It was a typical Dylan moment, apparently. Nearly everyone who remembers him from his Dinkytown years agrees that Bobby was best known for looking out for number one, but not really in a malicious way. Just in a boyish way. He seemed to be searching for an identity, the way every 18- and 19-year-old does, and he seemed to be convinced that he would find it somewhere on the road to pop-music stardom. Many who knew him in 1960 in Minneapolis can’t help but feel that he was pretty cocksure, without a whole lot of substance to back it up.
On the other hand, jealousies were flaring. Dylan was already quite a lady’s man. A decade before the era of Free Love got underway, Bobby was a bit of a libertine. He seemed to have girlfriends in almost every port. He’d grown very close to Echo Helstrom in Hibbing, but at the same time he also had a girlfriend in St. Paul, whom he’d met at summer camp. On a trip to Minneapolis his senior year of high school, he met Bonnie Beecher and got romantically involved. (It’s widely believed that Dylan wrote “Girl from the North Country” thinking of Beecher, but he certainly had had enough girlfriends before he left the state to qualify a half-dozen women for the title.) Twin Cities friends remember Dylan as being very comfortable and forward with women to whom he was attracted. He was also known to hold long, deep grudges toward those who spurned him.
Flo Castner says she believed Bobby Zimmerman was in the middle of an identity crisis. “Dylan hadn’t found himself yet, hadn’t developed that poetic vision. He was much more into pop and rock. He’d only recently discovered Woody Guthrie. It was just a seed at that point, and hadn’t rooted and flowered yet. He was still bewildered and confused, stunned by what he was discovering. So he was this strange fish in this totally new pond.”
There were other reasons not to be inured to the boy from Hibbing. John Pankake, in fact, wasn’t too impressed with Dylan—not only because he didn’t think Dylan was a very good musician, but because he had sticky fingers. Already an obsessive folk collector, Pankake had a copy of The Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, a now-legendary collection of field recordings from the 1920s. He says Dylan swiped it. “In those days, Dinkytown was not like it is now,” he says. “In fact, in our rooming house, we didn’t lock the doors. So anyone could walk in off the street. It was like a small town in those times. Dylan had been up to my place listening to records and music and things, so he had an idea of what I had. And I assume he just came and helped himself when I was out. He lived in a white apartment building on 15th Avenue. A friend said they’d seen these records over there. So I went over one night and asked for them back. The next morning, I got them back.” (Not coincidentally, Pankake’s expertise in the field of folk music would grow so renown that he was asked to contribute to the liner notes of the album’s 1998 reissue on CD. He won a Grammy for those liner notes.)
Pankake saw Dylan perform several times at the Scholar, and at a handful of parties. “Dylan wasn’t very good,” he says. “He wasn’t Dylan yet. He was still Robert Zimmerman. He didn’t sound like Bob Dylan would later sound, and he didn’t look like Bob Dylan would look. He was just a college kid, a freshman. When he was playing his guitar, he looked to me like he’d recently learned the instrument. He sang some Odetta songs and some Josh White songs— singers whose albums were available at the time.” Dave Ray agrees. “He was just this square from up north.” He laughs, “Who knew? There was precious little of the future Bob Dylan to be seen in the guy.”
Castner says that Dylan actually got booed off the stage at the Scholar on one occasion, apparently as a result of his various attention-seeking antics. “He was being an obnoxious twit. In those days he was kind of schizophrenic.” Dave Ray says he heard that Dylan got booed for “sounding like shit”—and there are actually bootleg tapes from these years that would support such a theory. At any rate, Ray says it wouldn’t have been an uncommon experience for any musician, at the Scholar. “The audience was not bashful about telling you if you sounded like horse-shit.” Stan Gotlieb, who’d no sooner come to the University in 1955 than he’d immersed himself in Dinkytown folk for the next five years, agrees. He says, “Bob may have been booed off more than one stage in more than one venue, before he ‘made it.’ He was always reaching, trying to do—and be—more than he was ready for. Dylan always had more ambition and more chutzpah than talent. So much so that we didn’t recognize the talent that was there. He was an overachiever, and we were a bunch of self-appointed guardians of the one true music. I said, ‘He’ll never amount to anything’ and I count that as the first of a long series of bad predictions I have made in my adult life.”
***
There has been much written about Bob Dylan over the years, and his legend oddly seems to grow with each new biography and each new magazine profile. We can’t add much to the great volume of ink that has been spilled, other than to say that there are still dozens of people here in Minneapolis and St. Paul who remember that man-child, and who still can’t believe that Robert Zimmerman somehow became Bob Dylan within a few short months. Many of these people feel—rightly so—that we as a culture have come to be pathologically obsessed with celebrity and stardom, and that for every fame-starved Bobby Zimmerman, there is a Spider John Koerner or a Dave Ray or a Red Nelson—equally talented poets, musicians, social mavens who simply don’t have the interest or the inclination to do whatever it takes to climb to the top of the attention economy. But no. We embrace our local heroes, and we give them as much credit as they deserve—maybe more. Then again Bobby Zimmerman never belonged to us (he does belong to Hibbing, though), nor did Bob Dylan (who belongs to the world).
As a young man fresh from Hibbing, Dylan tried to conceal his true identity as a regular middle-class boy from a respectable Jewish family—a biography that was as plain then as it is today. And like all teenagers, he was struggling to find his identity, he was trying on roles, the more romantic the better. You could certainly say he had a clear vision of himself as a successful musician—but that would be with the benefit of hindsight, and the long view of a 40-year career and millions of records sold. Growing up on the Iron Range, he had a taste for rock ’n’ roll, the blues, “negro” music (as it was called back then); when he arrived in Dinkytown, he saw a vibrant new folk scene that combined bohemian culture, chess, art, music, and politics—just the way every generation of freshmen discovers an exciting new world, discovers itself in an exciting new world. Dylan, though, was a little different. To be sure, he quickly developed a singular mission to be a performer and songwriter, and the speed with which he achieved international fame after he left Minnesota for New York in January 1961 is breathtaking. It all happened so fast—within 18 months—it’s hard to believe the spark of his brilliance wasn’t apparent to his Dinkytown friends. In his early years, Dylan wanted desperately to have the kind of hard-knock life that Woody Guthrie had. He wanted to be a man of the soil, salt of the earth, he wanted his songs to ring with the truth of gritty, blue-collar realities. He wanted to be a sincere poet-bohemian in the style of Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarity. And yet he became so famous so fast that he would actually never be anything except a Hibbing yokel or a world-famous musician—although for a very brief time he was a University freshman. Almost as suddenly as he arrived in Minneapolis he was gone. A few months later, he was an international star.
This story was informed by two excellent books, one very recent, the other a golden oldie: Howard Sounes, Down the Highway (New York: Grove Press, 2001) and Toby Thompson, Positively Main Street (New York: Coward-McCann, 1971). Sounes’ book, in particular, contains groundbreaking research on Bob Dylan’s years in Hibbing and Minneapolis, and we give it our highest recommendation.—Eds
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