a squabble with Keith Godchaux that had so upset Bill he’d flown home. In June, the Dead played at U.C. Santa Barbara in a show opened by Warren Zevon, whose “Werewolves of London” was a current hit that so intrigued Garcia he’d taken to performing it, the first contemporary song the Dead had covered in many years. Unfortunately, Zevon chose to perform drunk, was treated rudely by the audience—opening for the Dead is a miserable lot at best— and responded in kind, earning some of the most enthusiastic boos in Dead Head history. At that, he escaped the fate of the Dead’s friends at Jefferson Starship, who that month in Germany lost all their gear when fans reacted to a canceled show by rioting. In July, at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, it was so hot that for half an hour Garcia refused to leave his trailer.

It was time for another vacation, or better still, an adventure. Something cosmic, something special. Shows ran into shows, some good, some not. But if they were to have a life that wasn’t a stoned version of nine-tofive, they needed something more. On September 2, before a concert with Willie Nelson at Giants Stadium, New Jersey, they had their first formal press conference since the bust at 710 Ashbury Street, and announced what “something more” was going to be: they were going to Egypt in mid-September to play three concerts in front of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. It seemed to qualify as an adventure.

43

Dark Moon over Gizeh (9/78)

Dr. Saad Ed-Din, Egypt’s minister of culture, was an impressive man. A poet, a friend of Lawrence Durrell’s, the former head of the secret police, he was the most important Egyptian that Phil Lesh, Alan Trist, and Richard Loren would meet in their advance scouting trip to Cairo. Dubbing themselves the MIBS, the Men in Black Suits, the trio had come to Egypt early in 1978 to clear the way for a Dead visit to the pyramids.

“Have you ever played anyplace outside the U.S.?” asked Dr. Ed-Din.

“Yes, we’ve played in Europe,” said Lesh.

“Have you found that your music changes when you play in different places?”

“Precisely,” replied Phil, “and that’s why we want to play at the pyramids.”

“I thought so.”

“And that was it,” recalled Lesh. “That was the fulcrum, right there.”

The notion of taking the Dead’s circus to an exotic place had been around for a long time, and had picked up considerable momentum in 1972, after Lesh and Garcia visited Stonehenge and grew acquainted with John Michell and geomancy. In the course of shooting
The Grateful Dead
Movie,
Garcia and Bobby Petersen were filmed speaking of Kesey, who was then doing a story on the pyramids for
Rolling Stone.
But the real impetus came during the hiatus, when their booker/manager Richard Loren, his wife, Elaine, and a Stinson Beach friend, Goldie Rush, had vacationed in Egypt. Loren came to feel that the consciousness of the Egyptians, a river people very different from their nomadic brethren to the east, had a fabulous looseness that reminded him of the hippies of Marin. He became convinced that “we’d all get along well there.” As Goldie put it, the Egyptians, like hippies, had a “nonlinear concept of time.” Both groups of people were also frequently stoned. Richard, Elaine, and Goldie’s trip had been a smashing success, and included meeting Ati, a Nile boatman, during a search for hashish. He had not only taken them up the river, he and Goldie had enjoyed a romantic interlude that would bless them with their son Ali. As they floated on the Nile, the trio thought, said Goldie, “wouldn’t it be nice to have some more friends here, wouldn’t it be nice to play some music, and then pretty soon, the fantasy became the Grateful Dead at the pyramid.” On a return visit, Richard Loren took a horseback ride in the area of the pyramids and discovered a small stage for sound and light shows at the base of the Great Pyramid, and the idea gestated. It became Loren’s mission.

Phil Lesh and Alan Trist became Richard’s partners in the mission, and they began to make connections. One of Alan’s English journalist friends, Jonathan Wallace, was the editor of a respected Middle Eastern journal, and he sent them to Joe and Lois Malone, former government employees—Joe was also a distinguished former professor of history at the American University of Beirut—who now advised Americans doing business in the area. At considerable length, the MIBS went off to Cairo to meet with Dr. Ed-Din. Before they left, they asked Bill Graham if he wanted to be involved. Of course, their method of asking was to have Mickey and Phil picket Bill’s house in the middle of the night with flashlights and placards that read, “Better Gigs, Better P.A.” and “Egypt or Bust.” Bill came out and they raved all night, telling him that he should take the Dead to Egypt. He thought they were crazy—after all, the most recent war was only five years past. When Loren followed up, Bill briefly became involved, but then suggested bringing Santana. “No, Bill, it’s not that sort of trip.” Since it wasn’t his trip, Bill dropped out. They’d do it themselves.

In March 1978 the MIBS went to Washington, D.C., where they met with Joe and Lois and created the strategy that would seal the deal: all funds generated would go to charity, half to the Waf Wal Amal (Faith and Hope Society), the president of Egypt’s wife’s favorite charity, half to the Egyptian Department of Antiquities. In Cairo the next week, the Malones proved equally charming at the American embassy, and after their meeting with Ed-Din, the game was on. On March 21, they sent a telegram home: “Two count them Two open air concerts [in fact, they would be allowed to play three] at the great pyramid sphinx theater in lower egypt confirmed repeat confirmed for September 14 and 15. Steering committee landing sfo Thursday with signed repeat signed agreement.”

It would have been a thin party if only the band went, and in April their travel agent, Randy Sarti, was told in secrecy to work on a charter. At first the price was astronomical, but Randy lucked out and found a charter that fit their dates at a cost of $999 a head, twelve nights at the Mena House included. The family began to gather, and by the time they set out, Randy had 65 on the band’s charter and 109 on the family charter, which didn’t count the Texas and Bill Walton contingents, who came independently. In September they were off. It was not your average flight. As M.G. would recall it, “all of us, a huge Prankster contingent . . . two telescopes, a shovel, fishing pole, broad net, screens for screening artifacts out of the sand, three or four tape recorders, the video equipment, endless amounts of stuff . . . There were Pakistani stewardesses and they freaked out completely about halfway to New York because we were having so much fun on the plane. They took all the liquor off the plane in New York, which really upset some people seriously as I’m sure you can imagine.” Even if a few people might have had too much fun, the cacophony that results from having a tape deck in every third row, each with a different tape, was distressing to the airplane crew. “Then you hit Africa,” M.G. continued. “It’s like flying over the moon . . . made Nevada look like the Garden of Eden . . . [At the airport] the first thing you see out on the runway are these army guys with machine guns, standing there. They have no shoes, their trousers are in total shreds . . . the machine guns are old and patched.”

They staggered off the airplane, and were as much confused as reassured when not one bag was opened; the proper arrangements had been made. Then they plunged into Cairo, unlike anything they’d ever experienced. “Mix in your mind,” wrote Kesey, “the deep surging roar of a petroleum riptide with the strident squealing of a teenage basketball playoff; fold in air conditioners and sprinkle with vendors’ bells and police whistles; pour this into narrow streets greased liberally with people noisily eating sesame cakes fried in olive oil, bubbling huge hookahs, slurping Turkish coffees, playing backgammon as loud as the little markers can be slapped down . . . thousands of people, coughing, spitting, muttering in the shadowy debris next to the buildings, singing, standing, sweeping along in dirty damask gellabias, arguing in the traffic—millions! and all jacked up loud on caffeine. Simmer this recipe at 80 degrees at two in the morning and you have a taste of the Cairo Cacophony.” Noise and traffic. Oh my, yes, traffic. They drove to the Mena House down what Kesey described as “an unlit boulevard teeming from curb to curb with bicycles, tricycles, motorcycles, sidehackers, motorscooters, motorbikes, buses dribbling passengers from every hole and handhold, rigs, gigs, wheelchairs, biers, wheelbarrows, wagons, pushcarts, army trucks . . . rickshaws, buck-boards, hacks both horse- and human-drawn, donkey-riders and -pullers and -drivers, oxcarts, fruitcars, legless beggers in thighcarts.”

Mena House, a Victorian relic in the shadow of the pyramids, was a tranquil colonial refuge, and the hotel’s guards, packing Armalite automatic weapons, made sure it stayed that way. The sudden appearance of longhairs in jeans and Dead T-shirts didn’t seem to bother anyone at the hotel, and except for Bear, who spent mealtimes sending back his meat, which he wanted raw—“Burned! Burned!”—and grousing at the waiters, everyone enjoyed his/her stay. At any rate, few stayed in their rooms for long. Outside the hotel gates was Mena Village, home to the guardians of the pyramids and hustlers of tourists since—Marc Antony? Napoleon? “Everyone seemed to be yelling at me all at once,” wrote one of the party, a friend of Bear’s and sometime crew member and truck driver named Bob Nichols. “ ‘Mister! Mister! Ride my camel!’ ‘Hire my horse!’ ‘I will run up the pyramid with you!’ ‘Let me guide you!’ Hands clutched at me, and hungry-looking children yelled, ‘Baksheesh! Baksheesh!’ ” Goldie had been concerned that her friends might embarrass her in Egypt, but she was swiftly reassured. Instead, an authentic cultural exchange took place. Even the constant harassment of sellers was fun. “It’s not like they were pissed if you didn’t buy,” said Sunshine Kesey, “it was more of an argument about the value of something, rather than bringing down the price . . . I was walking back to the hotel and this guy followed me trying to sell his bracelets, I’m going ‘No, leave me alone,’ he kept following me. Finally, he ended up giving these bracelets to me, for a present. I go, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ He goes, ‘One piastre’ . . . hahahahahah.”

The exchange transcended barter. All over Mena Village there were plenty of willing Egyptians licking LSD from Dead Visine bottles off their fingers, with no complaints. As Garcia would say, Egypt was “no cops, no parents.” “It’s so much of another world,” said M.G., “and it’s so ancient, wonderful, everywhere you’d look there would be little outcrop-pings of bizarre culture. Like the pyramid goats . . . On all the pyramids, you hear their little hooves going boing boing . . . The thing about the pyramids is, go off behind them and there is nothing, vast nothingness . . . rubble, rubble, everywhere. They will be working on it forever.” George Walker planted a Grateful Dead flag on the peak of the Great Pyramid, and it stayed there for days. Everyone climbed the Great Pyramid at least once, even Bill Walton in his cast—he was then on leave from the Portland Trailblazers following surgery.

If international relations were run by Dead Heads . . . M.G., Paul Krassner, and Goldie went off to the Medina, the oldest part of Cairo, to buy hashish, which came in slabs the size of a large, heavy Hershey bar. That their party included two tall women, one of them blond, attracted a certain attention, but they did their business and then lit up without incident. But Krassner was a purist and would not mix hash with tobacco, as local custom dictated. The Egyptians thought this “profligate,” but it would set things off in a charming way. “These other Egyptians,” said M.G., “decided they were going to try their hash without tobacco . . . to be polite you hit everybody in the place, it’s like buying a round, so we sent around one with no tobacco in it. [One of the Egyptians] got a big hit going on that and started to cough. It was just like the Grateful Dead crew, once again, they razzed this guy to death. It was a real bad one he had going, they put their foot behind him and shoved him off the bench, laughing. He gets up, brushes himself off, he’s still coughing and coughing, and laughing and coughing . . . the next guy says, ‘I can do it,’ he starts coughing, the third guy, he’s going ‘Okay, I have to stay cool,’ that’s enough with coughing, and he just takes a tiny, tiny hit, right, and doing all the horrible facial contortions that you do—he didn’t cough. It made it around those guys without any of the rest of them blowing it. Then we were okay. So we sent that around a few more times and got out of there.”

They did have shows to do, however, and there things were a trifle more complicated. Cairo in 1978 was a city of 10 million with a sewage system fit for 3 million. There was no telephone book. It was basically a pretechnical society, a place where everything was falling apart all the time, saved only by fix-it men. “Malesh”—“Never mind”—was the standard response to almost everything. The chief of the local stage crew was Abdul, who announced, “I have the heart of a camel! I have outlived eight of my wives, and even now I must have a young woman!” They needed Abdul, since trucks could get no closer than thirty yards to the stage, which resulted in Anvil equipment cases being flipped end over end across the sands. Creativity was the order of the day: Candace Brightman wanted to light the stage with flaming torches, but was overruled. Dan Healy wanted to “play the pyramids” by using the King’s Chamber as an echo chamber, broadcasting from the stage to a receiver on the side of the pyramid, through wires to a speaker in the chamber, then back to the control board. Made of stones so precisely cut and fitted together that one cannot slide paper between them, the King’s Chamber is a box sixty feet by thirty feet by forty feet deep inside the pyramid. It is so solid that it can create “indefinite sustain,” said Healy, defying physical laws so that it resonates in tempered Western scale as well as the scale of physics. It was the band’s favorite playground.

Garcia, Hart, M.G., Weir, and David Freiberg visited the King’s Chamber and enjoyed a small epiphany. Hart brought a tar, a desert drum that resembles a tambourine without jangles. “Going
bitabitabi—tabita,”
said M.G. “Every sound is held and amplified and reverberated . . . so I hmmmmmmed and snap! flashed instantly that here was something . . . So I said, ‘Shut up you guys, listen.’ They wore down and I got in the box [sarcophagus] and hmmmmmmed a bit and they all tried it . . . Everyone took their turn in the box, then they started to talk. I told them all to shut up again. Then Freiberg and Jerry and Weir started singing little parts. It sounded incredible . . . You start to sing in there with the lights out, you think you’re in the biggest church in the world . . . little teeny square room . . . suddenly it becomes, the walls just fall away, it’s this vast amphitheater sound, the world’s biggest bathroom . . . We stayed in there till we couldn’t sing another note . . . They were playing around with what parts you couldn’t sing, anything with any dissonance would just build up into a wave of feedback, terrible, dreadful, instant pain.” Trying to wire this magic place was a wonderful idea, but even though soundman John Cutler wore his knees bloody raw trying to make it work, the inferior local phone cable could not stand up to the human tourist traffic over it during the day, and it failed.

Still, the Dead and its crew got to know the pyramid, at the very least one of the most remarkable structures on the planet. In Kesey’s words, “It’s a multidimensional bureau of standards, omni-lingual and universal, constructed to both incorporate and communicate such absolutes as the bloody inch (a convenient ten million of which equals our polar axis) plus our bloody damned circumference, our weight, the bloody length not only of our solar year and our sidereal year but also our catch-up or leap year . . . not to mention the bloody distance of our swing around our sun, or the error in our spin that produces the wobble at our polar point.”