The Search for the Secret Pyramid

Bill Graham isn't one of these promoters. He was always too sharp a businessman to back a stone loser. But he shows up anyway, right on cue, for the sound check. This is the Most Memorable Scene I mean. ...

It has been a hard crazy afternoon. The Dead road crew is about the only thing that's properly wired. The equipment is unfamiliar (it's borrowed from the Who and shipped into Alexandria to save $) and the Egyptian electricity is uncooperative. The stage is a cruel anvil of hot stone, situated right off the right paw of the crouching Sphinx. The sun is pounding like a brass hammer. It's hot it's hard it's a bitch.

The band is prowling around the towers of amps and speakers, trying to find a little shade — "Let's fucking get this over with before this fucking guitar melts!" Hamza el Din, the opening act, is trying to tune his crook-necked instrument in front of a goose-necked mike. The instrument is an eight-stringed oud. Hamza's a Nubian, black as Mystery Itself. His backup group is twenty-five other Nubians, clustered uncomfortably around him on the hot stage. They're Hamza's school chums from his village, to the south. He thought it might be a nice gesture if the Dead flew them in to help with the little Nubian homeboy chant that he was planning to open the show with. Mickey Hart had of course loved the idea: "Twenty-five Nubians doing an African nursery rhyme? Groovy, fly 'em in."

They've never been away from home before; now Yankee sound guys are trying to tell them what mikes to use. The poor nervous Nubians don't speak American they don't speak English they don't even speak Egyptian! Nobody is communicating with anybody. "Yibble yabble," the Nubians chant. "This mike!" the sound guys yell. "Eee-e-ek!" the tortured equipment screams.

It is into this hot and hectic tableau that Bill Graham comes stalking, right out of the Sphinx's gritty armpit.

"Uncle Bobo!" Bob Weir calls. "You just couldn't keep away, could you?"

GRAHAM [hands on hips, shaking his head at the stir-fry of incompatible ingredients sizzling before him]: Never thought it would happen, not in a million years.

ME: Quite the mixed bag, huh, Bill?

GRAHAM [awed but not overwhelmed]: Never woulda believed it. Seemed insurmountable. What a mishmash.

ME [oracular and portentous]: Nobody has any idea what a mixture like this might produce.

NUBIANS [chanting along with the little tune Hamza is finally coaxing from his oud]: Yibble yabble gobble dobba dobba doom boom...

MICKEY [calling over the backbeat he's adding on his hand drum]: It's a twelve-tone scale worked into twelve different rhythm sequences, repeated twelve times, got it?

GRAHAM: Mickey's in hog heaven.

NUBIANS: Hotcha motcha gotcha gotcha zoom zam...

PHIL [hunched turkey-necked over his bass]: Thomma boom zoom sorta got it —

NUBIANS: Hotcha motcha gotcha gotcha getcha zoom — [I had just turned on my little Sanyo is how come I happen to have this cassette I'm listening to at present, Charlie. Phone my son Zane, 503-484-4315, if you want a copy].

JERRY [stepping at last into the dangerous desert sunshine, tentative, like a gray old lion in tinted sadglasses]: Zwangle, squeedle dweedle dorngle gottit now zwornk!

GRAHAM: Tasty...

And suddenly, at that moment, under that acetylene sun, it all fluxes together — like silver solder fluxing with gold, a bright wire, stringing all these different rhythms and races, these alien scales and ancient civilizations, into a kind of necklace of sound, gaudy yet somehow appropriate, like the sort of bauble that Bo Diddley, say, might mail to, say, Queen Hatshepsut if he had her address. Indeed, a tasty trinket.