Today is the day legendary singer and songwriter Bob Dylan will be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Dylan has said he won’t attend the presentation, but we do know what Martin Collis will be doing.
He and fellow members of the local Dylan appreciation society, called the Trainload of Fools, will celebrate the occasion by toasting his achievements and playing songs such as Knock Knock Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.
The professor emeritus, a physiologist in the University of Victoria’s department of physical education for 30 years, has dedicated a large part of his life, and home, to Dylan’s work.
On his walls hang limited-edition prints by Dylan, signed autographs, photographs taken throughout his career, album covers, original programs and concert posters. The bookshelves are lined with tomes focusing on Dylanology.
Collectibles include a replica program from the first concert Dylan gave in England — the original is tucked away in acid-free paper — and another from the Newport Folk Festival, “where Dylan went electric for the first time.”
Collis not only has hundreds of the great man’s vinyl records, but also every record on which the artist appeared. “Which is quite a lot,” he said with a chuckle. “For instance, he played back-up harmonica on a Harry Belafonte album.”
Dylan has released 37 studio albums, 58 singles, numerous compilations and 12 albums in the Bootleg series. Collis has one of each, plus scores of duplicates, multiple pressings under different labels — and of course, many of the unofficial bootlegs.
Collis’s Queenswood-area house — aptly called the Colliseum — was built in 1989 and was a nice, functional house close to the university when he first saw it. He bought the home in 1991.
“I was living on Piers Island at the time and getting tired of the commute,” he said. But the house needed restyling and a lot more shelving for his growing collection.
The professor and his then wife created a new vision for their home. Renovations were undertaken by Good Manors’ Don McCarthy, a building contractor and designer with more than 35 years in construction.
They didn’t change the footprint, but transformed the style and integrated the rooms, which previously featured a variety of carpets and linoleum. “We connected all the areas with hardwood floors, and introduced quite a bit of black in the lower part of the house to add some formality,” said McCarthy.
They re-did the formerly enclosed staircase, retaining the shape but opening it up and adding new railings. They also reconfigured the upstairs den, which is now lined with shelves and built-ins, like the downstairs library.
“It was a challenge because it was a long room, open to the staircase, with a roof that sloped down to the floor,” said McCarthy, who knocked out the roof and put in a dormer and a gas fireplace.
“The owners liked the look of French and Italian home design, so we added Tuscan yellow paint outside, French doors and a Juliet balcony off the master bedroom — and laying western maple floors throughout made a huge difference.”
The builder said carrying the same flooring throughout a house, even in the bathrooms and kitchen, makes it feel much bigger and more connected. “And marks and dents are part of the character.”
McCarthy is not keen on vaulted ceilings in living rooms because it can look cavernous, “but because Martin has such a good collection, we made all those shelves and cozied it up, adding darker marble around the fireplace and on the counters.
“We added bookshelves on either side of the dining room’s patio door, too, and a lower bank of them along the dining-room wall, always using extra-thick dividers, at least three to four inches.”
It made the collection more of a feature, which is what it has been in the owner’s life.
Collis first saw Dylan perform in January 1963. “I’d never heard of him but I was home for the weekend from university and my parents were watching a BBC play of the week called the Mad House on Castle Street.”
It had a part for an itinerant folk singer and Dylan was hired for the cameo after the British director heard him play in a coffee house in the States.
“Dylan only sang two songs, but I was absolutely scarred for life,” Collis said. “There was an instant connection. I went to the record store the next day, bought my first album and played it white.
“He became a thread in my life, a very joyous one.”
Years later, when Collis had his doctorate from Stanford and was teaching at UVic, he and Canadian poet and English literature professor Stephen Scobie (a Dylan scholar who wrote Alias Bob Dylan) created an extension course on the poetry of Dylan.
It evolved into a group that has been meeting for 30 years, with scores of members who gather in each other’s houses. (For info email martinlcollis@gmail.com.)
At the group’s Christmas party, everyone dresses up as a Dylan song or phrase. “Lots of people have come Tangled up in Blue over the years,” and a reveller once arrived with a bottle of rum, making farting noises, saying he was Caribbean Wind.
Why the passion?
“Dylan is an extraordinary individual, less touched by public opinion than almost any other artist I know. His imperviousness to what other people think is a real part of his brilliance,” said Collis, who always hosts the summer BOBecue.
“And for most of his recording career, his songs have been very organic, growing and changing with each performance.”
In the last 50 years, Collis has seen Dylan about 50 times, in venues from Paris to Texas. He also went to his first major art exhibition in England and he bought two large artworks.
“His work is very hot now,” said Collis.
Collis’s own work is cold — very cold. He was part of the UVic team doing hypothermia and water-survival studies that led in the 1970s to development of the famous Thermofloat jacket.
Before that, he was assistant coach at Santa Clara Swim Club to Olympic medalists such as Mark Spitz and Claudia Kolb. Earlier still, he was a camp counsellor.
“Mick Jagger was my junior counsellor at summer camp in 1961,” he recalled with a grin.
“I was 21 and he was 17. Jagger was totally unknown at the time, but he was beginning to play and he was trying to get everyone to call him Jed ….
“To be honest, he wasn’t a very good counsellor, but he taught me a lot about blues artists. He had a powerful interest in music.”
Soon after, Collis attended a Dylan concert in Portland, Oregon, and started collecting. He asked the theatre manager if he could have the only poster there, hanging in a glass case.
“The manager gave it to me after the show and I later sold it for $10,000. It helped pay for house renovations.”