“Seeing the Real You At Last: Life and Love on the Road with Bob Dylan”

By Britta Lee Shain

Britta Lee Shain was a friend of Bob Dylan's until he asked her to join him on the road in the mid 1980s, at which point she became more than a friend. In this intimate and elliptical memoir of their time together, at home in Los Angeles and on tour with Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead, she offers a unique portrait of the romantic, earthbound, and poetic soul trapped in the role of Being Bob Dylan.



"Seeing the Real You at Last: Life and Love on the Road with Bob Dylan" By Britta Lee Shain on a bookshelf with other books

A finely detailed look at life with the legend, "Seeing The Real You at Last" helps ground Dylan, presenting him as both pampered rock star and everyday quirk machine ~ The New York Post

"Blonde on Bob" image of an article Britta Lee Shain was interviewed for about her relationship with Bob Dylan. It Discusses her life on the road with Bob Dylan and how their relationship began. The full article is in the New Your Post from 5/8/16

Entire libraries of books have been written about Dylan, but few--if any--offer any lasting insight into the man behind the shades. Until now. Written with the elegance of a poet and storytelling snap of a novelist, Seeing The Real You At Last is a poignant and tender romance that reveals Dylan's playfulness, his dark wit, his fears and struggles, his complex relationships with the men and women in his life, and, ultimately, his genius.

Britta Lee Shain posing with her guitar for The Bridge Interview with Sid Astbury


 
 Seeing The Real You At Last

July 1987. New York, New York. 


After three martinis apiece, BobDylan, Elliot Mintz, and I close the bar at the Algonquin Hotel. My boyfriend, Bob's roadmanager, is with us, too. As we stroll down the wide sidewalks, passing a joint and window-shopping our way back to the hotel, a police car slowly cruises past. 
 


'Uh oh,' Elliot says. 'Don't look at them.' 
 


The cop car spins a u-ey and screeches to a halt at the curb next to us. 
 


'Oh, man!' Dylan moans. He has this way of saying this favorite phrase of his so that the 'a' in man is drawn out for at least two seconds, maybe three. 
 


The cops jump out of the car. 
 


'How you folks doin' tonight?' the policeman with the ticket pad in his right hand says with an accent that would make Sly Stallone proud. His gun glistens in the glow of the street lamp. 
 


Oh, Jesus. I grind the joint into the cement wall behind me. Tamping the tip out with my bare fingers, I slip the roach into my purse. 


 
 'You're Bob Dylan, aren't you?'
 


Bob grunts.


 
 The cop moves in on Dylan.
 


 'You think I could have your autograph?'
 


FROM CHAPTER FIVE, GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY, SEEING THE REAL YOU AT LAST


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