Getting to Gothenburg

24 September, 1987

One of the highlights of the Gothenburg concert, 25 Sept, ‘87. It wasn’t on the set list, but Bob spontaneously asked keyboard player Benmont Tench to play “If Tomorrow Wasn’t Such a Long Time,” which they’d never played before, and have Mike Campbell play on it, too. Just the three of them. Everyone who was there that night remember how deeply this song, played spare and intimate – just enough to frame Bob’s tender voice – touched them. Thank you once again to Irene Hilda for sharing your excellent recordings!

It must be around midnight, and we are halfway across the Baltic Sea, sailing from Helsinki back to Stockholm. Our ship is the only light in an expanse of darkness, around, below, and above us. Every once in a while, the invisible clouds reveal a glimpse of the stars and a thin slice of the moon. It’s as if the stars don’t exist, then they do, then they don’t. Even the open deck of the ship, where I’m standing alone at the rail, feels somehow imaginary, wrapped in an eerie fog. It looks like the final scene in Casablanca: the little airstrip at night in the fog, when Bogart says to Rains, as they walk away into the mist, “Louis, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Wherever I was with Bob, it was always a country that ran on the laws of dreams, where everything is a symbol of something else, that if you saw it straight and clear, would stop you in your tracks, and make you feel you have no words with which you could address it. Or even describe it. That’s what dreams are for, they turn the overwhelming mysteries into a movie you can handle. And if you’re lucky, and suddenly remember that you’re dreaming, you have the freedom to change anything about it, stretch your arms out and fly across the burning river, or turn the flames into flowers in a field and run through them. Dreams teach us to create. A lot of Bob’s songs do the same. In fact, his whole life has been a creative act, from his very name to the whole cast of internal characters who speak through his songs, like actors in a magnificent, epic play. 84 years ago today, he started working on this masterpiece: himself.

I found that to travel with Bob Dylan is to be constantly reminded of the freedoms life offers, waiting to be used. It isn’t my job to guess what anything means to someone else. It’s my dream. Even those fleeting whispers of feeling that arise from things that cross one’s mind or physical path – the sorrow on the face of someone passing on a bus; the sudden memory of a brief affair in a place you’ll never be again; the way the waves on the beach remind you of someone’s snores; spring buds blooming on a grey and withered tree – all might be messages and invitations to recognize something inside your heart that you felt long ago, feel now, or are longing to feel one day. Brightly enameled pieces of the mosaic of the self-portrait that is your life on this planet, at this time.

Life, when seen as embodied messages from your soul, starts to resemble a ballad by Bob Dylan. That’s one of the things that makes him the greatest. One of the reasons he changed all our lives. He showed us what life is like when you take it personally, and drop the obligation to simplify it for anyone else. Life is your lover. You have a secret language between you. Your day-to-day is pillow talk. You can jump into the middle of the story, any time. You both know the beginning. And there is no end.

I think it’s one of the reasons we love him with a very personal kind of love, and even though there are millions of us sharing that feeling, it is unique to each one of us. Because he perpetually shows us that to truly engage in the adventure of one’s life is to recognize it’s actually a personal pilgrimage, and on a pilgrimage nothing that happens is accidental. Every blister or washed out bridge, every yak-herding nomad or wandering monk who sings a song you once heard in a dream, is a message, a teaching, an attempt to get you to recognize the world is a mirror. As William Blake said, “Sight is the most fallen sense,” because it is the only sense that can trick you into thinking the world is out there. All other senses are clearly happening in here, on my tongue, my skin, in my ears, my nose, inside me. Where dreams come from.

Bob – I am convinced, after spending this precious time with him – passionately wants his fellow humans to realize the creative power instilled in all of us, be like the bird who, raised in a cage with no roof, one day realizes it has always had the power to fly anywhere it wants. In his song, I Crossed the Rubicon (2020), he says it as clear as a mirror:

I feel the Holy Spirit inside and see the light that freedom gives
I believe it’s within the reach of every man who lives

To claim that freedom is – to quote one of his most piercing exhortations – to be busy being born. And to leave that freedom unclaimed is to do the opposite. That gets to me, shakes me up, always has, still does. And I’m only just beginning to get hold of that conviction that his whole life has been devoted to:

“I’m an artist. I have only one job, to express how I feel.”

I know – from the times when he’d say to me things like, “Everyone’s a creator, it doesn’t have to be a song. It could be a rose garden, or an apple pie, but we’re all creators,” – that he’d absolutely agree that you don’t have to identify as an artist to honor and express your feelings, by creating. Maybe the all-inclusive version could be: “I’m a human being. I may have other jobs, but to be true to my soul, it is also my job to find ways to express how I feel.”

But, we all know there are times no expression comes, times when you would give anything for a handful of words to fall out of your mouth, but nothing is there.

Like this same night on the ferry when Bob asked me a question I couldn’t answer, and the fact of being in the middle of a sea of darkness in all directions perfectly reflected how I felt.

As I stood alone at the railing, I saw a cluster of shadows at the far end of the deck, emerging from inside. They paused, heads together, leaning towards the one in the center, who I could faintly make out was wearing a dark hooded jacket. The hooded jacket nodded a signal to them, and they began following him as he started walking towards me through the mist, on a long diagonal across the deck.

With their slow, perfectly coordinated steps, they were a group of actors in an opera, and as they came nearer, I heard one of them giggle. I knew who was in the center. And now I could make out Tom Petty to his right, Victor Maymudes to his left, Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell behind him. What was this? I was transported back to Jr. High School attending my first sock-hop, and a group of boys were helping Tim McCarthy get up the courage to ask me to dance. I knew Bob lived in constant danger of being recognized and accosted, and needed protection when in public, but their twittering in a huddle hurt my feelings, as if this were all a game. As if, indeed, I were the game being stalked, like a deer in the woods.

When he was quite close, Bob turned, nodded to them to stop, and approached me by himself. I felt curious as to what this was all about, but also shy, a bit scared, and defensive. It wasn’t like we were strangers. But we were acting like we were.

“What’re ya doin’ out here?”

“Just thinking.”

“Thinkin’ about what?”

“I was just wondering.”

“What were you wondering?”

“…if you wanted to be alone.”

Until the day I die, and maybe into the next life as well, I will never stop regretting those words. They hung in the air, mingling with the fog like a bad smell, like the smell of burning wool, which can make your eyes water and your throat burn. He was indeed irritated when he answered,

“If I wanted to be alone, would I be standin’ here talkin’ to you?”

I was so embarrassed I couldn’t look at him. I could just make out the dim glow of the wake the ship was leaving behind in the dark water. I turned to look at him, hoping that our eyes, as windows of the soul, could save the moment and say what neither of us had words for.

There was openness in his eyes. I always found that to be true about him. The quality of the soul being the captain of the ship, as it were: always navigating by the brightest star, steering toward understanding. The fog was kind enough to absorb my words and dissolve them in the darkness.

His tone softened, and he asked, in that penetrating, honest tone with which he sings so many questions in his songs, “Who aaare you?”

How could I possibly answer that? I reached deep into myself for some pure defining crystal in my soul – externally I was quiet, but internally I was frantically searching in myself for an answer. I felt like I was reaching down into the well of my being, but when I pulled up my hand, there was nothing in it but air. Like I wasn’t even there. It felt like that moment when you think you are looking in a mirror, but there is no reflection. Maybe you’d died and hadn’t noticed. Then you realize you’re looking through a window.

Bob’s waiting for my answer dissolved into the merciful fog, along with my silence. I could feel him thinking to me, “You should be able to answer that. Not for me, but for yourself. That’s our main job in life, maybe our only job. What are you waiting for?”

“Okay…see ya later,” he said, and turned to go. I couldn’t tell if that meant later tonight, or that he’d given up hoping our connection would resurface. But an hour later – an hour that felt like a year – we were standing alone in the cozy, quiet darkness of the captain’s quarters, about to climb up onto the high wooden bed.

“No, I don’t want to be alone, to answer your wondering…But maybe we don’t have to get all tangled up tonight,” he said softly. I nodded, and felt a wave of peace.

Statements were steps on solid ground. But questions felt like quicksand, and more than once he had to pull me out. As long as we steered away from questions, we were in the clear, and it didn’t matter if we couldn’t name it…does the vast savannah, watching the night fade as the sunrise pours golden light across the land, need to name itself, or what it’s feeling? We were simply accepting a connection we couldn’t define, because it was in some other kind of time. Seeds, which have been known to have lain in a jar in a tomb for 5,000 years, can still possess the power to sprout anew. Like that seed, there was some tender leaf sprouting from an old, old story, but there was nothing that could speed up the process so we could see what kind of seed it was, except to give it light and water and leave it alone. Sleeping together also felt like the best way to help it grow, for plants, just like people, do most of their growing at night.

Listening to his voice as we fell asleep felt like I was following him to a secret place to see something he had found…like a boy who has discovered that on moonlit nights the spider webs draped between the hollyhocks catch the light and glow like a magic veil between worlds. “Don’t touch it,” the boy might whisper, “or it will disappear…like a pebble erasing the reflection in a lake.”

In fact, it wasn’t just that night, but whenever we were quiet, I could feel that hovering somewhere behind him. It seemed to me he was never far from nature's dream catcher, silken threads that caught images out of the ethers, showing up as tiny drops of dew when they touched the thread, like musical notes on staff paper.

I fell asleep wrapped in the warm cloud of our mixed breath, and the feeling of gratitude for whatever mysterious force was carrying us along, like an omniscient author who had brought us together for a reason that would be revealed in a coming chapter: “Trust me…you’ll understand when you get there.” The same message I always got from the pale blue light.

The wake-up call came around 7:30 the next morning. My heart was sorry to see my dream disappear, like a poem full of clues to this story, blown overboard into the sea before I had a chance to read it. But better than any dream, was the reality: a soft and sleepy-headed Bob Dylan by my side, wishing he could sleep a little longer.

I massaged his back a little, promising to give him a bodywork session when we got to Gothenburg, but unfortunately, we had to get going: we had a 5 hour drive ahead of us to get there, where 10,000 fans would be waiting for him in the evening at the Scandinavium arena.

After coffee and a pastry, we boarded his big black bus and headed from Sweden’s eastern to her western coast. Bob sat next to me for much of the way, and at one point said,

“Tonight, I want you to come out with me and I’ll introduce you as Shirley MacLaine… they’ll love it!”

I think I blushed as I said, “Nobody will believe it,” and he laughed and insisted, “No, you’re wrong! I’m sure everyone will believe it…come on… it’ll be fun.”

“The crazy thing is when I was five, my grandmother, who painted beautiful portraits of Hollywood stars, told me, ‘You look just like Shirley MacLaine, and one day that will open doors for you.’ Of course, I didn’t know who that was, but I was intrigued.”

“Well maybe this is the moment she was talkin’ about, Christiania,” (he was still calling me by the name he’d given me in Copenhagen). I had showed him my fearless, brazen, Calamity Jane side in Rotterdam, (strangely enough, my grandmother’s father had been lovers with Calamity Jane in the 1870s in Deadwood, South Dakota, so I grew up feeling somehow related to her.) Bob was baffled by why I had turned shy, and I was just as baffled, to be honest. How many different selves we are, the greatest mystery of being human! Like Bob says, “I contain multitudes!”

He stopped trying to get me to agree, but said, “Well, see how you feel when we open the show…”

The hours on the road sped by, and around 2 p.m. we pulled in to Gothenburg – Sweden’s historic shipping center on her western coast, exactly mid-way between Copenhagen and Oslo – with enough time to relax, do some bodywork, maybe nap and eat something before showtime.

I went for a short walk alone, to see a bit of the town, and when I got back, sweaty from walking up the hills, I changed into a black and white striped cotton jumpsuit, and we started a movement session. I was leaning over him on the bed, gently rotating his thigh bones in his hip sockets, when he looked up and said,

“That’s very cool what you’re wearing…you look beautiful in it…what do you call that?”

“Aw…thanks. It’s a jumpsuit. Really comfortable. I just got it in Amsterdam.”

“I’d like something just like that. But I suppose they don’t come in my size.”

“Yeah, I think it was just made for women. I wish I could give you this one.”

“But then I wouldn’t get to look at you wearing it…”

It was something I would be reminded of every time I heard “Born in Time,” which he recorded in ‘89 in New Orleans for his album, “Oh Mercy,” but held it back to record it with a different sound, which got released on “Under the Red Sky.” It opens with:

In the lonely night
In the blinking stardust of a pale blue light
You're comin' through to me in black and white
When we were made of dreams

I sent Bob this photo as a post card of me performing to “Every Grain of Sand,” a few days after leaving the tour. Another image of me in black and white. The next time I saw him, he said he loved it. Photo: Leoni Ravestein

I feel a bit shaky writing, for the first time, that I hear him singing to me in “Born in Time.” But, promising myself that I would speak from my heart as I share this experience, I would be breaking that promise if I kept it hidden. Because of this writing, a wonderful connection has just occurred to me, putting to rest the struggle I have had for over thirty years, being convinced in my heart of something I don’t have concrete proof of, thus putting myself in the vulnerable position of being called delusional.

What I see now is that the profound spiritual courage driving Bob’s songs – and its invitation to us to apply it, to claim more boldly the right as individuals to say what things mean to us, the connections we see and feel, the symbolism of the dream we find ourselves in – is fundamentally saying, “Express what you feel to be true, even if you can’t prove it. You don’t have to live your life as if you’re in front of a judge and jury, who are ready to tear your story to pieces and condemn it as a bag of lies because you lack sufficient evidence. Life is not a courtroom. It’s a story, it’s a poem, it’s a song. And you’re writing it.”

I see in “Born in Time” the feelings and the challenges we faced, as this was not the life in which our connection could be more intimately explored. It was already an old story, from several lives ago. But maybe, as the master poet of time knows so well, there is no separate territory in the heart marked “long ago,” and the soul does not travel on a railroad line moving perpetually forward toward a place one never reaches, called The Future. What he has said on so many occasions, and his songs so often illustrate, is: “You have to stop time.”

Which is to say, let the soul lead us out of the courtroom of linear causality, a constructed view of life that applies to objects, but not to hearts, minds and souls. The nature of time in truth is simultaneous. And the soul, when we manage to feel what it is telling us, remembers all our lives and all our loves, just like a library holds it all in the arms of its shelves – or selves! – all at the same time.

The greatest joy of being with Bob Dylan was to be with a master who knew beyond any doubt that our souls are always ready to tell us their stories whenever we truly listen, and the way to hear the soul is through honoring our feelings, expanding them so we can see the details, the beauty of them. Because what we have been conditioned to do, for centuries, is to minimize them, brush them off, and get back to work on the important things, like working in a job that makes someone else rich, and turns us into automatons.

So Happy Birthday, and thank you, Bob, for all your heartfelt inspiration and encouragement to spread our wings and believe that we can fly. For when we dare to lift off, we will all discover that the sky it is our nature to inhabit, is a place where the past, the present, and the future are all one.