Big news in Cairo, the Grateful Dead are playing three concerts at the pyramids with a Sudanese oud master. I’m going Thursday and if it’s good I’ll go again. It should be a strange night.
-Letter Home, September, 1978
I remember that night at the pyramids, there was VIP seating for Egyptian bigwigs and their wives in evening gowns, the kind who come for Aida and Sound & Light, the kind of show I’m sure they were expecting. None of them got all the tie-dyed dancing hippie chicks who’d flown in. Twelve years later I interviewed oud player Hamza el Din for an article about his life and forgot to ask him about that night. But I did tell him that we’d used a bit of his music in Voice of the Whip, paired with the scene of KhairAllah riding his camel through the grassland early in the Darb.