![]() A parallel track was underway whose synchronous conclusion at the concerts would blow the minds of many a head. ![]() Nineteen seventy-two was also the year that President Anwar Sadat evicted the Soviet military advisers from Egypt, a gesture toward the West in the Cold War era that eventually opened the way geopolitically for the Gizah concerts. Later, manager John McIntire would approach the record company with the idea of an archaeological mystery tour, but nothing came of it. In London we hung out with John Michell, whose books had reawakened a generation's interest in arcane perspectives on Earth energies. These intrepid voyagers were ever interested in the patterns of the past and the meanings of the moment, and the idea occurred to them that profound energies might be tapped, and their music enhanced, at ancient sites around the world. On a day off, I took Mountain Girl, Phil, and Jerry on a ride to the ancient megaliths of southwest England, visiting man-made Sidbury Hill, Avebury's megalithic circles, and Stonehenge. Thirty years later, it's time to tell the tale, a tale that begins, at least to our normal faculties of recollection, during the Dead's 1972 European tour. ![]() In the course of the return flight from Cairo in the fall of 1978, Hamilton Eddy gave me this assessment of the Grateful Dead in Egypt, and though like the event itself, he has disappeared Sphinx-like beneath the sifting sands of time, his words have haunted me ever since. Their music asserts that we are liberated, not enslaved, but such an acceptance of total awareness, and their pilgrimage to the Great Pyramids of the Nile, the cradle of revealed cultures, is made with the understanding that men and women, many thousands of years ago, also aspired to voyage to the stars in their search for a pure and universal humanity. The Grateful Dead themselves epitomizing Duke Ellington's definition of the excellent as being "beyond category," have south access to sources of the imagination which transcend "Western" or "Eastern" categories of history and culture. ![]()
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