Gothenburg Sunday Morning

The Roman Empire at the docks

The morning after the concert, we were drinking our coffee, when Bob asked for the morning paper. Someone finally got hold of one and brought it to the room. He was anxious to read the review. I confess I didn’t believe that an artist like Bob, who soars with eagles, would even try to focus his far-seeing eyes on something as small as a review as if it were lying in the grass so far below him. But I was wrong. He cared. He wanted to read it.

We both knew the journalist was bound to be angry that he hadn’t gotten an interview, hadn’t gotten a backstage pass, a front row seat, or any other special treatment. I thought of trying to talk Bob out of reading it. But of course I didn’t. I couldn’t interfere with his impulses, as if I knew what was good for him better than he did himself.

Still barefoot, Bob sat at the round table in the corner of the room where windows facing south and east let the morning sun cast a golden aura around him. I wish I’d taken a photo of that moment, like a thousand other moments that now exist only in the gallery of my heart. But that’s not what I was there to do, and the minute I was tempted to step in the direction of any kind of recognizable role, or take from him anything at all, I would fall off the tight wire of the Pure Unknown that I was doing my level best to cross, keeping my eye always on the blue light up ahead.

I watched his face as he read it to himself. Though the Göteborgs-Posten was the local newspaper, they printed reviews of top English-speaking acts in English. I was hoping to see the water rolling off the duck’s back, a bemused smile, or an outright laugh, but Bob wasn’t ridiculing it as meaningless, or spitting it out like poisoned food; he was taking it in, tasting the bitterness, chewing it, digesting it.

It always surprised me, the way he let things in that I would have thought he’d just ignore as a waste of his precious time. But the more time I spent with him, the more I saw he never took a step back from life, but like the devoted reader and listener that he is, never skims the page or skips ahead, but stays engaged, his curiosity always turned up high, his willingness to feel always unconditional, the best listener a singer could ever have, the best reader who catches all the nuances and references and symbols as the story unfolds. Nothing is lost on him, and he shrinks from nothing. As withdrawn and quiet as he often seems, in truth he’s more fully open and alive than anyone I’ve ever met.

Curiosity and unconditionality – Bob’s right and left leg carrying him through life – are, I remember a spiritual teacher saying, the two main qualities of the soul. And what are they, really, but aspects of openness, letting life in, giving all you’ve got, and being willing to feel it all?

As he read on, his brow wrinkled, he looked confused, then hurt, like being accused with no means to defend himself, until, shaking the newspaper spread open between his hands, he stood up, still reading, paced a bit and asked me, “Why would anyone come see me after reading stuff like this?!”

He dropped the paper on the table and stood looking out the windows. I imagined him seeing all his fans before him, and asking them, “Is this how you see me?” Of course, he knew it wasn’t true, but I was surprised to see the disgruntled review mattered to him at all. It was a lesson for me, reminding me that he was still every bit as human and vulnerable as the rest of us. Most of the time he let that stuff go, but not always.

Victor showed up and proposed a walk through Haga, the old hippie district nearby, with the idea to continue down to the piers that the city was famous for. It was a place full of sailboats, which interested Bob, as he was the co-owner, since 1979, of a beautiful 63-foot schooner in the Caribbean, that he loved sailing on. It was named Water Pearl, and had been built on the island of St. Vincent by his ship-builder partner, Chris Bowman, who was on this tour with us, and had been on the last one, as well. Chris, his wife Vanessa and their 6 year-old daughter Clara, had a bus to themselves for the tour. He and Bob had become good friends on and off the boat.

Water Pearl being built in Bequia, Saint Vincent. 1979 Painting: Peter Carr From Chris Bowman’s book, Me, the Boat, and a Guy Named Bob.

Water Pearl on her maiden voyage, December, 1979. Photo from Chris Bowman

Bob on Water Pearl, shortly after its launch in 1979 Photo: Vanessa Bowman

Bob and Victor had been in Göthenburg at least twice before, for concerts at Scandinavium in 1978 and 1984, and Victor seemed confident about the lay of the land. (It would be 8 years before cell phones came into usage, and the first ones to have GPS would not be invented for another 12. )

It was just what Bob needed, to get out of this hotel suite, into the natural elements, and let the sun, the wind, the calls of migrating birds overhead and the hum and buzz of life on the old cobblestone streets dissolve his agitation from being trashed.

The autumn air was bright and crisp, with an unmistakable atmosphere of joy you could see in the faces and hear in the voices of the people passing by, especially the children. It felt like party everyone had been invited to. Lots of people were chatting at sidewalk cafes, or passing on bikes with baskets filled with flowers and fall harvest fruit and vegetables from the market. The sun was out but wasn’t hot, and the cloudless sky above us as blue as our bard’s blue eyes.

As we, with Victor, Jim, and someone else I may have forgotten…strolled past a book store with a flower stand beside it, Bob paused to look at the flowers. I didn’t know until then how intensely sensitive he was to the harmonies of colors, just like music, and he often seemed to be taking pictures with the camera of his eyes.

As we lingered, a young woman with wavy dark blonde hair leaned her head out of her window directly above us – a lovely hand-crafted wooden house like most others in the area, built in the 1800s, a two-story set of flats with window boxes filled with geraniums. She saw Bob and said something I didn’t understand, but Victor went up the stairs to meet her, and soon came back down. “She was there last night,” he said, “…and loved it… There’s nobody else up there. She wants to offer you tea. I said not to tell anyone and to keep it short.” Bob looked up and she smiled down, relaxed, composed, and, curiously, with no sign of being star-struck.

Bob went up as I waited below with Jim and Victor, who said something like, “He has always liked to do this, pop in on people, out of the blue…” I wondered if it would be a romantic interlude. When he came down about 15 minutes later, it was clear he’d enjoyed stepping into someone else’s world, an unplanned encounter with a total stranger, but it didn’t seem like it had gone beyond tea. It was just another example of Bob seeing life as a God’s library of infinite stories, and instead of clinging always to just your own story line, as it were, you can step into someone else’s, like reading a page of their book. It made me think of Buster Keaton’s ingenious 1924 movie, “Sherlock, Jr.,” in which he steps out of one film and into another.

It was one of many sides of Bob that fascinated me, always saying to life, “Surprise me!”

Sunday morning in Haga, known as the hippie neighborhood of Gothenburg in the 60s and 70s. Bob was always interested in whatever was or had been the hippie part of town.

When he came back down, we headed off toward the river, the Göta Älv, which widens to become the port as it joins the sea.

Sailing boats on the Göta Älv River, Göthenburg

We kept walking toward the sea, where the deeper water could support the massive freighters lined up to receive the containers of freight being hoisted by huge cranes. Those cranes always made me a little sad. Having grown up when the docks of San Francisco were still manned by stevedores, many of whom were my father’s friends, I always remembered how hard it had been for those men to lose their jobs to machines. I had also loved playing in the giant warehouses filled with smells that could knock your socks off, escaping from the mountains of burlap bags of cacao beans from Africa, spices from Indonesia, untanned animal skins heading for the tannery, enormous coils of sweet-smelling rope, crates of whiskey from Scotland and boxes of pillows from Japan that were taller than I was, but so light, I was allowed to offload them from my father’s trucks.

Loading a freighter at the Göthenburg docks. (photo: unknown). As we walked past, Bob said, “It’s still the Roman Empire… and it’s still comin’ down.”

As I stood beside him on the embankment looking down to the docks, it felt like we had stepped into another gravity field. It was a feeling that had been building up as we walked along a row of old warehouses being hit by bright sunlight, looking abandoned, like a cemetery, or something lost in the past. It was the kind of place I knew well and recognized the way it hovered just out of reality, reluctant to disappear, like a projection not quite solid anymore.

Now, as we watched the massive ship being loaded with containers lined up like cows to be slaughtered, everything mechanized, and hardly a stevedore in sight, Bob said, with a sigh, as if resigning himself to the fact that the bigger the power, the harder it is to change it:

“It’s still the Roman Empire, and it’s still comin’ down.”

We all nodded, silently, suddenly seeing through his eyes, what was so obvious but we had never seen it.

It reminded me that he is always sensing the world in layers: the present, the near past, the ancient past, many chapters of each, stacked up but transparent, and he feeling the morality at work or its absence, in every layer. Colonialism and capitalism, the heartless twin tools of empire: taking raw materials from other countries either forcibly or paying a pittance for them, shipping them home to your country to feed your industries and reap the profits. But there is no moral code inducing Empire to pay a fair price to the people who labor all day under the hot sun to produce it, the growers, the harvesters, the miners, the owners of the distant land itself, all paid so little they remain chained to poverty. We were watching the well-oiled machinery of exploitation: an economic system that works perfectly for the Empire, that only a moral awakening could ever change.

It was one of those moments that revealed Bob’s way of always seeing through time, but what seemed to always accompany his expanded time consciousness was his heart consciousness bringing it into focus, showing what really mattered. As we stood watching the ships being loaded, he saw the unbroken chain of millennia of unnecessary human suffering to enrich an empire, and I only saw my father’s friends who had lost their jobs when I was a child.

It was time to walk back over the river and up the hill to the hotel. A five-hour drive lay ahead of us, for a concert in Stockholm, Bob’s last stop in Scandinavia.