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thewestern · 1 year ago

Text

Chapter 12.5

Now when he was a young man,

He never thought he'd see

People stand in line to see the boy king.

It’s true that as pharaohs go, Tutankhamon wasn’t really all that memorable. Not in terms of his achievements. Nor was he infamous for some or other empirical blunder. He was just a kid. Nine years old when he ascended the throne. Dead at nineteen. Perhaps then the Boy King captured the childlike imagination inside of us all.

Or rather it was his toys. Because the real reason you and I know Tutankhamon was his tomb, and more specifically, all the wonderful things contained within it. Lucky for us, the entrance to his tomb had been obstructed by rubble and debris — likely the handiwork of some fly-by-night ancient Egyptian contractors in the course of their renovation of a neighboring tomb unit in the Valley of Kings (KV). As a result of his being hermetically sealed away as such, like in a storage unit, all of his royal stuff was preserved in near-mint condition. Likewise, the many looters who had plundered nearly every other crypt of note couldn’t get their grubby grave-robbing mitts on it. So that when KV62 was finally discovered, largely intact, in the early Nineteen Twenties, the public could be spellbound by the opulence of these his burial goods. Among the artifacts, a great many of them gilded, there was an iron dagger, rare for the Bronze Age, revealed by X-ray fluorescence to likely have been fashioned from a meteorite. Hell yeah. As well as there were luxury chariots, designer sandals, linens of ancient Egyptian cotton and of course his iconic funerary mask, forged of solid gold, baby. Those and hundreds of other treasures were buried there for what was supposed to be all-time with his diminutive teenage mummy. For he was a sickly boy king. And like Russian nesting dolls, laid alongside his there were a pair of sarcophagi which were tinier still, whose occupants were later proven by DNA analysis to be his daughters, probably stillborns.

(King Tut) How'd you get so funky?

(Funky Tut) Did you do the monkey?

The media frenzy resulting from the find was unprecedented in the history of Egyptology. Newspapermen from all over the world reported breathlessly as contents were extracted from the tomb and catalogued somewhat haphazardly by the attending archeologists. Their readers simply had to know … What would they dig up next?

They had hit paydirt. Tutankhamon had arisen from his tomb, a popular cultural phenomenon reincarnate. Before there was Beatlemania, there was Tutmania. That was seriously the suffix by which they called his ascent to fame. Three thousand years posthumously, King Tut — as he was so affectionately nicknamed — had achieved -mania Mode. (Other previous and subsequent -manias include: Tulip Mania, a period during the Dutch Golden Age when the speculative price of tulip bulbs reached exceptionally high levels before collapsing dramatically, and Beanie Mania, a period during the American Golden Age wherein the same thing happened with plush toys stuffed with plastic pellets. Also Billy’s favorite -mania, Wrestle, which remains ongoing.)

They composed big band songs about him on Tin Pan Alley. Cast him a leading man of the silent film era. Women flocked to department stores to purchase household goods, some modeled faithfully after the primeval appliances, others crudely appropriated of their exotic-sounding names and likenesses.

You can bet your sweet ass that Big Museum cashed in too. Exhibited over the decades from Tokyo to Toledo, Ohio, London to New Orleans, Louisiana, Paris to St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida), King Tut’s treasures became arguably the most well-traveled relics in history.

Born in Arizona,

Moved to Babylonia (King Tut).

In the Fall of Seventy-eight, KT — or more specifically a life-size replica of his mummy — was subletting an unfurnished wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the last scheduled stop on his three-year North American Tour. By that time his shit was hot, having already been cargo-shipped around the world and back again. Circumnavigations that included a visit to the former Soviet Union, which at the time harboured considerably friendlier relations with the Egyptian government than its Cold War combatants. As you may imagine, this constituted a great embarrassment to these United States. So much so, that following Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s deft diplomatic interventions during the Yom Kippur War, President Nixon immediately cashed in the resultant political capital, boarded Air Force One to Alexandria and personally appealed to his counterpart Anwar Sadat to please, let his people look upon these magnificent things. Sadat relented, and years later, while Tut was lying in state at the Met, Sadat was himself stateside at Camp David, signing the as-titled Accords with Israeli PM Menachem Begin.

On that very same day that President Jimmy was brokering Middle East Peace (okay … two things that Hayseed got right, Hank would have begrudglingly allowed), meanwhilst untold thousands of tourists were descending upon the Upper West Side like locusts with fanny packs, there was An American Band — nay, The American Band — kicking off a three-night run at the New Sound & Light Theater just outside Cairo, which from Tutankhamon’s down valley resting place was about the same length-drive from New York to D.C., albeit along the banks of the Nile, a Hell of a long way from the Hudson or the Potomac. The Grateful Dead gigging Giza and the Great Pyramid was mostly Phil’s project. Go figure. Like they had recently been to Stonehenge or something and he was on this kick about them playing Places of Power. The pyramids are like the obvious number one choice, he said, because no matter what anyone thinks they might be, there is definitely some kind of mojo about the pyramids. Fucking-a. But on the other hand, show me a place of power and I’ll show you one of suffering, someone might could have informed him. Live From Chornobyl. Europe 72 AD (recorded at the newly constructed Colosseum). At Folsom Prison.

(Plattsburgh Air Force Base? Big Cypress?)

Whatever. Hank wasn’t there if you were wondering. They’re weren’t hardly any capital-f Fans in the audience. Mostly members of The extedned Family. You know, usual suspects: Mountain Girl, Kesey, Ram Rod, Bill Graham, Bear, Portland Trailblazers’ center Bill Walton, Big Steve. As for local party crashers, the nearly blindingly nearsighted Lesh claimed to have caught out of the corner of his soda bottle-bespectacled eye some shadowy figures gathered on the crowd’s outskirts, swaying rhythmically in dark flowing robes. Somehow it was later backchanneled to him that these were Bedouin, the nomadic horsemen of the desert, and that they’d been drawn in by the lights and the music, falling on and echoing off the eroded profile of the mighty Sphinx.

Hank did attend one of the shows they put on back home to help offset the cost of hauling all their crew and equipment, all the way to fucking Egypt. (Whereas aformentionedly he heard the debut rendition of Shakedown Street, the title track of the forthcoming studio album.) This had not been a treasure-hunting or even profit-seeking Arabian adventure. What meager proceed there was had been donated to the Antiquities Society. (It belongs in a museum!)

Hank had however seen the Tutankhamun traveling road show when it stopped through his town. Fucking everybody went. Even the Grateful Dead! The band members had been, in a way, so resurrected by their experience in Egypt, that they couldn’t hardly wait to visit the blockbuster exhibit for themselves. Conveniently its final destination was right down the street, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park. (The U.S. tour had originally been announced without any San Francisco dates. Area Tutheads bombarded the Mayor’s office demanding that he wield the fullest extent of his executive power to Bring Tut To The Bay. de Young Museum trustees flew to Cairo shortly thereafter to negotiate the terms of his visit.) Let the good times roll!

By all accounts, Jerry had especially high expectations for Egypt. They were going to harness the power of that ancient place and levitate the pyramids, he was purported to have said. Of course, Abbie Hoffman and the yippies had attempted that same metaphysical feat on the Pentagon in the decade prior, granted the geometric parameters were incongruent. They were ten years on from the Summer of Love. Garcia had since forsaken the world-expanding properties of LSD in favor of heroin, which as we know constricts time and space down to a much more manageable plane. Although now the walls of his tomb were closing in on him. Maybe that’s what he felt that day at the museum. That the existential jet lag had set in, and the big trip was really over for good this time. All that was left was the sand in his pockets and all these souvenirs.

Alas, the show must go on. Record company’s on line one. We got a studio album to cut. One of the lest-remembered tracks on Shakedown St. is its finale: If I Had The World To Give. As a fairly straight-ahead love song, it’s sort of an outlier in the Dead oeuvre, even for a Garcia-Hunter ballad. Okay, obviously, there’s TLEO, but isn’t that about love as a concept, conceptually, rather than the act of loving somebody? THEY love EACH OTHER. And it’s a warning. Their love is like a freight train, and boy they better take care it don’t run ‘em clean over. Easy for you to say, watching from the station.

A true love song — it could be said — is about love in the first person. I love YOU. From my POV, where I stand astraddle these tracks, I can hear the whistle blowing, see the locomotive coming round the bend, smell the steam now as I feel the cattle guard sweep me off my fancy feet, launching me sky fucking high, to kingdom come. And, baby, I don’t care if I ever come down. Because even if I brought you back heaven and the moon and the shining stars above, you still wouldn’t love me back, would you? Don’t lie to me, baby. That’s alright. That’s just fine with me. Because I got something bigger and better. Don’t believe me? Wait till you hear this … (It could also be said that the best love songs are about romantic feeling unrequited. If he or she already loves you back, then really, what the hell are you strumming an acoustic guitar for, like an asshole? Wasting time which could be better spent screwing. That’s what.) This song that I sing to YOU, with these assembled here today as my witnesses: the acid heads and the speed freaks, the Jerry Side and the Phil Zone, the spinners and the tapers and the nomadic horsepeople. It is a divine force all too powerful and too pure for YOU and ME to keep locked away in this tomb of love. THEY have to know what WE have. It is something they can never understand but they can hear it so that they may feel an infinitesimal fraction of it for themselves. THAT is what all THIS is for.

They only played it three times, all in that same Fall of Seventy-eight, the last of which rendition was performed in Cleveland, of all fucking places, arguably the third best city in Ohio (possibly fourth best, depending on your tolerance for the delicacy which is Skyline Chili), and undoubtedly a long fucking way from Cairo. (Famously, Cleveland is home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The city lobbied for the right to host the Hall by citing that local disk jockey Alan Freed had coined the term, Rock And Roll. Additionally it pledged sixty-five million dollars in public money to fund the construction. The building was designed by hall of fame-architect I.M. Pei, who drew up the blueprints for many-a-museum, including the Louvre, which like its Clevelandish cousin, also prominently features a glass pyramid for its plaza facade.) November the Twentieth. By then they were a poorly fucking lot. Bobby was purportedly backstage puking his guts out for the better part of Set Two. Phil, for his part, was by his own accounting a fully-blown drunk in Seventy-eight. Kreutzmann had a cast on his hand, which he busted getting bucked off a goddamn camel. Speaking of the Grateful Dead and their Great Pyramid scheme, the Rocking the Cradle live album they had planned to release as a means to pay for this boondoggle in full had to be scrapped. So here they were, a half a million in the Red Sea, all on account of some crew member had gotten into a row with the piano tuner, who then tendered his resignation in protest. So Keith was off-key in addition to being offbeat. The latter owing to his accelerating abuse of cocaine, which does a number on one’s sense of time. Hard on a marriage too. So, of course, he and Donna were on the rocks. What else is new?

On top of all that bullshit, before the curtain fell, the band’d just been informed of an unspeakable tragedy that had occurred only two days previous. Leo Ryan, a U.S. congressman representing California’s fightin’ eleventh, where indeed all the band members resided (and some of them paid taxes), was gunned down on an airstrip in Guyana. Murdered by an outfit by the name of the Red Brigade on the order of its commanding officer Jim Jones, another erstwhile San Franciscan and embattled leader of the Peoples’ Temple, which had fled to South America to escape persecution for their fringe religious beliefs and raised this settlement that they called Jonestown. (Congressman Ryan had launched this fact-finding mission at the urging of the loved ones of the alleged cult members, many of whom were his constituents. Upon completing his investigation, he was prepared to report back that living conditions were indeed adequate and that, by his judgement, no one was being coerced to remain there against their wills.) Anticipating swift reprisal for this slaying of a sitting U.S. congressman, the Reverend called upon his flock. Rather than be themselves slaughtered by the capitalist pig forces which had been conspiring against them (among whom Jones cited the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. Postal Service and others), he beseechethed thee to commit an act of Revolutionary Suicide. In single file they lined up — men, women and children … alphabetically by height — to be served red plastic cups of grape Flavor-Aid, ladled from a large metal vat. In place of LSD, this fruity concoction had been laced with a cocktail of chemical agents that which notably included the compound commonly known as Cyanide. Small children died within five minutes. Less for babies. (Mothers were instructed to administer their own infants’ doses via syringe.) Adults took an agonizing twenty-to-thirty minutes to succumb. Just over nine hundred people died that day. All but one — Jones was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the left temple, his head cushioned by a pillow — died of the poisoning. The events at Jonestown constituted the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until the incidents of September the Eleventh.

Maybe Jerry was thinking about that. Or, albeit less likely, he could have still been hung up on Ole King Tut, laid to rest beside his wife and half-sister Ankhesenamun, their two deadborn daughters — cherubs, elaborately embalmed — and all their fabulous worldly possessions, when he sang, presumably for the last time, these words:

Well maybe I've got no star to spare, or anything fine or even rare,

Only if you let me be your world, could I ever give this world to you.

Could I ever give this world to you.

#novls of tumblr #tutankhamun #tutankhamon #tutankhamen #tutankhaten #king tut

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