A Long Strange Trip (69 page)

At sundown on September 14, the Dead played their first show. Garcia told one reporter, “This place has really freed me from something that I am normally quite concerned with, which is just professional competence . . . But this experience is greater than the elements of performance in a normal sense.” It was the right attitude to have, because their playing was handicapped by a number of things. That summer Kreutzmann had broken his wrist playing basketball, and he was not able to make his normal contribution, effectively playing one-handed. Lesh spent much of the visit in the Mena House bar: “I was a drunk in 1978,” he said. Keith’s piano was untuned, as their tuner had taken offense with the crew and not shown up. Overall, the band in 1978 was at a low point in its playing. But the shows were for the experience, and that was rich. On the first night, a local police official took stage guard Jeff Boden aside and asked him and the rest of those onstage not to smoke hash visibly, then took him behind the amps, broke off a fine chunk, gave it to Jeff, and said, “Here it’s okay.” Sue looked at Garcia and smirked, “I can’t believe we’re getting away with this.” He nodded, grinning. The web of peaceful synchronicity reached beyond the Dead: several thousand miles away outside Washington, D.C., the leaders of Egypt and Israel were concluding a peace agreement known as the Camp David accords. It was a special moment in Middle Eastern history.

Their first show was preceded by a choir and percussion ensemble from the Abu Simbel School of Luxor, whose appearance was arranged by the band’s friend from Marin, Hamza el-Din, a master of Nubian music. Then the Dead came out to play. As they began, Weir swatted a bug, and then another. Their stage lights were the brightest thing around, and they weren’t far from the Nile. He began to fall into a serious gloom with the realization that he’d come ten thousand miles to be eaten alive, and then something whipped past his head. And something else. Under the stage lived bats, thousands and thousands of them forming a cloud around the musicians. The bats dined royally and all was well. It was as stunning to Weir as the simple fact of playing rock and roll in front of the pyramids. Tickets cost from $1.50 to $7.50 and were purchased by Dead Heads, a few government people, and the occasional American living in Egypt, such as the kids at the American School, as well as local Cairo youth; still the audience was only in the several hundreds. Advance word about the shows was mostly rumor, although it was interesting that bootleg tapes with labels like “Oxomoxo,” “American Booty,” and “Tearapin Station” had appeared in local music stores. But tickets weren’t terribly important. The theater consisted simply of plastic chairs separated from the desert by a rope, and the locals and Bedouins from the desert gathered freely.

Just to take everything to the planetary edge, the third night included a complete eclipse of the moon. This time, instead of opening the show, the choir waited and began the second set. The eclipse began just after moonrise as the wind whipped at the sand. The Bedouins who lined the stage area wailed in a match for anything on the stage. Mena Villagers began to pound pots and pans and shake cans filled with stones to bring the moon back, as the choir sang and played their tars. Then, magically, one by one the members of the choir drifted off the stage, and one by one the members of the Grateful Dead replaced them. Voices and the rhythm of the tars were oh-so-elegantly displaced by the first notes of Hart’s “Fire on the Mountain,” as the Dead played the moon back from darkness. Healy stood on stage thinking, “If there is a moment and a place to be somewhere, this is it. It’s the best fantasy anybody ever had about us, and we did it.” Later, Mickey Hart asked Omar, one of the horse and camel purveyors, if the music had moved him. “It makes me feel like that man on TV who leaps tall buildings and breaks bricks,” he said. It was Omar’s first experience with large-scale amplified music.

Bill Graham had been invited to be a guest on the adventure, and after the third night he threw a party for everyone at Sahara City, a gambling and fornication tent out in the desert. Dozens of camels and horses stood at the side of the stage, and after the show the band mounted up for a moonlit ride to the party. Belly dancing, booze, and fabulous food made for a good night. Kesey and Garcia raved about literature, and a roadie waved a bottle of Jack Daniel’s at them and asked, “R’all yew guys sittin’ round talking ’bout books?” Mickey and Graham, both ex-waiters, challenged each other to a race around the tent with loaded trays; the winner remained forever in dispute. Sunshine would remember the hundreds of cats that milled around on the roof, waiting for scraps.

After the shows, Mickey took off for Hamza’s hometown in Sudan, Kom Ombo, with MERT (mobile engineering and recording team), which included Jerilyn, Bret Cohen, and John Cutler. He pulled out his tar and initiated a rhythmic encounter between cultures that entranced both sides. Meantime, the rest of the band had taken Goldie’s friend Ati’s boat, the
Sobek
(Crocodile), up the Nile to Luxor, dubbing the vessel and themselves the real “Ship of Fools.” After a few more days of bliss, they piled back on airplanes and returned to the real world, where the band had an album to finish and a tour to start. The Egypt visit quickly seemed like a dream, for two reasons. One was that shortly after their return they all visited San Francisco’s deYoung Museum, then home to the traveling Treasures of Tut Ankh Amen tour, which, thought David Freiberg, “was everything that wasn’t still in the tomb. You say, ‘I just left the sarcophagus over there . . .’ It wasn’t as good as being there, though.”

And on the 5th and Lincoln kitchen bulletin board was a note from Ashraf Ghorbal, the Egyptian ambassador to the United States, to Jerry Garcia, noting that all accounts and reports “give me, as they must give you and your colleagues, great satisfaction . . . concerts have become a unique chapter in the story of Egyptian-American friendship . . . My sincere congratulations and best wishes of success to the Grateful Dead.”

44

Interlude: The Rhythm Devils (DRUM BREAK)

October, The Capital Centre, Washington, D.C.

As the other musicians leave the stage, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart settle in to one of the Dead’s profound rituals, the drum duet. On the night they met, the two men drummed on cars, lampposts, the city itself; the conversation has continued. At different times, “drums” has included oil drums, garbage cans, chains, and the sound of Brent Mydland gargling. Mickey’s first dramatic instrument was the “beast,” a giant hoop of iron from which various drums were suspended. In later years he and Kreutzmann both acquired electronic drums, in which pads are hitched to sampled sounds via MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). But tonight their taste goes to the ancient. Mickey picks up the tar and evokes the dry sound of the desert in a light
pitapitapitapita.
Kreutzmann picks up the talking drum, for which he’s always had an uncanny facility. Of African origin, the talking drum is squeezed under the arm to produce differently pitched tones. A stream of beats courses through the room, first chasing each other a la Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray, then circling. It is elegant, very old, and new as the dawn. It’s a monstrous challenge for the sound guys, who must follow them like kids tracking an escaped pet. Since the drummers have moved back behind their trap sets into the land of boom-boom, monitor mixer Harry Popick can’t see them. At the monitor board, he groans over a random screech, “It can’t be the tar mike, which one is he playing?” An Ultra Sound guy runs off, and returns to say, “More tip” (the microphone at the top of the setup). Another trip, “Just a taste more tip.”

As the drummers make waves, the audience divides. A large proportion live for the drums, and they surge forward. A sizable portion finds that this is a good time for a bathroom break. At the back of the stage, Garcia and Weir take a breather with their roadie, Steve Parish, and the laughs begin. Fragments of Garcia’s rap float out, disturbing the nearby guests trying to listen to the music, until they begin to listen to the humor and finally break up laughing. Tonight, Garcia’s on a pirate rant, and in a low, perfect growl, “Shiver me timbers” leaks out of the curtain in front of his space. In between a Hart balaphon riff, one hears “Keelhaul the—” then “bodies—” creeps between the sound of chimes. The duet is exquisite as one of the catering guys brings a load of towels onstage, just doing his job, while the audience sways, rapt.

Though the performance is a partnership of drummers, the energy and motivation to go beyond the conventional has always derived from Mickey Hart. Early sound effects included cannons and frying bacon. In August 1968, in the middle of a performance of “Alligator,” the amps were rolled apart, drum risers came forward, and Mickey and Billy welcomed Vince Delgado and Shankar Ghosht into a drum quartet jam. During Hart’s retirement from the road, he also received his greatest gift. His teacher, the Indian tabla master Ustad Allarakha, sent Mickey his son, Zakir Hussain, and they began a long-term and blessed partnership in sound. One of the first results was the band Diga, which means “naked” in Sanskrit, and is a specific type of sound in Indian drumming.

But the true flowering of Mickey Hart’s abilities as a percussive maestro took place in 1978. One night in October that year, Francis and Eleanor Coppola came to a Dead concert at Winterland at the urging of Bill Graham, who had had a role in Francis’s film
Apocalypse Now,
then in postproduction. Francis was looking for someone to do a musical score for the film, having just received a score that he didn’t like. They sat onstage behind the drums, and it was, Eleanor wrote, “amazing. It had physical impact.” The evening reminded her of a night inside an Ifugao priest’s house in the Philippines, where
Apocalypse Now
had been filmed. “The scale was different, but everyone being joined together by rhythms and images was the same.” Exactly.

Francis hired Mickey to produce a percussion sound track, and for the first time, Mickey had found an “employer” who was as willing as he was to flirt with insanity in pursuit of the muse. Mickey set up video screens all over his home—the bathroom, the kitchen, next to the fireplace—and began to absorb the odyssey of Captain Willard, the man sent to kill Colonel Kurtz. Over several months he assembled a collection of percussion instruments, some invented on the spot, and then laid them out on the floor of the Front Street warehouse in batteries, according to compatibility. To mime the sound of walking through the jungle underbrush, they created the “scritch,” a collection of vertically mounted metal and glass rods played by rubbing them with a rosin-powdered gloved hand. Willard’s perusals of Kurtz’s dossier had a sound signature, a glass harp. There were wind chimes, devil chasers made from bamboo grown at the ranch, and the Beam, a ten-foot-long piece of aluminum, which produced the sound of a napalm explosion. At length, Mickey took Billy, Phil, and his old students and/or Diga members Michael Hinton, Greg Errico, and Jordan Amarantha “up the river,” playing to the film as they moved from place to place within the jungle/garden of instruments. The recording sessions took on not only the obsession of all Hart projects but also an echo of the lunacy that permeated everything to do with the film. Only a little of their work made the final cut of the deeply flawed and utterly brilliant masterpiece that was
Apocalypse Now,
but it was a fantastic stimulant to Hart’s imagination. Ever after, he would be, as John Barlow put it, a “sorcerer,” assembling the elements to make powerful magic—most especially with his band Planet Drum.

As the eighties passed, Hart began to research the origins of his chosen world—for the drums are not merely his instrument, but his reason for being. Particularly inspired by his encounter with Joseph Campbell, he began to study the lore of percussion, and through it the roots of shaman-ism and the alteration of consciousness, the very foundation of the Grateful Dead experience. “In the beginning was noise,” he wrote in his first book, the memoir
Drumming at the Edge of Magic.
“And noise begat rhythm. And rhythm begat everything else. This is the kind of cosmology a drummer can live with.”
Edge
was followed by his visual encyclopedia of drumming,
Planet Drum,
published in 1991. “People play music for different reasons,” he said in an interview about the first book. “I go for the spirit side of things; not necessarily to be perfect. What I’m after is changing consciousness.”

Onstage tonight with Kreutzmann, drumming in pursuit of magic, they leave aside the ancient tar and talking drum and leap straight into the twenty-first century, walking to the back of the stage and to electronic drum pads which are hooked into computers containing sampled sound— any sampled sound. One whack of a stick and a snarling dog can come out, or the sound of breaking glass, or thunder, or rain. They have always had a variety of different sound possibilities at their command, but now this variety has multiplied to stratospheric levels. Billy stands casually and produces a pulse; Mickey stands rigid, still militarily erect, bouncing off, over, around, and through the pulse. It builds into a roar and they go off. We are whipped with sound until the only possible response from the audience seems a prolonged scream.

Back in Parish’s clubhouse, the guitarists are loosely working on a concept for the space jam segment. Sometimes the subject is serious, as on certain nights when the knowledge of some hero’s recent death is fresh, sometimes it’s a sly take on current events—“Khaddafi Death Squads,” an earthquake, Reagan in China—and sometimes it’s outré. As they scheme, Mickey finishes with a Beam solo and Billy leaves the stage, it being pretty well impossible to play something at the same time as a Beam solo. Beam sounds are the fullest expression of Mickey’s muse, for the Beam produces not just music but noise, and there is one part of Hart that simply wants to make the loudest, most attention-getting noise possible. The Beam is a slab of aluminum strung with piano strings over a magnetic pickup, and is based on the Pythagorean monochord. Robbie Taylor spends considerable amounts of his time tuning it. Mickey Hart uses a piece of pipe, his feet, and you-name-it to wrestle the nastiest sounds he can imagine out of it. It is like nothing any average music listener has ever conceived, a drumming on the very edge of magic—or, as one critic so evocatively misheard it, “drumming at the edge of madness.”