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We’re going out on a limb here and recommending you skip Opening Day (April 12) and go to the second home game Saturday night. The best reason is this: You get to avoid all the dorks who know nothing about baseball and make it hard to get to the concession stands to get a beer and to the bathrooms after you’ve had a beer. (Think of those fans as the reason why you get blaring electronic music on the over-amped Dome speaker system instead of a clever organist like they have in Chicago. You’ll hate them even more.) This Twins team is worth watching for those who know the game. Torii Hunter’s and Doug Mientkiewicz’s magic gloves, Cristian Guzman legging out a triple, Joe Mays’ sinker just off the corner—that’s baseball. Those of you who prefer the never-will-bes who play for the Saints just because they perform outdoors really don’t get it. Major League infielders are the greatest athletes in American sport, period. (For those who would dispute this, ask yourself why Michael Jordan plays basketball. Answer: because he couldn’t make the White Sox.) Let it be said here first, too, that because we decry the objectification of animals, we won’t be using any animal team names like Tigers, Cubs or Orioles in The Rake.

We can’t be too emphatic about it: This Australian is one of the best and sturdiest singer/songwriters around (and, for all you Entertainment Tonight devotees—Russell Crowe’s favorite pop star!), even if he has never managed more than the most meager cult status here in the states. Kelly’s songs have a sneaky, brooding force that grows as you live with them. In a voice low and craggy and sometimes ineffably sweet, he snatches up incidental moments—passing memories of childhood, love, betrayal—and breathes life into them again. And his new record, Nothing But a Dream, is one of his finest. (See also: Post, Gossip, So Much Water So Close to Home.) If you don’t see Kelly you’ll kick yourself—or we’ll come over and do it for you.

It’s hard to believe, but Emmylou has had a career as full of twists, turns, and total self-reinvention as Madonna. No, wait, she’s had way more—and she’s been a national treasure for twice as long. Only in recent years have more people come to the realization that this woman is all that. Thanks to the remarkable “Three Divas” series, we now have flashbacks that send us back to the mid-70s, when she sang backup on Bob Dylan’s Desire. Remember “One More Cup of Coffee?” How about “Joey?” Yup, that was Emmylou. She’s always shined her brightest as an equal partner in a duet or a trio, but we certainly wouldn’t miss this solo performance, where she’ll give us a taste of the bluegrass, pop, country, rock, and soul that fall out of her songbook like so many gilded petals.

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.

***

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.