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Krishna Das


A Conversation with Krishna Das (continued)

KD: At one point I went down to stay at a friend's place in Topanga. And he had a little trailer. And I was going to become a rock star.

[laughter]

PM: Yeah, why not?

KD: Why not! But it wasn't the time for that. And actually, at that point, that's when my girlfriend showed up, my former girlfriend. And then we got back together. And then she got pregnant, and then I had all this responsibility. All of a sudden life got real, so to speak, in a big way.

PM: Right.

KD: And I had to support her, and our daughter and her daughter by a previous marriage. It was pretty intense. I really couldn't deal with it very well. I wasn't made for it.

PM: Yeah, I've never done that, and likewise, I don't believe myself to be made for it. So I empathize.

KD: Yeah.

PM: And so did you split, then, or--

KD: Well, no. Did I split? No. We stayed together for about 10 years. But during the course of some of that I got into freebasing coke, and I got strung out on coke for about a year.

PM: Yeah, it's a devil.

KD: Absolutely the devil, it really got me. And I was just going down. And then this Indian man came from India who's like my father, my Indian father. And he came and he looked at me--he didn't know anything, he just took one look at me and said, "Promise me now you'll stop cocaine, right now. Promise!" He was looking right in my eyes and he wasn't going to let me go. This guy was a great yogi. And he was quite extraordinary. He just looked at me, and he made me vow at that moment to stop. And I really believe that he also gave me the power to do it, because from that moment on until this moment, cocaine and shit looks exactly the same--actually, shit looks a little better.

PM: And so have you seen this Indian father many times since--

KD: Oh, I was very close. He died in '97. But for all those years, I used to go to India and travel around with him and his wife. And we were like a very strange group to see, these two little Indian people and this big white monkey walking around.

PM: [laughs]

KD: I was really like their son. And he was my best friend in the world. I told him everything. I could tell him everything, and he'd never judge me. And he always helped me--he'd always find the bottom line, and help me find a way out of the problems I was in. It was incredible to be with him.

PM: And was he older, or a contemporary?

KD: He was older. He was probably about twenty years older than me, maybe a little more.

PM: And what was his name?

KD: K.C. Tewari. And his wife, Mrs. Tewari, I called her "Ma." They saved my life. They look me in. They loved me and they took care of me. They gave me all the love that I needed to just get through, because it was really a hard time.

PM: Well, thanks for all those details of the story. I'm grateful for all that.

Now let's move on to your work of present day. I want everybody to know about Kirtan. [Chanting.]

KD: Okay.

PM: When did that begin in your life as something that you would, say, lead?

KD: Well, first of all, Ram Dass had been chanting a little bit when he came back from India. And I enjoyed it very much. But it wasn't until I got to India and actually experienced the way it's done there—the intensity, the madness, the totality of the way people get into it there--that I intuitively felt that, wow, this is for me. I can't get enough of this. And so when I got there and saw what was going on, then I just wanted to get further into that. But even so, it wasn't about becoming a Kirtan leader. That wasn't in my high school guidance counselor's book of careers.

PM: [laughs]

KD: No, this was something I needed to do to save my own ass. This was a way of connecting. This was intense, this was great. And I really didn't know much about it. I just started doing it anywhere somebody was singing, I tried to go and sing. And for me it was like a lifeline, it was like oxygen, it was like an oxygen tank. And I got more and more and more into it. You see, we actually didn't spend a lot of time with Maharaj-ji. He'd see us for a little while, and then he'd send us to the back of the temple. So I figured if we started to sing to him we could bribe into spending more time with us.

PM: Right.

KD: And it worked. [laughs]

PM: Oh, it did.

KD: Oh, yeah. He loved it. He loved when we sang. So then he used to call us to sing when the Indian people were there, and he would look at the Indian people and say, "You miserable people, all you want is jobs and healing and blessings. And when these people come they don't want anything except God, look at them they're just--they're all here just to sing. They gave up everything. They left America," you know, all that bullshit.

PM: Right. [laughs]

KD: But the fact was, what was happening was that we were recognizing that through the chanting we were beginning to connect in a deeper way, to move inside of ourselves. Even though we thought we were chanting to him, we would have these experiences ourselves, inside. And even though for me it all blew up after he died, it was twenty-one years later, after he died, that I was standing in my room. And I knew--all of a sudden I saw and understood and knew completely--that if I didn't start singing with people who didn't know me from the old days...

PM: Right.

KD: I knew that I had to do this with people who didn't know the first thing about it, and I had do it in that way.

PM: Wow, that's a long time, twenty-one years after--

KD: It was a long time, Frank.

PM: Wow.

KD: The fact that I'm still alive is a frickin' miracle, period.

PM: Right. And it's amazing that that much longer later that you still had that epiphany to say--

KD: Yeah.

PM: --to say, "Oh, this is what I have to do now."

KD: Yeah.

PM: Do you remember where you were when that epiphany took place?

KD: Yeah. I was standing in my living room in my apartment in New York City. Right in the middle of the room.

PM: What a breath of fresh air that must have been.

KD: It was scary.

[laughter]

KD: It was scary because I had been hiding, doing a lot of heavy shit, a lot of dark stuff, a lot of--let me say it another way. Let's just say that I was really lost, and I wasn't getting found very fast. All of a sudden I saw that if, in fact, I wanted to be found, this was the way to do it. I was going to have to find myself. And the only way to clean out these dark places in my heart was to chant with people. I just knew that intuitively in one second. And then I forced myself to go down to this Yoga center and asked them if I could lead some chanting.

PM: Now, where was that one? Is it the one on Fifth that you still gig at today?

KD: It's the one on Lafayette Street.

PM: Lafayette, around where?

KD: Downtown. Lafayette and Fourth Street, roughly.

PM: Right. Lafayette and Fourth, okay. Yeah, because we rent a loft on Wooster, between Spring and Broome. So next time I'm there--

KD: Oh, cool.

PM: --I'm going to take a walk and see if that Yoga center is still there.

KD: They're actually going to be moving soon. They're moving up to Union Square. But they're there, I know, as of now.   continue

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