In case you came here looking for my "Calgary Flood Diary" comic strip about Gian-Carlo Carra, you can see it here or just scroll down to the end of this post. For now, though, here's something new:

I can't help it, I've just had "flood songs" flooding my head for the past week.

And today seems like a "flood song" kinda day. The Calgary Herald's Tom Babin has put together this list of songs inspired by the amazing events of the past few days. And Matt Masters is putting a new spin on his 2005 flood-inspired tune "Centennial Swell" (for which I painted the album cover picture, by the way). This new version of the song will be debuting on CJSW's My Allergy to the Fans from 2-4 today (i.e. NOW) as part of a fundraiser for flood relief.

My own flood soundtrack is just made up of Bob Dylan tunes, but what else do you need, right?

Sign on the Window (New Morning, 1970). This not-exactly-well-known song is not really a floody kind of song, but it contains a resonant line - a line that transforms the rather dull, sublunary* pace of the song into a soaring flight of despairing-sounding release: "Looks like nothin' but RAIN..." Well, that's just my own interpretation, but for what it's worth, that's the line I had going through my head for the whole month-or-so before the flood!

*That's John Donne, and maybe another time I can write about how strange it is for that line to have suddenly appeared in my head. But not just now.

A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall (The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, 1963) - In case that other rain-inspired song wasn't enough for you.

Wedding Song (Planet Waves, 1974) Definitely not about rain or floods. It's a kind of dirge-y sounding love song. But it has this wisdom-packed line: "What's lost is lost, you can't regain what went down in the flood." Something that Calgarians are definitely internalizing right now.

Nettie Moore (Modern Times, 2006) - This bare-bones recital just repeats simply: "The river's on the rise." And it also includes a line - a terse utterance, really - that's probably going to be increasingly relevant to post-flood Calgary: "Too much paperwork."  But have you ever actually met anybody named Nettie?

High Water (for Charley Patton) (Love and Theft, 2001) - This isn't my favourite Dylan tune - although it's been praised for its incorporation of all sorts of meaningful references to music and history -  but it's certainly about a flood.

Then, there's the funny and weird "2 x 2" (for which I actually can't find a link, other than to the lyrics), from Dylan's seemingly child-inspired collection of nursery-rhyme-ish tunes "Under the Red Sky" (1990). This song seems to take some inspiration from the story of Noah's ark (the lines read as a numbered list, the way you're supposed to imagine the animals lining up to enter the ark. Oh, and it also says, "Two by two, they stepped into the ark"). But it also tosses out a few random philosophical musings along with its account of the journey:

How much poison did they inhale?
How many black cats crossed their trail?

And how many other crazy questions went through Noah's head during those 40 days and 40 nights (or however long he was stuck in there)? And how many Albertans evacuated from their homes have been going around in circles for the past week, too? Floods make you crazy, that's what this song is about, maybe. (Or maybe I'm just going crazy, which is entirely possible.)

Shelter from the Storm (Blood on the Tracks, 1975) - Well, that was obvious.

And now, here's the one that's really been in my head for the past week: the first song I ever heard Dylan play live: Down in the Flood (The Basement Tapes, 1975). (That link plays the original song - from the album - despite being paired up with a rather incongruous video.) He opened with (a rather more rockin' version of) this song on April 28th, 1997 at Toronto's Masonic Temple (which back then was just called the "Concert Hall") and the opening chords alone blew my mind. But I digress. it's kind of a nasty-tempered song:

Well, it’s sugar for sugar
And salt for salt,
If you go down in the flood,
It’s gonna be your fault.

And:

It’s gonna be the meanest flood
That anybody’s seen.
Oh mama, ain’t you gonna miss your best friend now?
You’re gonna have to find yourself
Another best friend, somehow.

No sympathy for flood victims from Bob Dylan! Luckily, in Calgary, many people seem to have found themselves new best friends somehow, through the amazing relief work that's been going on all week. Here's to that! And now we need some new songs to get these soggy ones out of my head.

It's Bob Dylan's birthday!

Since I've been doing a lot of graphic recording, I've been thinking a lot about how to draw images that capture words and concepts. And I was reminded of how I'd done something like this a long time ago (maybe around 1999?) as part of a Bob Dylan get-together.

But first I should explain what I mean by a "Bob Dylan get-together."

I used to follow Dylan's tour around a bit, and in the course of these adventures I became friends with other fans whom I'd meet again and again at different shows around the world. The main appeal of all this travelling was, of course, the amazing performances by Mr. Dylan, but the comraderie of all these diverse, yet like-minded fellow fans, quickly became a secondary attraction.

To start off, here are some comics from the Drawing Book from a few of those fun gatherings.

You get the idea. So, to make a long story short, there was one time when a bunch of friends had decided to get together after a show and play some kind of Bob Dylan trivia game. I couldn't make it to this event, so I thought I'd send along a contribution.

I listened to the song "Where Are You Tonight?" from Dylan's 1978 album Street Legal (for reasons too mysterious to understand, this has always been my favourite Dylan album). "Where Are You Tonight?" reads like a long list of briefly stated scenarios. I drew pictures - one for each line of the song. Then I cut out all the pictures and mixed them up, and sent them off to my friends in whatever city they were in (I can't remember). The idea was that they had to guess which picture matched which line from the song. Bonus points if they could do it without looking at the lyrics (i.e. if they actually knew the song that well!).

So, for Bob Dylan's birthday, all these years later, here's the same game for you. The song lyrics are at the end of all the pictures. Hint: The first panel just serves as the title of the song, and the next two panels actually correspond with the first two lines of the song. After that they are all mixed up.

Ok, I know that no one but the real Dylan fanatics would actually feel like undertaking this. So for the rest of you, it can just serve as a reflection on how graphic recording works - for example, it's easy enough to draw "There's a long distance train rolling through the rain," but how easy is it to draw something like "Strong men belittled by doubt" or "Horseplay and disease are killing me by degrees while the law looks the other way" ?? Well, you get the idea. I think my favourite picture in this little gallery is the one that depicts "There’s a babe in the arms of a woman in a rage" - or maybe, "If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise / Remind me to show you the scars" (what a line!).

Happy birthday Bob!

-sam.

P.S. My friend Margery & I are featured shaking hands in the panel that depicts the line, "In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed / Sacrifice was the code of the road."  - That pretty much summed up our eventual strategy when it came to long unpredictable ambitious crazy Dylan tour expeditions!

P.P.S. I ALWAYS think of this song when I walk along Elizabeth Street in Ramsay.

P.P.P.S. If you'd like to listen to the song while you peruse these enigmatic scrawlings, it's here.

Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)

There’s a long-distance train rolling through the rain
Tears on the letter I write
There’s a woman I long to touch and I miss her so much
But she’s drifting like a satellite

There’s a neon light ablaze in this green smoky haze
Laughter down on Elizabeth Street
And a lonesome bell tone in that valley of stone
Where she bathed in a stream of pure heat

Her father would emphasize you got to be more than streetwise
But he practiced what he preached from the heart
A full-blooded Cherokee, he predicted to me
The time and the place that the trouble would start

There’s a babe in the arms of a woman in a rage
And a longtime golden-haired stripper onstage
And she winds back the clock and she turns back the page
Of a book that no one can write
Oh, where are you tonight?

The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure
To live it you have to explode
In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed
Sacrifice was the code of the road

I left town at dawn, with Marcel and St. John
Strong men belittled by doubt
I couldn’t tell her what my private thoughts were
But she had some way of finding them out

He took dead-center aim but he missed just the same
She was waiting, putting flowers on the shelf
She could feel my despair as I climbed up her hair
And discovered her invisible self

There’s a lion in the road, there’s a demon escaped
There’s a million dreams gone, there’s a landscape being raped
As her beauty fades and I watch her undrape
I won’t but then again, maybe I might
Oh, if I could just find you tonight

I fought with my twin, that enemy within
’Til both of us fell by the way
Horseplay and disease is killing me by degrees
While the law looks the other way

Your partners in crime hit me up for nickels and dimes
The guy you were lovin’ couldn’t stay clean
It felt outa place, my foot in his face
But he should-a stayed where his money was green

I bit into the root of forbidden fruit
With the juice running down my leg
Then I dealt with your boss, who’d never known about loss
And who always was too proud to beg

There’s a white diamond gloom on the dark side of this room
And a pathway that leads up to the stars
If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise
Remind me to show you the scars

There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived
If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived
I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive
But without you it just doesn’t seem right
Oh, where are you tonight?
...

Well, hope you don't think I'm too crazy. Like I keep saying, I had a lot more free time back in those days. Meanwhile, here are some post-show parting words:

P.P.P.P.S. This picture was signed by the panelists. The one in the middle is Greil Marcus. Who were the others, I wonder?

Third time's the charm: Finally got that latte fix from Ramsay's Caffe Rosso that I'd been dreaming of.

I met Damian long, long ago when it seemed like we were among the tiny handful of Calgarians who were creating indie comics. I've been out of the scene for a few years (see Alec's Year Book for details) but I knew Damian's Dorkboy Comics was still out there. Now we finally met again at the Calgary Expo and confirmed our apparently mutually long-held suspicion... that we're still among the tiny handful of Calgarians who are creating indie comics.

Is there anybody else doing this? I mean, Damian has been doing it for more than a decade (so have I, on and off)... but are there any other folks writing and drawing print comics in this town? Is this a dead art? Does Calgary have - or want - an indie scene? It's the element of the Calgary Expo - despite its amazingly all-encompassing embrace of all things geeky, nerdy, and comic-booky - that I've found lacking. Maybe because there just isn't an indie scene. Or is there?

A sign you'd never see anywhere else.

Why I need to get a bit more high-tech if I want to do this kind of thing at next year's Expo.

Ashley's dinosaur met all the stars it had hoped to meet, including Gillian Anderson - who apparently rode the dinosaur. That t-rex will remember this weekend forever. Let's hope Ashley will be able to live vicariously through its adventures. And that she's grateful to her dinosaur-lugging friends.

And here's one more note for the end of the Expo: It was really a fitting day for me to be surrounded by crazy obsessed star-struck fans, because it also happened to be the 17th-year anniversary of a star-struck day of my own: the anniversary of my first Bob Dylan concert.

By now you might have figured out that, much as I love the Calgary Expo, I'm not really in tune with the Expo scene - I don't have any costumes, and I hadn't actually heard of most of the celebrities who were coming (which may have something to do with the fact that I don't have... and never have had... a TV). But that's not to say I can't relate to people who are wildly, madly passionate about the ingenious work of a celebrity icon. I saw Bob Dylan perform for the first time on April 28th, 1996. I don't know how many times I've seen him since - I stopped counting after about 40 shows. Bob Dylan still rocks my world (even though I don't follow his tour around the way I used to). You can read some comics about my touring adventures here. Suffice to say - all you Expo fans who are right now coming down from your Expo high - I know how it feels. Just hang in there till the next show comes to town.

Just in case you're getting the impression that I'm a lady of leisure who lounges around just dreaming up frivolous things about which to blog, I'm putting it on the record things are very busy around here. More on that later (or, if you don't hear any more about it, you can just assume I'm too busy to fill you in. For now, I'll just say that it has a lot to do with the fast-approaching Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo on April 26-28).

When I'm drawing comic strips, I have to be able to concentrate. But when the drawing's done and I'm just inking, I don't have to think, so I love to work while watching (or rather, listening to) a movie - preferably something long and slow with a lot of dialogue, so I'm not missing much by never looking at the screen. I know, I should just be downloading podcasts. But anyway, the other day, I watched a 1994 TV adaptation of George Eliot's jaw-droppingly awesome novel "Middlemarch."

Why am I telling you all this? Because watching "Middlemarch" reminded me of a brilliant discovery I made almost twenty years ago. So I looked up my record of this in some ancient archives from the Drawing Book (the discovery's on page 2). This is about Bob Dylan, of course.

So what do you think, Middlemarch/Dylan fans? Is it not obvious that "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" is referencing this book? What other perfection-seeking bankers' niece, associated with a country doctor, could Bob possibly have been thinking of? (I've heard it suggested that this might be a reference to a banker's niece in Henry James' "The Portrait of a Lady," but what about the doctor?) Google wasn't around back in 1994, but it is now, so I Googled this hypothesis - and came up with nothing. Is nobody onto this except for me? Well, if not, consider this vital information my sole contribution to the jam-packed libraries of Bob Dylan scholarship out there.

There was a third page in this little Drawing Book anecdote, by the way - here it is, for what it's worth.

P.S. Most people think the last verse of "Love Minus Zero" is about Edgar Allan Poe... but I think it's about "Wuthering Heights." A debate for another day... if I ever have free time again.

Apparently, it's National Hat Day. I guess the nation in question is probably the one south of the border. but do I need any more excuse that that, to post some hat pictures? No, I didn't think so.

These are pretty similar - the first one is a page from The Drawing Book vol. 1 (1996), and the next one is a kind of oil-painting-reprisal of the same theme, from around 2002.

Here's Anita Silvey's post about the classic tale Caps for Sale (which I just read last week, as it happens...) in honour of the day. Thanks Anita!

I'm out of Christmas cards. After 2005 I started sending photographs. But I found this. It isn't exactly a Christmas card, but a comics story (written about ten years ago) that ends with a Christmas wish. Merry Christmas to flight attendants everywhere... and to the rest of you, too.

And now a giant leap to the next Christmassy card in 2013.

Everyone's talking about the end of the world (tomorrow, perhaps) and it reminded me that I drew some end-of-the-world scenarios in the Drawing Book back in about 1999. Here they are. But now that it's 2012 I don't actually think I'd do a single one of the things on this list. Well, about three of them are possibilities, I guess. But that's all I'm saying. If you're really curious, feel free to ask me (if you're still around after midnight).

This freezing cold winter is making me remember another winter long ago (2003), when I escaped to Germany to see Bob Dylan play a show. I recently sent this comic strip about the voyage to a friend of mine, and so I thought I'd put it up here too. More illustrated Bob Dylan adventures here. Stay warm, everyone!

Bill Pagel posted my review of Dylan's Edmonton show on his site, www.boblinks.com! Thanks Bill! I sure wish I had been this internet-savvy fifteen years ago when I was writing illustrated reviews of Bob Dylan shows on a regular basis. I will just have to make amends for that by posting those old ones now, a little bit at a time. Meanwhile, after all this time, it looks like Bill Pagel is still out there keeping track of all of Bob's shows and set lists. It is such a cool project, and must take a lot of time and work, considering Bob Dylan is constantly performing. Here is a picture I found of Bill from a few years back, hard at work restoring Dylan's original home in Duluth, Minnesota. I met Bill a few times at shows long ago (although doubtless he doesn't remember me) - I do seem to recall one time... might have been in Normal, Illinois... when he had some extra tickets and passed them along to my friend & to me. How could I ever forget something like that! (Well, I've probably forgotten the city it happened in. I think it was somewhere in the so-called midwest. I'm not so good at remembering that kind of thing!)

By the way, it seems a bit odd to me that I've been writing so much about Bob Dylan in here. Don't get me wrong! Still perhaps the single most creative artist alive today! But I do think about other stuff, too. Must just be the buzz of recent Dylan excitement in my life that's spilling into this little blog. All right! On to other things! And thanks again, Bill!

Took in a great show by Bob Dylan in Edmonton last night. To see my full review (illustrated!), take a look here.

Two highlights:

1. Finding out that the opener, Mark Knopfler, is responsible for writing the riff that's featured in the now-no-more CBC Radio show "Dispatches" (it's part of a Knopfler song! I had no idea);

2. (Much more exciting!): Dylan performing a cover song (wow!) and speaking an extra three whole sentences to the crowd! This show was a rare treat indeed.

P.S. The mystery cover song was by Gordon Lightfoot (another song I didn't know... I guess I have to expand my listening beyond Dylan and CBC Radio). It's funny... I remember Dylan played "I'm not supposed to care" at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto 1998 - but that was because Lightfoot was in the audience (or, at least, it seemed pretty likely that this was the reason, since G. L. was sitting right there.) But maybe that's just something Dylan likes to do when he's in Canada. Ah well, what does it matter... it still was lovely.

I have drawn quite a few other comic strips about Dylan shows. A couple of them are online, and you can see them here. One of these days I'll get around to putting some of the others up.