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In my lifetime, the closest personal experience
involving a supernatural / paranormal / spiritual / inexplicable by
scientific method event, occurred in the mid nineteen-seventies in
Rio de Janeiro. I was busy working with my then brother-in-law, Raul
Seixas, being rock and roll stars in Brazil required constant
tedious preparation. Raul had just moved to a new apartment in Rio.
It was on the big lake, Lagoa Rodrigo Freitas, which has a
mountainous backside with the lake stretching to a big sandbar that
is heavily populated by the cities of Ipanema and Leblon which form
a barrier separating the lake front from the Atlantic Ocean. The
brand new 3 apartment high rises were sitting at the back of the
lake in a carved out mountain base. From Raul, wife Gloria, and
newest daughter Scarlet’s 10th floor apartment window,
the view was beautifully awe-inspiring. With the reflections off the
lake, Rio De Janeiro’s tall black rocks shooting out of the white
beaches against the blue ocean and sky, and civilization packed in,
a view of man’s role in nature becomes quite evident.
The first weekend in the apartment, Raul was
booked to play a live show in the suburbs on a Saturday night. He
asked me to come over for lunch and afterwards go over the songs we
would play that night. The rest of the band would show up at
Raul’s around six, then, as music director, I would go over the
charts with them. Afterward, we would leave directly to play the
show, which was scheduled to begin at 10 PM.
I arrived around noon, tediously prepared for
the gig. Raul’s maid had prepared an excellent meal- more like a
dinner than a lunch. Afterwards I went to the bathroom and while
looking out its rear view window was surprised that all I could see
was rock. I went around back to the maids’ quarters and could see
where the mountain was solid rock from the ground up to around 150
meters above the building and then I couldn’t see anymore. It was
not unusual for Raul and me to embark on a spontaneous adventure, so
I asked Raul to climb the rocks with me before we got started on the
music, to work off that lunch and just check it out. We took the
back elevator down to the ground level and began looking for a way
up. Raul led me over to another building’s back parking lot and we
began our assent. Raul eyeballed a trail for us to follow, which
took us up above the rooftops of the 20 story buildings where we
encountered a different type of rock formation. Since I was taller
than Raul, and had more reach, I began choosing the way up. I had us
over one hundred feet above the tops of the apartments now out of
our view when I decided to get on a ledge leading to a boulder which
I thought would take us higher. After climbing onto the ledge and
checking it out, I then pulled Raul up to the narrow ledge with me.
The ledge was against the solid rock face and about a foot and a
half wide. It led a few feet over to a protruding boulder, which
measured about 10 feet (3 meters) in diameter and stuck out a couple
of feet beyond the ledge. I envisioned a trajectory, which, if I got
up about a foot and then slid around to the front a couple feet,
would enable me to grab a notch near the top and pull myself up. So
I went for it, in one swift move I committed myself a foot above the
ledge while making a two foot slide to the right, and after securing
my precarious position, discovered I had miscalculated and was short
of the notch by about one foot. As a result, I was spread out wide,
both my arms were stretched clinging to the sides of the boulder. My
feet were suspended and it seemed that only the friction of my body
was holding me to the rounded rock surface and preventing me from
falling a couple hundred of feet to solid rock and certain death.
I could not return to the ledge since I was to the front of
the boulder and gravity would take me if I tried to lower myself and
move to the left. I could not reach up or I would lose my grip and
fall. Raul could not help me either since he was to my side. Raul
and I spent the next 30 minutes trying to figure out a way to get me
off that rock. Then we realized that not only was I stuck, but so
was Raul. Since I had pulled him up the ledge, he could not go back
down for help since he could not reach the places to stand. He also
could not sit down or go up since I was blocking the only other
apparent way off the ledge. We
spent the next hour hoping a helicopter would fly over or somebody
would see us and rescue us by repelling from the other side of the
mountain. However, unfortunately, we had not told anyone we were
going up there and we were so high above the ground that we would
only appear as specks if someone did see us from the ground. After
we had said everything we could think of, the silence came. Every
once in a while bird would fly by and squawk as if laughing at us as
all I could think of was my impending death. If I got a muscle
cramp… I was dead. I didn’t know at the time there were no
earthquakes in Brazil so I had also entertained that possibility, or
high winds. I was thinking about God, humanity, my family, my life,
and preparing myself to die with no regrets and no fear. The sun
began to set as Raul and I seemed to accept our fate. In an instant,
my body became extremely light, and it seemed to lift its self
slightly above the boulder while simultaneously my stomach and chest
seemed to undulate like a snake and lift me to the notch in the rock
where I grabbed it and pulled myself to the top. It happened so
fast, without any conscious effort on my part, that I was startled
that I was safe and life was mine once again. Raul asked me how I
did it and to this day I have no idea how that happened. It was an
intervention by something beyond my cognitive abilities of
recognition. I reached down and pulled Raul off the ledge to the top
of the boulder. We sat there, looking out over that majestic view,
amazed that we had met and cheated death.
Raul led the way from there to get us back down. We ended up
in a different part of town called Gavea and we took a taxi back to
Raul’s apartment. When we got there the band members had already
arrived. Raul said he was emotionally wasted and sent his driver,
Antonio, to the slums (Favela) to buy him some cocaine and Raul
began to drink heavily as he told the guys about our afternoon
adventure. When Antonio returned Raul began snorting these big lines
and he became very serious. Soon the agent who had booked the show
for that night showed up to take us to the club for dinner before
the show. Whenever someone new came into the apartment, Raul would
tell the story all over again, and each time it became more serious.
Raul had managed to work himself into a paranoid state and retreated
to his bedroom supposedly to get ready to leave. I went over a
generic show with the band, selecting Raul’s hits and our regular
Rock and Roll tunes. It was nearly show time and Raul would not come
out of his room. He said he could not deal with the public and
wanted the manager to cancel the show and pay the fine. Raul would
not come out of his room and everyone took a turn going to his door
to try and convince him to come out and do the show for us since we
needed the cash. Finally, around midnight, Raul emerged from his
room. He had consumed nearly an entire bottle of Scotch by himself,
but he was not drunk. He was dwelling on the importance of staring
death in the face that afternoon and he could not stop thinking
about it. When Raul ran out of the cocaine the manager finally
convinced him to go do the show promising to get him more cocaine
after the show. We
arrived at a large gymnasium in the suburbs about an hour later. It
was nearly 2AM and the crowd, of around 2000 people, was hostile
since they had been waiting nearly 4 hours for Raul. We walked
onstage to a mixture of applause and boo’s. We started off with
one of Raul’s hit songs called Al Capone and people began to throw
things at us. A glass full of beer suddenly bounced off of my
guitar, soaking me and my new Gibson. The overhead stage lights were
blinding so I quit playing and moved to the front of the stage to
try and see who threw it because I was enraged and going to go kick
somebody’s ass. Then the whole band quit playing and Raul started
screaming on the microphone. He told them that Brazil was a backward
third world country because of idiots like those throwing things at
us. Raul was so emotional and inspired that the audience could sense
how powerful his words became as he bitched them all out. He told
them the Alternative Society was for the enlightened people of the
world who were not afraid to make changes in their lives and stand
up against their parents or their government for the benefit of all
humans to live life to its fullest extent. After an exhilarating 15
to 20 minute monologue, Raul started off his anthem “Viva
Sociedade Alternativa” and the entire crowd enthusiastically sang
with him. That emotional burst from Raul seemed to charge the
atmosphere with positive energy and gave everybody more than their
money’s worth as they got to really hear what Raul was all about.
The show went on for another hour and a half with everyone
delightfully cheering their newest rock idol, Raul Seixas.
Rock Lesson # 714 : Sometimes a glimpse of
death can give you a surge of life.
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