Mickey wasn’t going to be had that easily, though, and so he and Garcia—who sided with Mickey—redid their part. Olsen wasn’t going to give up either, so he made sure the strings remained in the final mix. The recorded version of “Terrapin Station” is probably my least favorite version because of that. It sounds really grandiose, like somebody’s ego is playing those strings. Anyway, that was a wrap for the record, Terrapin Station.
The album kicks off with “Estimated Prophet,” which is a Weir/Barlow creation. I did the same thing with Bobby for that one that I did with Mickey for “Terrapin Station.” It’s a great song but when he brought it to us, something was off. It needed a groove. It was in quick 7/4 but it didn’t swing. Yet. For my homework that night, I combined two fast sevens and played half-time over it. The two sevens brought the time around to an even number—the phrasing is in two bars of seven, so technically the time signature is in 14/8. But that’s getting technical. In layman’s terms, “Estimated Prophet” suddenly grooved.
Terrapin Station is a pretty good album, all told, and it holds up today, I think. I hope.
Meanwhile, Jerry and Mountain Girl had broken up and Deborah Koons entered the picture. She chased him down. Well, down and around. The whole situation between those two was volatile from the get-go. This one time, in New York City, Jerry called me up in a panic. We were in a fancy hotel on Fifty-Seventh Street. We had a gig the night before. It was now the following afternoon. Jerry got me on the phone and said, “Bill, you have to come to my room. Deborah’s here and won’t leave me alone. You’ve got to help me get rid of her, man.” So I hauled ass down there. I threw on a pair of beat-up blue jeans and a ragged old white long-sleeve shirt, and left the room, still barefoot. I was lucky enough to remember to stuff my room key in my pocket.
I entered Jerry’s room and, sure enough, Deborah was there, holding her ground. Jerry told her to leave and she refused. So I grabbed her, firmly but without hurting her in any way, and I forced her into the elevator. I told her, “Don’t move! I’m not going to hurt you, but you have to get out of here.” I looked at her and realized that she actually looked pretty good—she was all dolled up to attract Jerry’s attention. And I was just the drummer in a rock ’n’ roll band, so I looked scruffy as all hell.
We got down to the lobby and I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I just knew I had to get her away from Jerry. I took her to the front desk and explained that they had to make her leave. The clerk took one look at me, in all my ragged glory, then took in her graceful debonair appearance. He looked back at me again. “Sir, are you a guest here?”
I flashed, in that second, that she could’ve easily turned the tables on me. She could’ve flipped the script. But I reached in my back pocket for the only thing I had on me, my room key. They called security and got her to leave the property. If I hadn’t remembered that key, I could’ve been the one escorted out.
Deborah was capable of that kind of conniving, because when I talked to Jerry about it afterward, I asked him why he invited her over in the first place. “I didn’t,” he said. “She snuck in underneath the room service cart.” She paid off the waiter to sneak her in the room and, once he left, she popped out. “Surprise! Nice to see you, Jerry!” Well, he didn’t think so.
I heard stories of her getting violent when they lived together, but I didn’t see any of that. I don’t know what their deal was or when they got together or when they broke up or when they got back together; that’s their story, not mine. But I do recall one time at Bobby’s studio when Jerry, Mountain Girl, and Deborah were all in the same room together and it ended with Mountain Girl throwing Deborah into the foot-thick studio door. It broke the hinges off. I don’t know how Deborah survived that. But what is it that they say? Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?
Deborah must’ve been used to running into thick doors, because when she came out on the road with Jerry, he’d get hotel suites with two separate bedrooms. He made sure his always had an additional lock on it. That pretty much says everything, right there.
I should add, however, that she and Jerry shared an interest in film, and he would probably have been as happy as I was to find out that she recently made a documentary (Symphony of the Soil) about the dangers of GMOs.
Issues of love and warfare aside, 1977 was a rather memorable year for the Grateful Dead. One of our high points. Right around the corner, 1978 would bring us our greatest adventure yet, in a faraway land, on a whole different continent. The long strange trip was about to get very strange indeed.
14
On May 18, 1978, we were at the final stop of a spring tour and the end of a three-night stand in Chicago. I made them cancel the gig. Actually, I didn’t make anybody do anything. But long before our call-time at the Uptown Theater, I was already home in California. For whatever reason, Keith and I got into a major fight back at the hotel, after the gig the night before. I don’t even remember what the fight was about. Isn’t that something? It was probably some real nonsense.
I stopped by his hotel room and, out of nowhere, he started saying some really nasty shit to me. “Well then, fuck you, Keith!” I was exhausted. It was the end of tour, which usually means you’re crispy up top and frayed around the edges. I overreacted and jumped on the first flight out of there, even though we had just one more show to complete the tour. The grand finale. But I didn’t want to be in the same building as Keith and I couldn’t imagine walking on stage with him and doing something as interpersonal as playing music. It was that bad.
We didn’t throw any punches, although I do remember wrestling with him on the floor. We mostly just got into a lot of verbal garbage. Fueled by alcohol, I’m sure. Other drugs too, probably. It was stupid. Keith blindsided me—with a series of visciously personal insults that were intended to sting. Mission accomplished. My feelings were hurt—deeply—and between my damaged ego and my wounded pride, I wasn’t going to stick around to take stock of the emotional carnage.
I pulled the rip cord. “I’m outta here!”
I was in my seat on the flight and the doors were about to close when suddenly Dan Healy came running down the aisle and plopped down in the seat next to me. Sweat pouring off his forehead. “I made it, Bill!” It was his way of saying, “I’ve got your back.” It was a really big way of saying that.
After the tour, I went and stayed at Mickey’s ranch for a while and told him that I wasn’t going to play in the band anymore. Not if Keith was in it. After some post-tour decompression, I was able to dust off, but it took a minute before I could let bygones be bygones. That’s how deeply Keith was able to cut. I don’t remember how we healed that wound other than the universal cure-all: time.
Besides, we had bigger fish to fry that year—the Grateful Dead were going to Egypt. It made Europe ’72 seem like a stroll to the corner store. Egypt instantly became the biggest, baddest, and most legendary field trip that we took during our entire thirty years as a band.
As kids, Egypt captured all of our imaginations. Sure, we wanted to play there, just as we’d want to play on the moon or under the ocean or in never-never land—but the moment we realized that Egypt might be something more than just a collective daydream—that it might actually be possible—it took on its own momentum. And urgently. It felt like one of those things where the universe wanted it to happen.
Phil gave me a book to read called The Great Pyramid Decoded. It was an absolutely fascinating book that explained the difference in measurement between the old inch and the modern inch and why we couldn’t find the doors and some other stuff that we knew existed inside the Great Pyramid. We were using the wrong size measurement to discover them. Pi plays an incredible part in some of the math.
Bringing our caravan to Egypt wasn’t exactly as easy as bringing it to London or Paris. And getting permission to do what we wanted—propping up the Grateful Dead big top right next to the pyramids—was particularly tricky.
After diplomatic meetings, both in Cairo and Washington, D.C.
, a deal was struck: Ultimately, we were cleared to perform three shows at the Sphinx Theater, which was right at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza. But we weren’t going to be compensated for them. Half the proceeds would go to a children’s charity that was connected with the Egyptian first lady—President Anwar el-Sadat’s wife, Jehan. The other half would be donated to the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, which oversees the pyramids. We were all too happy to sign off on that. But it meant that we had to pay for everything ourselves. We went on our own ticket and that cost a lot of money. Especially since, once again, we brought an extended family with us.
Our Egypt ’78 extended family was different from our Europe ’72 extended family. Different lovers, different loves. Members of the Merry Pranksters, including Kesey, came with us for this one. Bill Graham joined us, just for fun. On my end, I brought my wife—but it wasn’t Susila. It was a woman named Shelley Pearce, who was an elementary schoolteacher and a really amazing woman. I fell for her pretty hard and our marriage lasted fifteen years. I’ll fill you in on all of that, soon enough.
When we landed in Cairo, Shelley and I took a cab to the hotel with Richard Loren, our manager during this period. He had been to Egypt before and pointed things out to us, eagerly, during the ride. We could tell we were in a strange land. The vibe was different. The air was different. Everything looked different. We dug it.
We could see the silhouettes of the pyramids, off in the distance, and immediately felt their energy. It’s so flat out in the desert that you can see their outlines for many miles. The crackpot theory that the pyramids may have been used for marker beacons suddenly didn’t seem so crackpot. But marker beacons for what?
The other thing I remember about that drive is that it felt like being on that amusement park ride, the Wild Mouse—but without any safety regulations. Traffic lights were merely suggestions and right-of-way appeared up for debate. It was a little too risky for me. I realize that might sound like a ridiculous statement, just however many pages after telling you about the race from the Great American Music Hall to San Rafael. But this time, I wasn’t driving.
Our hotel was less than half a mile from the venue—and by venue, I mean … the Great Pyramid!—at a renowned place called the Mena House Hotel. The hotel was palatial and surprisingly elegant. The stone walls were unusually thick to protect guests from the elements—the desert heat pierces through thin walls faster than a knife can cut through butter at Thanksgiving dinner. The hotel felt like a solid fortress, surrounded by a fifteen-foot fence. It didn’t look like much from the street, but behind the walls was a grand resort.
Of all the amenities in my room, the Great Pyramid was my favorite. It was framed inside my window, ready to be gawked at whenever we opened the curtain. Naturally, we gazed at it often, but we learned rather quickly not to leave that window open at dusk, because of all the mosquitos. They came in, uninvited, and took over every inch of our ceiling, as dense as the crowd at Watkins Glen. But unlike most of those folks on the raceway, mosquitos don’t like hash. Well, we did—so we smoked them out.
We had tons of good hash while we were there. All locally grown and produced. We didn’t smuggle in any paraphernalia, so we would use aluminum soda cans and whatever else we could come up with to smoke out of. We weren’t too proud.
There was a nine-hour time difference from San Francisco. At five in the morning on the first night, our internal clocks hadn’t yet time traveled. We were stuck in the previous afternoon. Shelley and I were starving and—despite security issues, common sense, and Shelley’s protests—I decided I was going to go out and get us some food. I was a hunter gatherer. I got as far as the stairwell when a waiter walked past me with a giant food tray balanced on his shoulder. I offered to buy the entire tray, on the spot. “Just call room service and I’ll bring it to you.” I couldn’t believe it. We were in a country where a significant portion of the population still went to work on camelback—and yet, here we had twenty-four-hour room service. The same waiter turned out to be our hash connection … so we liked that guy.
A lot of people in our entourage got sick because of the bacteria in the food, but I took a preventative measure: I ate yogurt every day. Probiotics. The only yogurt I could get had a really bad stench and was served in jars without lids on them. Every day, I’d take a big dollop of strawberry jam and mix it in and somehow manage to get it down the hatch. I’m convinced that it kept me from getting sick. Shelley didn’t do that and she got sick. She wasn’t the only one.
It was so hot there during the daytime that, from about 11:00 A.M. until late afternoon, you really couldn’t go outside. If you wanted to venture, you’d have to wear all white clothes, a white hat, and go from shade to shade. You couldn’t hang out. Everything becomes a ghost town except for a few hardy locals, walking their horses up and down the streets. Nighttime was where it was at, and that’s something that we could really get with. In fact, part of the impetus of us being there in Egypt came from Richard Loren, who had visited Luxor and made a spiritual connection between Egyptians and hippies. They had tapestries instead of tie-dyes but it was all cut from the same cloth. And they liked getting high as much as we did.
The Mena House was on the one road that ran up to the Great Pyramid, in an area called Mena Village, which is a little outpost at the edge of Cairo. The downtown is way off in the distance. Mena Village can be a tourist trap during the day for all the travelers going to and from the pyramids.
Everyone on the hotel staff instructed us not to go out after dark. “There’s a reason we have a fence around the perimeter,” they said. “It isn’t safe.” You tell the Grateful Dead or the Merry Pranksters not to do something and you know damn well that’s one sure way to get them to do it. So we all—individually and in small groups—snuck out. We all found each other out in the street and started laughing our asses off.
The Egyptians were the nicest, most peaceful people I had ever met in my entire life. And at that time of night, after it cools off, they go outside and sit with their hookahs in front of their shops and homes and drink tea and smoke. They didn’t drink any alcohol and that was really an attractive characteristic to me—even though we drank a ton of beer, out of super-sized bottles, back at the hotel.
The local custom for smoking hash was a bit different than ours. They’d fill their hookahs with black, gooey tobacco and then they’d clean out a little, finger-sized bowl in the middle where they’d place a tiny, round ball of hash. They showed us their way and then we showed them ours—we filled the entire hookah with hash. No tobacco. We put some coals in the middle, so the hash would burn, and puffed, puffed, passed. The local Egyptians scratched their heads and shot each other glances and then got really, ridiculously stoned with us. Everybody had fun.
Shelley and I met a friendly local who invited us inside his abode to meet his family and see his horses. Their horses are a source of great pride, and they treat them like extended members of the family. In fact, the horses actually live in their basements, where the stalls are kept cleaner than any racetrack’s I’ve ever seen. Manure gets picked up faster than the hottest hooker in all of Las Vegas—they use it for growing vegetables. These Arabian horses were so completely trained, they were simply incredible animals.
The rest of the house had the faint smell of horse wafting through it, but it wasn’t so bad. With their smell came their heat—the horses became natural space heaters during the cool desert nights.
All of the furniture in this particular house was covered in plastic, so it wouldn’t get dirty. I don’t know if that was an Egyptian thing, or a 1970s’ thing, but the plastic all had the same color and the same design, and I looked at Shelley like, “This is a little weird.” But we weren’t scared of a little weird.
Our hosts invited us to stay and drink tea, so we sat on the couches, on top of the plastic, and sipped away. They weren’t trying to sell us knives or get us to join their religion or rip us off in any way—they were just being friendly. Strange
rs stopping strangers. The Heart of Gold Band.
We couldn’t really say but a few words to each other, because of the language barrier, but we tried knocking it down with a combination of charades and ingenuity. Shelley somehow explained to them that we had horses at home, too, that we loved. But the love these people had for their horses really left an impression on us. They didn’t just care for their animals; they respected them.
Everyone we met in the village was just as peaceful and as sweet as could be. When we compared notes the next day, every single person in our traveling rock ’n’ roll carnival had similar experiences. There was nothing but love and good tidings. So all that nonsense that the hotel staff told us about the dangerous world outside their protected gates was just hogwash. It always is, isn’t it? They probably just wanted us to spend our money exclusively in their overpriced hotel shops and restaurants.
The Sphinx Theater held a couple thousand people and we couldn’t sell it out. Cairo wasn’t our biggest market. There were a lot of Americans in the audience but not all of them were Deadheads; at least, not in the traditional sense. I looked out at the crowd and thought, “Pretty straight audience.” There were a lot of American diplomats and government workers—and their families—mixed in among some extremely stoked foreign exchange students and random travelers. About a hundred seats went to our friends and family, including the Pranksters. And then Basketball Hall of Famer (and “Celebrity Deadhead Number One”), Bill Walton, led his own entourage on this Egyptian expedition. So the crowd was small but mighty.
Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead Page 24