The Journey Begins
Chapter 1: With Dylan in Rotterdam, 19 September, 1987
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 when 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 have entered it, and anything is possible now. Everything feels open and relaxed, like the dance of clouds slowly changing shape overhead. Invisible forces are working in mysterious ways to help you encounter someone or something, for reasons you don´t yet understand.
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 all the men and women merely players. And if it´s a stage, you know there´s a lot going on in the wings, or up on the catwalks, and down 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 kinds of time exist, other dimensions and other lives, and forces at work that Newtonian physics doesn´t apply to. Just like looking through a microscope or a telescope, without the right lens, we would be blind to vast areas of life around us and even inside us. 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. Because they have proven to me that where I might once have seen them as the results of chance, there is a force at work that is the very opposite of chance. Call it the hand of fate, divine will, or the next act of a play that began in another time, it leads us to say things we didn´t intend to, know things we had no way of knowing, and be in a precise place at a precise time to set events in motion, which, at the time, appeared as simple as luck. Nothing could be farther from the truth, though truth also changes with the lens we are looking through!
So far, this is how I understand our 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 Dylan said, "You know something´s happening, but you don´t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones."
Which pretty much describes the feeling I had when he asked me to go on the road with him. It felt like what was about to unfold had either happened already long ago, or we were outside of time altogether. During the tour, there were moments when it seemed like all 20,000 of us felt that we were in another dimension and liberated from time like birds from gravity.
I believe we all have experiences, if only for a moment, of being outside linear time, feeling the unchanging and limitless now – often called spherical time – in which the past and future are equally accessible. Sadly, we rarely talk about them. Sometimes it is more about space than time, seeing someone appear in space only to disappear a short while later, like a mirage. Since I didn´t hear anybody talking about such things as I grew up, I didn´t know how to talk about them when they happened to me. 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, it´s hard to find the right moment to share them, and you get the feeling society maintains an invisible wall to keep out such topics as if they were threats to consensus reality. It is, at least, some comfort to know we are no longer in an age when sharing such experiences could get you put away as a lunatic or burned at the stake as a heretic.
Our glimpses through a tear in the backdrop of Time are treasures we carry with us, that shine like stars in our memories. Sometimes they make a constellation. Connect the dots, and you get the picture. For me, they are spell-like moments when thoughts, words, and even my identity all disappear, leaving nothing but the sense of being present,and ready for anything.
I want to write about these moments because whatever the story is, they are part of it like silence is part of the music, the bare canvas part of the painting, and stillness part of the dance. As a teenager devoted to dance precisely because it was a portal into such experiences, when I came upon these words from T.S. Eliot I 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 revolutionary dancer Steve Paxton as a teacher, he told me that his generation of dancers had embraced these words years earlier as the flag they sailed under. I had found my soul´s tribe, and I knew even then it was not by chance.
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 offered to drive us to Rotterdam to see Dylan in concert. I jumped at the chance. Not only was I a life-long fan (my mother had taken me, my brother Peter 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 get a film produced 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, we were rebuilding our 10-year on-and-off again relationship.
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. 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 had written On the Road with Bob Dylan: Rolling with the Thunder, and had become friends with Dylan), whom Michael and I had hung out with often in New York when Michael would come to visit me. I asked what the secret was to getting backstage, and he said, "Just ask for Victor Maymudes, Bob´s road manager," and it worked. In no time at all, Babeth – looking vampish 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, while Dylan and I spoke about Michael, across the room. I was happy to see he remembered me from the night in San Francisco at the Fox Warfield Theater in 1980 when he´d asked Michael to come sit in. When I brought up the film he wrinkled his brow and didn´t want to hear about it. I couldn´t have picked a worse time to ask.
"I´m not feeling well," 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 and looked clean. “I´m a dancer, and we do this to release tension and 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?"
"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 every instruction. I bent over him, lifting his knees, and told him to let his pelvis relax and be heavy, to help 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 grateful.
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 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 never thought we´d 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 under his waist; he leaned forward and I rose under him, until I was standing with him draped over my shoulder. 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. The pain is gone, but 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 slightly 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 anyone on stage allowing me to see them in their natural state, doing what they truly want to be doing in that moment. 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 the Heartbreakers – who were the opening act and also backing Dylan on this tour called Temples in Flames – were wrapping up their last number, Dylan was looking good, ready to roll, and I followed him 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 into the shadows down the long concrete hallway, heading for the stage.
whoa! this is going to be incredible!
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…
Thank you for sharing these visions of,
and questions about, the players
that remain at the present stage.