Why Dylan Matters. Richard Thomas F.

it was a bit like visiting the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. As a 2016 headline in the CTPost put it, “Mark Twain fan visits his Hartford mansion, finds it’s like communing with a long-lost friend.” Whatever we think we are doing on such journeys, what moves us is the sense of being at the wellspring of artistic creation, where creative genius began to form the art that would become central to our own lives and imaginations. In Hartford, we’re looking for Huck or Tom. In Dorsetshire, we’re hoping to run into some sign of Tess or the mayor of Casterbridge. Likewise, in Hibbing, we were all there looking for something to connect us to the Dylan we had known back in our youth and been with ever since. We were hoping to find it in the magnificent Hibbing High auditorium, where the fifteen-year-old Bob Zimmermann had played with his band, singing and pounding out a Little Richard tune on the piano, as recalled by his then friend John Bucklen:

      He got up there … in this talent program at school, came out on stage with some bass player and drummer, I can’t remember who they were, and he started singing in his Little Richard style, screaming, pounding the piano, and my first impression was that of embarrassment, because the little community of Hibbing, Minnesota, way up there, was unaccustomed to such a performance.

      I think we could all imagine that event, but in 2007, fifty years after the show, it was hard to get close. Bob wasn’t there, but it was also easy to imagine him up on the stage looking out at the audience in the elegantly upholstered seats of the 1,805-capacity auditorium of which Dan Bergan, who wrote a booklet on the school, rightly noted, in language that, like the auditorium, seemed remote from the hard realities of the Iron Range:

      Nowhere in the United States can one find a high school auditorium—perhaps any auditorium—of such incomparable beauty, of such ornate and elaborate decoration … the auditorium features a 40- by 60-foot stage, framed by its 20- by 40-foot proscenium arch whose borders are marked by massive pillars with composite capitals in gold rising on each side of the stage.

      Dylan would soon enough be performing at Carnegie Hall in New York and at the London Palladium, but that stage in Hibbing was not a bad place to start. This auditorium must be emblazoned in his mind. The nostalgia involved in the activation and exploration of memory is something that is essential to Dylan—as he said in 1967, “You can change your name / but you can’t run away from yourself.”

      After visiting Hibbing High, our group, a little ragged from the warmth of the early spring day, made the short three-block walk from the school down Seventh Avenue, now “Bob Dylan Drive,” to the corner of Twenty-Fifth Street, and the house Bob Dylan grew up in. According to the Iron Range Tourism Bureau, it is no longer open to the public—“drive-by visits only”—but on that day the owner had actually opened its doors and allowed us to go into the front living room, where he had set up a display of Dylan memorabilia on a coffee table. There was a Dylan song playing, I can’t quite remember which one, and I think all of us felt a combination of pleasure at having arrived at such a place, along with slight embarrassment to be intruding in the inner sanctum. I was relieved that a request to visit the bedroom was declined, though some went around the side of the house to look up at its window. The owner of the house told us about Dylan’s own occasional visits over the years. He would spend time up in the bedroom of his old house, presumably making contact with memories of listening on the radio to the music that would form him, first gospel blues and country, later rock and roll. He surely found his teenage self on these occasions.

      Lunch was at Zimmy’s, which has since closed as the town continues its economic decline. Some of us bought very unauthorized-looking Zimmy’s T-shirts, along with copies of B. J. Rolfzen’s memoir, The Spring of My Life, a self-published book in ninety-five pages of Courier font—and an interesting account in its own right of growing up poor in post-Depression America. The bus also took us a few miles out of town for a visit to the famous iron ore pit that you can see from the moon. The best ore was long gone, even when Dylan was growing up, and it was easy to connect to the song “North Country Blues” from The Times They Are A-Changin’—a mining blues folk song Dylan would sing at the Newport Folk Festival on July 26, 1963, then once again, for the last time at a concert, at Carnegie Hall, on October 26 of the same year. “This is a song about iron ore mines, and—a, iron ore town,” he said at Newport. The song is in the voice of a woman, as we discover only in the fourth verse, brought up by her brother, who falls victim to the mines, following the same end as her father. In a final blow her husband deserts her and her three children. Dylan had written the song following a trip back to Hibbing, before the public discovered that he had grown up in the town. Andrea Svedberg broke the news of that reality in a Newsweek article published the Monday after the Carnegie Hall concert.

      Once the Hibbing connection was made, “North Country Blues” was too easily situated in Hibbing and to the background of Bob Zimmerman, despite its narrator’s female voice and the far different details of its story. Maybe that was why Dylan sang it only once more, in 1974 at a benefit concert for the Friends of Chile. By 2001, when “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” came out, Dylan cared less about people knowing where he came from, and B. J. Rolfzen in his talk is not the only one to have detected autobiographical undertones to the song, both in the lines he quoted and in the ending of the same verse, on the young people of the town:

      They all got out of here any way they could

      The cold rain can give you the shivers

      They went down the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee

      All the rest of them rebel rivers

      By the time of that song, 2001, Dylan’s real identity and background was even more beside the point. While “North Country Blues” is a song that can be tied to the hard lives of those who worked and died in the mines of Hibbing, Minnesota, it is even more a song that came more from the folk tradition of mining songs, and especially from the fertile mind of Bob Dylan. Like Dylan, our group soon enough boarded the bus and headed south, following his fifty-year-old trail, to the University of Minnesota, and the next day for coffee in Dinkytown, where he went in the fall of 1959 to take up the art of folksinger performance on his way to Greenwich Village and destiny. The conference itself was memorable enough, but what has stuck in my mind most is that day, spent in the little Minnesota town of Hibbing.

      LATIN AND THE LATIN CLUB, HIBBING, 1956–57

      As the only classicist in the group, I was also in Hibbing looking for something else, for traces of a bond I shared with Bob Dylan that for me dated back to 1959, when I began studying Latin at the age of nine. Following lunch at Zimmy’s, I slipped out and walked the two blocks to the Hibbing Public Library. One of the waitresses had told me there was a Dylan exhibit there, featuring a copy of the Hematite, Dylan’s high school yearbook from 1959, the year he graduated. The Hematite was named for the mineral form of iron oxide that brought wealth to the town, and had in the days before the main lode dried up paid for the building of its magnificent school. I had already seen page 76 of the yearbook, at a Dylan exhibit in Seattle in 2005, and in the Scorsese documentary No Direction Home, so I knew what to expect. On that yearbook page the life and career of the future Nobel laureate was summed up in just three details:

      Robert Zimmerman: to join “Little Richard”—

      Latin Club 2; Social Studies Club 4.

      Plenty has been written about Bob’s early interest in Little Richard, one of the foundational singers of rock and roll, whose hit “Tutti Frutti” shot up in the charts at the end of 1955, when Bob was a freshman at Hibbing High. By the following fall, backed by the Shadow Blasters, his name for the first band he had put together, Bob Zimmerman was himself now imitating the songs and stage antics of Little Richard. Indeed, the head shot of Bob Zimmerman at the top of that same yearbook page even alluded to the identity his notice craved, in the form of his trademark Little Richard pompadour hair style. This was well before he started taking on the persona, and the look, of Woody Guthrie as he headed for the folksinging scenes of Greenwich Village.

      But few have paid much attention to his membership in the Latin Club. With his newfound performing interests, and from the evidence of his dropping off the honor roll from 1956 to 1958—he made it back on for his last year—his later claim to be interested in nothing beyond his music (liner notes, Biograph, 1985) might seem credible