My Bob Dylan Layover
A one-page comic about a German Dylan concert
Back in the days when I wrote and drew in The Drawing Book, my old sketchnote journal, I was a flight attendant with Air Canada. (Why did I do that job? Well, I had an English degree and a year of art school, and I hadn’t yet figured out how to make a living as an artist/writer kinda person. That happened later. But anyway - back to my days on the airplane.)
Because I’d spent some time in Germany and learned to speak German, I got to work on the Calgary-Frankfurt flight. It was usually a weekly cycle: leave one afternoon, fly all night, stay in Mainz (just outside Frankfurt) for 24 hours, fly back the next day. Usually those 24 hours were spent doing a lot of sleeping. But not this time.
It was the summer of 2000, and Dylan was playing a show in Stuttgart, only about 3 hours away! It wasn’t too far from where I’d lived myself, and I figured I knew my way around. And I counted on the excellent train system to get me there. I guess you could say it all worked out, but I must have been tired on the flight home, which left about noon the next day…
Ensinger! The sourest, fizziest, fizzy water of all German carbonated waters. You can’t find it everywhere in Germany, but I found it in Stuttgart, hooray!
Look at how old-fashioned things were back then. I had a little battery-powered alarm clock with me on the train - not a phone. And I called my new long-distance boyfriend (whom I’d met at my most recent Dylan show, as recounted in this adventure) on a coin-operated pay phone at the train station.
Looks like I had a rolled-up show poster beside me on that luggage cart. I guess I still have that poster, now that I think about it.
As for the show? I’m afraid I don’t remember it too well, but I remember hearing “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” near the end and loving it. You can see the whole set list here.
Actually, you can see the set list here, too - on the other side of this rather large ticket, scribbled down by me in the dark! It’s pretty messy, but I see I wrote down a few notes about some of the songs - like “slow” describing “Can’t Wait,” “Ophelia” next to “Desolation Row,” (maybe he played that verse?) etc.
At the bottom of the ticket, there’s a name and an email address. At this show, I met a woman who was wearing a leopard-skin pillbox hat, like me! She was flight attendant, like me (she worked for Lufthansa). She’d followed Bob everywhere, planning her flight schedule around his tour. And she had some great stories about her adventures. Once she had Bob and his band on her flight, in the upper deck of the 747. She said she wouldn’t let any crew members or passengers come in past the curtain, to goggle at Bob and bother him. She stood at the curtain and blocked the way. “I guarded him with my life!” she told me.
Did she goggle at Bob herself, while she had him in her airplane section for a whole flight? Did she try to talk with him, ask for his autograph? No. “But I saved his fork,” she admitted.
These days, in 2024, things are so busy! I haven’t got much free time this week, which is why it’s such a short post for now. If you need more Bob Dylan in your life, check out the latest release of Pod Dylan featuring a lovely interview with the legendary Happy Traum. See you next time!
P.S. I feel like I have to add this. If you have some time between flights and you get to go to sleep (even if you only get back to your hotel at 3:43 AM), it’s a “layover.” If it’s just a short stop between flights, and there’s no sleeping involved, it’s a “stopover.” I heard someone yesterday talking about their “layover” between connecting flights. Nope. That’s just a “stopover” - take it from me, an old flight attendant!