Even small scenes depend on meeting places or club houses, and the Scholar quickly became the center of this movement. Red Nelson, who later bought the Scholar from Steve and Annie, said he was drawn to the place because of all the misfits that gathered there. The self-described “biker” says today, “It was incredible. I could hang around and drink coffee and meet all of these exotic people—intellectuals, real artists, real musicians.” Flo Castner remembers the high-powered chess matches that took place among artists, poets, and philosophers in the Scholar’s backroom. “It was a wonderful meeting place for activists and radical thinkers. At all hours you’d find some really serious chess games going on, and some really serious kibitzing.” In fact, at one point Castner says she made a pretty good living at pick-up chess matches, winning as much as $100 per game from the more arrogant sex. More than anything, though, the Scholar operated as a kind of switchboard for this secret society. Castner says, “It was grassroots energy, from the poets, the artists, and the activists. The Scholar attracted these similarly inclined people. You could always pick up a stimulating conversation and a good chess game, some great ideas, some exciting music. And networking! It was the grapevine, word of mouth, what’s happening, what’s going on.”
Mike Justen, the last owner of the Scholar (he bought it from Red Nelson in 1965), remembers the Dinkytown location vividly. “It had plate-glass windows, with random art kind of stuck in the windows. And there were curtains you could pull at night, so the performer whose back was to the glass would not be visible to the outside. It was dark. The whole place was essentially black or red, but it wasn’t threatening. A lot of the décor was the people.”
And the people were, in some cases, shockingly young. Dave Ray, for example, lived right down the street and regularly popped in. At the tender age of 15, he’d hooked up with Dave Morton at University High—the Southeast Minneapolis high school later known as Marshall-U, which was closed in the 1980s. At 18, Morton seemed very worldly to Ray. An aspiring poet, he’d also picked up the acoustic guitar, and he used to come over to Ray’s house and give him guitar lessons. “He was a beatnik,” says Dave Ray today. “He was a few years older, but it felt like 20 years older. You know how it is when you’re 15 and somebody else is 18. So we’d go down in the basement and play guitars.” Morton remembers it that way too. He was devouring beatnik literature and poetry, folk music, and radical politics, and he had a powerful influence on his young friend. “I was the original beatnik in Minneapolis,” he says. “At that time, Dave was in 10th grade. I would go over there to teach him some things on guitar. He was good.” So good, in fact, that within just a few years he would become a legend in his own right, in the seminal folk trio that came to be known as Koerner, Ray, and Glover.
Morton may have been Dinkytown’s first folknik. Looking back, he’s pretty sure he launched a movement… at least the one that made its first baby steps on the stage of the Scholar. “My partner and I were the first musicians to play at the Scholar. He was a graduate student in classics, named Vic Kantowski. He played the banjo, and he played a bunch of Old English ballads.” Shortly thereafter, the Scholar came to host regular hootenannies at the small stage up front under the windows. Local musicians frequented the open-stage nights, and the owners began to book traveling performers too, such as Odetta, Rolf Cahn, and Jeff Espina. At one point, the Scholar played host to a handsome young folkie from North Dakota named David Solberg—the artist who later went to Hollywood and became David Soul. (There he was known less for his strumming than his gunning—in Starsky & Hutch.)
Into this scene Bobby Zimmerman arrived. As small as the folk scene was, even fewer people were actually playing and singing. Bobby would have already set himself apart by being an aspiring performer, among just a handful of other players like Dave Ray, Spider John Koerner, Soupy Milton, and John Kolstad. Though Bob arrived as a bit of a rocker, his exposure to the Twin Cities through friends like Larry Kegan had hipped him to the nascent folk scene even before he got to town, and somewhere along the line someone turned him on to Woody Guthrie. The scene at the Scholar and a handful of other similar coffee shops like the Bastille and the Purple Onion, the record stores, and the bookstores was all about folk music of the widest imaginable variety—including the folkier and bluesier roots-rock that Dylan had already been turned on to in Hibbing. Dave Ray says, “There were all kinds of different styles, fingerpicking, classic Americana, Jewish folk songs, flamenco. And then blues impersonators like me.”
As the fall quarters wore on, Bobby Zimmerman seemed to pay less attention to his studies, and more attention to his new friends in Dinkytown. He’d learned to play the harmonica, and he’d taken to referring to himself as Bob Dylan, too—although he perhaps hadn’t settled on it, because he was still fond of prankishly calling himself all kinds of goofy names, including at one point “Bobby Vee.” At any rate, the funny little man was beginning to make his allegiances known, such as they were. Dave Ray remembers an incident when Dylan was chased out of the Sigma Alpha Mu frat house by his erstwhile brothers. “One night, he came over, running from the Sammies. He’d stolen a bunch of steaks out of their freezer. They were looking for him and he came to my house seeking sanctuary. I hid him in the basement for a few hours.”