Bob Dylan Comics: A "cosmic country gentleman" in Canada

Catching some Canadian shows in the fall of 1998

Hello! At last I’m picking up where I left off with some more comics about following Bob Dylan’s tour around in the late nineties.

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!!!

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!