Thoughts On Egypt Without Research

Uprose the merry Sphinx,
And crouched no more in stone;
She melted into purple cloud,
She silvered in the moon;
She spired into a yellow flame;
She flowered in blossoms red;
She flowed into a foaming wave.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• • Egypt is made out of sand and a river, and the river is more important.
  • Unless you’re a dung beetle.
  • Dung beetles couldn’t give a fuck about rivers.
  • They go for dung.
  • Humans, though, need steady access to ample water for societies to flourish, and the Nile was just that.
  • And more!
  • The Nile floods its banks every summer, and the water droplets that once were snows atop Ethiopian mountains now deposited themselves into plains abutting the river’s course, and they brought with them yummy and nutritious microbes and oogie-boogies and they fed the soil and made it as fertile as a Mormon rabbit.
  • And then the sun shines for the rest of the year.
  • That right there is the Garden of Allah, my friend.
  • (Allah did not yet exist. I mean, Allah existed in the way that gods are retroactively eternal, but nobody in Cairo had yet heard of the Almighty Allah, PBUH.)
  • There was so much food that it enabled the Ancient Egyptians to trade and become wealthy, and then get conquered by everybody else on the Mediterranean.
  • The Assyrians, the Persians, the Alexander the Greats, the Romans, and finally the Muslims.
  • Ancient Egypt was a jobber.
  • If Ancient Egypt were a Spider-Man villain, it would be the Shocker.
  • Just there to get whupped.
  • (NOTA BENE: The Ancient Egyptians did not refer to themselves as “Ancient Egyptians.” Their name for themselves was “Eyeball-Vulture-Bread.”)
  • (NOTUM BENUM: I’m proud of that joke and I don’t care what you think.)
  • And Ancient Egypt is dead, anyway; they built a dam on the Nile called as Aswan, and now the river does not overflow its banks every summer, and there is no reason for our species to any longer be there, but still we remain and maybe still they do, too, all shaven and kohl-eyed and cat-fancying.
  • We know so much about the Ancient Egyptians because they chose the most secure file medium of all: chiseled into stone.
  • Tape rots, and so does paper, and digital objects are written in languages that die off quickly.
  • Compact Discs, too.
  • Sony told us CD’s lasted forever.
  • While they were selling us CD’s.
  • Maybe it’s our fault for believing them; in our defense, it seemed correct that the information stored on the disc would remain pristine and whole forever: CD’s involved lasers, and they were shiny, so therefore they would last until the future.
  • That’s Logic 101, muchacho, but no: compact discs hold their charge for a decade or two and then it’s as barren as the deserts of Al Dabaa.
  • Getting a slave to chisel your messianic rantings into the side of a boulder?
  • That’s History 101, muchacho.
  • Stop saying “muchacho” and get to the part with the Dead.
  • This is a blog about the Grateful Dead.
  • Right. 
  • This brings me to the Ottomans.
  • Leave the Ottomans out of this.
  • What about Sadat?
  • You should mention Sadat.
  • Anwar Sadat was in charge of Egypt in 1978; he had been in power for eight years and switched the country’s alliance from the Soviet Union to the correct team.
  • FRIENDSHIP ENDED WITH IVAN.
  • NOW JOHNNY IS MY BEST FRIEND.
  • He was also the only Arab leader to attempt peace with the Israelis (after kicking their ass in the Yom Kippur War); the other Arab leaders threw him out of their club for this move, but some Swedish stiffs gave him an award.
  • Concurrently, Sadat was trying to patch up the relationship between Egypt and Iran, which was still a Westernized country at the time.
  • The dude was big on peace.
  • He was, of course, shot in the face.
  • That’s in ’81, but we’re still in ’78 so Sadat has not been shot in the face and Egypt is open and welcoming and willing to let a sweaty, hairy horde of infidels choogle in front of their biggest tourist attraction.
  • But why did the Grateful Dead want to?
  • I submit that there are two reasons.
  • The Grateful Dead loved the Pyramids because the Grateful Dead loved sci-fi novels and conspiracy theories and tales of lost civilizations and secret histories, and the Pyramids figure into all of those categories.
  • You name a hoodoo, I’ll show you a pyramid.
  • Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Ganges, Uluru; you know: the Magickal Places.
  • The Dead loved that shit.
  • That is the first reason, and it is (in translation) what the band would tell you.
  • There is another explanation: Because it was the Grateful Deadest thing they could do.
  • Self-sabotage?
  • Financially ruinous?
  • Performances hampered by chemical dependency?
  • Yes, yes, yes.
  • Pink Floyd played in the ruins of Pompeii, but they had a professional film crew with them, and Metallica went down to Antarctica to do a gig for the scientists who may or not be The Things, but that was an advertisement for Coca-Cola.
  • The Dead’s working vacation was entirely on their dime.
  • 10, 700,000 dimes in today’s money.
  • Which is very many dimes to spend without any return at all.
  • The bill was so high because the Dead brought about a million people, or maybe a couple hundred, either one, and everyone stayed at a hotel called the Mena House and smoked hash and looked at ruins and varied in their levels of native-clothing adoption.
  • (Garcia stuck with his usual jeans and a tee-shirt. Mickey immediately purchased a dishdasha and wouldn’t stop talking about the breeze on his balls.)
  • The band didn’t pull the old-school “back of a flatbed truck” stage routine either; they were scheduled for a place called the Giza Light & Sound Theater.
  • They projected movies onto the Sphinx that made it look–kinda–like he was speaking, and he would thunder his questions at you, and then maybe some fireworks .
  • It was a show for the tourists, but when the Grateful Dead got there it looked like this:

•  This was the 13th (soundcheck), 14th, 15th, and 16th of September, 1978.
• Theater holds 3,000 comfortably.
• They drew around 1,000, but it was a hip crowd.
• THE DEAD IN EGYPT, MAN!
• How could any self-respecting weirdo pass it up?
• There was the Family, and Bill Walton had a big group, and so did Kesey; Texas and New York and Los Angeles sent contingents; London and Europe: a gathering of the tribes.
• The Bedouin (who are an actual tribe) wandered up and listened, but chose not to gather.
• Egypt is a nigh-unbeatable card if you’re playing Headier Than Thou.
• That’s like dropping a Draw Four or a Black Lotus on the table.
• “I saw them at Winter–“
• “EGYPT, MOTHERFUCKER.”
• And it’s over.
• High-end drug dealers, and hustling college kids, and shit-starting novelists, and viscounts with ancient wealth, and NBA centers, and quite a few people who didn’t want to discuss their professions, but were still a ball to hang with.
• The Grateful Dead had purchased the crowd an excellent party.
• Which, you’ll note, is the opposite of how that’s supposed to go.
• So: they’re $1.7 million in the hole and the only possible way up and out is by producing some sort of salable product while in Cairo.
• This proved daunting.
• The band was down half-a-drummer, as Billy had broken his arm punching dick several weeks before.
• He says he was playing basketball, but he’s a lying dickpuncher..
• And, you know, just saying, no offense, in my opinion: if you have to lose half of a drummer, you wanna lose half of Mickey.
• That’s a fact.
• I’ll brook no debate.
• Garcia and Keith, both opiate addicts, cannot/are afraid to score; they are tamping down withdrawal with copious valium and over-the-counter codeine and it is mostly working.
• (Keith is usually cited–obliquely–for blame when the Egypt shows are dissected by the band. There are vague stories about piano tuners storming off in a tizzy, but the follow-up question–“Why wasn’t a new one called in?”–never gets asked. Cairo has piano tuners. It’s an enormous city. I cannot detect the piano’s cacophony, anyway. Keith’s pounding basic shapes four-to-the-bar like he did during his decline, but the piano’s not at fault.)
• Phil is drunk.
• As is Mrs. Donna Jean.
• Plus, everyone is tripping their nostrils off and has diarrhea.
• If this were a movie, it would be the middle of the second act, when things look dire for our heroes.
• But if this were a movie, the band would have overcome the obstacles to perform a triumphant show, thickly-gooey with jams and maybe even a Dark Star.
• They did not do that.
• They went the other way with it.
• It’s a mess.
• The last night is the best night, but it’s not a good night because the best part of the night is when someone other than the Grateful Dead is playing.
• At all three shows, Hamza el-Din and several dozen of his friends played their tars and ouds and tapped and clapped, the sound of the desert, and the Americans would join in piecemeal; the Egyptians would leave the stage, and the music, to them.
• Which worked.
• Every night.
• What didn’t?
• Everything else.
• Each set has at least one major trainwreck.
• Not each show.
• Each set.
• One point at which the song totters and stumbles drunkenly towards its own doom, like Peter O’Toole heading towards exposed machinery, at least once a set.
• And when they’re not actively falling off cliffs, they’re meandering, and Garcia plays poorly for the whole run, hitting clams with a frequency that would recommend him for a job as a clamboxer if such a thing existed.
• There was not even enough decent material to scrape together a single LP, the band decided after hearing the tapes.
• (Years later, the tapes would be relistened to and found to still suck. However, the Deadheads were also listened to and found to be willing to purchase a two-CD, one-DVD package with an essay and pictures and whatnot, and the folks at Rhino took the Deadheads’ side.)
• $1.7 million, never recouped, but no one missed it.
• It wasn’t about the money.
• It was about the doing the Grateful Dead thing.
• Which, invariably, cost a shitload of money.
• But what is money to the desert sky?
• What is it to the peek-a-boo moon?
• To the street vendor, to the smells previously unknown, to the stallions at dark, to the baksheesh, to the hashish, to the Nile at sunrise, to the Tomb of the Kings to the Riddle of the Sphinx?
• What is money to Egypt?
• In’shallah.
• (ADDENDUM: It must be pointed out that during the run-up to their concerts, the Grateful Dead attempted to integrate the Great Pyramid of Giza into their sound system because of course they fucking did.)
• (ADDENDUS: Go check out Grateful Seconds’ collection of contemporaneous articles and ephemera about the Egypt trip.)