More Bob Dylan Comics
A Bob Dylan party and another live show
Hi friends! I’m back with some more Bob Dylan comics! (By the way, I’ve been wondering how much longer I’m going to be able to keep posting Bob Dylan comics! Bob may be on the Neverending Tour, but unfortunately I don’t have a neverending supply of Bob Dylan comics! I do have a few ideas, though, so I think we’ll just keep going and see what happens…)
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).
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!
