Ivan Suvanjieff recalls his first meeting with Adam Yauch
This was around the time that we came up with the idea of PeaceJam. I was with Dawn Gifford Engle, my wife and co-founder. We were thinking, yeah, this could easily have a music component to it. Peace and Jam, right? So I read somewhere in some magazine, maybe Spin or something -- this was back in '94 -- that [Adam] Yauch had done some Buddhist research and all the rest of it. So I thought, "Well, I'll go to this guy first."Dawn Engle picks up the story from here:We worked together over a year, actually. We were going to do PeaceJam. I don't know if you know about PeaceJam at all, but PeaceJam, when we first had the idea, was just going to be a five-year project, and we were doing it jointly with Adam Yauch, and the Gold Mountain people were helping us. The idea was that it was going to be an annual music concert and there was going to be an education component, too, that went year-round.So I called Gold Mountain [Entertainment] and got ahold of John Cutcliffe, a guy they called JC; I don't know if he works there anymore. But he invited us out to San Diego for a Lollapalooza, and we met Yauch backstage there, and talked to him about it. He had just jumped out of the swimming pool. He had just gotten off stage and went directly to the swimming pool that was attached to the gymnasium. So he came out in some sort of weird pair of underwear, soaking wet, and Billy Corgan was there playing basketball, shooting hoops. So that was the setup. We talked to him, and he sounded interested. So we got together and talked some more.
So we talked to all the Nobel laureates, who had agreed to be part of PeaceJam. We had eight, including the Dalai Lama, and they were excited about it. We asked the Dalai Lama if he would take a meeting with Adam Yauch, because Adam Yauch really wanted to meet him. So we set that up, and it was pretty funny. He was so excited about meeting the Dalai Lama that he rushed to a plane and jumped on it and flew to India. When he got off the plane, he didn't have a visa, so they wouldn't let him in.
We were actually at Erin Potts's house, who founded Milarepa with him, his foundation. We were staying at her house, doing all this planning to get everything going, and it was very funny when we got the call from him. It was around dinnertime, and we got this call that he was stranded at the New Delhi airport in India, and that they wouldn't let him into the country, and what could we do? So I had to get on the phone and call up to Dharmasthala and get the Dalai Lama's office to call down to New Delhi, to the airport, and we had to, like, organize a visa over the phone, long distance.
But anyway, he went up and met with the Dalai Lama, and it made a big difference in his life -- you know, he ended up marrying a Tibetan girl [Dechen Wangdu], and so much ended up coming out of that meeting. After working together for about a year, by the fall of 1995, it was clear that he really wanted to focus just on Tibet, and we wanted to work with all the Nobel laureates, so he went off and took the music part of it, and that became the Tibetan Freedom Concert, and we took the education part of it, and that became the PeaceJam program. It was a really wonderful collaboration, and those ideas coming together, us coming together with Adam Yauch, two really fabulous things came out of it.