Dave’s Blog for OC & The World

Stopping off for dinner last night I parked next to a psychedelic minivan, something I hadn’t seen in many years. This wasn’t an amateur job slapped together with leftover housepaint; looked like it had been professionally done with a nice finish. It had more than a couple of bumper stickers on it; the ones I remember were SCO (SCO Linux? Rebelling against the Open Source establishment?) and “Meat is Dead”. A normal looking suburban family piled into the van as I was leaving; of course we had all eaten at In-N-Out Burger.
Flashback to my high school in Egypt where I was on the school newspaper. In Cairo when you grow your hair long or wore tie dyed t-shirts they called you a “khumfus” which is an Arabic word for beetle since the first wave of visitors to Cairo looking like this were fans of the Beatles. When I was in high school, khumpfuseen were more likely to be fans of the Grateful Dead.
There had been rumors for years that an American band would come to Cairo and play at the pyramids so we were a little skeptical at first when we heard the Dead were coming until Phil Lesh turned up to do some advance work for the band. Being on the newspaper of course I went for the interview, and surprisingly enough he agreed to meet with me. I brought along a buddy of mine, Eugene, who actually knew something about the music scene back in the States, and we met with Phil at his hotel room in Cairo and then later went to a press briefing at the pyramids with him, Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart. It was great to have those opportunities to meet with the Dead - don’t know if other bands would have been so open to meeting with a couple of rookie high school newspaper reporters - but that is what the Dead were all about, being of the people.
I missed the show; I had a tough choice between seeing the show or going with my track team to the Oktoberfest Marathonlauf in Munich on the same weekend and I chose the trip to Europe, but there is a pretty detailed account of the Dead playing the pyramids here.
Phil later wrote a book about his experiences, sadly no mention of us in his book.

Update - October 2008 The Dead finally release the concert at the pyramids on a DVD+2 CD package - 30 years late!; more info at Grateful Dead - Official Site