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"Bukra fil-mishmish is kinda the Egyptian version of the Mexicans' Mañana. It translates as 'Tomorrow, in the time of the apricots.' But dig: There isn't any apricot season on the Nile...." — Charlie Perry
Pleasant Hill, OR
St. Pat's Day, 1992
Charlie Perry
Camp Mogen David, CA
Dear Charlie:
Downwind by a couple decades, peeking back through cracked mind mirrors. You see, Rolling Stone is publishing a chunk of "The Search for the Secret Pyramid" they sent us on in '74, and Jann has asked me to come up with the Most Memorable Scene from that historic assignment. A grand gallery of Egyptian etchings comes flapping to mind:
— like that first night in Cairo, when Ramadan ended and 7 million uproarious believers broke out in a teeming rash of discordant harmony, heralding the rise of global Muslim might...
— or that afternoon our motor-mad taxi driver T'ud ("Thud?" you screeched from the back seat. "This gear-grinding tire-burning pedal-to-the-metal maniac's name is Thud?") drove us out to Sakara, where a tunnel beneath the sand led us past hundreds of stone boxes big as Buicks, all of them coffins for the bulls that were elaborately sacrificed every year for hundreds of years thousands of years ago, each of them carved from a solid block of rare black granite, and every one of them empty, enigmatic and depressing...
— or that chilly dawn my shadowy little Not-guide, Marag (pronounced with a soft g, remember? Mah-rahzh-zh...), guided me down through the dark throb of his ancestral village to score me some hash so you wouldn't have to listen to me complain anymore that I was "highless in Gîza."...
Great memories, Charlie, but I'm afraid I'm gonna have to disappoint Jann; the Egyptian memory that stands out most in my gallery actually happens on another trip, four years later, when I finally persuade friends and family to return with me to that fabulous land of the pharaohs...when hard-shell Baptist Jimmy Carter is getting hard-nosed Hebrew Menachem Begin to sit down and schmooze with moderate Muslim Anwar Sadat in the name of Peace...
— in the Time of the Apricots, when the Grateful Dead played the Great Pyramid.
Sadat's old lady helped put the gig together, explaining to unenthusiastic Arab allies that she understood their concern about infidel Rok'n Rolies playing the World's Most Ancient Temple, but she did not consider it blasphemous in as the promoters agreed that all prophets from the concert would go toward the construction of a soccer field for the underprivileged children of Cairo.
Right. Prophets zero, lions ate, as usual. But the Arab elders went for it. How could they have known what rough beast was lurching toward them across the desert by the truckful? How could they have imagined the prophet-gobbling appetite of a Rok'n Rol army on a full-scale campaign? Even the gig's promoters never dreamed how unprophetable the gig was gonna be. Only 700 tickets sold, mostly to hard-core Deadheads, government operatives and spoiled Saudis who motored over by the limo load. Local sales are zip.
"Oh, well," the promoters sigh as they strap on their most philosophical Woodstock Grin, "some things you gotta write off as the Will of Allah."
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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.
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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.)
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He spent the next week or so contacting other occult sources around the country, including the Cayceite Association for Research and Enlightenment, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and someone in the Midwest named Enoch, who had never been to Egypt. We hooked up in New York and flew together to Cairo.
After one night at a decaying hotel on an island in the Nile, we took a cab to Gîza, the Cairo suburb where the Great Pyramid is located, and checked into the Mena House Hotel, just two minutes' walk away. Kesey determinedly talked them into giving us a room, although we didn't have a reservation, but we were clearly told it would be for only two nights.
The next morning, Kesey threw the I Ching and concluded it was time to have our first real look at the pyramid. Terrific recommendation, I Ching. It was a Muslim holiday, and on holidays the poor people of Cairo tend to party at the base of the pyramid (Cairo is short of parks, and it's a cheap bus ride). The place was crowded with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Cairenes, picnicking and dancing in party clothes, which they traditionally dye lurid Day-Glo colors.
Kesey had been overwhelmed by the seething mob scene that is Cairo ever since we'd arrived. Clambering up the huge stones of the pyramid, surrounded by hordes of people dressed in science-fiction hues, he seemed even more overwhelmed than usual. Then I heard some kids shout, "Elkhawaga byidukh! El-khawaga byidukh!" ("The foreign gentleman is dizzy! The foreign gentleman is dizzy!")
In Arabic "dizzy" is a polite way of saying "throwing up." And so he was — in a sort of vitamin-laden christening, the foreign gentleman was recycling his breakfast orange juice onto the pyramid. Later, Kesey told me he'd taken a little LSD that morning to heighten his perceptions.
That wasn't the only moment he'd regret dropping that acid. A few minutes later, still not suspecting his sensitive condition, I suggested that we go into the pyramid. Kesey raised his eyes to the mob standing in line, a look of mute struggle on his face. The Universe had just laid down a challenge to him; he sighed and said yes, of course we had to go in.
The internal passageways of the Great Pyramid are steep and narrow, not designed to hold scores of people at a time. We found ourselves in a sweating, lurching crush of people struggling in both directions at the same time, panicky from lack of oxygen. I'm not surprised Kesey concluded the pyramid was not a tomb but a place of initiation.
The next day the hotel reminded us we had to turn our rooms over to the people who had reserved them. Kesey refused to leave the vicinity of the pyramid, though. The management, used to the perennial Egyptian housing shortage, eventually threw up its hands and offered to let us sleep in the changing rooms at the swimming pool.
These proved to be the worst accommodations I've ever had. If you closed the windows to keep out the mosquitoes, you could either leave the air conditioning off and suffocate or leave it on and catch cold. I chose the final option and in two days had to go back to Cairo to find a decent hotel room and the kind of ferocious antibiotics that the USDA hesitates to allow Americans to buy but you can easily find, I'm glad to say, in countries where it's possible to get really sick. I left Kesey on his own.
When I got back to San Francisco, I was given the chance to put in my two cents on the edit of Kesey's reports — which wound up running to five installments — but I declined. Kesey had explained to me his theory that it's more important for a writer to discover his personal myth than to relate facts, and from the narrow, fact-bound viewpoint of a reporter, I'd have had to point out where he played fast and loose with quotations (most of the things he has me say in the story are, let's say, literature) and plain old facts.
But go ahead and read about the Great Pyramid. Something may be revealed after all.
[From Issue 632 — June 11, 1992]