Brief Encounters with Canadian Folkies
Britta Lee Shain, Seeing the real you at last: Life and love on the road with Bob Dylan (2016)
I can’t really recommend reading this book, but if you’re at all tempted, I will say this: you won’t learn much about Bob Dylan, but you will get an idea of what it’s like to be in the orbit of a truly famous person. Shain’s goal in writing the book seems to be to prove that she is not just another woman Bob Dylan slept with a few times on tour, but rather his true soul mate and the only one in his entourage who really understands him. I don’t think she succeeds in that, but she does reveal what it takes to be a part of Bob Dylan’s world. Essentially, you have to do things for him. Shain is constantly running errands for Dylan: buying him clothes, boots, walking sticks, take-out food, picking up his girlfriends at the airport and then sitting downstairs reading a book and listening to them having sex upstairs. She believes that all these things bring her closer to Dylan and prove that he can’t live without her; to an outside observer, they suggest that she is one of many people Dylan uses to take care of whatever his needs are at any given moment with no regard for them as individuals. To quote what the man himself tells her when he gives her the kiss-off, “Sometimes I do bad things.”
But that’s neither here nor there. The book contains a number of references to Canada and Canadians, most of them passing and really not of much interest, but I’ll quote a few of the ones that stood out for me.
Sorrowful-Eyed Gentleman of the Northlands
As we’ve seen in numerous posts before, references to Canadian musicians are one of the most common ways Canada slips into books by non-Canadians. Shain is no exception, and given the world Dylan moves in, it should be no surprise that in this book we encounter the Canadian folk-rock triumvirate of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Here is Shain meeting Neil Young:
May 30 1986. Prince is at the Wiltern Theater, as part of what will later be dubbed his Hit n’ Run Tour, since most of the shows are announced just days or hours before the actual concert takes place. Carole [Bob’s wife or “main girlfriend,” I can’t remember which] gets four passes, but Bob doesn’t want to go. Ernie [Shain’s boyfriend, who works in some capacity for Dylan, I can’t remember what — it’s through him that Shain meets the great man] and I escort her, and while she’s really getting off on the music, I spend most of the show mingling in the foyer with a growing chattering mob that prefers being outside of the music hall. Afterwards, backstage, I’m introduced to Neil Young, whose sorrowful dark-eyed gaze threatens to suck the very life out of me. (59)
Yikes — these morose Canadians! Most intriguing (to me) is the question of what Neil is doing backstage at a Prince concert, but of course Shain has no interest in that. There’s more about Neil a couple of pages later, from June 5 1986:
A beautifully polished bus is also parked — engines running — in front of the hotel, and [Bill] Graham tells me this is Neil Young’s bus, and that unlike most rockers who rent their transportation, this is actually a bus that Neil Young owns — that he’s fixed it up really cool, and that other rockers rent it from him. (61)
We don’t tend to think of Canadians as hard-headed businessmen, but that’s an interesting portrait of a man who never lets an opportunity to make a buck slip past his sorrowful eyes.
Neil’s bus is mentioned once more, when Shain is on tour with Dylan in 1987:
Bob and I are hanging out on the bus, getting loaded, watching one of the twelve Elvis Presley movies Ernie has secured at Dylan’s request for the road tour. Somewhere along the line we’ve acquired Neil Young’s bus, and it’s very cool, with deer antlers up front and center, above the driver’s seat. (119)
There’s a glimpse of the gilded lives of celebrities and their hangers-on. Nice to think our great Canadian folk hero/businessman is making a little money off Bob.
Hanging with Joni Mitchell
From a long entry dated February 21, 1987, in which Shain and her boyfriend Ernie throw a Chinese New Year party for Dylan and some of his friends:
Actress/singer Ronee Blakely, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her supporting role in Nashville, shows up, looking beautiful but incredibly vulnerable. Some say she still hasn’t gotten over her relationship with Dylan.
Joni Mitchell is here, too! Plus all the usual suspects. This is by far the most successful of the parties to date.
Joni and friends wind up sitting around in Ernie’s den until three or four in the morning, long after Ernie’s gone to bed, singing Everly Brothers songs and other hits from the 50s and 60s while I pathetically try to keep the tune. (83)
A lot of the book is written like this: a breathless catalogue of the appearances of famous or semi-famous people, with little Wikipedia-like notes of their main accomplishments dropped in if Shain thinks the reader may not know who they are. Canadian Joni Mitchell is famous enough to just be named; Ronee Blakely is not. It is, beyond that, a nice portrait of the down-to-earth Canadian folk genius singing the night away with some friends.
(As an aside, it’s interesting to note the similarities between Shain’s writing style and the parodic diary of the Vancouver-born aspiring actress Kim Girard in Bruce Wagner’s I’m Losing You.)
The Laborious Writing Process of Leonard Cohen
This passage, after an Italian concert in 1987, gives a sense of how people in Dylan’s inner circle spend their time. It also illustrates how completely Shain has bought into the idea that a person’s value is based solely on how well they satisfy their “star”:
Dylan will be in rare form tonight, playing lengthy and cohesive harmonica intros to rarely performed classics like ‘License To Kill.’
After the show, Ernie and I go to an Italian eatery and buy tons of takeout antipasto for the bus ride — Bob has a thing for sausage — along with several bottles of Chianti. When Ernie has the time and is focused on working for Bob, he does go out of his way to make sure Dylan’s pleased.
While Bob cools off in his quarters at the rear of the bus, Ernie tells the rest of us the story of Dylan’s meeting with Leonard Cohen after Cohen’s Wiltern Theater show in ’85. He says that when Dylan complimented Cohen on the song ‘Suzanne,’ Leonard confessed that it took him five years to write it.
Later, Cohen told Dylan how much he liked ‘License To Kill.’
‘It took me five minutes,’ Bob crowed. (169-70)
Poor Leonard. But perhaps we can learn something about the painstaking character of Canadian writers, constantly insecure about their work and doing everything they can to ensure they make their songs as good as they can be, versus the more casual approach of Americans who, in tune with their national spirit of exceptionalism, just assume that they’re entitled to the world’s attention?
A Mysterious (Canadian?) Woman
This passage relates to Dylan’s role in the film Hearts of Fire:
October 1986. Production of Hearts of Fire moves to Ontario, Canada, where Ernie rents a house for Dylan. Problems arise, I’m told, when Carole wants to join him, since Bob is occupied with another woman. (73)
Exciting, I suppose, to think Dylan was living in Ontario in 1986. No doubt Canada was being used as a cheaper stand-in for some American location in the movie. We never hear about this other woman again; is she Canadian? Has she written a book about her experience with Dylan? Maybe she should — not everyone has slept with a Nobel Prize winner.
Wow - Canada! 