The Search for the Secret Pyramid

GRAHAM [hot and getting hotter]: Damn, I hope somebody with a good tape machine has the sense to record this.

Nobody did, as far as I know, except me and my sixty-buck Sanyo. But even on the crappy cassette you can hear how the hectic scene started changing for the better from the moment Bill Graham showed up — as though the bastard were some kind of bad-vibe blotter. The hotter he got the colder the scene became until, at some secret signal, the whole stage full of chanters and drummers and rockers shifted out of Nubian homeboy raga into Buddy Holly rock as smooth as the transmission on one of those Saudi limos, from "Hotcha motcha gotcha gotcha gee" to "I'm gonna tell you how it's gonna be" without nicking a cog.

Now, lo these many years later, listening to the tape, it all seems to flux together again...and by golly, you know, Charlie? Maybe it was all part of our Rolling Stone assignment after all, the same way the concert at the Sphinx was part of Uncle Bobo's business whether he promoted the damn thing or not.

Be that as it may, scenes this tasty and profound oughta always be reported. That night at the gig, for instance, a conjunction of particularly profound events went down: As the Grateful Dead were playing "Dark Star" through the Who's equipment between the paws of the Sphinx at the foot of the Great Pyramid in the Season of the Apricots, the Sahara moon underwent a total and completely unforeseen eclipse (check it out, September 17th, 1978) at the very hour that Keith Moon was blacking out and dying at his flat in London.

What does it all mean, Charlie? Probably nothing. But if I were Jann, I would send out another probe, just to be on the safe side. It's time. He's got to keep his finger on the dark vein of the World Beyond, whether he detects any pulse or not. Mondo 2000, for instance, is putting together a team of virtual surrealists to send to that atoll where they found Amelia Earhart's shoe, hoping to channel an interview. We could beat them to it, Charlie. You choose the wine, I'll chart the channel. Hunter has already volunteered his pineal gland, no strings attached.

At the ready,
Keez

In 1974, Jann Wenner owed me a trip to Lebanon. I had stuck with Rolling Stone through every crisis since RS 12, and in reward, he'd promised to let me do a story on the Lebanese hash fields.

The idea made sense. I spoke fluent Arabic, and as a sometime pen name, Smokestack el Ropo, implies, I had a passing acquaintance with controlled smokable substances. Almost immediately, however, Jann started hemming and hawing about his promise. He'd heard of gang warfare in the hashish groves, he said. My services as copy editor and all-around deadline trail boss were just too valuable for him to risk my life.

I was a busy boy in those days, between copy editing, proofreading, fact checking (in my years we never misspelled a Sanskrit word) and riding herd on the design and editorial departments to get everything in on time, plus writing a lot of the headlines and captions. I was under so much pressure that in the fevered exhilaration of deadline nights, I developed a habit of walking around on the tops of desks — to "get a higher view," as I put it. I came to feel that all colors but bright yellow were an insidious energy drain. Some people found the resulting wardrobe a bit strident.

But I really figured I could have taken care of myself in the hash fields, and the issue was a faintly sore one between Jann and me for a couple of years. Then, in '74, Ken Kesey approached Jann about a story on the Great Pyramid of Gîza. Jann was a longtime fan of Kesey's — in Rolling Stone's original office, on Brannan Street, there had been only two photos on the wall: one of the Marx Brothers and one of Kesey at a 1965 Acid Test party. Now the great man wanted us to sponsor an expedition to unravel the mysteries said to be embodied in the pyramid. According to the babblings of the famous "sleeping prophet," Edward Cayce, the pyramid was not a tomb but a symbol fraught with occult power. Moreover, adjoining it was the "Hall of Records," which Cayce said would be discovered between 1958 and 1998. Verrry interesting.

Now Jann could honestly discharge his promise. Kesey would need a guide familiar with the land and fluent in the native tongue. Also (a fact not lost on Kesey), Jann wanted somebody from the home office on hand to...well, make sure everything was moving along. He may have had in mind the bizarre room-service bills Hunter Thompson had run up in Las Vegas.

So in place of a trip to the Lebanese hash fields, I got a translator-chaperon job on an occult journey to Egypt. Close enough. As a sort of trial run, Kesey wanted to visit the headquarters of the Rosicrucian Order, in San Jose, California, which boasts a scale model of the Great Pyramid. It was an early clue to Kesey's psychic-matador research methods. When we got off the freeway in San Jose, Kesey refused to use the map to find the place, hoping to be able to sense the pyramid's vibration. (We had to cheat a little on the final approach.)