All Along The Watchtower

A comic to celebrate Bob Dylan's birthday!

Every week, I try to post comics from my old sketchbook journal, The Drawing Book. I missed last week, because I got too busy peddling zines at a local zine fair! Take a look here to see the “Curious Calgary” zine series I’ve been writing for The Sprawl. But this week, it’s time to get caught up!

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.”

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!