Happy Anniversary: The Grateful Dead’s Rocking the Cradle concerts

37 years ago today, The Grateful Dead performed the first of a trio of concerts at the Gizah Sound and Light Theater - just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Cairo, Egypt - that proved to be their only shows in that country during the course of the band's existence. If you're a proper Deadhead, then you've probably heard material from the second and third night, as it can be found on their live album Rocking the Cradle: Egypt 1978, which actually took 30 years to finally see official release.

Why did it take so long for the concert album to see the light of day? Well, the phrase “technical difficulties” may be a bit of a clichéd excuse, but in this case, that's exactly what the problem was: due to the way things went down with the equipment, the recordings of the entire first night and part of the second night were deemed unusable.

So what about the rest of the second night and the whole of the third night? The only real answer that seems to float around is that the band were more focused on finishing the Shakedown Street album at the time, resulting in any plans to salvage the live album being shelved for the time being…and, of course, by “the time being,” we mean “three decades.”

Still, to give the Dead credit, they did at least seem to be interested in making up for the amount of time it took them to get the recordings into stores: when Rocking the Cradle: Egypt 1978 was finally released, it wasn't just a 2-CD set, it also included a DVD which featured not only concert footage but also 8mm film of the band and crew visiting various Egyptian tourist attractions.

No, it doesn't make for a 30-year delay. But it's still pretty cool.