The Bridge Interview: Britta Lee Shain By Sid Astbury Excerpts from Summer 2016, Volume 55 p. 06 – 13.

Syd Astbury: I enjoyed your memoir, Seeing The Real You At Last, which I have reviewed for The Bridge and I am very grateful that you have agreed to be interviewed for the next issue of the magazine. Has your relation with Dylan lessened your respect, your affection for Dylan’s songs?

Not at all. He is. And will forever be, the Poet Laureate of the universe. My personal favorite of his albums continues to be Blood On The Tracks with Highway 60 Revisited a close second. The last record of his that truly awed me was Time Out of Mind. One thing about Dylan that I don’t hear people discuss much is what a remarkable writer of love songs he is.

Lots of people get let down by Dylan. How have you coped?

The first draft (of the book) was started as a journal entry. It was 1998. I was living in a remote part of California, up in the mountains – with CNN on the upstairs TV to keep me company–– when I heard the breaking news that Bob Dylan had been hospitalized with a potentially fatal lung infection. I had been married for 5 years at that point, and it hit me that I was still tangled up in Bob. I knew immediately I had to write it out of me, or be tangled up in blue, forever.

Despite the hurt, you said you don’t regret getting close to Dylan and you would go through it all again. What of value did you get out of it?

Again, we are talking about Bob Dylan, the most influential writer of our times. In the end, he’s only human. But in the meantime, he’s the most brilliant hilarious whimsical, endearing and maddening creature on the planet, and as crazy as it sounds, I really did fall in love with him.

Obviously, it’s extremely validating to have someone of that stature, let alone your own personal hero, spend time with you, but I think ultimately, the most valuable thing I came away with was a certain sense of freedom. When you’ve hung out with someone who can essentially do whatever they want whenever they want to do it, and you get a taste of what that’s like, it frees you up going forward. You build a new psychological vocabulary, replacing words like, “I can’t do that, ” with words like “Why not?” Suddenly everything is possible and you realize that the only person really holding you back in life is you.

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