No Room for Dylan

Title kinda sounds like it'd make a good sit-com, huh?

via the Beeb:

Celebrated Dylan photo recreated

A celebrated photograph of Bob Dylan surrounded by scruffy "waifs" in a Liverpool doorway has been recreated 40 years on.



The original picture was taken by photographer Barry Feinstein while the new image is created by Dylan fan Chris Hockenhull, from Waterloo, Merseyside.

He tracked down eight of the 10 people who appeared in the first image and took them back to the Dock Road area.

But he did not ask Dylan to come back as there was "no room for him".

Mr Hockenhull, 50, who teaches a Bob Dylan course, explained why he had chosen to re-create the scene.

"It was such a clash of 1960s culture. The kids looked like Victorian street urchins and Dylan looked like a man from Mars with his loud shirt and wild hair. That's what fascinated me," he told BBC Inside Out.

"It began when I first saw a Bob Dylan picture without any location credits in the mid-1970s. Something just convinced me it was from Liverpool.

"When Barry Feinstein's book, Early Dylan, came out in early 1999, the picture with the children in the doorway caught my attention.

"I started looking around various sites in Liverpool and finally stumbled across the place where it was taken. I couldn't believe the building still existed.

"The kids lived around there in the 1960s, in what could be termed now as real squalor. The Swinging Sixties hadn't hit that part of Liverpool."

He said the houses were demolished about two years after the photograph was taken and the children were dispersed around the city. He added: "Very few of the children had any recollection of the event in 1966. They were oblivious to the fact that the picture had gone all around the world and been used on CD covers and in magazines.

The former children were tracked down using the electoral roll, through visits to the pubs where they drank and by placing adverts in local newspapers.

The resulting shot was taken in November 2006, but without the legendary Dylan.

One of the women in the photograph, Bernadette Gill, 47, now a doctor's receptionist from Knotty Ash in Liverpool, said of the original image: "We really did have a lovely childhood but it looks as though we haven't changed our clothes for years, let alone months.

"We used to go and play in the warehouse as soon as we were let out, that's the only place we had to play.

"I don't remember a thing about the original photograph. Only a couple of us do. I don't remember being given money, I probably went straight to the sweet shop and spent it.

"It's lovely to look at it, and realise what you've been part of. I wasn't a Bob Dylan fan. I still can't say I like all his music. I like some of it though."

Mr Feinstein, Dylan's sole photographer during his 1966 and 1974 world tours, remembered of the youngsters: "They were all like waifs. They weren't your Beverley Hills kids."
The search for the children in the photograph and their reunion will be featured on Inside Out on Friday on BBC One at 1930 GMT. Digital viewers can watch the documentary on channel 101 or 948.