Krishna Das Keeps It Simple

Krishna Das—that honey-tongued vocalist who headlines kirtan festivals all over the world and has brought more people to the joy of chanting than probably any other kirtan singer on the planet—is at heart a blues man. That’s right, his idea of great music is not devotional chants, but Ray Charles and Mississippi John Hurt. How is this possible? To understand it, we have to back up a few decades.

It all began with Ram Dass, albeit indirectly. Back in the infamous ‘60s, Jeffrey Kagel, as our man was then known, was living on a piece of land in upstate New York owned by acidheads who returned from spending time with Ram Dass and, “My friend Steve had so much light coming out of him I said, Write down the directions, I’m leaving right away. And I drove all night.” Kagel spent more than a year in the Ram Dass glow before realizing, “It really wasn’t him, it was coming through him.” He determined to find Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass’s guru in India, but the guru didn’t want to be found. It was only with great difficulty that any info could be pried out of Ram Dass, who finally told him to write to K.K. Sah, another devotee. An entertaining storyteller, KD unraveled this account from “KK” that gives insight into both the guru and the way KD perceived him. KK began:

“I walked in with your letters—there were three by that time—and put them where he was sitting, and began to cut and peel an apple [cause Maharaj-ji had only, like, three teeth, so KK would cut up soft apples and feed him piece by piece].” When KK told Maharaj-ji the letters were from students of Ram Dass, he said “Tell them not to come.” Now, this is the beauty of the show, right? Maharaj-ji had asked KK to take care of Ram Dass, so KK felt it was his duty to serve Ram Dass because it was Maharaj-ji’s instruction. KK felt he was serving Ram Dass by promoting our cause, because we were students of Ram Dass, and now Maharaj-ji himself was interfering with the very service he’d given KK to do. KK began to pout and stopped feeding him the apple, right? So Maharaj-ji said, “What’s the matter?” And KK wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t talk to him. Finally Maharaj-ji threw his arms up in the air and said, “Okay, tell them what you want.” Being a good devotee, KK wasn’t going to make anything up, but what did he say? “If you happen to be traveling in India, the doors are always open.” So that’s the way Maharaj-ji is. He plays it fast and loose as if he doesn’t know what’s going on, but he’s really the great puppet master.”

That was enough of an invitation for KD, who responded very quickly. To those who did not recognize him, the young KD by Balaram Das guru he found might have seemed like just another petulant, aging man—Maharaj-ji himself liked to say he was nobody—but to KD, “He shined like the sun. Do the trees and flowers need instructions on how to grow? Our hearts bloomed in his presence, in that love. There was nothing to teach, no words were necessary. Our hearts opened and we experienced from within what real love is.”

It’s hard to argue with this—who doesn’t want to be unconditionally loved? KD’s words here were recited like a familiar—albeit heartfelt—poem. Still, it’s difficult to get a fix on Maharaj-ji; we Westerners don’t necessarily comprehend the nature of the guru-devotee relationship, and this particular guru was more elusive than most. He had several homes yet moved about frequently and sometimes disappeared entirely. He was widely recognized in India as a saint and is said to have performed miracles, but had no mission to extend his teachings, and there was reportedly “no manipulation, no making people believe or hoping they would see things the way he did.” So what was so compelling? “He loved us from the inside out and you began to feel something that you never felt before and it’s quite natural to want to always live in that feeling.”

If you’re just coming to this party, don’t despair, you may still be able to connect with Maharaj-ji even though he’s left his body. “Sing to him,” KD suggested. “Look at his picture. Ask him to come. Yell at him. Get angry that he isn’t there. Do whatever you have to do.”

It seemed almost frivolous to ask, but nowhere is anything written about Maharaj-ji’s teacher, in a tradition that’s long on lineage. “He never mentioned it as far as we know,” KD answered. More important to KD was the profound spiritual connection. So when Maharaj-ji told him to chant, he did it with fervor.

And then Krishna Das lived happily ever after in spiritual bliss, right? Oh, if only it had been so simple.

Navigating Rough Waters

Before Maharaj-ji died, his final instruction to KD was that same phrase he’d used earlier: “Do what you want.” But it took KD a very long time to figure out what that was. Sex and drugs didn’t work, nor did anything else. Finally, after a dark, tumultuous period he went back to chanting. “I realized that if I didn’t sing with people I would never be able to clean out the dark shadows of my own heart,” he said. “That was the only rope that was going to be thrown to this particular drowning guy.”

Watching KD in the delightful Jeremy Frindel film One Track Heart released in 2013, it’s not entirely clear he’s worked his way through that darkness. There’s a sadness about him.

“Basically I’m depressed, that’s who I’ve been most of my life,” he acknowledged. “Life doesn’t go away when you start to do practice. I’m still dealing with a lot of stuff, and there’s a longing to be living in that love all the time, which I can’t do. But I’m working on it, so for the most part I’m content with the way things are.”

Some of his struggle undoubtedly stems from his Long Island childhood, shared with a sister. His mother was often angry and his father was often gone, and it later turned out mom was an alcoholic (who did clean up for her last 20 years). “But she was not a happy person and she was pretty hard on me,” said KD. “And my father left me at the mercy of this hurricane, which would blow at any time.”

That background was a stark contrast with the love of his guru. “I still haven’t felt anything close to what I felt with Maharaj-ji,” said KD. “It’s a unique relationship. So, uh, yeah.”

What of his love for his daughter Janaki? “She’s great. It’s very intense, but it’s not unconditional. So that’s the difference.” (In fact, she noted in One Track Heart that he was gone a lot during her childhood, but as he remembered it, “I didn’t miss that much.” Such disparity of perception is not unusual between parents and kids.)

“I’m not putting down worldly love relationships,” KD clarified. “Once I was very much in love with a woman. I was telling my Indian father, Mr. Tewari, about it and he was listening very patiently. When I finished he said, ‘My boy, relationships are business. Do your business. Enjoy your business. But love is what lasts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Real love is who we are; it’s not between people. It’s not affection, it’s not caring, not attachment. It’s actually who we are. It’s our true nature.’

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“And someone like Maharaj-ji, a real saint, has become that. So around those people you have the possibility of feeling something that encompasses human emotion. It’s as if… how many colors are there, seven? It’s as if you open your eyes one day and you see an eighth color you’d never seen before. It doesn’t make the other colors any different but it encompasses all those colors. Love is not between people, love is who we are. This is the real thing we’re all looking for. Which we’re not finding, which is why everybody is so unhappy. We’re looking for the right thing but we’ve got bad aim.”

KD-Promo24-color Objectively speaking, KD’s aim seems pretty right on. He’s kind and compassionate—he was on an errand of mercy while talking to WLT—and a loyal friend still close to his BFFs from the ‘60s. He’s immersed in beautiful music and has a strong spiritual practice, yet he’s down-to-earth and open with a ready laugh. Plus at 66 he’s still easy on the eyes. His tall, trim frame seems to glide into place on stage, and his eyes are warm and smiling despite any lingering sadness.

So does he have space in his life for a woman? He does. “She lives in Brazil and we see each other a few times a year for long visits. Not a monogamous committed relationship but it’s a good relationship, and I’ve had other girlfriends over the years. I’m a human being you know—a person, a guy—that’s what we do.”

He said he’d learned a lot from relationships, but claimed he’s difficult. “Relationships are hard and they force you to deal with the stuff hidden in your own heart, so I find it’s very useful for me, and sometimes it’s even enjoyable. I think anybody who’s over 20 can’t really imagine they’re going to find eternal happiness through another person; it’s just not possible, that’s not how human beings are wired. We have to find a way to feed ourselves from within.”

Music or Not

He may not call the chants music, but KD has always played instruments. As a boy he studied piano, cornet and euphonium, and was in a marching band. He enjoys blues, rock ’n’ roll (his rock-infused 2010 album, Heart as Wide as the World, is great fun) and sometimes even a hint of country.

“I like almost all music,” he admitted, but, “When I first heard country blues, Mississippi Delta Blues, I was completely blown away. When I heard Robert Johnson I lost my mind. Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James… this was real music, people singing about their lives. You can feel the ground, the dirt, the earth, the sky, hunger, sadness… it was so real it killed me. So I really got into the blues for a long time. Essentially I’m still a blues singer, as far as I can tell, but it’s kinda cosmic blues.”

Asked what legendary musician he’d like to bring back to jam with if he could, he didn’t hesitate. “I’d have to say KD Performing_by Kailas Ray Charles. The man is unbelievable. I remember when I heard him sing country and western. It’s one of the most amazing things you’ll ever hear in your life, called Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. It is sooo cool, so great.”

Don’t, however, expect any of these styles on KD’s next CD. “Musically I found a groove I like to chant and a way I feel the chants really communicate, so I try to keep it simple,” he said, “not get too involved with the musical shape of things. That’s not really what I’m about.”

It’s so much not what he’s about that he was surprised when the Grammy committee nominated him for an award. It was an odd choice of category—his music isn’t New Age—but for KD, “It was an interesting situation, cause I don’t think about what I do as music. I think about what I do more as meditative chanting. Entering into that loving presence. And the CD they picked to nominate (Live Ananda)… you’d have thought it would have been the one before, right? But it was a very simply done chant record. I was honored and pleased that the simple chant record would get that kind of recognition. And it also made me recognize that I’m not really a part of the music business, it’s so far from what I’m about. I enjoyed it, but it’s not who I am, any more anyway.” So clear did this become that his next CD was crowdfunded through Kickstarter, rather than a record company.

In talking about an earlier detour from his path, KD said, “Desires for fame, money, sex, power… there was no possibility of my doing this chanting the right way, I was going to misuse all this power that was coming to me.” Getting nominated for a Grammy might have kicked up some of that old energy, but, “Nah, I’ve been through that, ya know, how many times do you have to get drunk? The chanting itself is so rewarding,” he said, “it just brings so much love, so much peace, so much inner strength that you can’t even be bothered with that other shit.

“The practice of chanting is really about dissolving your separateness into this vast space where you recognize yourself in a different way,” he explained. “The name is the name of that space within, the sky of the heart within, which really encompasses everything. All we know of the universe is what we perceive through our senses and interpret with our minds, but that’s a very small part of the story. Through these practices we begin to get our sight back. It’s as if we’ve been walking around in the dark and we think this is the way it is, but we don’t think it’s dark, this is just life, right? When the sun starts to rise we’re completely surprised. All of a sudden we’re seeing everything differently. Wow, it’s not all black, the trees are green, the sky is blue, and you can see far distances! Everything looks different when the sun rises, and this is what happens with spiritual practice. It’s very liberating.”

In One Track Heart KD said, “I could probably say the whole thing again and make it sound really mystical but who gives a shit? This is the way it really is.” What else would you expect from a down-to-earth cosmic blues man? This is the way he really is.