The Bob Dylan Never Ending Tour Diaries- (a Dokumented Blast!)

Bob Dylan Never Ending Tour Diaries: Winston Watson’s Incredible Journey — Produced and directed by Joel Gilbert. Featuring Winston Watson. 

Review* 

Nelhydrea Paupér

Back in my day — let’s call it My Back Ages — Dylanologywas synonymous with Garbology. That is, the fascination with Bob Dylan and his writing led to a sort of cultish enthusiasm that could cause one A.J. Weberman to literally pick through Bob Dylan’s family trashcan on the curb outside his Greenwich Village apartment, searching for some clues to the Big Questions. Most Dylan followers found this whole exercise repugnant and beneath contempt — yet we still wanted to know what Webberman discovered. What does Bob eat for breakfast anyway… and were there any scrapped song lyrics that turned up amidst the used Kleenex?

    But things have changed. Today Dylanology is a cottage industry. There are, it seems, enough people — like myself — who still want to know what the guy eats and, better yet, what he’s like to work with, to produce a steady stream of books and DVD releases about his life, his work and even his employees.

    I’ve known musicians who’ve worked with him — and know musicians who know musicians who’ve worked with him — and everyone seems to agree that, well, he’s a bit odd (NO! You DON'T say!). But they generally liked him. By most accounts he isn’t overly palsy-walsy — but he isn’t the reclusive, abusive, egomaniacal weirdo many would imagine. When all is said and done the greatest songwriter since Homer is really a hard-working musician who tours almost constantly — despite no apparent financial need to do so — and prefers to play with musicians who are hardly stars on their own. In fact, compared to the bands that guys like Eric Clapton or Rod Stewart assemble — that is, slick, top flight, big-name studio guys — Dylan’s folks are often one step up from bar band musicians. And often that step up came courtesy of Dylan himself. He may be a bigger name than Clapton or Rod the Mod, but he is, musically at least, more salt of the earth.

    Watson Winston, er, Winston Watson — the thoroughly charming star of Highway 61 Entertainment’s new DVD, Bob Dylan Never Ending Tour Diaries: Winston Watson’s Incredible Journey — is exactly that sort of musician. He was Dylan’s drummer for several years in the early-mid 1990s. But before that he had only played with local big-hair bands in his home state of Arizona. When the call came to try out for Dylan it was through a friend who’d been drumming for Dylan and wanted out. So the recommendation came from one no-name drummer for another no-name drummer. And purely based on the guy’s say-so Winston suddenly found himself on stage in Kansas City playing with BOB DYLAN in front of 80,000 people. One night after the call came. Without any rehearsal. Or set list. Or anything.

Winston did well enough that Bob kept him on for the next few years.                                      Watson, a heavy metal guy of African-American and Native American descent, had relatively little knowledge of Dylan’s work. So he had a LOT to learn... (awww, you’ve got a lot to leeeearnnn…) 

    But I digress.

During his tenure on the Never Ending Tour (‘The Never Ending Tour’ is the nickname fans gave Dylan’s restless, seemingly perpetual tour schedule that’s been going on since the 1980s) Watson was present for the 30th Aniversary Bobfest at Madison Square Garden; the 1992 Olympics; the Frank Sinatra tribute TV special; the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame kickoff concert; plus tours with Santana, the Grateful Dead, Patti Smith and the Rolling Stones. He says Dylan paid well, has an excellent touring staff, never uses a teleprompter to help with the words and gets lots of celebrities like Don Rickles and Raquel Welch turning up at his shows.

Winston reports that while Dylan was not exactly palling around with the guys on the tour bus — he had his own, separate bus — he was not unapproachable or ever less than nice. He describes his first impromptu breakfast with The Bob, as well as a number of later conversations, nearly all of which were friendly, with Dylan being a supportive and encouraging boss. The one negative encounter was after Watson failed to perform well at a show, resulting in being called to the principal’s office for a dressing down. Which, from Watson’s description, was brief, professional and perfectly reasonable. (You should hear the stories about James Brown). In other words, Winnie Watson provides absolutely no dirt on Bob Dylan. He genuinely likes Dylan, respects him and only speaks highly of him.

But he’d gladly take a shit on the head of Van Morrison.

Now, I should say that, in addition to being a huge Dylan fan for, well I mean like forever, I’m also a huge Van Morrison fan. And while I’ve heard plenty of people say nice things about Dylan though the decades, in the 35+ years I’ve been following Van the Man I have never heard or read one single person say anything nice about him ever. Not once. He is, by all accounts, a difficult, miserable, mean, grouchy, moody, nasty sumbitch-I-tell-you-what. If kindness were petals on a daisy, Van Morrison would be one completely plucked flower.

Watson’s career with Dylan, by his account anyway, was ended by Morrison. After a gig in Norway that Morrison shared with Dylan, everyone sat down for a big dinner and, as Dylan talked with Van about his band, Van suggested — LOUDLY — that he should get rid of his drummer because the guy couldn’t play.

(Author’s note: I once saw Van Morrison storm off stage at the Palladium mid-set and never return because — well, fucked if I know why. But he never returned. I also saw him start to lose it at the Beacon Theatre mid-song because the drummer couldn’t find the groove he wanted. He kept turning back looking at the drummer, glaring at him like death was imminent. David Hayes, the bass player, frantically led the poor drummer into the groove Morrison wanted. Having played with Van for years he knew full well what was about to happen if they didn’t get it together fast. 

So even my limited experience tells me Winston’s version is probably accurate)

But I digress.    

Watson, who seems like a genuinely sweet guy, describes his total horror and nausea that night. And he sees it as the moment he was finished. After the tour ended another tour followed later on but he was done. A touching coda follows when Watson attends a Dylan show a year later. Dylan is friendly to him but blows Watson away when he thanks him for his letters. Watson, it turns out, had sent Dylan a few letters after he’d left the band, thanking Dylan, saying what a pleasure it all had been. In their last meeting Dylan tells him no one who worked for him had ever written to him. The rich, famous, endlessly working star/employer is more touched by a simple, genuine personal gesture than by all the adulation he receives each stop of each tour.
Charles Dickens, where the fuck are you? 

Watson went on to tour with Alice Cooper and others. But his story trails off before we find out why he’s now working as an electrician and playing in a Dylan cover band. With Scarlett Rivera. Huh?

That band, Highway 61 Revisited, is fronted by Joel Gilbert, the director and interviewer of this DVD. Gilbert also made the other Dylan DVDs available from Highway 61 Entertainment. They’re all good, entertaining, engrossing and always surprisingly well made. I say surprisingly because the average History Channel documentary isn’t as well put together as these small-budget but creatively and intelligently presented documents.

So here’s the money shot: Bob Dylan Never Ending Tour Diaries is a blast. Winston Watson is charming, smart and goofy in a way that is totally endearing. It’s no wonder Dylan wanted him around on his tours — Winnie has a vibe that is always sweet and upbeat. Joel Gilbert has put together another of his fun and informative romps through the fascinating landscape of Americana owned and operated by Bob Dylan. Dylanologists eveywhere will agree — it’s much better than garbage.

To order, visit the official website.

Ps: YourLustForLifeStartsRightNow!

Drawing Bob Dylan Portraits & The Never Ending Tour

Why Bob Dylan?

Let me tell you a story about a man who started work at 14 years of age, he was employed to work on the building of the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool, the United Kingdom. This building was officially started in 1904 and ended in1978 after this man retired. This man worked his whole life in the same job, in the same place, for 51 years at least.

His Bobness has been doing this also, he was about 20 years old when he hit the music scene in 1961 and now 70, a grand total of 50+ years. If you take into account he was forming bands when he was in school, at a time when you left at 14 or 15 years of age, then it might be 55 or more years.

His Bobness is still at this time, (2011) performing a stage performance on a regular basis and has been entertaining for the past 50+ years. Is that a good enough reason, to do a portrait of Bob Dylan?

Regardless of any cash they did or didn’t make doing their life’s work, it must be seen as an achievement of the highest order, 50+ years doing the same job and being successful at it, is an outstanding achievement.

Bob Dylan has been on a never ending tour all his life, having taken a little time off, now and then with sickness, as happens to us all. He tells us that he is just a song and dance man, nothing more, nothing less, one who just sings songs and is not prepared to wear anybody else’s crown. An entertainer, just like Arthur Lee or Julian Beever, artists all of them, so I did this portrait drawing, titled, The Never Ending Tour. Surely it was a worthy cause and good enough reason to do it?

The Never Ending Tour.

The first thought when doing this drawing or perhaps even before I did the drawing, was I did not want to just copy a picture of Bob because that would just be a copy of someone else’s portrait and would not say very much about the man or his life. I spent a while doing some quick sketches of Bob trying to find some ideas and get a feel for the features of his face, this is something I often do when drawing portraits. I also looked at hundreds of pictures of the man on line, in magazines and books, luckily many of my friends are fans so there there is an abundance of material around me. These people are also like encyclopedias on the man, so I could find out lots of information about him, which would help me build up and hone in on this knowledge base to inform my thinking.

This also gave me plenty of opportunity to discus these ideas and get some feed back from real human beings, as well as what was going on inside me own head. If you don’t put anything into the box then you are not going to get anything out of it, I always think.

Bob Dylan like many Americans during the 60s had idolized, Woody Guthrie, an American singer, songwriter and folk musician. Woody it seems was a man with a wonder lust, a traveling man, who jumped trains and lived as best he could, at times singing for a nickel or a dime. Bob Dylan perhaps because of the influence of his idol was much the same and spent some of his time with Woody, after seeking him out in New York during that last years of his life.

During this time trains where a big and important part of a traveling man’s life, so for both men there would have been a great deal of time spent around trains and stations. The rail road had to be a strong feature and influence in Dylan’s early life as well as well as woody’s.  The never ending tour and the railways went hand in hand so had to be a feature in any Bob Dylan portrait drawing and also having a great significance towards it being a journey.

The pencil portrait of Bob Dylan (Right....>) was my first attempt at drawing him, I used graphite pencil, mostly a 2b and 4b. This was only a quick drawing but I do think I captured something of the man as he is nowadays much older than the young man moving to New York in 1961. 

The more you draw a persons face, the more you learn about it, so it is important to do this when trying to create something original from photographic information. Doing this also helps to find ideas for new concepts and ways of stating something in your drawing, as often they suggest ideas.

All of this together is more than good reason to do some preliminary drawing and also having a wish of creating something original it is necessary for feeding your imagination I think.

I found an image on line of Bob not looking like Bob at all, wearing a woolly hat and a jogging suit out for a jog. It was not your usual image so I had to have a go at drawing it just because of this reason and I was looking for something original. The drawing you will find below is another quick drawing with a black Sharpie marker pen.

Notice how I have put the suggestion of other images into the drawing as well, trying out ideas and trying to generate something new from the other drawing by looking for a way of combining them.

The image below was mostly drawn with maker pens, using different grey scale tones, I did the out line sketch with graphite pencil. 

I tried combining another image of a railway line into the drawing because I was trying ways of portraying something different to make the drawing original. The railway line idea became a good idea when I thought about it after because it would be a significant part of the never ending tour.

Now I had something to work with I created a photographic type image by combining different images together using a free photo editing software called GIMP Shop, this is the image below (Right ::::>) 

When I am working on idea I like to put them together in one place so I can see them all together and then keep looking at them looking for further ideas.

From looking at all these ideas together I came up with the idea that I could use the blacked out side of the face to bring something else into the image and after looking at it for a while I thought that I could make an image of somebody sitting down on a stool playing the guitar. This then instigated me doing a quick sketch of what it might look like and can be seen in the drawing (Above ^ & Here). 

I now had the idea I was looking for, a story of the never ending tour, a younger Bob Dylan and older version, with a railway line between both so I then made the portrait drawing you can see below by taking bits from different photographs, combining them into something completely new.

 

<::::: A graphite pencil portrait drawing of Bob Dylan, the never ending tour, size A3, 16" x 11-6/5".

The video was another experiment captured with a camera and illustrated with black Indian ink, a brush and some water. 

By Gareth Pritchard

Ps: YourLustForLifeStartsRightNow!

The Brook of Bob: The Never Ending Star

Bob Dylan's contribution to popular music is immeasurable. Venerated as rock's one true genius, Dylan is considered responsible for introducing a new range of topics and new lyrical complexity into popular music. Without Bob Dylan, rock critic Dave Marsh once claimed, there would be no popular music as we understand it today.

As such an exalted figure, Dylan has been the subject of countless books and intricate scholarship considering various dimensions of both the man and his music. This book places new emphasis on Dylan as a rock star. Whatever else Dylan is, he is a star -- iconic, charismatic, legendary, enigmatic. No one else in popular music has maintained such star status for so long a period of time.

Showing how theories of stardom can help us understand both Bob Dylan and the history of rock music, Lee Marshall provides new insight into how Dylan's songs acquire meaning and affects his relationship with his fans, his critics and the recording industry. Marshall discusses Dylan's emergence as a star in the folk revival (the "spokesman for a generation") and the formative role that Dylan plays in creating a new type of music -- rock -- and a new type of star. Bringing the book right up to date, he also sheds new light on how Dylan's later career has been shaped by his earlier star image and how Dylan repeatedly tried to throw off the limitations and responsibilities of his stardom. 

The book concludes by considering the revival of Dylan over the past ten years and how Dylan's stardom has developed in a way that contains, but is not overshadowed by, his achievements in the 1960s.

Ps: YourLustForLifeStartsRightNow!