Grateful Dead

Snakefinger's guitar solo on The Residents' "Satisfaction" is one of the greatest of all time.

....thanks Santa.
Merry Jerry Christmas everyone!

get any new music for Christmas?
Cheers

I bet Dennis got a bunch of music for Christmas....…..

A Gift From A Flower to a Garden- mono vinyl - Donovan
Lets Go Down and Blow Our Minds - British Psychedelic Sounds of 1967 - various
Hackney Diamonds - The Stones

RIP John Cutler, a bit of a story, the Grateful Dead sent John ahead of the band and the rest of the bozo's and bolo's to Egypt for the "Egyptian experiment". When he got there (this is in the 70s now) the airport authorities were very skeptical and leary of all of the musical equipment so John had to disassemble every piece so the authorities could inspect it. The fore thought of the band to send someone weeks ahead of the scheduled shows was a brilliant thought and one that saved the show. There was a war going on between Egypt and Israel at the time so it was not real easy for anyone to get into Egypt, especially a hippy with a bunch of "equipment". At the time, Egypt was still quite a backward country and there was nothing on site that could be used by John to set up shop, so he asked for some cable, as the engineers thought they could use the great pyramid as an echo chamber so they brought him some, left over by the nazis in WW2. Of course the bulk of it was unusable and the echo chamber idea was shelved.
Needless to say, he did it, and the band pulled off a legendary show.
Fare thee well Mr. Cutler, and thank you, for a real good time.

RIP Tommy Smothers tried to show us what was going down, and the censors cancelled him. A true warrior who will be missed. The Smothers Brothers comedy hour was ahead of the times and spoke negatively about racism, the president and the Vietnam war. They also had an incredible list of rock stars on the show, along with anti war folk singers. The Who almost blew up the stage when 3 explosive charges were put in the cannon inside Keith's bass drum and when it went off, caught Pete's hair on fire and sent a piece of cymbal into Keith's arm. All on network tv.
Thanks for the memories, now over 50 years ago.

ALERT: Only 150 left an hour ago.
Oct. 31, 1971. That's a show worthy of vinyl.
Cheers

Fun times! Great to be in the Bay Area in December.

There was no war actually going on between Egypt and Israel at the time of or preceding the Dead's Giza concerts. (There hadn't been since the October War/Yom Kippur War/Ramadan War in 1973.) What was going on, mostly secretly until signed on Sep 17 1978 (the day after the last Giza concert; also Ken Kesey's birthday), were negotiations mediated by President Jimmy Carter in Maryland
between (not usually together in the same room) Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar el-Sadat that culminated as the Camp David Accords and led to the Egypt-Israel peace treaty signed six months later. (That treaty made a formal mutual recognition and normalization of relations between the two countries, ended their state of war existing since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and led to Israel's departure from Sinai.)

oh, and I think it's doubtful that the inadequate cabling provided to try to wire up to the King's Chamber for echoing the concert feed dated from the Nazi era; that's probably someone's tale-telling exaggeration (I checked Rock Scully's entertaining but facts-challenged memoir Living with the Dead as a likely source for that, but it's not there. Maybe in Nicki Scully's or Kesey's accounts of the Egypt adventure?)

Y'all be cool

the Camp David Accord ended all hostilities between the two countries, so technically not at war, just hostile to each other. Thanks for pointing out that little bit of history to us all.
My previous post was correct, just because one can't find the information doesn't mean it didn't happen. Do you think I made it up? 1979 Egypt was very primitive. I did not use Rock Skullys book, I did research it a bit and I stand by my post, the wire was ancient, probably left over from WW2.
The main point is that without forethought by the band and them sending John to Egypt these shows might not have happened.
Thank you John, and fare thee well.

Just wasted a half hour and late for work trying to post about the Egypt thing, including quotes from Healy, but it’s all another effin waste as I can’t post it, I’m so over this BS!
Hey rhino, we’re giving you millions of dollars a year, how bout you fix your lame ass site!

I can't remember ever reading a post on here from anyone who attended those Egypt shows. Maybe I just missed it.

RIP John Cutler. Loved his recordings.

Interesting info. Alan Trist has a great write up in the liner notes of the Rocking the Cradle release. They used The Who's PA system from London. Quite the production to make these shows happen.

As Oro says, we are still experiencing censorship at a massive level trying to post. I tried a four sentence post and had to cut it to two. It was about Christmas albums, clearly dangerous stuff. I hope you can help. Thank you.
Cheers

We're being repressed!

My wife gave me 5/9/77 vinyl.

Everyone else gives me amazon gift cards.

So far I bought Dicks 4 & 5 (never bought the dicks when they came out)

so now I have 4, 5, 9, 14 & 29. Have 100 bucks left in amazon bucks. Looking for best deal on more Dicks

update edit.... surprised it let me answer that! Now will the update work?

Still being stoopid!

Page 187 GD gear

Healy

Purchased

that was inferior, from local phone company

When my first amendment rights aren’t being violated

One of my latest purchases was his recent release The New World on the Discus label

Just been hey nowed Several times so far

I had to delete much of this post to get it past the censorship

PT, I mean no personal criticism. But I believe it's not true that it was not real easy in 1978 for anyone to get into Egypt (though John Cutler with equipment may indeed have faced some lengthy inspection rigmarole at entry, not unusual).

I traveled to Egypt for the Dead's concerts among a small group of Californians who got there via flight and hotel arrangements coordinated by Brian Bisnett. We flew TWA from San Francisco to New York on Sunday Sep 10 (as I remember it), then again on TWA from JFK to Cairo, with stops in Rome and. Athens. That and entering Egypt was all easy enough and very travel-business-as-usual for any American with passport and visa and typhoid inoculations (or for Canadians or Europeans or Africans, say, with equivalent travel-doc necessities; if one were Israeli, or were to travel from Israel to Egypt, I can't say how easy or difficult that may have been). Tourism was a large, normal, and vital factor in Egypt's economy.

I had the means to go, and it was not particularly expensive. (I lack good partiicular memory of the cost, but I'll guesstimate something over $800 and under $1500 for everything. We were in Cairo and Giza for three-and-a-half days before the shows, throughout the shows, and for several days afterward went upriver to Luxor [encountering there Jerry and Mountain Girl, Donna and Keith] and Abu Simbel, then north briefly to Alexandria before return to Cairo and then home.) Again, it was fairly easily done, and we were just a bunch of anybodies doing it. I recall no remarks from other foreigners about difficulties getting in to Egypt.

Mark, wow, that is really cool you made the trip out there. That is dedication. Must have been a great experience.
Would love to hear more about the shows. I have the release and the bonus disc, and I always have enjoyed it all even though they were a little off at times. How did you all feel about the shows?

really? this is still happening? can't post now, thanks deadnet

from Jambands 2015, has the whole story.

Mark, that's really cool to have been there with them all and got to experience the eclipse and the Bedouins, so cool.

that's Jambase, not bands

Along with allot of other folks who post here, December was a great time for attending Dead shows if you lived in the Bay Area.

PT, so glad - really - that my continued pushing of my take on your comments didn't offend! I'll check out that Cutler interview at Jambase.

DeadVikes, and all:
One could maybe comment on the Grateful Dead Egypt experience to no end. At the moment, what I'd like to say is that the "Peggy-O" from the first night really resonated with me while we were there, thematically, and afterward; seems among the most touching songs they gave in Egypt, dire language of warfare and all. Had hoped it would have been included in the Egypt 1978 album, but perhaps Thursday's recordings were not as useable as the other two nights', or Keith's piano tuning sounded worse. There are recordings at archive dot o r g. Also, I should say that I think good audience recordings from the Giza performances (which I haven't researched enough to be able to name) really give the best aural impression of the concert ambience. I saw a few people with D-5s taping.

I would love, eventually, to obtain good recordings of Hamza El Din's sets at Giza, and also of a concert he gave at Moraga Hall in Santa Cruz in 1979, I think it was (I've looked for that Moraga Hall performance recently, found no evidence of availability; someone ran classified ads in Santa Cruz in 1979 or 1980 offering cassette tapes of it for around 8 or 10 dollars, which I didn't go for, stupidly!). (I run a Mac computer, and don't have audio software yet to deal with FLAC music files, which Macs natively won't play, so haven't looked to download any of the whole Egypt performances available.)

I’ve been repeatedly hey now’d trying to post 2 sentences.

Awesome that you made it to Egypt.

xACT will convert F L A C files to A I F F.

VLC (traffic cone icon video player) will play F L A C.

FLAC and AIFF are banned words.

When not using them to inform somebody of something.

Sang Jerry on 7-10-89

Played that show in the car today

Wishing all a safe, happy , new, year. The events of December has likely changed my entire outlook on the rest of my life. Another story for another time.

Last 5:

Mahavishnu Orchestra-Visions of the Emerald Beyond
Gov’t Mule-The Tel-Star Sessions
The La’s-The La’s
Miles Davis-Bootleg Sessions Vol. 1 Live In Europe 1967 Discs 1 & 2.
Frank Zappa-Overnight Sensation 50th Anniversary Box-Disc 4 Detroit May 12, 1973

I guess the Sitegeist had had enough of long comments from me today, let's see whether this one goes through

DeadVikes, you did ask, How did you ALL feel about the shows?

I can't declare on that for the others I traveled with, only about my impressions of their responses. Everybody mainly had a real good time, so far as I sensed. We didn't do a lot of or maybe any performance critiquing! (Nor were any of us who weren't couples necessarily in the same spots or areas during the shows.)

What I most remember is how we enjoyed the scene and our experiences in it (discounting, in my case at least, some mild diarrheal trouble). Highlights included climbing the Great Pyramid to the top (eventually so, in my case - the first evening we were there, prior to the shows, some of the guys, especially, were hot to climb {up a side, to begin with, which everyone found isn't the better way to go about it], which I thought was a typically American response of conquering something before understanding it, so I didn't myself until a day or two afterward)

and one of those days encountering and saying hi to Jerry, MG, and some others on the way up as they were coming down; also ascending the (urine-stanky) Grand Gallery inside passage to the King's and Queen's Chambers;

If xACT is Exact Audio Copy, that software itself apparently won't work on a Mac.

I see that VLC will, I just haven't gotten around to this track of my digtal-music train journey

for today
Posts 3c and 4 of How Our Group Felt About The Egypt Shows (And Around Them) to follow, maybe tomorrow, then I'll shut up, g'night all

Thanks Mark, appreciate you taking the time to comment about your experiences there. I can't imagine what that would have been like. I will have to check out some of those recordings. I did listen to part of Disc 2 from Rocking the Cradle tonight in the car. Love that Shakedown! Jerry just kills it.

Phish - Hoist (vinyl)
Dylan - The Bootleg Series 4
King Crimson - Thrakattak
Galactic - Ruckus
Tedeschi Trucks Band - I Am The 🌙. All four of them because they are all awesome.
.
Current. Road Trips Vol 3 No 1 12.28.79. Happy Anniversary!

I use xACT on Mac.
I also use Toast, but that’s not f r e e

Thanks for the clarification re xACT.

And I'd forgotten about Toast (Titanium - do they still call it that?).

I've got to get to this before dying...among other and more serious tasks