“High on hash”: how did the Grateful Dead end up playing in Egypt?
The Grateful Dead and casual drug use tend to be perceived as going hand in hand with one another. Whether it was a case of hitting several tabs of LSD and allowing their psychedelic hallucinations to take hold of their extensive jams, or if it was simply smoking a healthy amount of marijuana, they were almost infamous for their association with taking liberal amounts of illicit substances.
Who can blame them for this? They were in the ascendency during the counterculture movement that swept through the US during the 1960s and ‘70s, and with this came a lot of drug use. The fans who listened to their music were equally as prolific when it came to substance use, and the music that they made was perfect for taking substances to – spacey, dreamlike and freewheeling. Of course, the Grateful Dead were going to be heavily associated with the drug culture of the period.
It wasn’t just them carrying this torch; there were plenty of others in the era that had a notoriety for this sort of drug-addled behaviour, such as The Doors, Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane, all of whom would have had plenty of tales to tell about their escapades while high. However, it was perhaps a substance-induced decision from the Grateful Dead’s manager that led to one of the band’s wildest adventures and one that lives down in rock and roll infamy.
Richard Loren had a long history of knowing how to deal with some of the biggest names of the period, having begun his career in the 1960s as a booking agent. He’d worked alongside Jim Morrison and Grace Slick before, so he knew how to handle debauched antics and had pretty much seen it all. As the saying goes, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’, and Loren certainly knew how to do that as well. If anything, he was the perfect person to manage a band like the Grateful Dead.
It was in 1975 that Loren had the brainwave while on holiday to bring the band to Egypt, a location where very few other US artists had ever performed before. He noted that the Pyramids of Giza were an astounding location to have as a backdrop for a performance, as well as the stunningly clear night sky, but his idea of what a perfect Grateful Dead live show would be like seemed to fit well with everything he was seeing.
“Most groups have a few hits and then play those hits night after night after night,” he said in his memoir, High Notes, “But the Dead played different sets each time, an interplay, one song free-flowing into another, you didn’t know what would happen next. The music always changed magically wherever they went. And there I was on this camel looking at that stage beneath a necklace of stars and a pendant moon – and hanging out with all these Arabs and Egyptians who all got high on hash – and thinking ‘the Dead could play here!’”
They would end up doing exactly that just three years later, and although Loren’s vision of seeing the band perform in such an idyllic location had managed to come to reality, there were a number of issues with the three consecutive performances that meant there’s little record of them having played there. For one, the piano they’d brought was wildly out of tune, which also meant that large amounts of the footage they had recorded of the performance was rendered useless. It might have been an ambitious project, but it was also as shambolic as you might expect a bunch of stoned hippies to come up with.
