I was 20 years old at the time, and had been doing photography for about three years and had been using a darkroom for a year and a half or so. I loved the darkroom and learning and using various darkroom techniques. I was also a big Bob Dylan fan, and so when the 1974 tour was announced, there was a mail-in “first-come first-served” process for getting tickets to his show at the Maple Leaf Gardens. I took my letter down to actual post office where their post office box was and ended up with quite good tickets. I was directly stage right a few seats from being obstructed by loudspeakers. I was relatively close to the stage, but not really close. I photographed the 2nd of Bob Dylan's two concerts in - I think it was - January of 1974. I'd never photographed a concert before.

The camera I was using was a screw-mount Leica III which dated back to the 1930's. It was my dad's - he'd bought in London, England in 1945. I had a fast normal lens for it, but not a telephoto, so I borrowed a Canon 135 f3.5 lens from the father of a friend of my sister. Anyhow, I shot about a roll and half of 35mm Tri X - the standard 400 ASA film of the time - and tried to figure out the exposure. I pushed the film to about 1600ASA (ASA is the same as ISO. but that's what it was called then). I don't recall if I did the darkroom work to make the cover image in the Fall or Winter of 1974.

At the time, I was doing a lot of darkroom manipulation of photographs as well as hand-colouring them. I was very familiar with Bob Dylan's music and I felt that the combination of darkroom technique and hand colouring echoed the old/new dichotomy of much of his work, as well as the notion that it echoed the (sometimes slapdash) off-handed power of his words and music.

Here's how it was actually made - The negative was enlarged in the darkroom onto another piece of film in such a way that just Dylan's head was on it. This would normally result in a positive image on the film which, if you printed it onto a piece of photo paper, would give you a negative print. However, I solarized this piece of film (that is, re-exposed it to light) as it was being developed. This partially reversed the image and also gave it the distinctive line between what was dark to start with and what has made dark by the solarization. Technically, this technique is actually called “the Sabbatier effect”, and the lines are called “Mackie lines”. This resulted in a quite dark and low-contrast piece of film to make a print from. I had to use the very high-contrast grade 6 Agfa Brovira paper to get a print with enough contrast.

I made a bunch of these and hand-coloured them using Marshalls photographic watercolours (they are a dye that sinks right into the emulsion of the photographic paper). I do recall that I was selling 5X7 hand-coloured prints of the cover image and the entire image for $5.00 in the Fall. In the fall of 1974 I sent Bob Dylan some of the photos. I sent in at least two images- the one that ended up on the cover and a hand coloured version of the entire image.