Resending Chapter 1

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TRAVELING WITH BOB DYLAN AND OTHER UNSOLVED MYSTERIES

The Journey Begins

Chapter 1: With Dylan in Rotterdam, 19 September, 1987

CHRISTINA SVANE

2 JAN 2024

Nina Simone meets Bob Dylan for the first time. Brussels, 11 June, 89 Photo: Christina Svane. I love the way he´s pointing at me as I take the picture. Sorry it´s so fuzzy. I couldn´t focus my ancient Nikon fast enough!

Welcome to the first episode of my new Substack.  Thank you for being here.  I want to tell you what this one will be about.  It will be a collection of stories in which there are moments where time stops It´s an exciting feeling.  I know you´ve felt it.  It happens in a tiny moment, easy to miss if you aren´t paying attention, but if you feel it, you know you´re about to be changed forever.  There are forces at work that can´t be seen, working in mysterious ways, pulling you here or there, whispering in your ear.

All the experiences I have chosen to write about, especially my travels with Bob Dylan, remain unsolved mysteries.  How and why did they happen the way they did?  They´ve convinced me that life really is, as the Bard wrote, a stage.  And if it´s a stage, you know there´s always a lot going on in the wings, or up on the catwalks, and in the trap room under the stage to make people magically appear and disappear.  

There is no doubt left in my mind that other spaces and times exist, other dimensions and other lives, and forces at work in dimensions that Newtonian physics don´t apply to.  Just like looking through a microscope or a telescope, we know other areas of life only come into view when we have the right lens to look through.  The experiences I want to share with you are the ones that forced me to find or make those lenses, which, just like the glass ones, need to be ground and polished in order to open, in the words of Aldous Huxley, "the doors of perception."   Writing about them and sharing them with you are essential parts of that process.  

Though I call these events unsolved mysteries, I am no longer trying to "solve" them. They have proven to me that where I might once have seen the hand of chance working the levers behind the scenes,  there is a force at work the very opposite of chance that makes us say things we didn´t intend to say, know things we had no way of knowing, and be in the "right place at the right time" in order to set a series of events in motion, which, at the time, appeared as nothing more than dumb luck.  Nothing could be farther from the truth, though truth also changes with the lens we see it through!  

What I have now is a rudimentary understanding of the situation: The stage we perceive as life has a painted backdrop which we call Time, but every so often it gets a tear ripped in it, through which we can catch a blurry glimpse of what´s really going on "behind the scenes".  As Bob Dylan so masterfully sang it, "You know something´s happening, but you don´t know what it is..."

Which pretty much describes the feeling I had when he asked me to go on the road with him.  It felt like a lot of giant gears were turning and what was about to unfold had either already happened long ago, or we were simply outside of time altogether.  During Dylan´s shows, there were moments when I believe all 20,000 of us felt that we had stepped out of the train running on steel tracks of linear time and been liberated from it like birds from gravity.

I believe that we all have experiences in which we let go of the tracks of linear time, but sadly, we rarely talk about them.  Sometimes the experience isn´t about time, but about space, and who is present in that space; someone who appears "out of nowhere", perhaps even speaks or touches us, and then is gone like steam.

Since I didn´t hear anybody talking about such things as I grew up, I didn´t talk about them either.  Without a vocabulary for something, a child would have to invent one for herself.  Not an easy task.  As adults, even though we may find the words, the difficulty of finding the appropriate moment to share them can give you the feeling society maintains an invisible wall to keep out such topics as if they were wild and dangerous beasts.  It is, at least, some comfort to know we are no longer in an age when sharing such experiences could get you branded as a lunatic or burned at the stake as a heretic.

Our glimpses are treasures we carry with us, that shine like starlight in our memories.  For me, they are often spell-like moments when thoughts, words, even my identity all disappear, and nothing is left but the sense of being present.

I want to write about these moments because whatever the story is, they are part of it like silence is part of music, the bare canvas part of the painting, stillness part of the dance.  As a teenager devoted to dance precisely because it was a portal into such experiences, I came upon these words from T.S. Eliot and felt the thrill of seeing words put to something I had never been able to express, except by dancing.  When I got to college and was blessed to have the dancer Steve Paxton for a teacher, I found out from him that his generation of dancers had embraced them years earlier as the flag they sailed under.  I had found my tribe.

from Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot  (1935):

..."At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."...

How I Wound Up on the Road with Bob Dylan

In 1987 I was living in Amsterdam with my boyfriend, the guitarist Billy O´Haire.  I had been offered a job teaching at the School for New Dance Development, and we had moved there from San Francisco, my hometown, feeling our fates had been miraculously altered, as we´d been so broke I´d sometimes had to sell our clothes on the street to make ends meet.  One evening my friend Babeth Mondindi Vanloo – the Dutch film-maker ­– offered to drive us to Rotterdam to see Bob Dylan in concert.  I jumped at the chance. Not only was I a life-long fan (my mother took me and my brother and my best friend Justine to see Dylan in Berkeley when I was 11), but I had a big question I wanted to ask him: Would he help me produce a film about Michael Bloomfield?  Michael had been the astounding guitarist who´d created Dylan´s electric sound on the album, Highway 61 Revisited and at the Newport Folk Festival in the summer of 1965, thereby altering the course of music history.  When he died in 1981, he and I had been trying to surmount the difficulties in our 10-year on-and-off relationship, the two biggest problems being a continent between us as I´d moved to NYC to dance, and his torturous insomnia, which he was always trying to overcome with various drugs.  

I knew that in the six years since Michael had died, people had begun to forget about him, and the inspiration he had been to a whole generation of guitar players.  I didn´t want him to be forgotten.  I had met Dylan before and knew he loved and admired Michael, and it didn´t seem like such a crazy idea to ask.  Billy, however, thought I was insane for thinking I could get backstage, and, not wanting to be stuck in a sea of 20,000 fans, turned down the offer to come with Babeth and me.  I had called a friend, the writer Larry Sloman, (he was friends with Dylan and had written On the Road with Bob Dylan: Rolling with the Thunder), who Michael and I had hung out with often in New York when Michael would come to visit me.  I asked his advice about how to get backstage, and he said, "Just ask for Victor Maymudes, Bob´s road manager," and it worked.  In a minute, Babeth, looking outrageous in the black, beaded bustier she´d bought as her costume for the occasion, was on the couch in Dylan´s dressing room, lighting up a joint.  Dylan and I spoke about Michael, and he remembered me from the night in San Francisco at the Fox Warfield Theater when he´d asked Michael to come sit in.  But the topic quickly changed when he said he felt ill.  

"I don´t feel good," he said, his voice sounding weak. "I really don´t feel like going out there and playing tonight. Probably some bad road food. That happens."

"If you lie on the floor, maybe I can help," I said. It was carpeted, looked clean.  "I´m a dancer, and we do this to center our energy.  It´ll make you feel better."

"You´re not going to hurt me, are you?" he said.  He did look pretty miserable, but his smile was sweet, like a little kid whose mom said he could stay home from school.  "You promise?"

"No. I promise I won´t hurt you.  Trust me, it´ll feel good."  He didn´t have his stage clothes on yet, and he didn´t mind lying on the carpet. 

"Okay, just relax on your back. Good. Bend your knees, with your feet on the floor.  This is called Constructive Rest Position, it lets your spine completely relax.  Now focus on taking a few deep slow breaths."

He was curious, and willing, and followed instructions.  I bent over him, lifting his knees, and told him to let his pelvis relax and be heavy, which helps the spine release. I could see him enjoying being worked on and gradually dropping the tension from feeling pain in his stomach. I did some reflexology on the soles of his feet, massaged under his shoulders, neck and head, and by the time I was done, he was smiling and very appreciative.

I got him back on his feet, to get some energy going, thinking he better not get too relaxed before his show.  We did a counterbalance stretch, standing and holding each other´s wrists, then leaning back, getting a delicious stretch which is fun to move around from your thighs to your back to your arms.  He was starting to feel better.  I was teaching Contact Improvisation at the Theaterschool then, and knew how much people enjoyed being lifted onto a shoulder so their spine could totally hang loose. It´s an experience most of us remember from childhood, "hanging like a sack of potatoes" from your Mom or Dad´s shoulder, but it´s something we just never thought we´d ever feel again, a happy memory stored away in the attic of the soul, gathering dust. 

"This will feel great, just hanging from my shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Give me your weight, trust me, I´m strong. This is what I do."  I bent down to get my shoulder positioned around his waist, and he leaned forward and let me pick him up.  Yikes, he was heavier than I expected, but I got centered under him and swung him gently from side to side, giving him a good long hang.  He loved it.  When I set him slowly back on his feet, he said, "If you could do that for me before every show, that would be fantastic.  I feel so much better.  But I still don´t feel like playing tonight. I just don´t have the energy."

"You know, you should just do what you feel like doing.  You´re Bob Dylan, and all those people just want to spend an evening with you.  You could lie on your back on the stage with the mike and just tell stories or something.  It´s your show, you should do whatever you´re feeling."

He looked at me amazed, his mouth open in disbelief, and it looked like he was seriously imagining himself doing it. I would have loved it.  From being a performer myself, I am always interested in seeing a performer allowing me to see them in their natural state.  Then he let out a little laugh at the ridiculousness of the idea.

When it was getting close to show time, he said he felt much better and thanked me. By the time Tom Petty and his band, who were opening for him on this tour called The Temple in Flames, were wrapping up the last number, he was looking good, ready to roll, and we stepped into the hallway leading to the stage.

"Be here when I get back, " he said.  "Don´t go anywhere else."

"I´ll be here," I said.

"Promise?  If you go somewhere I won´t know where you are."

"Promise," I said.  And I watched him disappear down the long dark concrete underground hallway heading for the stage.