In 2001, I wrote a comic about September 11th that was published in the anthology “9-11: Emergency Relief.” Graphic designer Chris Pitzer, who worked on “9-11,” asked me to write something for a new anthology he was putting together for his new publishing company, AdHouse Books. It was called Project: Telstar. He told me that the stories should be about “robots and outer space.” He was in Virginia, I was in Calgary, and I can’t remember if we even talked on the phone, or whether this plan was made over email (which was still kind of a new thing). Long story short, I wrote an outer-space story that, unfortunately, didn’t include robots. I always feel bad that this story probably wasn’t what Chris P. had been envisioning. He invited me, not realizing that I was a 20-something scatterbrained flight attendant who hadn’t really done something like this before. (And who didn’t know anything about robots.)

Anyway, the book was beautiful! The cover art was by Dave Cooper:

The interior pages of the book were black and white, with metallic blue highlights. In 2002, this meant me drawing the pages on paper, and then putting tracing paper over those pages and filling in the spots where the blue highlights should go. Then scanning the tracing paper and sending it to Chris, who had to try to piece it all together. As you’ll see, my tracing paper highlights didn’t line up perfectly. I did most of the work on layovers between flights to Frankfurt! So, my story definitely is not perfect, but the other contributors to this book were amazing! There were 27 contributors, and one of them was TOM GAULD! Wow!

Here’s the story, with some annotations after each page.

Planet Waves is, of course, the name of Bob Dylan’s 1973 album.

Gravityman: a superhero invented by my then-boyfriend’s roommate, and modeled after him.

High school me: that “M” was on my real high school t-shirt.

My friend Tom helpfully supplied the name “Zeblor.”

Lutz, the East German beaurocrat redistributing East German property after the fall of the wall, was based on a guy I knew who did that kind of work for real, back then.

I did actually go on a student exchange to Germany, which included some trips to the coast of the North Sea, but I did not really inherit an island.

The last panel is my homage to Herge’s “The Black Island.” But the island in my picture is a inspired by an island in a painting by Lyonel Feininger, called “Coast of Nevermore.”

If you don’t know about Feininger, you can find out more about him in my Telstar comic - read on! I mentioned him in the very first couple of pages of the drawing book, and I wrote about how his work inspires me, here in an old blog post.

The picture of Gravityman on his planet owes a bit to “The Little Prince.”

Tycho Brahe and the island of Uraniburg were real!

Kepler’s “Music of the Spheres” ideas were real, too! So is the text I copied onto this page.
Max Klapra was not real. At least, not as far as I could find out. In 1990, an Ouija board told me that a ghost called Max Klapra, the descendant of a Hanseatic sea merchant, had a message for me. When I needed a medieval North Sea character for this story, I thought of him.

Oh, and I forgot that Gravityman found me on my old website, thedrawingbook.com! Please don’t go there to find me in 2025. That website is still up - because I don’t know how to take it down! I haven’t updated it in ten years. It’s full of dead links. But that’s a problem for another day.

My space ship is based on Feininger’s 1930 painting “The Market Church at Halle.” It is not really hanging in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, but my friend and I really did go there, while I was writing this comic.

Subscribe now

At the University of Toronto, I did not really study music and quasi-physics. And I didn’t put “Chance favours the prepared mind” up on my wall, until I read it in a Margaret Mahy novel in the late 1990s.

It’s true that, in 1996 while living on Walmer Road in Toronto, I realized that Bob Dylan music was the most potent substance in the universe! It’s also true that my friend Phil kindly sent me many bootlegged live performances. They were on tapes and CDs back then. These days, you can find them on sites like the excellent bobserve.com.

I was stumped for a solution for a way to travel instantaneously between my space ship and my home on earth, so my friend Tom suggested, “a renegade Harkonnen selling SPICE out of his trunk.” This sure added a layer to my already-ridiculous story, but I thought it was pretty funny and I loved “Dune”… and I didn’t have a better idea… so that’s how that part got in there.

The music playing during the ship’s launch, “When the night comes falling from the sky” (the live version with the E Street Band), is an incredible song that I think really could power a space ship!

In 2003, I was not actually spending time on a secret space ship. I was writing an essay about Margaret Mahy. It was published in this anthology of essays. (Maybe I should have stuck to essay anthologies, instead of comics anthologies!) That’s why “Tycho Potter rules” is taped above my desk. He’s a character in Mahy’s novel “The Catalogue of the Universe.” He was named after Tycho Brahe, the man with the golden nose - and he was a Potter long before Harry.

”Hazel” is one of the tracks on “Planet Waves.” I guess I thought was appropriate for space travel since it mentions “Moon dust in yer eye.” It’s funny (to me) that I also included the lyrics, “Yer tall and…” from some live version I can’t find now, where Bob seems to be at a loss for compliments to Hazel, and just mumbles that she’s “tall and...” Well, I thought it was funny.

I really did have a dog (I wrote about her in this Drawing Book episode), whom I often wished I could bring along on my flights and layovers. I really was a flight attendant who went to Frankfurt about once a week.

The books on the top shelf are all attributed to friends of mine, some of whom wrote real books! And on the bottom shelf, there’s Mahy, along with “Sport” by Louise Fitzhugh, and “Apple Bough” by Noel Streatfeild. They were both important books for me, growing up. I wrote about Apple Bough here, a long time ago.

I think Gravityman says “Ola” because the real-life guy who inspired his character, was learning Spanish. “Don’t fall apart on me tonight,” is a Bob Dylan song, of course.

There you have it - a silly, and way too complicated, story. But a fun one, I hope!

I like that this comic was drawn on paper. I still have the original pages somewhere in my basement. I don’t have digital files of these images. To share them here, I opened up the book and scanned the pages.

“Project: Telstar” is out of print, although I still have a couple of copies. If you can find it, it’s worth reading for Tom Gauld’s story, alone - the saddest robot story you’ll ever read. I was going to include the first couple of panels in here (along with a few other pictures), but Substack is telling me that I’ve reached my limit.

Speaking of reaching my limit, I want to mention that I might start posting comics every second week, instead of weekly, for a while. I love doing this, but it’s getting hard to justify spending time on unpaid work when I have clients who are waiting for me to finish my real work! You see, for the past year, I have had long covid, and unfortunately, things are getting worse instead of better, health-wise. Maybe I’ll write about that sometime - but for now, my productive work time is quite limited, so I have to use it carefully.

I really appreciate the folks who have chipped in! If you like these stories, you are welcome to sign up for free, share with others, and/or make a one-time or an ongoing donation! It sure helps. I will look forward to getting back to The Drawing Book after a short break!

Bon voyage!

Over the last year, I shared some old comics I wrote about Bob Dylan, and I pretty much got to the end of them. But a couple of days ago, a Calgary friend mentioned Dylan’s wonderful 1965 song Love Minus Zero/No Limit, and that reminded me of this still-unpublished story. So, dear comics readers: be warned, this one is a bit of a deep dive into Dylan! I wrote WAY more about this, than I should have. Even the Dylan fans may be deterred. If you like, just skip the essay and read the comics!

Back in 2003, I wrote in The Drawing Book about the then-recent revelation that Bob’s album Love and Theft seemed to have stolen some lines from the novel Confessions of a Yakuza. Was Bob a thief? Is it ok for artists to steal from each other? Those are big questions, which prompted these reflections…

(By the way, those lines from Sweetheart Like You have sure been on my mind a lot in the wake of recent political events in the western world. But I digress.) On to the next page, and my theory about Love Minus Zero: No Limit. I’m pretty curious to hear what you think about this.

Middlemarch!

I read George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch in a fourth year English class in 1994, just at the same time I was really getting into Dylan. To me, the connection seemed obvious! But I’ve asked lots of Dylan fans about this theory over the years, and never found anyone who had noticed it. Just now, I searched “Bob Dylan - Middlemarch” and I found two links. One was to my own site (I blogged about this in 2013). But the other one was a 2021 article by prolific Dylan author Jochen Markhorst on the Untold Dylan site! Markhorst knows his Dylan (and by the way, he’ll be the featured guest at the Bob Dylan Book Club meeting on February 9th, to talk about Blood on the Tracks!) I was so excited. Maybe someone else was going to confirm my theory after all these years?

But Markhorst didn’t think so. He acknowledged that Middlemarch was about a banker’s niece, but wrote:

“…it is unlikely that an unbridled, slightly revved-up, 23-year-old cool hipcat in Greenwich Village like Dylan would have wrestled through those 800 pages, let alone been touched by them.”

Well, I am no Dylan expert. But it’s well known that Bob has always been a voracious reader, so I don’t think it’s impossible that he read Middlemarch. I read it when I was 21. In 2019, it was selected as the “greatest British novel of all time,” so it was probably on a few course lists in the 1960s.

We don’t know, either, whether Bob really read and was “touched by” Confessions of a Yakuza, either - but he was still able to borrow a few lines from the book. Even if Bob just flipped through Middlemarch, I think he could have been inspired to put the reference into a song. And even if he didn’t read Middlemarch himself, I wonder if he could have heard about the story from some literary folks in that Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene. After all, as Bob says in Love Minus Zero:

“In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations…”

What if Love Minus Zero is painting a picture of Bob’s experience talking with those book-reading, quotation-repeating folks mentioned in the song? Maybe Bob joined, or overheard, a conversation about the novel, even if he hadn’t read it himself. After all, the novel’s subplot about the idealistic country doctor who marries a superficial, materialistic banker’s niece, is one of the most interesting aspects of the novel: it’s about the tragedy of realizing you’ve married the wrong person, and figuring out what to do when your dreams fail you. If you were talking about the book, it’s the part you’d probably talk about.

It isn’t impossible to imagine that Bob found himself in a conversation, maybe with some scholarly folks, about Lydgate, the young doctor who marries the banker’s niece. You might wonder why this subject would have stuck in his mind. It could have been that he had the subject of marriage on his mind. Love Minus Zero is widely understood to be about Dylan’s soon-to-be bride, Sara. The song release, and their wedding, both took place in 1965.

As I was thinking about all this, I listened to an episode of the late, great Pod Dylan. Rob Kelly discussed Love Minus Zero with his guest, noting (I’m paraphrasing) that Dylan sets up the heroine of his song as someone superior to those superficial folks who do things like “make promises by the hours.” As Rob put it, “He’s complimenting the person he’s singing about, by knocking somebody else!” I think that’s absolutely right, and I wonder if the “somebody else” isn’t just anybody. The superficial person who could be bought by a valentine, the person who thinks that success is only success, the person who has no time for failure… it’s a perfect description of Rosamond, the banker’s niece. She’s everything the heroine of the song is not.

I’m no good at math, but the song’s weird title is worth a mention. According to Dylan, the title “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” is meant to represent a mathematical equation, a fraction that expresses infinite love. (That’s pretty cool.) One thing I didn’t know, was something I just read on Wikipedia: “…the title is based on gambling terminology which would mean that all love is a risk.^[12]" I have no idea about this theory, but picking the right person to get married to, is surely one of the riskiest choices you can make (and that’s one of the takeaways of Middlemarch).

Wuthering Heights!

Well, since we got this far, you might as well stick around for one more theory about “Love Minus Zero.” It’s about the last two lines of the song:

The wind howls like a hammer, the night blows cold and rainy
My love she’s like some raven at the window with a broken wing.

A lot of folks seem to think that this is a reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven,” but I really disagree. The creepy raven in Poe’s poem isn’t anybody’s love. (Can you imagine comparing your love to the raven in that poem????) And the raven isn’t at a window. Famously, it’s “rapping at my chamber door.” It’s a door, not a window! There are no windows in that poem!

But who is a lover trying to get in though a window, on a night when “the wind howls like a hammer, the night blows cold and rainy?” The ghost of Catherine Earnshaw, in the novel “Wuthering Heights.” (Yes, the same one Kate Bush wrote about in her 1978 song “Wuthering Heights.” You know, the one that goes: “Let me in at your window!”)

I read Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights in the same class about 19th century English literature. It doesn’t seem impossible that the two novels could have come up in the same conversation. If my theories are right, the song sets up the singer’s love as a foil to Rosamond, the superficial banker’s niece - but at the end, his love is compared to Catherine, a true and faithful lover even after her death.

What do you think?

Subscribe now

After all that, there’s one more page in this comic about love and theft. (For the record, I was wrong about “Counting Crows” - the band in question was “Hootie and the Blowfish”).

Ok, enough about that! Have a listen to Love Minus Zero. It’s a beautiful song, no matter what it’s about.

P.S. I thought I was done, but I realized there’s one more place where you can find “Bob Dylan” and “Middlemarch” on the same page. It’s in this mini-comic I wrote in maybe 2001, called “The Art of Finding your Balance.” In this comic, I mention Mr. Causabon (a character in Middlemarch, who struggled for years to write a gigantic, all-encompassing scholarly work) with Dylan (who effortlessly dashed off dozens of song ideas in no time at all). That’s another story, but this felt like the right place to mention it! Ok, that’s all for now. Go and read some 19th century literature - or listen to Dylan - or both?

It’s time for me to share some comics! I’ve been alternating between comics from the old Drawing Book, and comics about Bob Dylan - and I’m due for a Dylan comic. I don’t have too many more of these, but I found a Dylan reference in this old comic from my old series Sam Hester’s Ramsay, a monthly comic I wrote for my community newsletter for a few years. It’s a December comic, so there’s a Christmas tree in the last panel. And there are a few other trees, as you will see…

When I first heard Dylan’s song, “I’ll Remember You” (a lovely, thoughtful song from the strange but awesome album Empire Burlesque), I thought the use of “piney” as an adjective was kind of silly. Can you really say something, even a wood, is “piney”? Apparently you can. There’s even a place called the Piney Woods - maybe that’s what Dylan was thinking about.

But when I hear that line, I think of the Reader Rock Garden, the rooky wood near my house.

It’s amazing to me that this shady, flowery, foresty oasis in Calgary’s downtown once looked like this, apparently (I found these photos of the Reader garden and house in an Avenue Magazine article by Andrew Guilbert).

William Reader was Calgary’s Parks superintendent from 1913 to 1942. The land where he made his home, just south of the Stampede grounds, is a beautiful forested park today. Thanks, Reader! (Although, rumour has it that Reader was responsible for introducing “creeping bellflower” to Calgary, a pretty but persistent weed that is nigh impossible to get rid of. Oh well, his intentions were good.)

Subscribe now

William Reader helped early Calgarians to get thinking about the way plants, flowers, trees and green spaces could play an important role in the city. (Here’s an article about his work.) Today, Calgary still has a long way to go to make the most of natural infrastructure, but there are some cool things happening - like the City’s program that gives away trees for free, and this interactive map of all the (City-owned) trees in Calgary!

And speaking of beautiful, historic, forested places, I’m thinking this week of the town of Jasper, in the mountains of western Alberta, which was damaged by wildfires a few days ago. I’m not from Jasper, so that isn’t my story to tell. But you can help those affected by the Jasper wildfire by donating to the Canadian Red Cross, either on their website (www.redcross.ca), by calling 1-800-418-1111, or by texting ABFIRES to 45678 to donate $10.

I hope the community can recover and rebuild, and I also hope that decision-makers can learn from this tragedy, so that future disasters like this one can be avoided.

We’ll remember you.

Here are a few tree drawings and paintings from the files in my basement! A sketch for a 1999 mural concept: a painting of the house and spruce tree that I saw from my bedroom window when I was about fourteen; a forest painting; and a work-in-progress tree painting (I painted the sky blue, later) from the early 2000s.

Share

In 2008, Bob Dylan played some Alberta shows, and I went to see him in Calgary (just a short walk from my house) and in Lethbridge (a few hours’ drive away). I associate both of those shows with some memorable and scary experiences. On my way back from Lethbridge, my car’s headlights malfunctioned and briefly went off - so, for a couple of seconds, I was driving in complete blackness. That was kind of scary. But luckily, I figured out how to get them on again, so it was ok.

And on the way to the Calgary show…

Now my kids are big, and they good-naturedly tolerate my Bob Dylan mania. Just yesterday, my younger son said something about climbing through a window, so of course I said, “Did you know Bob Dylan has a song called Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” (And then I played the song for him, of course.) Afterwards, he said: “Of course Bob Dylan has a zany song about every single subject I could ever come up with.” And, yes, that’s true.

Subscribe now

By the way, in Lethbridge in 2008, I remember that Bob played Chimes of Freedom, a song he hasn’t played that often! Here’s a recording of the same song from a couple of nights earlier on the same tour. And here’s the official 1964 version (much better quality).

Some of my old comics are about adventures following Bob Dylan’s Neverending Tour, and since it was Bob’s birthday a couple of days ago on May 24, this felt like the right time to share this one.

Most of the shows I saw (and most of the comics I wrote) were between 1996 and 2000. After that, the pace slowed down. This comic is from November 2003. By this time, I had a new boyfriend who was feeling apprehensive about the fast-approaching cold Alberta winter. Because I was a flight attendant with Air Canada, it was easy enough for me to suggest that we get out of there and jump on a flight to Frankfurt. And of course I had an ulterior motive: Bob and his band were playing a show there!

This comic features the lyrics of Dylan’s song “All Along the Watchtower.”

Subscribe now

Of course, the band closed the show with “All Along the Watchtower.”

I remember that this was a very fun show, although it didn’t feature any new-to-me songs except for the opener, Down Along the Cove. Here’s a recording of that song performed about a week later in Amsterdam. You can see the whole Frankfurt show setlist here on the Bobserve site.

The folks I drew in the last panel were friends who I often used to run into at Dylan shows: an American guy and a German woman who, like me, was a flight attendant. She worked for Lufthansa and had followed Bob literally around the world (Lufthansa flew to a lot more destinations than Air Canada). Once, she’d had Bob and his band on her flight, and she worked in the first class section where they sat. She told me that when other crew members wanted to come past the curtain to get a glimpse of Bob, she didn’t let them in. She wanted him to have his privacy. She said, “I stood between them… I guarded him with my life!”

I asked her if she got his autograph or told him that she was a fan. She said no, she hadn’t wanted to disturb him. But she admitted: “I saved his fork!”

If you are looking for more Bob Dylan stuff in honour of Bob’s birthday, check out the new and great Dylan podcast Songs of Experience, which is stepping in to fill the shoes of the late, great Pod Dylan - it features a great conversation about some unexpected Bob Dylan connections with the movie Titanic! (My links are to Apple Podcasts, but you can find these pods in a few other places, too.)

Happy belated birthday, Bob!

Share

(Back then, I didn’t know that the famous quote, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” originated with the British essayist and political thinker Samuel Johnson. But that’s one of the good things about Dylan’s music… it’s full of references that can teach you a lot!)

That Bob Dylan quote comes from a song called Sweetheart Like You, by the way. And the next line in that quote? “Steal a little and they throw you in jail - steal a lot and they make you kings.” Yeah, that still sounds relevant!

Feels like we are living through some hard times. I am not feeling too optimistic about 2024! Will we (humanity!) ever figure out how to get this right?? This stresses me out! Luckily, I found this half-finished page in the old drawing book…

I don’t often have either of those old tunes in my head, anymore. It’s nice to remember them! You might like them, too! Musetta’s Waltz (by Giacomo Puccini) is beautiful: here’s a classic version of it (and here’s an instrumental version from the movie Moonstruck, that’s got a bit of a swing to it). As for the love theme from A Fish Called Wanda - why did I ever get that in my head?? It looks like John Du Prez composed the score for that movie. Here’s a clip that features the tune I have in mind (about 1:15 in, when it shows the fish in the fish tank). It’s lovely!

Sorry I didn’t have more to say about Bob Dylan today. But there are still a few more Dylan comics coming up in the weeks ahead!

In these stressful times, I hope you have beautiful tunes in your head to help get you through - whatever they may be!

Subscribe now

I don’t have a vivid memory of this show, but I remember that the band played Rank Strangers To Me, a cover tune that’s surely one of the highlights of Dylan’s album Down in the Groove. Looking at the Bobserve website, it looks like this was one of only 27 performances of that song (and this one was the last one).

And I also remember that Dylan played John Brown, the only time I heard him sing that song. (I don’t see a recording of that performance online, but here’s one from another show around the same time.) But if you don’t know that song, you probably want to start with an older version from the 1960s like this one. It’s a powerful anti-war story, and I actually just played it for my ten-year-old son the other day, because he was reading a historical novel about the first world war. (He liked the song!)

Subscribe now

You can see the whole set list of that 2001 Terre Haute show here. But here’s the picture that I discovered in my old box of papers. I really like the way it says a lot about the band at that time. The band members are all watching Bob, and Bob is just doing his thing. The Charlie Sexton/Larry Campbell harmonies on Rank Strangers to Me are what I remember about that show.

I noticed that it says “Bob Dylan” in messy handwriting along the neck of Dylan’s guitar - I wonder if that was really written there, or why I wrote it?

Terre Haute in 1978

Back in those days, Dylan was well known for playing lots of shows in small or midsized cities all over the place. After looking at these old pictures, I wondered how often he’d played in Terre Haute. Thanks to the Bobserve website, I see that Dylan only ever played one other show in Terre Haute, way back in 1978. I just took a look at the set list and… wow! Not only did he play 27 songs (!), there are some really great ones. First of all, Stepchild, a song I was hardly aware of (the link goes to an article on the Untold Dylan website that talks a little bit about the song), but also one of those very rare performances of Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat), which was only ever performed in 1978! Back in January when I had the pleasure of talking about Where Are You Tonight on the late, great podcast Pod Dylan, I didn’t even know that any of those 1978 renditions were out there, but I’ve since discovered that they are (here’s one)!

Oh, and the closing number of that 1978 Terre Haute show: Changing of the Guards. An incredible, mysterious, magical tune. That’s one I would have really liked to hear live. You see, there was this movie I seen [sic] one time, and it was called Last Night. (A good old Canadian movie.) In the movie, the end of the world is nigh, and everyone is scrambling to figure out what they should do during those last few hours. On an earlier page of The Drawing Book, I wrote down a few suggestions for what I’d do. Here was one of them:

Yeah, any of those song choices would be good ones. What do you think?

The world might not be ending, but these days, it sure feels like there is a lot of bad news. Rediscovering old Bob Dylan comics and sharing them with you, is one of the things that’s bringing me joy in these times. Thanks for reading!

Share

I remember the stressful start to the show, but I don’t have a strong memory of the show itself. I do remember, though, the next show, the next night, in Ann Arbor. Before the show, there was a gathering of Bob Dylan friends, at the house of someone who lived in some forested place that was maybe just outside the city… we stood around under the trees in a clearing full of dead leaves and warmed ourselves at a fire. I drew the fire. Who were those people? I don’t even really remember, but I remember them as friends.

For some reason, I have a vivid memory of this show, more than so many others. I remember walking along the autumn streets, through the university, to the venue. I remember the theatre and where we were seating (on the floor). I remember dancing, I remember

the band, and I particularly remember loving Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell singing harmonies on Duncan and Brady and Searching for a Soldier’s Grave. (You can see the whole set list here.) I remember leaving town the next day, getting on a bus to go somewhere (an airport?), and putting my Time Out Of Mind CD into my discman (or whatever those portable CD players were called) so I could replay the sounds of Standing in the Doorway, which I’d heard the night before.

Subscribe now

“Let’s Work Up a Good Swet!”

After that trip, there were a few months without shows. But in the spring of the next year, Bob Dylan was off to Japan, and I decided to go. My brother had been part of a Japanese exchange program (the coolest exchange program you’ll ever encounter, the Ship For World Youth), and wanted to go back to Japan. He had a friend who offered us a place to stay in Tokyo. And of course, back then, because I was a flight attendant with Air Canada, it was easy to travel - as long as you didn’t mind sweating a little as you waited, with your fingers crossed, to see if you’d get a standby seat on the flight. We were lucky, and we did.

Unfortunately, I didn’t do much sketching on this trip. The thing I remember the most about it, was that Tokyo was freezing cold. No more working up a sweat for us. Unlike in Canada, no buildings in Japan had central heating, and the early spring temperatures hovered just above freezing the whole time we were there. I remember having a hot bath in the smallest bathtub I’d ever been in, which warmed me up a little.

It seems crazy to think that we actually travelled to Japan to see a show without having tickets lined up, but apparently that’s how we did it, since the first line in my Japanese word bubble says (kippu o-nimai kudasai), as far as I can tell: “Please give me two tickets.” This was long, long before Google translate - how did I figure out what to say? Maybe we had a phrase book written especially for concert-goers? Anyway, we got the tickets somehow, I guess!

kono butai wa sugoi desu: “This stage is amazing!”

bando to issho desu: “I’m with the band.”

The setlist wasn’t too far removed from the ones at the November shows I’d seen just a few months before. I remember that our seats were up high, on the side of the auditorium, so that we looked down at a side view of the stage. I think I remember taking pictures and having my film taken away from me (that happened to me at a few shows) - anyway, I didn’t leave with any pictures. I did take some pictures of the crowd outside, which I can’t find now. In the throng of people outside the venue, there was a band of buskers playing Bob Dylan songs in Japanese. What a cool and surreal experience. And so nice to see a show with my brother, too.

In the book where I keep my Dylan concert tickets, I also found this. Wonder what it was from? It has some good advice, though - I think?

Thanks for reading! There are still a few more Bob Dylan comics in my old sketchbooks, so stay tuned in the weeks ahead!

Share

In an earlier Bob Dylan adventure story, I wrote about going to see a couple of shows in Santa Cruz, California. Not only did I get to enjoy a couple of incredible shows (Highlands!!), I also met a guy who became my boyfriend! In the months that ensued, there was a whirlwind romance that involved a lot of travel between Calgary and California. At last, we decided that if we were going to have to travel to be together, we might as well travel somewhere beautiful - like Italy! (Remember, this was when I was a flight attendant. And before Sept. 11th, 2001, hopping on standby flights was so easy.) Anyway, we planned a trip to Italy in the spring of 2000, and believe it or not, it just happened that Bob Dylan was planning a trip there, too. Fate!

I drew a lot of pictures on this trip, but I’ll save those for another, non-Bob-related Drawing Book story.

After a couple of weeks travelling, we arrived at the train station in Florence, to be met by lots of locals trying to convince us to stay at their hotels, hostels and penziones. One lady was particularly persistent, and in an attempt to deter her, I told her, “we don’t want to stay in the city. We need to stay at a place near the Palasport…” (the stadium where the Dylan concert was happening, outside of the city centre). “Ma poi!” this lady cried (or something like that), “our place is right beside Palasport!” What could we do? We went with her and her son Bernardo, who (she assured us) made the best cappuccini in Florence.

And that night we walked over a little footbridge from her street over to the stadium to see the show!!

You can see the boyfriend figures rather large in the picture - for me, this trip was as much about him, as it was about Bob!

The set list was about as close to a “Greatest Hits” set list as Bob ever gets… there are some real classics in there, along with the obligatory obscurities. I don’t see this show online anywhere, but I can find recordings of my two “firsts” from that show (songs that I was hearing live for the first time, that evening). First, a recording of the “really nice” version of “Visions of Johanna” that he played that evening, to an appreciative crowd; and a recording (from another show) of the catchy, upbeat traditional cover “Duncan and Brady.”

Subscribe now

But our blissful holiday was not going to end as blissfully as it had begun. This trip was the longest time my long-distance boyfriend and I had spent in the same place, and we were starting to feel the strain of that too-much-togetherness. You can tell how upset I was, when you see that on the next page of the drawing book, I even referred to my cool new Bob Dylan t-shirt as “this silly t-shirt.”

By this time, the blissful trip had become decidedly un-blissful. It was time to sing the blues. This part isn’t about Bob Dylan, but I’m including this page because of the Dylan reference in my made-up song.

It was time for me to leave Firenze. So I did - without the boyfriend.

The relationship didn’t last much longer and I spent about a year with a broken heart. But luckily there were still some more Bob Dylan shows in my future - I’ll write about them in the next episode of Bob Dylan Comics. In the meantime, stay well and don’t get your hearts broken!

Share

Because I’d spent some time in Germany and learned to speak German, I got to work on the Calgary-Frankfurt flight. It was usually a weekly cycle: leave one afternoon, fly all night, stay in Mainz (just outside Frankfurt) for 24 hours, fly back the next day. Usually those 24 hours were spent doing a lot of sleeping. But not this time.

It was the summer of 2000, and Dylan was playing a show in Stuttgart, only about 3 hours away! It wasn’t too far from where I’d lived myself, and I figured I knew my way around. And I counted on the excellent train system to get me there. I guess you could say it all worked out, but I must have been tired on the flight home, which left about noon the next day…

Ensinger! The sourest, fizziest, fizzy water of all German carbonated waters. You can’t find it everywhere in Germany, but I found it in Stuttgart, hooray!

Look at how old-fashioned things were back then. I had a little battery-powered alarm clock with me on the train - not a phone. And I called my new long-distance boyfriend (whom I’d met at my most recent Dylan show, as recounted in this adventure) on a coin-operated pay phone at the train station.

Looks like I had a rolled-up show poster beside me on that luggage cart. I guess I still have that poster, now that I think about it.

As for the show? I’m afraid I don’t remember it too well, but I remember hearing “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” near the end and loving it. You can see the whole set list here.

Actually, you can see the set list here, too - on the other side of this rather large ticket, scribbled down by me in the dark! It’s pretty messy, but I see I wrote down a few notes about some of the songs - like “slow” describing “Can’t Wait,” “Ophelia” next to “Desolation Row,” (maybe he played that verse?) etc.

At the bottom of the ticket, there’s a name and an email address. At this show, I met a woman who was wearing a leopard-skin pillbox hat, like me! She was flight attendant, like me (she worked for Lufthansa). She’d followed Bob everywhere, planning her flight schedule around his tour. And she had some great stories about her adventures. Once she had Bob and his band on her flight, in the upper deck of the 747. She said she wouldn’t let any crew members or passengers come in past the curtain, to goggle at Bob and bother him. She stood at the curtain and blocked the way. “I guarded him with my life!” she told me.

Did she goggle at Bob herself, while she had him in her airplane section for a whole flight? Did she try to talk with him, ask for his autograph? No. “But I saved his fork,” she admitted.

Subscribe now

These days, in 2024, things are so busy! I haven’t got much free time this week, which is why it’s such a short post for now. If you need more Bob Dylan in your life, check out the latest release of Pod Dylan featuring a lovely interview with the legendary Happy Traum. See you next time!

P.S. I feel like I have to add this. If you have some time between flights and you get to go to sleep (even if you only get back to your hotel at 3:43 AM), it’s a “layover.” If it’s just a short stop between flights, and there’s no sleeping involved, it’s a “stopover.” I heard someone yesterday talking about their “layover” between connecting flights. Nope. That’s just a “stopover” - take it from me, an old flight attendant!

Share

Anyway, that guy was now living out in San Francisco, and when we heard that there were some California shows coming up in the spring of 2000, it seemed like a great opportunity to head down. It was cool for me to meet my friend’s friend in person, after all this time – in the drawing book, I described him as “a figure of legend.”

But the shows were not in San Francisco - they were in Santa Cruz, about an hour and a half’s drive south. I think this was the trip where we realized we hadn’t brought any music to listen to (this was before the days of digital streaming)… and we had a strict rule that we could only listen to Bob Dylan music on a Bob Dylan road trip. Luckily, one or the other of us dug up a cassette tape of Street-Legal. And so Street-Legal it was, for the whole trip – on repeat. A road trip that confirmed my especial love for that album, which remains my favourite to this day! (I got to talk about Street-Legal’s greatest song, “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)” on the wonderful podcast Pod Dylan, a couple of months ago.) (That previous link was to the Google version of the podcast, but here it is on Apple Podcasts, too.)

In the picture above, we were sitting on the sidewalk. Why? Because, strange as it may sound, we’d come all the way to California without tickets. It wasn’t the way it is now – like last fall, when tickets to Bob Dylan’s 2023 Toronto shows at Massey Hall sold out within minutes of being released online, at ridiculous prices. Back then, you could expect to buy last-minute tickets at the venue, or get some from scalpers or just folks whose plans had changed. We travelled to all our shows on standby, thanks to my Air Canada flight passes, without knowing for sure that we’d get there - and so it never made sense to buy tickets ahead. We’d always managed to get in, before. But that night proved to be more precarious than most.

The show was about to start, and somehow we heard a rumour that there were a few open spots remaining. It was a small venue - the Boblinks website tells me the seating capacity at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium only holds 1957 people. I wish I could find an old photo, which I still have somewhere, of the venue marquee, that still showed the lineup from the night before: Neil Young had just played there.

Word came down the line that the venue was going to release the extra tickets to the first ones in line. Luckily, we were pretty close to the front. We held on to our spots and dreamed about the perfect set list.

We talked to the people near us in line. Waiting just behind us was a long-haired guy in a bright red mechanic’s suit. We remarked on his suit and he told us this story. He was actually a student at Stanford, but some years before, he’d been working as a mechanic. One day, he heard about the chance to see a Bob Dylan show and dashed out to see it without having time to change out of his bright red suit. Ever since then, that had been the lucky suit that he wore to every Bob Dylan show - wearing it, he felt that he was guaranteed to get a ticket. If I remember right, this show would be his twentieth show. I remember that because this would be my twentieth show, too.

But it was not to be. When the venue folks came out to release the extra tickets, they didn’t give them to the first people who were lined up - but, instead, to random people throughout the line. Our Stanford friend wasn’t in luck, but amazingly, the three of us all got tickets, and we were in.

After all that, our hopes were high. Maybe that’s why I felt so disappointed by the show that I called it “The Most Disappointing Show Ever.”

Some of the show reviews I found online confirm that the band wasn’t at its best that night. But… how could I have called that a predictable set list?!? Sure, the then-current standards were all there in their usual places - I’d heard them all before. I guess that’s what I meant. But there were some incredible standouts. Willie Dixon’s “Hoochie Coochie Man,” (made famous by Muddy Waters in performances like this one) one of only three times Bob has ever performed the song; “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior” by Frances J. Crosby and William H. Doane, one of only five performances ever; the first time I heard “Drifter’s Escape”… and it was only the fifth-ever performance of “Things Have Changed,” which Bob has since played over a thousand (!) times. (If you don’t know this great song, check out the wonderful video for the original release.) Honestly, other show issues aside, it was an amazing set list, and you can hear the whole show here on the Bobserve site.

Subscribe now

But that wasn’t all. There was a second show, the next night. So the next day, we repeated the work of patiently waiting in line on the sidewalk for tickets to materialize. By now, we were getting weary and worn out. Not too weary to quote “Brownsville Girl” in the drawing book, though.

There was something else on my mind, too. At the show the night before, I’d met a boy I really liked. In my drawing book, I’d often drawn pictures of ships, as I imagined myself adrift in a churning sea of changes. Now, I drew my ship running aground, as I sensed that I’d arrived in a new place that I was going to stay for a while. Little did I know what would happen next.

But first, the show on the second night. March 16, 2000. Definitely one of the best and most memorable shows I’ve ever seen. I’m sorry that there are no comics about the show, but there are some great reviews on the Boblinks site. You can also listen to the whole show, here.

And if you do, you will hear some great covers, including “Rock of Ages” (one of only ten performances ever) and Johnny Cash’s “Big River” (one of only six performances). There were songs I had never heard live: the iconic “Song to Woody,” one of the first songs Bob ever wrote, as a tribute to his idol, Woody Guthrie (if you don’t know that song, check out the original version here)… and an amazing rendition of “It’s Alright, Ma.”

And the highlight of the night (and maybe of my all Bob Dylan touring years?) - “Highlands.” He’s only played it nine times in all these years, and this performance was unforgettable. This long story-song was told with so much humour, and audience interaction - it was Bob at his most animated. We were standing on the floor a few rows from the front and got to see him smiling, flashing his teeth and pausing to emphasize every poignant and funny word of this complex song. It was twenty-four years ago and I can still remember it well! You can hear that performance of “Highlands” here, and you can hear the whole show here. (And you happen to be unfamiliar with this long song, you might want to start with the official version: the words are a clearer than on the bootlegged recording from the show.)

Subscribe now

It was an amazing show. And that wasn’t all. After the show, I managed to meet up again with the boy from the night before. There was magic happening and we didn’t want to be parted. I changed my travel plans (which created some big inconveniences for my travel companions, to my lasting regret) and stayed in Santa Cruz for another week. The next time I got to my drawing book, I was back at the San Francisco airport, heading back to Canada after a whirlwind week, with the words from another Bob Dylan song in my head: “You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” On this page, I wrote that this this song was there to counterbalance another song I’d written about in the drawing book a while before: “Lucy Ashton’s Song,” which I wrote about in this episode of The Drawing Book called “Flaky Introspection.” I had changed a gloomy song for a joyful one. The opening harmonica on “You’re Going To Make Me Lonesome” still sounds to me like pure joy.

Of course, “You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go” isn’t really a title that bodes well for a long and lasting relationship, is it? But at the time, I just thought of it as the soundtrack to a new long-distance romance that was going to be defined by meetings and partings. The trip had been magical in so many ways and, for now, I was happy.

Share

Well, back in 1999, there was a real community of dedicated fans who met up at Bob Dylan shows, and increasingly, also, online. Some Toronto friends had a network of online connections, and this led to some non-show-related gatherings… like a Bob Dylan party!

Now, every true Dylan fan knows it’s a rite of passage to sit through Renaldo and Clara, the (long!) 1978 movie that Dylan directed and starred in. But in 1999, in order to watch this movie, you had to know somebody who had a bootlegged VHS tape (that might still be the case in 2024 - I don’t think this is the easiest movie to find). Luckily, one friend in the Toronto scene had a copy, and so everyone gathered in one house, to watch the show! We even dressed up as the characters in the movie!

I remember flying in from Calgary just in time for this party and hastily getting changed into my costume.

This must have been sometime around my birthday, because on the next page of my old drawing book, I see that I was reminiscing about past birthdays. It seems that, a few years before, I’d spent another birthday watching another Bob Dylan movie, the Rolling Thunder Revue.

This was back in the gloomy days when I was an art student commuting from Hamilton, Ontario to OCAD University in Toronto. You can read more about those days, near the end of this episode of The Drawing Book. Luckily for me, my grandparents lived about halfway along my commute, so I often stayed at their place… even when they weren’t home (as on the night when I watched Rolling Thunder all by myself).

Subscribe now

A Satisfied Mind

But now it was time for another show! In November 1999, I joined the Dylan friends in Baltimore, where they had already been to a show that evening. This was during the time when Dylan was playing a lot of old-timey Americana tunes like “I am the man, Thomas” (here’s a recording of that song from another show) and “Hallelujah, I’m ready to go.” (You can listen to this oh-so-catchy song, featuring lovely harmonies by Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell, here). These shows were great! I mean… 5 encores…!?!

Even more special, it was at this Philadephia show that Bob played “A Satisfied Mind.” Bob recorded this song (written by Joe "Red" Hayes and Jack Rhodes) on his 1980 album Saved, but he never played it live… until this show. It’s the only time he ever performed it live! Luckily, there’s a bootleg recording of this performance, here.

And in case you don’t know, you can find full recordings of the shows mentioned here (and many others) on the Bobserve site, an amazing database full of all sorts of searchable information about Bob’s Neverending Tour.

During all this time, there was something else on my mind. I was thinking about changing my last name. I did that, eventually, the following year. But, in my drawing book, I wrote about how a lot of my heroes had changed their last names. Including Bob, of course!

Share

This page from the drawing book starts with a bunch of travelling adventures. It was an adventurous time! Everyone in my family (my mom, dad and three brothers) seemed to be off on a voyage of some kind, and some of my friends were travelling, too. Of course, because I was working as a flight attendant with Air Canada, travelling was all in a day’s work, for me. And when I found out that Bob Dylan was playing some shows in Minnesota - close to where he’d spent his childhood in Hibbing - it seemed like an occasion for a road trip down Highway 61!

By the way, speaking of travelling: the comics page above mentions the Ship for World Youth, probably the coolest exchange program ever invented. You should check it out!

But now for the Minnesota trip. How did I get to these shows? I must have flown to Toronto from Calgary, and rented a car with my friend, and driven down to Shakopee from there.

There were TWO shows on July 2nd - one in the afternoon, and one in the evening. My drawing book says “We saw the show,” as in, just one show… but maybe we saw both, because my drawing book shows Bob and Paul Simon playing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (which was played at the afternoon show), but my photos show that it was dark by the time the show was over!

The audience gathered in a field under the open sky. Luckily, I don’t think it rained!

It was one of those rare shows where no one was going to stop you if you took photographs! I think my travelling friend took all these pictures, though, not me.

Subscribe now

After the show, it was time to mingle around and run into all the Dylan fans who seemed to be at every show. Here’s a picture of me next to a frequent concert-attendee who was renowned for looking a lot like Bob Dylan (who was that guy?), and on the other side of me: the legendary Bill Pagel, famous for starting the still-awesome BobLinks website, where you could check out all the tour dates and set lists and show reviews, back then (and still today!). Thanks, Bill, for this service to humanity!! (Bill’s amazing work collecting Dylan-related-items is mentioned in this long but excellent 2022 Washington Post article.)

After that show, there was another show in Duluth (and an electrical storm that made our hair stand on end)! Actually, there were two shows that day, as well, but did we see them both? I only have one ticket from each day.

While I was looking for these tickets, I also found a ticket from earlier that summer, when I’d travelled to Vancouver, to see Bob and Paul Simon earlier in their tour.

And a extra trip to Hibbing

But back to Minnesota. After Shakopee, after Duluth, we had to visit Hibbing. We took a look at Bob’s old high school and some other landmarks like that. And of course we went to visit Bob Dylan’s old house!! We even met the then-current inhabitants, who were super nice (and didn’t mind us goggling at their residence). Who owns the house today, in 2024? Bill Pagel, of course.

And we made one other stop: Zimmy’s! This excellent diner/Bob Dylan museum was a highlight of the trip. I still have a Zimmy’s mug, although I see in this article that Zimmy’s closed its doors in 2014.

That’s it for my Minnesota photo album. Thanks for joining me! I promise that, next time, we’ll be back to comics!

Share

Today, looking through my old drawing book, I see I’ve reached another few pages of Bob-Dylan-themed comics. This time, I illustrated the song Jack-a-Roe from Dylan’s 1993 album World Gone Wrong. This album, like his earlier album Good As I Been To You, features a collection of traditional cover songs: mostly old folk and blues songs. Earlier in the drawing book, I illustrated the song Canadee-I-O, from Good As I Been To You. Today, I’m sharing what I think of as Canadee-I-O’s companion song, Jack-a-Roe.

The two songs are both old folk ballads, and they’re both about women who dress up in sailor’s clothes so they can go off to sea. The nameless heroine of Canadee-I-O is longing for adventure, but the (also nameless) heroine of Jack-a-Roe is following her lover. I like these two brave women, and I like that Dylan chose to sing about their adventures, making them (I think) some of the strongest women characters in his catalogue of songs.

You can find out more about the history of the traditional song Jack-a-Roe here, and you can listen to Dylan’s version of the song here. As well, the Pod Dylan podcast just recently covered this pair of songs in a discussion with guest Jim Morrison. So you see I’m not the only one who thinks of them as a matching set of songs.

A couple of notes about this comic:

1. I got a couple of the lyrics wrong… oh well!

2. Once again my ship’s captain is inspired by Ciaran Hinds’ depiction of a sea captain in the 1995 movie Persuasion. The physician was inspired by a physician friend of mine.

3. The “sweethearts a-plenty” were real-life love interests of mine, from back then (ah, those were adventurous times!!). But Jack the sailor, in the comic, was inspired by a character in a story I was writing… of which more, some other time.

4. I left the third panel blank, because… who’s telling the story? I wasn’t sure.

Subscribe now

The last two (empty) panels are my favourite part of the song. What could I possibly draw? The words in those last two panels change everything. You mean, this whole time, the singer has been waiting to twist the story around to suit his (or her) own purposes? The story of this faithful couple has just been a set-up for the narrator’s own pursuit of a relationship partner? Wow. Well done, is what I say. It was a great set-up. I hope the person that the narrator has been pursuing, said yes.

Wishing you success in all your adventurous quests, and your own devious set-ups! And… stay warm out there!

It’s fun for me to look back on the adventures of following Bob Dylan’s Neverending Tour around, many years ago. In February 1999, to be exact. The next Dylan page in my old Drawing Book is about a show in South Bend, Indiana, featuring the Brian Setzer Orchestra. We’d just been to a show in Normal, Illinois, the night before (the show at which Bob famously joked that “People told me I'd never make it to Normal…”).

I saved my Normal ticket, but seem to have lost the South Bend one.

This next page isn’t about seeing a show, but I thought I’d include it because it shows how much travelling was involved on these adventures. This was the day after the South Bend show. It didn’t really start with myself and my two road trip friends waking up all in one bed, but we did stay at the same motel. Meeting up with fellow Bob fans was a big part of the fun of travelling to shows!

But then we had to get home. Driving to Chicago… flying standby on a flight to Toronto (looks like we got some good seats)… and then riding the subway downtown. Then I went to Mississauga to stay with my grandparents (the ones who owned the car that I sort of, well, borrowed, to go to see an earlier Dylan show, as described in this story).

The Salad King was my favourite restaurant in Toronto, back when it was a little hole-in-the-wall spot on Gould Street – I still remember the first time I tasted Thai food there, back in the mid-1990s!! It blew my mind. (Actually, the Salad King website has a cool timeline showing the history of the restaurant, with a picture of that original location.)

I mentioned Salad King in another comic - the 2002 anthology “9-11: Emergency Relief,” published by Alternative Comics, about the events of September 11th, 2001.

Salad King is still there today (on Yonge Street, just across the road from its original location).

Subscribe now

But then I had to get back to Calgary, to a very different restaurant. Van Gogh’s was the only place in Calgary that was open late at night, that wasn’t a loud, smoky nightclub. It was just a cozy place where you could get food and coffee. (I think that Van Gogh’s Grill & Bar in northwest Calgary might be the descendant of that original late-night Van Gogh’s on 1st St SW). Since my regular work shift was on the night flight to Frankfurt, I was pretty nocturnal on my days off, and I liked having somewhere I could go out to in the late hours. It looks like this time, when I was there, I was thinking about the Bob Dylan song “I and I.”

I see that I wrote “wrote songs beside moonlit streams,” instead of “wrote psalms.” This was still early internet days and it wasn’t always easy to look up song lyrics!

For the last line of the song, to go along with the words “I and I,” I drew two characters in a story I was writing, who were kind of each other’s soulmates – two halves of the same person. (Maybe I can write a bit about that story, sometime.) The woman in the comic was inspired by a beautiful classmate of mine.

Next to the word “honours” I drew my godmother, who often used that word. I also drew her (with her big sunglasses) in this episode of my old Drawing Book.

And next to the word “forgives,” I drew a friend I was hoping for some forgiveness from.

While I was writing this post, my ten-year-old song pointed out that German listeners might think “I and I” was a song about two eggs (“Ei” means “egg” in German)… groan.

As for the “flaky introspection” - if you’re interested in that kind of thing, you can find some the next time I post some pages from the old Drawing Book!

Hope you’re staying warm out there, wherever you are!

Subscribe now

About a year ago, I discovered this show, in which host Rob Kelly and his guests tackle one Bob Dylan song at a time. I got hooked. During a year of gloomy news on both the worldwide and local levels, Pod Dylan lifted my spirits and reconnected me with the work of an artist I’ve loved for so long. (The fact that I took a little trip to Toronto to see the 82-year-old Bob Dylan perform, also contributed to my renewed interest!)

Around the same time I saw Dylan in Toronto, I started this Substack, posting old autobiographical comics I wrote and never published. Some of them are about my adventures following Bob Dylan’s tour in the late 90s.

But today I have a different old Dylan-themed comic to share. And I’m posting it today, because it’s about the song Rob and I discussed on Pod Dylan: 1978’s “Where Are You Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat)” from the album Street-Legal.

You can check out my conversation with Rob Kelly here (and find out why Street-Legal is my favourite Dylan album). I don’t know if I made much sense, but I sure had fun chatting with someone who loves Bob Dylan as much as I do!

Subscribe now

The Puzzle

Why did I choose “Where Are You Tonight?” One of the reasons is because I made a kind of comic strip puzzle about it, many years ago.

Back then, some Dylan friends were planning to gather after a show on Dylan’s Neverending Tour. At this kind of get-together, there was always lots of Dylan talk. Once, a friend even organized a Dylan trivia contest, the winner of which received a statuette she had bought. It was a night-light that looked like a little statue of Jesus: a “flesh-coloured Christ that glows in the dark.” Something only a Dylan fan could appreciate.

I couldn’t make it to the get-together, but I wanted to contribute something. So, while I was riding on a train in Germany, I drew this comic strip. Every panel represents a line or two from the song “Where Are You Tonight?” For example, this panel represents the song’s alternate title, “Journey Through Dark Heat.”

I’ll give away the first two panels so you’ll get the idea. They’re from the first few lines of the song. “There’s a long-distance train/rolling through the rain.” “Tears on the letter that I write.” Now you take it from there, and see if you can figure out the rest of them. Each panel represents either one or two lines from the song. The lyrics appear at the end, in case you need a refresher.

That last panel (above) of the two women shaking hands in front of a clock and a car, was an inside joke. This one goes with the line “At that last hour of need/we entirely agreed/sacrifice was the code of the road.” It was meant to show myself and my Bob Dylan road trip friend, thinking about all the sacrifices and codes and agreements that go along with the many road trips we took. You can read about some of those adventures in my Bob Dylan comics, and stay turned for more in the weeks ahead! Let me know if you if you solve the puzzle!

Where are you Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)

There’s a long-distance train rolling through the rain
Tears on the letter I write
There’s a woman I long to touch and I’m missing her so much
But she’s drifting like a satellite

There’s a neon light ablaze in this green smoky haze
Laughter down on Elizabeth Street
And a lonesome bell tone in that valley of stone
Where she bathed in a stream of pure heat

Her father would emphasize you got to be more than streetwise
But he practiced what he preached from the heart
A full-blooded Cherokee, he predicted it to me
The time and the place that the trouble would start

There’s a babe in the arms of a woman in a rage
And a longtime golden-haired stripper onstage
And she winds back the clock and she turns back the page
Of a book that no one can write
Oh, where are you tonight?

The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure
To live it you have to explode
In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed
Sacrifice was the code of the road

I left town at dawn, with Marcel and St. John
Strong men belittled by doubt
I couldn’t tell her what my private thoughts were
But she had some way of finding them out

He took dead-center aim, but he missed just the same
She was waiting, putting flowers on the shelf
She could feel my despair as I climbed up her hair
And discovered her invisible self

There’s a lion in the road, there’s a demon escaped
There’s a million dreams gone, there’s a landscape being raped
As her beauty fades and I watch her undrape
I won’t but then again, maybe I might
Oh, if I could just find you tonight

I fought with my twin, that enemy within
’Til both of us fell by the way
Horseplay and disease is killing me by degrees
While the law looks the other way

Your partners in crime hit me up for nickels and dimes
The man you were lovin’ could never stay clean
It felt out of place, my foot in his face
But he should have stayed where his money was green

I bit into the root of forbidden fruit
With the juice running down my leg
Then I dealt with your boss, who’d never known about loss
And who always was too proud to beg

There’s a white diamond gloom on the dark side of this room
And a pathway that leads up to the stars
If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise
Remind me to show you the scars

There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived
If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived
I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive
But without you it just doesn’t seem right
Oh, where are you tonight?
...

Subscribe now

In my most recent Bob Dylan comics, I shared the story of travelling to Hamburg to see Bob in the summer of 1998. That autumn, I didn’t have to go nearly as far, because Bob came to Canada! The first show I saw was in Calgary, where I lived (I still live in Calgary today!). Then I met up with my Toronto friend who flew out to take a little road trip with me to Edmonton and Saskatoon. Back in those days, I was a flight attendant with Air Canada, so it was easy to travel on standby flights.

Here’s what I drew the morning after the Edmonton show, sitting at a cafe on Edmonton’s Whyte Avenue that is now long gone.

It was fun to find out from the staff at the Saskatoon Earl’s (a western Canadian restaurant chain), that Bob’s band had ordered their food from them after the show! They told us what they had ordered, but I forget. That was twenty-five years ago!!!

Subscribe now

The incident of the scandalous book

One thing I do remember about that trip, though: the infamous incident of the scandalous book.

We went to the venue on the afternoon of the show to check things out, maybe try to catch a few notes of the sound check. While we were there, I accidentally left behind my daytimer. Back in the days before phones, people had books where they wrote down addresses and phone numbers and schedule information. Every year, I’d buy the same kind of book: a coil-ring hardcover book published by Taschen in Germany. This year, for some reason, I’d only been able to find one book in that series, and it just happened to be filled with photographs by the famous photographer Helmut Newton. They were almost all photos of nude women. It wasn’t my first choice, but I liked having the same kind of book every year, so that steamy book just ended up being my 1998 daytimer.

Anyway, I frantically called back to the venue later in the afternoon to say that I’d forgotten an important book there, and that I was hoping it had been found so I could pick it up. There was a long pause on the other end of the phone and the voice answered flatly, “Oh yes… we have your book.” When I went to pick it up, it was handed to me wordlessly by a staff member whose eyebrows couldn’t be raised any higher, while a small crowd of other staff members watched in silence. I was sure that just moments before, each one of them had been poring over every page of that scandalous book. And that’s the story of how I scandalized the staff of Saskatchewan Place in 1998.

Actually, when I looked through that old book, I noticed that, along with my notes about my own schedule, I also wrote down every city on Dylan’s tour along the left side of each page. Here’s a page from earlier in that year, while the band toured Europe.

But I digress. Back to the tour!

While we were still out on the prairies, we saw the northern lights!

And then after those western shows, we met up a couple of weeks later in Ontario for an unforgettable Toronto show at Maple Leaf Gardens. It was great to be reunited with friends from the touring scene!!!

After that show, there was another show in Ottawa…

And then back to Toronto to write a comic about the whole experience (although why I wrote, “Is your love in vain,” is a mystery - he certainly didn’t play that one! Maybe it was just on our wish list!).

The discussion mentioned above, was a public event (at a library, I think?) at which there was a scholarly talk about Dylan. The speakers were Rob Bowman, Greil Marcus, and a mystery woman whose name I didn’t catch. The other two signed my drawing book, though. I just saw Rob Bowman again, at the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour shows in Toronto at Massey Hall in October 2023… twenty-five years later!! (You can read my comics about that adventure here.)

At the event in 1998, I drew Rob Bowman saying, “It was nice to hear ‘I’m Not Supposed to Care.’” He’s talking about how Dylan covered the Gordon Lightfoot song at the Maple Leaf Gardens show. That was nice, indeed! You can hear Bob’s cover of the song here. It’s still nice to hear it, all these years later.

Thanks for joining me on my Bob Dylan tour adventures!

Share

Dylan’s album Time Out Of Mind had been released a few months before. I remember driving along Centre Street in Calgary, listening to the first track, "Love Sick,” during this time. Bob sounded old, jaded, yearning, desperate… messed up. He sounded like I felt. I loved it.

Yeah, that pretty much described my situation. (By the way, don’t you think “Sometimes I want to take to the road and plunder” is a forced rhyme? He just needed something to rhyme with “wonder.” I mean, who “takes to the road and plunders,” much less dreams about doing that… whatever that even means? Unless that’s how Bob thinks of the Neverending Tour, of course. He certainly takes to the road, and I guess we fans are willingly plundered along the way. Ok, anyway. That line always bugs me.)

Subscribe now

But it wasn’t just “Love Sick.” I felt like every song I heard, was about me and my broken heart.

Of course, you don’t need me to tell you this, but that one about “I’m a-walking down the highway,” is Bob Dylan’s 1962 song about the girl who left him (“Down the Highway”). That Sinead O’Connor song, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” is another song about someone who’s longing for a person they’ve lost. And… well, I’m not sure why I put the Blues Brothers in there, but I guess they were singing about the same kind of thing in their own fabulous way.

Since this was back in the days when I was having fun illustrating Bob Dylan songs (like I did with Canadee-I-O, shared here in an earlier episode of Bob Dylan Comics), I drew some pictures for another song that was on my mind: Dylan’s cover of the traditional ballad “Love Henry.” Of course, any resemblance that these characters have, to real people in my life at the time, was purely coincidental…

Yeah, so that’s kind of morbid. No, I didn’t kill that guy who broke my heart, although I felt I could relate to the girl in the song, as she wrestled with jealousy, love and hate. I finally got over that sad affair, and made peace with the fact that he would never be mine.

Bob Dylan, on the other hand…

But the whole experience of falling in love with someone who was stringing me along, had been emotionally exhausting. It changed me, and I think it changed how I listened to those songs I had heard before, as I listened now with the world-weary wisdom of someone who had been such a fool.

These comics and drawings are all taken from my old drawing book about my life in the late 90s, which I’ve started publishing on this Substack. You can check that out here, or you can watch this space for new comics about Bob Dylan, which I’ll keep posting once a week or so. The next episode of “Bob Dylan Comics” takes us back on the road, following Dylan’s tour in the fall of 1998! Stay tuned for more and thanks for reading!

Share

By the summer of 1998, I’d been working as a flight attendant for one year, and I’d got the hang of things - especially standby travel. In this comic, I flew home to Calgary after a visit to my friend in the States, then hopped on my usual work-shift flight from Calgary to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt, our layover was 24 hours and 35 minutes long. Would that be enough time to get to Hamburg, in the north of Germany, to see Bob Dylan? Maybe, if I was lucky enough to get a seat on a standby flight…

It was an open air show. The evening weather was beautiful. I hadn’t slept in 24 hours! But that didn’t matter… I was there!

You can listen to this whole show here.

Who was Collins? The airport janitor who found me sleeping on a bench before my early morning flight back to Frankfurt, where I’d meet my crew for the flight home.

Subscribe now

In 1990, Bob Dylan recorded the album “Good As I Been To You,” a collection of traditional folk songs. He sang them all to the accompaniment of his own solo acoustic guitar. I first heard these songs when I was getting into Dylan’s music in the mid-90s, and it’s remained one of my favourite Dylan albums. I love the simplicity of the arrangements, the beautiful guitar playing, Dylan’s gravelly voice as it rolls and flows all around the lyrics… and I love the song Canadee-I-O. (Have a listen!)

A long time ago (in the 90s), I illustrated this song (on a bumpy train ride… apologies for my messy writing. You can also read the lyrics of Canadee-I-O here, on Bob Dylan’s site).

I drew myself as the main character. After all, I live in Canadee-I-O! Back when I drew these pictures, I had long brown hair, and I had two big white dogs, a smart adventurous one and a shy one, who seem to have found their way into the pictures.

She fell in love with a sailor boy…

I’ve always thought that she didn’t really love that sailor boy. Just listen to the line, “it’s true, she loved him well.” It sounds to me like a case of “The lady doth protest too much.” If she really loved him, we wouldn’t need that reassurance… we’d just know. (Is the singer trying to convince us, the listeners? Or is that the voice of the woman trying to convince herself?) Either way, if it had been true love, she certainly wouldn’t have had to “bargain” with him, and PAY him, to get him to take her along. No, it wasn’t the sailor boy she loved - it was the adventure of going to Canadee-I-O. Besides, what happens to the sailor boy when his girlfriend is threatened by all the ship’s company? We don’t hear about him standing up for her. He just vanishes from the song. He was only ever a means to an end. Now, the captain is more interesting…

Now when the Captain he heard the news…

The captain in my comic is more than a little inspired by Ciaran Hinds’ depiction of Captain Frederick Wentworth in the 1995 movie Persuasion (a movie I loved when it came out, and which I’m still crazy about). The captain in Persuasion is the hero of the story - the one who comes to the heroine’s rescue. So what happens with the captain in Canadee-I-O? He, too, falls for the girl and comes to her rescue. (Maybe not in that order.) And speaking of reversing order, I love the way the same line is used twice, each time with a different meaning. “And with the whole ship’s company, they were willing to engage” is used first to denote the crew’s anger at the stowaway woman, but afterwards, the same line (“And with the whole ship’s company, he was willing to engage”) is used to denote the captain standing up against his crew. That’s some real economy of language in a song that’s already pretty sparse with its words.

Subscribe now

Anyway, here’s the big question: did she really love the captain? I have my doubts. She already used one sailor to get her to the place she wanted to go. What would stop her from using another one? Maybe this seems a bit cynical, but in the time we’re talking about (the song was written in the mid-1800s!), what other means did women have, to travel to new places they were dreaming of, other than taking advantage of some man’s convenient position? But even if her liaison with the captain was, for her, a marriage of convenience, it still sounds like she did well by it - she got where she wanted to go, and ended up with a husband who seems like a honourable person. And who knows, maybe she found love as well. I hold that hope for her.

In my illustrations, the captain’s wife keeps her sailor’s suit hidden, but leaves the hat hanging from a hook when the other fine ladies (who I never got around to colouring in) come to call. And she keeps her adventurous dog as well.

I wonder about the vanished sailor boy - if he knew what he’d lost, or if he just went on to the next adventure, never thinking about the one that got away.

Come all you fair and tender girls…

In the last verse, the narrative shifts, and the speaker is speaking in her own voice! It’s no longer just a tale about a fair and handsome girl - she’s now telling her own story. She’s truly empowered now, speaking from her safe position as a captain’s wife, and advising other “fair and tender girls” to follow their dreams as she has done herself. When she advises them to “follow your own true love,” I think she could be talking about a love of ambition or adventure, not necessarily a man. It may be that this was the only language available to a woman of that time - it wouldn’t have been possible for her to advise them to follow a career or a voyage of adventure. But when she sings about “the honour she has gained” in the last words of her narrative, she’s not talking about the honour she has gained as a captain’s wife who is now the “finest of the ladies” - it’s the honour she has gained “by the wearing of the blue.” It seems that she considers her seafaring adventures to be her greatest accomplishment. I just hope that, now that she’s married to the captain, she gets lots of opportunities for more ocean voyages.

I love that Dylan chose this song - the song of a woman we don’t fully get to know, but whom we can admire for setting her sights on her dream, and getting there. In my mind, she’s one of the stronger women in Dylan’s songs, which so often focus on the (presumably male) narrator/singer’s perspective, instead of on the (presumably female) characters in the songs. The women are often the objects of the narrator’s desire, rather than the main characters of their own stories. What made Dylan choose to sing and record this song? I wish I knew! I’m just glad he did.

You can check out my previous Bob Dylan comics here, or stay tuned for the next installment, when I recount the tale of my long-ago trip to see Bob in Hamburg!

Share