Bob Dylan Comics, Part 3
We had to see Dylan... even if it meant stealing a car.
In the previous installment of “Bob Dylan Comics,” I shared my adventure of jumping up onto the stage beside THE MAN, at a Toronto show in 1997. You’d think that would be enough of an adventure for one week. But no, it was only the beginning. The next day, I became (I hope) the only person to ever steal a car in order to get to a Bob Dylan show.
This story is a little short on comics, but I thought it would be fun to share the adventure.
Just two months before, I’d relocated from Toronto to my old hometown of Calgary, to start a new job as a flight attendant with Air Canada. In July 1997, I flew back to Toronto to see that Molson Amphitheatre show with my Toronto-based Dylan friend. At the show, though, we discovered that there was ANOTHER show happening the next night – just a couple of hours away! (How come we hadn’t known about this? It was still early days for getting concert information online, I guess. And we were pretty new to the touring scene – the Molson Amphitheatre show was only our 4th show). Anyway, once we knew about this new show, we had to go!
But how? My car was back in Calgary. We couldn’t think of any public transit that would be able to get us to Darien Lake just east of Buffalo. But there was another option: my grandmother’s car.
My grandparents lived in Mississauga, and we were really close. When I lived in Toronto, I’d often stayed with them, and I still had a key to their condo. Surely, I thought, they wouldn’t mind lending us their car?
My grandfather had his own car – a Tornado, I think – but my grandmother’s car was the one I felt more at home with. A little Chevrolet Citation, it was famous (in my family) for having a custom license plate: ERB-222. Apparently my grandfather had learned that, if you paid a little extra, you could choose the letters and numbers on your license plate. It wasn’t a real “vanity plate” where you could choose whatever you wanted. When asked what letters she’d choose, my grandmother picked her initials: ERB. What about the numbers? Apparently she had replied, “Well, I guess I should choose 111, but I don’t think I’m quite the best there is. So I’ll be content with 222.” What does that say about my grandmother?
My grandmother’s second-class car was our key to the show. But there was one problem: my grandparents were out of town. They weren’t even somewhere that I could call. They were on a cruise somewhere, in the days before cell phones. So I just had to assume that they would be ok with me making an executive decision about a life-or-death matter. And I also had to hope that my aunt, who looked after their place while they were away, wouldn’t notice a missing car for just one night.
We took the GO Train from the city into Mississauga. We walked across the street from the platform to my grandparents’ condo. Went in, grabbed the keys. Went down to the parkade, got in the car… and we were off.
After that, it was easy. As I recall, the border guard just shook his head in disbelief in response to our enthusiastic news that we were crossing the border so that we could see a Bob Dylan concert.
By the way, if memory serves, we didn’t have tickets. We rarely got them ahead of time. We just headed for the show and hoped for the best. It wasn’t that hard to get into shows, in those days. There were always people selling tickets outside the venue. We were lucky.
The show!!
Somehow it was a different feeling than the shows we’d seen before. We were outside in the summertime in a big open field, standing near the front of the stage, taking in a set list that made us laugh and cry.
Here’s the tape my friend made for me, from a bootleg someone had made of the actual show.
You can hear the whole show here.
There are just two more good memories to add to this story. One was that we listened to the album “Good As I Been to You” on the way back, pausing mid-Canadee-I-O as we crossed the border at Niagara Falls. After the guards waved us through, my friend restarted the cassette player and we heard Bob sing the words: “When they came down to Canada…”
And then came the last part of the journey. We drove back to Mississauga in the wee hours. We were exhausted. We pulled into my grandmother’s parking spot gratefully… and then we looked at each other in horror.
You see, we had this rule that we weren’t allowed to push “stop” on the tape player mid-song. Unless it was something like an international border crossing - once Bob started singing, out of respect for the master, we had to listen to the whole song. And the song that had just started, as we stopped the car, was Lay Down Your Weary Tune.
A beautiful song, but also a long, slow, plodding song that might put you to sleep - especially if you were already as sleepy as we were! We wanted to get out of that stolen car, get on the train and get home to bed. But nope. Dutifully we sat there and listened to the whole thing. Slowly we smiled. We laughed. And the beauty of that peaceful tune washed over us at the end of our adventure.
As far as I know, my grandparents never found out.