Words Without Music: A Memoir (23 page)

I made only one significant purchase before leaving Europe—a small, inexpensive transistor radio. I planned to listen to music all the way across Central Asia and into India. This was soon after my work with Ravi Shankar, and my ears were, quite suddenly, wide open for whatever “new” sounds came my way. In fact, that was an extraordinary experience in and of itself. Starting in Europe, passing through Greece, and on the whole passage thereafter, I was forever tuning into whatever I could find on local radio stations. It seemed that every hundred kilometers or so, I could detect a change of some kind in the music that people there were listening to on a daily basis. The changes were slow but ongoing, providing a musical passage to accompany the local culture that we were passing through. It was all new to me, and all highly exotic.

First, we went down to Spain because the boat we were going to take would be leaving from Barcelona. We hitchhiked because we were saving for India and we weren’t going to spend any money in Europe. To start off, we took the métro to the outskirts of Paris and stood on the highway that led to Bordeaux. It was very common for young people to travel that way, and we got picked up a lot by truckers. In those days, hitchhiking wasn’t considered a dangerous thing to do. The consensus was that these were just young people who were trying to go home or go someplace else, so it wasn’t difficult.

We would go as far as we could go and in the evening we would stop at a hotel. The hotels could cost as little as twenty francs—in those days, about five francs to a dollar—so four or five dollars. These were not particularly clean hotels. You’d hear doors opening, slamming, and shutting all night long. They were basically bordellos of one kind or another. During our time in Europe we had spent quite a few nights in places that were servicing a nocturnal crowd like that, so it didn’t particularly bother us. But it didn’t make for very good sleeping.

After two days on the road, hitchhiking all the way, we arrived in Barcelona. Although it was mid-September, it was still warm. We had just enough time to find the ticket office and buy our tickets for the boat to Turkey.

The ship on which we took deck passage traveled at night and anchored for the day at ports between Barcelona and Istanbul—Marseille, Genoa, Naples, Brindisi, and Piraeus. Deck passage was unbelievably cheap—about thirty-five dollars for the whole journey. It also allowed for a day in each port to get off the ship and spend eight to ten hours sightseeing. The ticket did not include any meals, so we would in any case have had to leave the ship in the daytime to buy food. The nights on deck were pleasant, and I loved approaching the ports each morning, seeing Genoa and the various other stops along the way from the sea for the first time.

On our days in these port cities we mostly went to see the places you didn’t have to pay to enter, like cemeteries and cathedrals. The architecture in the Italian cemeteries was remarkable. Living in Paris we had visited the cemeteries like Montparnasse and Père Lachaise, with all the famous people buried there—chess masters, poets, musicians—but in Italy, it got even more flamboyant. Some of the tombs looked almost like chateaux on top of the plots of ground, with whole families buried in and under them. We would get off the boat and eat breakfast at a café, then have a late lunch in another café, then bring bread and cheese to eat and water and wine to drink for the night ride, returning to the boat at six or seven. At eight the boat would embark and we’d eat, go to sleep on the deck, wake up in the morning and be in the next city. It was comfortable. It was still summertime and the Mediterranean doesn’t have big swells. We were traveling with other young people, most of whom were going home to Turkey, Pakistan, or India.

When we stopped in Piraeus, we traveled into Athens to see the Parthenon, and we also went to the theater at the base of the Acropolis where I later would play many concerts. We were in the land of Homer and it was, for me, absolutely thrilling to be there. We knew the history of Greece because we had studied it, so we had an academic’s memory of these places, which were literally the cradle of Western civilization. We felt we had inherited more from the Greeks than from the Romans, though, in fact, I discovered later, when I was working on the opera
Akhnaten
, how much the Greeks had borrowed from Egypt. But that wasn’t emphasized very much in my education. I learned that from my own reading.

Some years later, when my sister Sheppie’s husband Morton Abramowitz was the ambassador to Turkey, Allen Ginsberg came with me and some other friends on a tour of Greek theaters on the Ionian Coast. I was interested in the acoustics and how they worked, so Allen would go on the stage and recite the famous W. B. Yeats poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” The tourists who were around would sit down in the seats in the amphitheater and listen, because here’s someone with a big head of hair who looked like a professor—I don’t think anyone knew it was Allen Ginsberg—and the guards didn’t stop him. He would walk to the center of the stage and recite, and it was amazing how beautiful and clear the poem would sound in that open environment.

JoAnne and I left Piraeus in the late afternoon for Turkey. I still remember slipping into Istanbul (Greek Byzantium/Roman Constantinople) two days later as the sun was setting, making the sky glow with a soft orange and red light—a warm, welcoming moment. With Istanbul we felt, for the first time, that our journey to the East had really begun. I was keenly aware that this was the gateway to the East, and it was easy to see how the city and its history, dating back to the Greeks in the seventh century
BC
, had the power to capture the world’s imagination. Straddling the West and East all this time has given the city its special quality: coming from Europe, it appears as an Asian city; coming back from Asia, it looks like a European city. It’s actually both. It’s a place where everyone can feel at home yet, at the same time, the call to prayer will be heard from minarets all over the city five times a day.

Leaving the ship, JoAnne and I headed to the area around the Blue Mosque, where, as expected, we were able to find cheap lodgings. This was a lively crossroads for young people going overland to and from India. We picked up all kinds of useful information, for example, how to make the crossing at the Khyber Pass where there were no formal travel arrangements available, or being given details of the bus that left Munich once a week and went straight through with minimum stops to Tehran—which we didn’t actually take, preferring instead to travel by rail, which was not much more expensive. Even with the East so near at hand, we had trouble pulling ourselves away from Istanbul. In the end we spent almost a week there. We visited Topkapi, an extraordinary museum, the steam baths known as
hamams
, and took a sightseeing trip up the Bosporus to the Black Sea. There was also the food (a vegetarian’s dream), the light, the city, and the people—all things together making it hard to leave.

We had been strongly advised not to take the short route through Iraq to the city of Basra. From there it would have been much shorter to go by ship through the Persian Gulf and straight to Bombay by way of the Arabian Sea. However, the area was considered even then far too unstable and violent for two young Americans—and one a blond blue-eyed woman at that—to safely travel there. Even so, we had to be careful all the way through Iran and Afghanistan. On the one hand, we had a “hospitality rule,” which meant that whenever we met local people along the way who invited us for tea or coffee or even to their homes, we would accept—that is, providing there were no overt signs to warn us away. It seemed to us that since we were so ignorant of local customs, we should either accept all invitations or none. I’ve followed the “hospitality rule” all over the world since then and, with one exception, have never felt uncomfortable. This was when, while having tea in the home of some military people in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, there was some suggestion that JoAnne and I might be separated from each other. They said, “We’re going to separate you now, but we’ll bring her back.”

“No, you’re not going do that,” I replied, because I was sure I would never see JoAnne again. We got up quickly and left, without explanation. There was no resistance, they let us go. I think they were not intending to be violent, but I didn’t trust the situation at all.

Except for that incident, our experience traveling through Central Asia, as well as the extended stay in India, was free of any trouble or conflict. True, everywhere we went, everybody—men and women—stared at JoAnne. It must have been shocking and provocative for them to see a blond woman lightly dressed and with her legs showing. She should have been covered. When a woman wore a burka, she was covered head to toe, and you wouldn’t see anything except the flash of her eyes. Here was a woman, from their point of view, practically undressed, walking around the streets. I don’t think we had any idea how we looked to them. People didn’t actually follow us, but they followed us with their eyes. It shifted once we arrived in India. India had been in the hands of the English for two hundred years by then and they were used to seeing Europeans. That made a difference.

When we left Istanbul we took the train to Erzurum, the biggest city in the far east of Turkey, and from there we took a bus to Tabriz, the first big town in Iran. We crossed the border without any trouble, and after Tabriz we took buses the rest of the way to Tehran. Here we were surprised to find a fairly modern and newly built city. The Germans had a very strong business connection with Iran in those days, and in many ways had become a conduit of Western European architecture and culture. This was still before the last days of the Shah’s Pahlavi dynasty, and the suspicion of all things Western, and especially American, had not yet taken root throughout the country. The powerful fundamentalist state that we know today would not emerge until after the revolution of 1979, so what we saw then in Tehran was the pro-Western culture of a country that was embracing the West and modernism.

After leaving Tehran we went to Mashhad, the last big city in the eastern part of Iran, where the same attitude did not prevail. We had been on the road now, counting from when we left Paris, for about five weeks, and our next big goal was to travel through Afghanistan and arrive at the Khyber Pass sometime toward the end of October. It was in Mashhad that we encountered the first sign of a fundamentalist reaction to our presence. In Turkey we had never seen anything of the kind. It had for quite a while been considered a secular country with a strong Muslim majority and we often visited mosques and holy places there without any difficulty. But Mashhad is considered a holy city, where saints are buried. We planned to spend a few days but soon found that whole parts of the city were closed to us. There were no signs or warnings. If we wanted to enter a part of the city that, unknown to us, was closed to foreigners, a crowd of people would quietly but suddenly block access. It was not violent, but it was decisive. We never were able to see any of the religious sites of Iran.

Apart from that, we found the Iran of 1966 surprisingly modern. Ten years later the Shah was still there when Bob Wilson and I were in the midst of touring Europe with
Einstein on the Beach
. Bob had performed in Iran in 1972 in
KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace
—
a play Bob described as a “mega-structure” that unfolded over seven days
—
and we were both very interested in the possibility of taking
Einstein
there. We had an invitation to perform at a festival in Persepolis, near Shiraz, but by then the Shah and his government were considered too repressive, and our
Einstein
supporters at home and even some newspapers were dead-set against our going. However, Tony Shafrazi, born in Iran and well known in the New York art world, urged us to go. He insisted that
Einstein
could be like a window onto the contemporary world of performance, and our presence there would have a powerful effect. But that one voice of support was not enough to make it happen.

In the end, JoAnne and I liked Iran very much—the people, the sights, and the remaining artifacts of the ancient Persian culture, which were still very much around. We left for Herat, the first big town in Afghanistan, again by bus, and found an almost startling contrast to Iran. Years, even decades, of conflict, both internal and from abroad, had left the country largely poor, undeveloped, and difficult to navigate. There was one major road, a two-lane blacktop, which connected Herat, Kandahar, and Kabul. It had been built, we were told, by the Russians. There was a small fleet of school buses that had been supplied, in turn, by Americans, and that was the public transportation between their three major cities. Herat and Kandahar were not big cities, each numbering far fewer than 200,000. Even Kabul had less than half a million. In between was high desert country, stark and mountainous, with flocks of sheep and shepherds scattered throughout.

My memories of Herat are of a dark, somber place, a frontier city. We passed only one night there, but Kandahar was another story. Though not much bigger than Herat, it was lively, with a busy central market and many small hotels. We hadn’t come for the hashish, but many others did, and that kept a small, transient population of young Americans, Europeans, and Australians very much present, and the hotels reasonably busy. It was warmer than the northern part of the country, but even so it could be quite chilly at night and in the morning. There was no heating at all in the kind of hotels we knew. The second day, we noticed that there was simply no glass in the windows. The desert breeze just blew right in. With all that, we liked Kandahar best. It was bright and sunny, but I was tiring of the food. For a vegetarian it was challenging. Lamb seemed to show up everywhere—in soup, rice, and always also by itself.

We went on to Kabul but didn’t stay there long. It had an almost international look to it, with all the UNESCO and U.N. people as well as the embassies. It reminded me a lot of Washington, D.C., which I knew quite well, only this was a more or less frontier version, and quite a bit smaller. There were government buildings and government people and Afghani soldiers around. It looked like the capital of a nomadic state, which I think is what Afghanistan was at that time. But now only the Khyber Pass and Pakistan separated us from India and we were ready to complete this first stage of our journey.