The Steve Gibbons Band

Most recent/Next visit to The Borderline Club:    Friday 4th November 2004

STEVE GIBBONS

Borderline Comment:

We've welcomed Steve and the guys to the before and it's a great pleasure to welcome them back again.

Steve Gibbons on Bob Dylan:

It is no exaggeration to say that the first time I heard Bob Dylan, it changed my life. In those days, I was working with my band The Uglys, and we were booked for a month at a little club called The Kon-Tiki in Munster (Germany) it was a hard slog: we lived at the back of the club in a one-room billet, and played six nights a week, four hours a night twixt 9pm and 2am, at which time a young American named Peter took over and played records. His excellent taste was all the persuasion we needed to linger longer and drink away most of our wages until the wee small hours of the morning - I think he played that one too..... Anyway, at one such session, he called me over and said "You ever heard of this guy? I got it hot in the post from the States". The guy was Bob Dylan, the album was 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan': track one, side one, the voice made me tingle, the song made me shiver, the moment is frozen.

The uglys repertoire was quite adventurous back then; sprinkled among the oft-repeated crowd pleasers were a few of our own dwarfish attempts at songwnting. "How old is this guy?" "Dunno, 22 or 23. What do you think?". I was thinking hard.... After the war, Munster, like many German towns and cities, had been rebuilt to look virtually the same as it had before the British and American bombers gave it such a terrible pounding. Peter's reason for being there had always been a bit vague, but we suspected that if he wasn't in Munster , he would have been in Vietnam . Oh my God 'Masters Of War', "I was thinking where do we go to surrender", the answer, my friend, is neither here nor there. Most musicians, writers, poets, painters and performers in their search for self-expression will suffer a temporary loss of heart when they come across the real thing - and this was real enough for me. "When you feel the jolt from my thunderbolt it will be 3 o'clock "- he said that for over an hour. But was I hung up? Was I deflated? No siree, Bob, I have just come of age at a stroke, he made singing a real, proper job, venerated the stage, and I'm eager to take it, spread the word, tell the world that this guy's gonna shake it, though it wouldn't be long before everyone heard... 4am, sometime in '63.

Two years later, and it's too big to stop, the light-bulb goes pop, and he emerges into the jingle jangle morning wearing razzle dazzle shades. It's getting hot, The Byrds are in full flight, and their subterranean writer flicks his words across our TV screens with natural cool abandon. It's a masterpiece in rhyme, a rap before its time, and it's 2 minutes 17 seconds in glorious black and white. Now here comes another big one, it's gigantic. There's never been anything like this before, for me or for millions of others. As far as the eye can see, it stands alone, like a towering volcano spitting and erupting red hot creation. It's 'Like A Rolling Stone'

Around this time, the rest of us are in a kind of limbo zone the order is rapidly changing. Dave Pegg, a blues guitarist joins us, and becomes a bass player, mainly for the privilege of playing alongside Roger Hill, our newly acquired guitarist It was an unusual line-up, and our repertoire became even more bizarre, yet liberally peppered with Dylan songs. We had some great fun, but Peggy and Rog left a couple of years later to do their own thing, having added a few illustrious pages to the Ugly picture book, which finally closed in 1969. The cultural revolution, inspired and fired by him, lurched into the Seventies with Dylan as an undisputed figure head and natural leader, but who could blame him for disdaining the role? My own career stumbled into a two year balls-up. it's a long story, but I came out the other end with a solo album titled 'Short Stories'.

The Steve Gibbons Band evolved in 1972, and for the next three years, we built our show, which either opened or closed watching the river flow. In 1975, we recorded our first album, 'Any Road Up', and the band is still together, although the ups and downs of the intervening years have brought about several changes in the line-up. Ten albums have been released, and it's been quite a journey, on which I've had the good fortune to work and travel with many fine musicians and kindred spirits. P.J. has been my Wright hand guitarist for 16 years. He's also a long time Dylan devotee. We were together in the mid-winter twilight zone near Lapland when he bought and we listened to 'Infidels' for the first time. 'Jokerman' always returns me to that shadowy world.

A few days after Christmas last year, I did a little impromptu gig with Peggy, having missed out on his 50th Birthday bash two months earlier. I was glad of the opportunity to play with him again - we had a great time, and it turned out to be a happy twist of fate. Our after-gig chat inevitably got around to the Main Man, one thing led to another, and Bob's your uncle. Peggy's enthusiasm and the offer of his services was just the spur I needed to do what I had long been considering; an album of Bob Dylan songs.

Now comes the tricky part, which handful of apples to pick from the rosy barrel. Some will say that the Sixties was his greatest period, and from his early Guthrie-esque beginning, freewheelin' back home into the wonderful surrealism of Highway 61 and Blonde On Blonde, then out onto the mystical plains of John Wesley towards the sunny simplicity of Nashville Skyline, it would seem to be fair comment. A hefty body of work by any standards, but thankfully, he didn't stop there. Twenty albums later and he's still at it, totally original and eccentric as ever. Some people will say "So what? The times have changed, it's a different world, different values". I cannot disagree; each to his own. Some swim in the deep and some in the shallows, and it's not dark yet, but if we keep on turning minnows into millionaires and our backs on the whale.... w-e-l-l......

One thing's for sure; whatever transpires from this endeavour, it will be a labour of love by all concerned.

For more information about Steve click here