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Was Bob Dylan a genius in the rough when he arrived at the University of Minnesota in the late 50s? Did he show signs of incipient greatness to those who hung around with him in the streets and cafes of Dinkytown? The Rake dug up this ancient history and discovered a thriving community of people who were there–who are here, 40 years down the highway.

It was fall, 1959 when 18-year-old Robert Zimmerman arrived from Hibbing, Minnesota. Bobby had always been interested in music, growing up on the Iron Range. He’d learned first to play the piano, then as a teenager, he picked up the guitar. His favorite music was the edgy, still-crazy rock ’n’ roll of the 50s—music that was at that time still considered a radical off-shoot of jazz. He stayed up late at night listening to the radio, in the crystalline air of the Far North, picking up stations from the deep, sultry South that played rock ’n’ roll, jazz, and the blues. Bobby was obsessed with music. A good middle-class kid with a prankster streak, he loitered at the Hibbing record store, picking through the slim offerings and harassing the clerks about this album or that single, laughing at the incompetence of these behind-the-counter nitwits who’d never heard of Leadbelly or Little Richard. As his abilities grew on piano and guitar, he started several rock ’n’ roll combos with his high school friends.

Already, Bobby had set his sights well beyond Hibbing and the Iron Range. Summers spent at Jewish Camp had hooked him up with friends who lived in the Twin Cities—among them Larry Kegan, who shared Bob’s love of pop music and had his own doo-wop group in St. Paul. In his later high-school years, Bobby Zimmerman took trips to the Twin Cities to visit his metropolitan buddies. Naturally, they turned him on to the best new music, the finest record shops, and even the worldly coffee shops that had sprung up around the University, where the beatniks hung out and played chess and solved the world’s problems. And the girls—Bobby was already crazy about the girls.

Picture the time and the place: In 1959, students across the country were still reeling from the age of McCarthy, still edgy with the constant threat of nuclear war, hanging like a thunderhead on the horizon—the real threat of what might happen if the Cold War suddenly got hot. The University of Minnesota, like the University of Wisconsin in Madison, increasingly became a gathering place for students who were beginning to question the dangerous world they were inheriting. Flo Castner, who was a student at the University in 1959 and a Dinkytown habitué, says, “You’ve got to remember what McCarthyism did to intellectual freedom, and independent academic research. All University research fell under the Defense Department, and everything was supposed to fit into our grand military and political schemes. Real research was dead. There were loyalty oaths. That was the climate.” Even though the Vietnam war was still three years away, there were plenty of reasons—beyond the eternal one of simply rejecting all authority—for students to feel anxious and indignant. And thanks to the baby boom and the GI Bill, there were more kids than ever before arriving at University. This equalizing effect meant that more middle-class and lower-middle-class kids were coming to school. Musician and longtime Dinkytown fixture Dave Ray remembers tuition was pretty affordable too. “The U. was a land-grant university, and anybody who could pony up the 75 bucks a quarter for tuition could go.”

A significant proportion of students were now coming from working-class families, and they brought a world of strange, fresh ideas with them. Bobby Zimmerman actually fit the stereotype of the traditional student pretty well. He was from a respectable professional family, albeit one from northern Minnesota. Ironically, even though Zimmerman hailed from the hardscrabble open-pit iron-mining country, he wasn’t really that sort of person at age 18—though he’d spend the rest of his life trying to become that kind of person. Or pretending to be that person. In 1959, though, he only knew that he liked rock ’n’ roll, and he seemed pretty sure of himself.

The summer before he arrived in Dinkytown, Dylan actually traveled to North Dakota to audition for Bobby Vee’s band. Not yet a star in his own right, Bobby Vee had a regular need for backup touring musicians, and when Bobby Zimmerman showed up in the summer of 1959 calling himself “Elston Gunn,” he let the kid play the piano for a couple of gigs. But they soon parted ways—Vee wasn’t overly impressed with Zimmerman. Anyway, Zimmerman was on his way to the big city.

When Bobby arrived at the University in the late summer of 1959, he was a typical Jewish boy ready to matriculate in general studies like Theater Arts and Astronomy. Of course, he’d brought along his guitar and his delusions of grandeur. But he still respected the wishes of his parents, who wanted him to be a good student. Zimmerman signed up for classes and made plans to rush Sigma Alpha Mu, the Jewish fraternity at the University where at least one of his cousins had rushed. But like so many abortive freshmen before him, Bobby suddenly and spectacularly went to seed. And like so many University freshmen before and since, the corrupting influence was Dinkytown.

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You can’t make sense of the Dinkytown scene of 1959 without revisiting its center of gravity: The 10 O’Clock Scholar. First established on the University’s Ag School campus over in St. Paul, by 1959 it had moved to a location at 418 14th Avenue SE. Today, this spot is occupied by a Hollywood Video parking lot. But in 1959, the Scholar was a small hole-n-the wall coffee shop that held no more than a couple dozen people comfortably. For a while, it was owned by a character named Clark Batho, but soon it was bought by a young man from Rochester named Steve Oleson and his wife Annie Mossman. Oleson was an accomplished flamenco guitarist, and when he bought the Scholar, he had a natural affinity for folk music—a growing interest among a certain crowd of students who were hanging around the University’s business district.

In the beginning, it wasn’t a massive scene like punk rock was in the 1980s, or the rave scene in the 1990s. “It was a small scene,” says John Pankake, a longtime resident of Dinkytown and folk enthusiast. “Everybody knew everybody else. I knew a dozen or so people, and if you count people I was acquainted with but didn’t know, like Dylan, I probably could have named about 20 people who were interested in folk music.” In fact, Pankake had himself been turned on to folk music by a guy who lived in his boarding house—Paul Nelson, a friend who’d seen a Pete Seeger concert, got turned on to folk, and started spreading the word. Nelson himself became a fixture in the Dinkytown folk scene not only as a fan, but as a photographer. He shot the covers of several albums by Minneapolis folk artists—including Koerner, Ray, and Glover’s first two records—and he edited a folk newsletter.

Editor’s Note: this page was modified from its original form to clarify a reference to Clark Batho.

At the St. Paul Armory on a sunny Saturday in January, two goateed men wearing NASCAR-style shirts and hats lower their legendary combat robot onto an elevated metal stage surrounded by plexiglass panels. Son of Whyachi is a heavyweight competitor built by Team Whyachi. To fans of combat bot warfare, it represents brute strength and raw power. On this day at a competition called “Mech Wars III,” the appearance of Son of Whyachi causes a stir as judges and emcees cower behind the raised platform where they usually perch. They undoubtedly fear that if the bot rips its opponent to shreds, some of the shrapnel might end up planted in their foreheads.

Son of Whyachi faces Pharmapac, an inelegantly designed but tough black box with a metal snow shovel mounted up front. As the battle begins Son of Whyachi’s mechanical legs spring into action and the rig’s three revolving blades, graced with meat tenderizer-shaped hammers, begin slicing through the air at 130 miles per hour. The blades thrash and crash against Pharmapac, fomenting a cacophony of metal-on-metal noise that could serve as a soundtrack for a war movie. Pharmapac’s body swings widely around during the pummeling, like a fighter trying to regain his footing after too many blows to the head. The crowd is ecstatic, appreciating Son of Whyachi’s relentless barrage against Pharmapac.

Whyachi’s exhibit of brutality does not frighten Craig Lovold, owner of a Holstein-colored bot dubbed Mad Cow. After learning his middleweight bot will face Why Not (the evil kid brother of Son of Whyachi) in its first bout, he does not head for the exit or cower in the corner. The 36-year-old computer programmer arrives at a simple attack strategy for his bot. First he decides to remove the “Spinning Udders of Doom,” a rotating appendage of two hammers and a titanium blade that does its business at 3,000 RPMs. Against Team Whyachi’s huge circling blades, he figures the udders will have little use. Instead, he decides to go for a direct surprise hit and prays that his opponent will die from the shock.

He grows more confident as he watches the Whyachi folks. They madly hover over the three bots they’ve entered into Mech Wars. “We’re optimistic because they’re doing a lot of soldering over there and that’s a good sign,” says Lovold with a grin. Wearing jeans and an “Udder Doom” T-shirt, Lovold has a relaxed style and wit that would not immediately indicate to an outsider that he’s spent many nights in his basement with a few buddies crafting a killer bot. Yet after watching Comedy Central’s hit show “BattleBots” regularly with his 9-year-old son Austin—a common male-bonding ritual in the bot community—he made calls last year to his former colleagues at Wilson Learning, an interactive training and media company. He quickly signed up Sheldon Nelson, Duane Anderson, and Tom Kruchten, all fans of the television program. Lovold began buying parts such as wheels, batteries, and sheet metal to build Mad Cow on a budget that has yet to crest $600. He even managed to attract a few in-kind sponsors who provide welding and materials.

Dubbing themselves “Team Rabid Robotics,” Lovold and friends built a four-wheeled box with direct–drive axles powered by two wheelchair motors. This they covered with armor made out of 11-gauge sheet metal. The crowning achievement was Mad Cow’s “Primary Weapon”—the detachable Udders of Doom hammer-blade combination. Team Rabid Robotics tested the rig, and found it had little trouble annihilating an old computer monitor and a Barcalounger, leaving an impressive mess. Lovold took it out on his driveway in Prior Lake for practice sessions. Some neighbors were frightened, but a posse of youngsters was impressed. Naturally, they’d seen battling bots on television.

Rabid Robotics gave Mad Cow a test run at a Minnesota State Fair exhibition last summer, but Mech Wars III represents its first real competition. And the competition is formidable: Team Whyachi is an intense crew of three who have a reputation for arrogance and a lack of congeniality in the otherwise chummy bot-building community. They wear uniforms, a turnoff for some botsters who don’t like such brazen attempts at professionalism. A woman who helps Whyachi wears a T-shirt that says “Deadly 4-Play,” a message reflecting the team’s general greaseball sensibility.

As it turns out, though, their surliness has more to do with the fact that they were up until 9 the night before, finishing a project at Westar Manufacturing, where they all work. (Whyachi, a term team members invented during innumerable sheepshead card games, is slang for taking someone down hard.) Located in Dorchester, Wisconsin, a small town near Wausau, Westar builds high-speed packaging equipment for the meat processing industry. But its small-town roots have not quelled the ambition of owner and team captain Terry Ewert, a man with big ideas. (Among his more sociable robotic concepts is a “neighborhood electric vehicle,” a sort of quasi-golf cart capable of 25 mph. Ewert hopes to sell it on the team’s web site.)

He dismisses the bad impression some bot builders have of his crew. While Team Whyachi has uniforms, Ewert confesses he simply purchased the clothing out of a catalog and finds it an effective way to spot team members in a crowd. They have sponsorships, unlike most bot builders, but he says it comes mainly in the way of cut-rate supplies and not much cash. And Whyachi’s beauty and craftsmanship come with a steep price tag: Son of Whyachi ran more than $60,000 in materials and labor.

Lovold and Ewert and their gangs represent the range of people who attend competitions and build combat bots. The audience and contestants are overwhelmingly white and male and have jobs in computer programming, engineering, sheet metal operations, and education. Some aspire to take their bots west for combat at “BattleBots,” “Robotica,” and other television shows which collectively have created a sport out of these iron cockfights. Others simply enjoy the competition and the engineering challenge of constructing weapons of little destruction. The Rake’s own Colleen Kruse, the comedian and storyteller who has twice served as an announcer at Mech Wars, calls bot wars “monster trucks for the Mensa set.”

These are the same men who read science fiction, play computer games, refurbish cars, adore Star Trek, and find comfort in the creation of mechanical objects. Along with the adults, there are smart teenagers bored by model airplanes, go-carts, and video games. They’re ready for recreation of a different order, often with the help of parents and siblings. “It’s a neat family project,” says Kruse. “We don’t have occasion to build things together as families anymore, it’s not what people do together. This is a chance to build something without many limits on the imagination.”

Jonathan VanderVelde is not a geek or an engineer but an architect who builds robots as design exercises. A rusty-haired 34-year-old with a rumpled appearance, VanderVelde has an abiding love of fringe cultures that first drew him to battle bots. His resume reveals his variety of passions: He was the lead singer for the power-pop band Zen Bishops. He has written comedy pieces for a local theater company. His interest in battle bots came in part because he saw similar events, chiefly monster truck shows, as “prosaic things” since competitors did not build them from the bottom up. “It could be monster toasters for how much creativity was involved,” he says. “I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to build something to attack and destroy things, where you’d have two teams slugging it out.”

We’ve made Canada the brunt of a few good jokes over the years, but they know it’s all in good fun. Besides, we Minnesotans are about as close to the Canadians as any American can legally be without renouncing citizenship. The problem isn’t so much that Canada doesn’t have a national identity separate from America’s (we do cast a pretty broad shadow, after all), but that they don’t embrace the one they have. All their best artists invariably pull up stakes and move south—Alanis Morissette, Neil Young, Barenaked Ladies, heck, even Peter Jennings turned tail on the True North as soon as the siren call of superstardom beckoned him to the land of sin. In recent years, though, Canadians have begun to quietly nurture a hipster underground of punkers posing as traditional folk artists, especially among the celtic folk fiddlers and cloggers out on the Atlantic provinces. Sadly, this micro-movement was nearly capsized by that Nova Scotian nitwit Ashley MacIsaac. Now Great Big Sea promises to heal the wounds and further the cause. This Newfoundland quartet is, for want of a better comparison, a Gen-Y Canadian version of Boiled in Lead—which is to say a cleaner, less angry version with someone who sounds a lot like Gordon Lightfoot singing. (That’s a good thing! Just wait until next month’s Broken Clock.)

A writer—a pulp novelist, a man who’s betrayed his own talent and, by his reckoning, every important relationship he’s ever known—lies in a hospital bed, delirious from disease. He can’t grip a pen; he can’t move at all without excruciating pain. To keep from going mad, he sets out to rewrite in his head The Singing Detective, his now-ancient first novel. But the world intrudes at every turn. Characters from his childhood and his wrecked marriage start turning up in his imaginings and take the story away from him. The serial’s writer, Dennis Potter—who died eight years ago this month—is wholly unknown in America, but he was one of the finest playwrights of Britain’s post-war generation, a fact too little noticed because he did all his writing for television. Potter, you should know, suffered from the same disease as his singing detective, Philip Marlow, a periodically flairing condition known as psoriatic arthropathy. The disease defined a great deal about Potter’s life; from time to time he was prone to thinking it had a moral dimension, and that if he could solve the riddle of his own life it might purge his illness. The Singing Detective is his brilliant, desperate effort to do just that, and in the process it redeems every cliché about the healing power of art.

There is no shortage of theories regarding the fever dreams of David Lynch. We have our own: He’s a walking clinical study of high-functioning autism, a man who lives—quite literally, by all appearances—in a private world that turns the everyday back on us in grotesquely refracted ways. All of Lynch’s most emblematic works (this movie, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) say the same thing: There is a world inside the world, more corrupt and more Byzantine than you can imagine. An ironic streak of puritanism colors Lynch’s notion of evil; you see it in the way he represents good (Laura Dern and Kyle McLachlan in Blue Velvet) and the glee he takes in brutality toward the unrighteous. But none of this even begins to explain the peculiar emotional force of these little dream-quests. As for Mulholland Drive, consider this Rakish Viewers’ Tip®: The plot isn’t tough to fathom if you take for granted that the first two hours are a dream dreamt by a character who doesn’t have a line until the last 20 minutes.

In the gritty alley behind Sex World, in downtown Minneapolis’ notorious Warehouse District, you can stumble upon a whole microcosm of vibrant activity. We’re not talking about the inebriated college kids pissing in corners after a night of drinking, though there is plenty of that, nor any of the unseemliness you might hope to encounter in such a nefarious block. No, the action here is the steady hum of One on One Bicycle Studio, getting ready for business. Gene Oberpriller is preparing to open the enterprise this spring. But unlike most shops who try to be all things to everybody, Oberpriller says he wants to serve the thriving subculture of urban cyclists who eschew the image of a typical bicycle “enthusiast.”

Anyone who passes through downtown Minneapolis these days can’t help but notice that the city is increasingly a bike town. Sideburned messengers, service-sector workers riding department-store clunkers, workaday folks with their pants tucked carefully into their dress socks; they all descend upon the city on their bikes. People seem to be catching on to the simple reality that bicycles are the best way to get around the city, especially the downtown area.

Oberpriller has lived in the warehouse district for more than 10 years, where he’s known to some for his raucous late-night parties and bike rallies. Among local cyclists he’s a colossus; he’s been a pro-level racer in BMX, mountain, road, and cyclocross disciplines. And now he’s become something of an economist. “Downtown is the fastest growing neighborhood in the city,” he says. “The Riverfront housing developments have the potential to bring in 10,000 new residents. And the recreational trail corridors, such as the Cedar Lake Bike Highway and the River Road/Stone Arch Bridge see as many as 3,000 people a day.”

That kind of increase in the downtown biking population will naturally mean more people needing a place to fix flats and replace chains. Until now, there really hasn’t been a bike shop downtown. (Several years ago, a small shop called Downtown Bikes tried, but didn’t make it.) Oberpriller’s shop will offer new and “recycled” bikes. In the spirit of Sanford & Son, One on One will also be a salvage operation, much like an auto parts junkyard, for people who need cheap parts. The basement of Oberpriller’s studio is brimming with wheels, handlebars, and general bike detritus gathered over a decade of trash-picking and dumpster diving. “One on One will provide the cheapest and most efficient means of transportation downtown,” says Oberpriller. “We want people to realize, especially in the urban environment, that there is an alternative to automobiles. It’s simple, really. Ride, don’t drive.”

It holds up pretty well, all things considered, but then we’re suckers for baseball movies. Tim Robbins’ turn as screwy southpaw Nuke LaLoosh (a baseball picture without clichés just isn’t a baseball picture) represents the funniest performance in le cinema du baseball since the hapless, ever befuddled William Bendix assayed the title role in The Babe Ruth Story. Susan Sarandon is likewise masterful as Annie, the temptress/muse/ home-team slut who undertakes to make Nuke a man. And Kevin Costner is—well, Kevin Costner. The man has made a second career of baseball films. (Field of Dreams, For Love of the Game—and wouldn’t a few pickup games have done a lot to spruce up Dances With Wolves?) Special bonus for Rakish readers: If you act now, the new special edition DVD is available from Amazon.com in a specially priced two-pack with The Natural, Robert Redford’s baseball horror flick about a preternaturally gifted young outfielder whose face is inexplicably melting.

“That comes to $7.10,” says the laconic clerk at Byerly’s. The woman in front of me methodically unsnaps her purse, unfolds her pocketbook, fumbles with a ballpoint, and begins to write a check. She drafts the month, F-E-B-R-U-A-R-Y, while I begin to simmer. Why can’t it be May? She applies her careful, mid-century penmanship now to her check register. Slowly, slowly she folds her check at the perforation, and extracts it from the book. Inwardly, I scream, “DEBIT CARD! DEBIT CARD!”

In other states, people left their checkbooks in the 80s. Try handing the Soup Nazi a check in Manhattan, and he likely won’t be as polite as the uptown Minneapolis branch of Old Chicago. When they stopped accepting checks recently, they handed out notes of apology with every bill. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope that our great food, cold beer, and friendly service will maintain your relationship with us as customers, friends, and neighbors.

Others may laugh at us for writing checks for 87 cents and our “check writing stations” for the handicapped. And they do, according to Buzz Anderson, president of the Minnesota Retailers Association. “When we talk to retailers in other parts of the country they say, ‘What?! You still accept checks in your state?’”

But Anderson says our acceptance of checks stems from our history of being neighborly. “I think it says something about our culture and tradition and history,” he says. He even remembers when retailers wrote counter checks for customers. “We’re still a pretty honest bunch of folks.”

Jason Korstange, a TCF director, wishes people would stop using so many checks, because they cost a lot more to process than any other form of payment. He says checks aren’t as safe as most people think either. A dozen different people may handle your check before it gets back to you. “There’s still a hardcore group of people who don’t plan on changing,” says Kathy Paese, a Federal Reserve System researcher. “Checks are going to be around for a while. They’re not going away anytime soon.” Paese describes the hardcore group as older Americans. We’ve noticed they’re probably a little more polite, a little more reserved, and a little more Minnesotan than average.

It’s hard to believe that Jeune Lune has never before staged a Greek tragedy. The highly stylized drama of that period would seem to provide fertile ground for the highly stylized productions of this French-derived theater company. Medea, however, is a bit of a surprising choice. Of all the ancient Greek tragedians (all three of them) whose works have not been entirely lost, Euripides is by far the most modern, by far the most concerned with the intricacies of character. Except for the ending, the gods are absent from Medea; this is a play about the messy business of being human. And that’s the weakness of this production, because Jeune Lune’s strengths lie more in the physical than in the psychological. Moreover, Medea is a tough show to pull off unless you have an actress with commanding stage presence to play the title character. Although Barbara Berlovitz is a fine actress in the right role, she’s not the scenery-chomping dynamo this job requires. Still, it’s interesting to see how Jeune Lune’s style matches up with the challenges presented by the script. And watch for Charles Schuminski as Aegeus, King of Athens, who makes his entrance looking remarkably like Jesus Christ Superstar.