Bob Dylan Comics: Travelling
"The way is long, but the end is near..."
When look back at these old comics, I see that it sure took a lot of time and effort to travel to and from those Bob Dylan shows I saw in the late 90s. (Thanks, non-Bob fans, for bearing with us through another episode of Bob Dylan Comics.)
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).
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!