by David Lynch
I finished the tour in September of 2007, and not long after I got home my father died. I don’t know if anybody’s ready to go when the time comes to die—maybe if you suffer enough you’re ready. My father was born on December 4th, 1915, and he died on December 4th, 2007, so he was ninety-two years old. He was kind of out of it by the end and was pretty much gone already, and I was there with Austin and Riley and Jennifer. My brother couldn’t make it but Martha was there, and one by one we all went in and said goodbye to my dad. Then everybody left and my sister and I went in. They’d pulled the plug and were just going to let him go, and I thought it would be good to meditate. I meditated for an hour and a half, and then as soon as I went outside to have a smoke he left.
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In October of 2007, Maharishi knew he was going and he stopped seeing anyone. Then, on my birthday in 2008, the people who were with him called me on Skype, and I was told later that Maharishi was shushing the pandits taking care of him, telling them to be quiet because he wanted to see this. After we hung up he said, “The world is in good hands,” and two and a half weeks later he dropped his body.
When Maharishi died Bobby Roth called me in the woodshop and said, “I think he’d like you to be there,” and I said, “Okay, that makes up my mind; I’m going to the funeral.” There’s no Indian Consulate in L.A., so I had to go to San Francisco to get a visa. Before I went up there they said, “No problem, all you need is your passport and you fill out these forms,” so Emily and I flew to San Francisco the next day. We got to the consulate and I went up to the window and gave them my passport and the forms and they said, “All the visa pages in your passport have been used up. You have to go to the American Embassy to get more visa pages, and we close in a little while. I don’t think you’ll be able to travel to India tonight.” I said, “I have to go tonight.”
We hightailed it over to the American Embassy, and there’s a line of two or three hundred people and a really rude guy at the desk. He said, “Take a number and wait in line.” After a while I go up to the window and say, “I need some visa pages right now,” and he said, “Settle down, bud; take this number and we’ll call you.” I said, “No, I’ve gotta have them now,” and he said, “You can’t have them now. Take a number and wait. We’ll get to you when we have the visa pages, and that may take a couple of hours.” I said, “No, no! They’re gonna close the Indian Consulate!” He said, “I can’t help that.” So they give me a number and I’m waiting and waiting and finally I got the visa pages and went straight to the Indian Consulate and they were closed.
Then Anna Skarbek told me, “I have a friend who said you can go over to this place and get this taken care of,” so we got the address and went to this little house with an Indian flag in front. We went up the steps into a living room that was like a lobby with chairs and a desk. There was nobody in the place except for a woman who was sitting there, so I gave her my passport and papers and she said, “Wait over there.” Then this girl comes out and says, “Okay, done.” This thing that was impossible to get done on the other side of town is done in an instant here! I said goodbye to Emily and went straight to the airport.
I went from San Francisco to Munich, where I changed planes, then I flew to New Delhi and arrived in a big, big airport. I’m supposed to be met by someone but that someone isn’t there, so I go upstairs to this restaurant and have a coffee and a smoke. After a while I start to panic because I don’t know where to go, then finally people arrive and they take me from the big airport to a tiny airport several hundred yards away that’s not like any airport you’ve ever seen. You could go into this place and be lost for eternity, but they took me to the right place and I ended up on a little plane that flew us to Varanasi. We land in Varanasi and there are two great big SUVs, white, matching, and I let it be known that I was going to smoke in the car, so a bunch of people went in the other car, and that was fine. They still cared for me but they didn’t want smoke, and we all took off for the four-hour drive to Allahabad. Every second on the road in India that you don’t get killed is a miracle. There are no stop signs or lights there, and you pass trucks that are so close you couldn’t slip a piece of paper between the truck and the car you’re in. There are animals in the road, little dogs, monkeys, water buffalo, cows—everything. Bicycles, pedestrians, pickup trucks with thirty people in them—everybody’s honking their horn and pedal to the metal. It’s high drama just getting a hundred feet. Drivers there say a prayer before they get on the road, then they leave it up to God. They just go.
We drove directly to Allahabad, which is where Maharishi’s ashram was, and his body was there surrounded by flowers in a big tent. People were going in and paying respects to Maharishi and taking a seat and spending time in there. I stayed for a little while, and I saw my friend Fatima and we sat together for a bit then I had to leave to find my hotel. I got in Dr. John Hagelin’s car and he doesn’t worry about the driving because he’s so highly evolved, and his driver was the worst I’ve ever seen. I said, “Please, tell him I’m gonna have a heart attack if he doesn’t slow down!” They just laughed, so I’m white-knuckling this thing like nobody’s business. We get to their hotel, then I get in another car to go to my hotel, which is a block away. I’m with a few other people and it’s dark now, so we drive and we’re looking for the hotel but it’s not there. We went around this strange, big block four times and then the fifth time there it was. How did we miss it? You had to go around four times and then it appeared.
There are beautiful grounds at this hotel, mowed lawns and beautiful plants, and when we went inside there was a giant wedding going on—they go crazy for weddings in India, and this was the wedding season. I go to my room and it’s filled with mosquitos. There are modern hotels in India that probably don’t have mosquitos, but this one was old and that was okay with me. There’s no wine—you’re not going to get any Bordeaux in this place—so I order these Kingfisher beers and they turned out to be bigger than forty ounces. When they brought the beers they also brought a little gadget to plug in the wall that emits a scent that makes the mosquitos leave, so as the beers came in, the mosquitos went out and I’m kind of happy. It’s a nice room.
The next morning Bobby calls and says, “Bring Mr. So-and-So; he’s staying at your hotel.” I go to the front desk and say to the man, “Could you let Mr. So-and-So know we’re here and we have to go,” and he goes through this pile of messy little cards and says, “He’s not here.” I said, “Yes, he is,” and he said, “No, he’s not.” So I go back to my room and call Bobby and he insists the guy is there. I go back to the desk and ask him to check again and he checks and says, “He’s not here.” Then this other guy comes along who’s going to the funeral and I say, “We’re looking for Mr. So-and-So and he’s not here,” and he said, “He’s in the room next to yours.” I love India. It’s magical.
On the second day of the funeral, Maharishi’s body was cremated in a different part of his ashram where they had the funeral pyre, and thousands of people were there for that. It was incredible how they set up this huge funeral pyre built out of special wood—everything’s got to be exact. A helicopter passed overhead and scattered millions of rose petals, but the blades of the helicopter were stirring up dust, so rose petals and dust were swirling around. It was something. The funeral pyre was still burning when I left to go back to the hotel.
On the third day we went back to the ashram and the fire has gone out, and the special pandits are gathering the ashes and dividing them up and putting them in urns that will go to different places. Then we all headed down to the convergence of the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the Transcendental Saraswati rivers. The rivers come together and merge there, and the place where you dip is called a sangam. Dipping there is about the most holy thing you can do in a life. You dip there and you’re gold.
There were all these boats waiting there and Bobby tried to get me on the big white boat where Mahari
shi’s ashes were, but they said no. Then a German guy named Conrad came out of nowhere and took me to a boat and I got in with a few other people and out we go, surrounded by hundreds of boats. We go out into the Ganges and the big white boat carrying Maharishi’s ashes is coming along, so I get undressed and Conrad gave me a shawl and I get out of the boat. You have to plug your ears, your nose, and close your eyes when you dip, because of the pollution. You say your prayers then you dip backward three times. I’d always thought, I, David, will never go to India, and there’s no way I’m going to ever dip in the Ganges in this life. But not only am I in India, but I’m in the sangam, and not only am I in the sangam, but I’m dipping, and not only am I dipping, but I’m dipping at a time in eternity when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashes are in the water around me. That’s something.
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Later on that year I’m in Paris, sitting in a café across the street from a Cartier boutique, and I asked Emily to marry me. We got married the year after that, in February of 2009, on the lawn at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and at one point I went out to take a smoke and ran into an Elvis impersonator who was doing a gig at the hotel. I said, “You gotta come over,” and he came over and people were dancing.
That same year I decided to make a film about Maharishi, and I went back to India to start working on it. Bobby Roth went with me, and Richard Beymer was there filming. Richard is a very special human being. He’s a character and a longtime meditator and a highly evolved guy, and he’s Benjamin Horne in Twin Peaks. He’s a great person to travel with and he shot great stuff and made a film about our trip, called It’s a Beautiful World. It’s not a film people are going to go in droves to see—look at the way the world is—but maybe one day they will. Not right now, though.
I went to India from Shanghai, and when I was leaving Shanghai I knew I had a fever and thought I might have bird flu. When you enter India you stand in line to go through passport control, and they have a thing that measures your temperature; if you have a high enough temperature, they pull you out of line and put you in quarantine and they don’t let you out until you’re well. So I’m in the line, then suddenly I saw this TV screen that was reading people’s temperature and I’d already passed it, so I made it into India. I was sick the whole time I was there, though, and I wish I hadn’t been. We followed Maharishi’s footsteps and I wanted to be in tippy-top shape, but I wasn’t myself.
After Maharishi’s teacher, Guru Dev, dropped his body in 1953, Maharishi built a little house next to the Ganges in Uttarkashi, the Valley of the Saints, where he pretty much stayed in meditation and silence for two years. After that he began traveling and teaching this technique, Transcendental Meditation, and everywhere he went he was met by people who wanted to help. Everywhere he went he set something up before he left, too, and he stayed in touch with these meditation centers that were springing up and built a worldwide movement to teach this technique. Maharishi’s two missions were enlightenment for the people and peace on earth, and before he dropped his body he said it’s all in place, it’s done. It’s like the train has left the station and it’s on its way. Peace on earth is coming. It’s just a question of how long before the train arrives. It’s all meant to be, and it’s happening now because the time demands it.
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I’ve been experimenting with music for a long time, but it’s disrespectful to great musicians to say that I’m a musician. I play music but I’m not a musician. Marek Zebrowski is someone I met through the Camerimage Gang, and he’s a composer and a brilliant guy who speaks eight languages. He has perfect pitch, so I can play anything and he’ll play along with me and it sounds like I know what I’m doing. The whole thing is improvised, though, and the only reason it works is because of his perfect pitch. The way a piece works is, I’ll start it by reading a little poem, then I usually hit a note on a keyboard, then Marek comes in. He’s listening to my changes and finding things and taking off from them—it’s pretty freewheeling stuff. It’s a mood jam based on the feeling of the words of the poem. I write new poems for these sessions with Marek, short things just to set a kind of mood, and then the music starts. We performed in Milan, Paris, Łódź, and at the Polish Embassy in New York City, and I enjoy these performances because I don’t have to memorize anything. With blueBOB I had to memorize changes and it was total torment having to play in front of people. Being in front of people and jamming is way better.
Another music project from around that time was Fox Bat Strategy, which came out in 2009 and was a tribute to Dave Jaurequi, who died in 2006 in New Orleans. That all started in the early nineties when I was in the hallway at the Pink House and I started humming a kind of bass line. I know how to read music because I play trumpet, but again, I’m not a musician, so I did a little drawing of these bass notes so I wouldn’t forget them, and I booked a session at Capitol Records, not really knowing what I was going to do. I knew I wanted to have Don Falzone on bass, though, and I said, “Don, this is really embarrassing, but I have this bass line,” and I hummed it for him. He said, “That’s cool, David! Can I do a little variation on it?” I said sure, and he did and it was beautiful. Then Don played it for Steve Hodges, who started drumming and they got the groove from that, then Andy Armer played some stuff on keyboards. There were a few guitarists I knew about, but none of them were available, and somebody said, “There’s this guy Dave Jaurequi,” so he got hired, but Dave hadn’t shown up yet.
We got the track recorded, then finally here comes Dave Jaurequi, “up from the islands,” I’m told. I don’t know which islands but it sounded cool, and he was wearing an island-type shirt and dark glasses and he sits down with his guitar. I tell him, like I always say, that it’s got a fifties vibe, and he started playing and he was so good I was going crazy. Just incredible. We recorded “The Pink Room” and “Blue Frank,” which are in Fire Walk with Me, and those guys are in the film, too. They’re in the scene at the Canadian nightclub the Power and the Glory.
Then some time goes by and I’ve written all these lyrics and want to go into the studio with those guys again. We check ourselves into Cherokee Studios. I end up working primarily with Dave Jaurequi; I’m giving him lyrics and he’s playing and singing, trying to find the tune. We wrote maybe six songs together that we recorded and mixed with Bruce Robb at Cherokee. It was just a blast, but nothing ever happened to those things and they just sat. When I finished my studio I wanted to bring Dave in and work with him, then suddenly I hear from his girlfriend, Kay, who has this bar in New Orleans called the John, that Dave was sitting on a barstool and fell over dead from internal bleeding. Kay and I stayed in touch and we did this tribute album to him that included those songs we did at Cherokee, but the music industry was in the toilet by then and nobody made a nickel. It was really great working with those guys, though. They’re great musicians and great guys.
Music has helped the David Lynch Foundation a lot. Laura Dern and I were the MCs at the Change Begins Within concert, which was a fundraiser held at Radio City Music Hall in April of 2009. I introduced all the people, and oh my God, it was high tension and the place was packed. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr? Are you kidding me? It was only the second time they’d been together since the breakup, and they performed “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Then Paul did a whole set. He brought two super-long semi-trucks filled with his equipment. Super long. Piano, every single thing, comes with him.
People don’t know how important the Beatles were to our lives. People who lived through it know, but young people don’t know. I lived through it, though, so meeting Paul and Ringo was beyond the beyond. On their first trip to America in 1964 they flew into New York City, then they went down to Washington, D.C., and put on their first American concert, and I was there. They were in a boxing ring [they performed for eight thousand fans at the Washington Coliseum on February 11th, 1964] and it was a giant room and you could barely hea
r them—it was like little tiny squeaks in the middle of wall-to-wall screaming. I was a senior in high school and I wasn’t planning on going, but at the last minute I wanted to go and I talked my dear brother out of his ticket and I went instead. I got to tell Ringo and Paul that I was there at their first American concert, and of course it didn’t mean anything to them but for me it’s incredible.
Ringo’s like Harry Dean. He’s a guy you can just sit with and not have to talk and feel comfortable with—he’s a real human being, this guy Ringo, he’s a special one. Every year I go to Ringo’s birthday party at the Capitol Records building. They play music for the crowd, then at noon Ringo announces peace and love and throws out armbands that say PEACE AND LOVE. He does this every year on July 7th. Paul’s a real good guy, too. I got to watch him rehearse for the Radio City show, and when he rehearses it’s down to the millisecond as far as timing. He’s a perfectionist and he just keeps everybody absolutely there, so when they go on it’s no fooling around and it’s tight. A lot of people drift over time, but when he plays one of his old songs it sounds exactly like the original recording. Paul and Ringo have been meditating since they were with Maharishi in Rishikesh in 1968, so they’re meditators and they love it and they’re both supporters.
During that period Mindy came to me one day and said, “Danger Mouse wants to meet you,” and I said, “Who’s Danger Mouse?” She told me who he was and I said, “He must want me to shoot a video or something.” So Danger Mouse came up and he’s a cool guy and a great producer, and it wasn’t a video he wanted me to do. He wanted me to shoot still photographs inspired by the music on this record he’d done with Sparklehorse, and we approached it like a cinema motion-picture shoot. We went to locations and the only difference was, instead of motion pictures we were shooting stills.
