All Along Bob Dylan

America and the World

Tymon Adamczewski

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367559786
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000195873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

All Along Bob Dylan: America and the World offers an important contribution to thinking about the artist and his work. Adding European and non-English speaking contexts to the vibrant field of Dylan studies, the volume covers a wide range of topics and methodologies while dealing with the inherently complex and varied material produced or associated with the iconic artist. The chapters, organized around three broad thematic sections ( Geographies, Receptions and Perspectives ), address the notions of audience, performance and identity, allowing to map out the structure of feeling and authenticity, both, in the case of the artist and his audience. Taking its cue from the collapse of the so-called high-/ low culture split following from the Nobel Prize, the book explores the argument that Dylan (and all popular music) can be interpreted as literature and offers discussions in the context of literary traditions, or visual culture and music. This contributes to a nuanced and complex portrayal of the seminal cultural phenomenon called Bob Dylan.

Section 1
Geographies

1 Bob Dylan’s Minnesota Roots

David Pichaske

As Jung and Freud pointed out long ago, we all contain multiple personalities. Dylan especially wears many masks and revels in playing many roles. (When last I heard him in concert, he was being Frank Sinatra.) Postmodernist intellectuals, whom Dylan often plays, love this aspect of the artist, which they replicate as best they can: the 2007 film I’m Not There, “inspired by the . . . many lives of Bob Dylan”, features six actors – none of them Dylan himself – pretending to be Bob Dylan. In Why Bob Dylan Matters (2017), Richard Thomas finds Dylan in Rome and in New York, in Homer and in Virgil. As for the “real” Bob Dylan, New Yorkers love to take credit for shaping the Nobel Prize winner, dismissing (probably out of ignorance or arrogance) the first two decades of his life.

When all is said and done, however, it is our early place that most shapes our thinking. Annie Dillard writes, “When everything else has gone from my brain, . . . what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of the land” (1987, 3). Dylan’s typology is northern Minnesota. In “11 Outlined Epitaphs” (1964), he wrote, “the town I grew up in is the one / that has left me with my legacy visions.” In 1966 Dylan told Playboy, “I’m North Dakota-Minnesota-Midwestern. . . . My brains and feelings have come from there” (Cott 2006, 109); in 1969 Dylan told Rolling Stone, “Well, I’m from the Midwest. Boy, that’s two different worlds” (Cott 2006, 146); in 1978 he told Playboy, “It is going to make you a certain type of person if you stay 20 years in a place” (Cott 2006, 211). In 1985 Dylan told Spin, “Looking back, it probably has a lot to do with growing up in northern Minnesota. I don’t know what I would have been if I was growing up in the Bronx or Ethiopia or South America or even California. I think everybody’s environment affects him in that way” (Engel 1997, 80). Like America and Walt Whitman, Dylan is large and contains multitudes. But as T. S. Eliot told us in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” tradition shapes the individual talent. Minnesota is Dylan’s bedrock tradition. Even Thomas quotes Dylan as saying, “You can change your name / but you can’t run away from yourself” (2017, 46).

Minnesota, the most northern state in the U. S., sits right in the middle of the country. There are more days during the year when the temperature drops below freezing than days when it stays above freezing. Minnesota produces lumber, grain and iron ore, which it sends to markets in the East. Dylan was born in the city of Duluth, on the western shore of the most western of the five Great Lakes. Trains bring grain and iron ore to Duluth. Then, the flour and iron ore are loaded on ships and sent through the Great Lakes to the city of Buffalo, to be loaded onto other trains and sent to bakeries in Boston or steel mills in Pittsburgh. At least, that’s the way it worked when Dylan was growing up. So, what Dylan remembers from Duluth are the hills, trains, ships, wind and snow.

When he was six, Dylan’s parents moved from Duluth to Hibbing, Minnesota, where his mother had been born. Hibbing is where the iron ore is mined – in fact, the original town (“North Hibbing”) sat on top of the richest ore and had to be demolished. Shovels the size of a small hotel dug a pit four miles long and a mile across, what Bob Dylan describes as “that great ugly hole in the ground” (Shelton 1986, 16) and Robin Morris terms “a gigantic vagina” (Morris 2009, 168). The physical landscape of our youth also carries a social history which shapes our youthful mental landscape. Hibbing miners tended to be Finnish socialists. Dylan’s girlfriend Echo Helstrom was Finnish. Some evidence suggests that Dylan’s father’s job was to “control” union activities at the company he worked for – maybe that is the source of Dylan’s problems with his father – but “Bobby always went with the daughters of miners, farmers, and workers”, David Zimmerman told Robert Shelton; “He just found them more interesting” (Shelton 1986, 47).

The mining operation generated a lot of money for the town, and Hibbing High School is a beautiful building with a beautiful stage. I have examined the Hibbing High School newspapers and yearbooks, and interviewed classmates. Bob Dylan was not an important person at Hibbing High School – he stood “outside of the box”, as one friend put it – but he once played the piano on that elegant stage.

Dylan spent a little time at the University of Minnesota (not going to classes) and at various places in states west of Minnesota, before heading at age 20 to New York City in 1961. In the bohemian corner of New York City called Greenwich Village, Dylan joined a group of folk singers who were looking for an alternative to the corporate-industrial America developing out East in the 1950s – President Eisenhower (a five-star general who was raised in Kansas) once called it “the military-industrial complex” and warned the country against its power. These people saw hope for the nation in exactly the place Dylan had just left: the working class, people in contact with nature on farms, in mountains, on ranches. Many of the New York folk singers – Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, etc. – had that connection . . . or pretended to have it. So, Dylan was able to market what he had just left in the city to which he had just come.

The influence of his years in Minnesota can be found in the subjects of a few of Dylan’s songs, in images and smaller references which appear in other songs, and in the importance Dylan places on nature (wind, rain, cold, snow). It can be found in Dylan’s language, in Dylan’s anarchist politics and in big-picture ideas like his vague but firm belief in the frontier experience as a test of character which produces finally the true American democracy – what Greil Marcus once called the Invisible Republic.

One song Dylan wrote about his home place is “Bob Dylan’s Dream” (1963), in which he remembers sitting with his friends around an old wooden stove “laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn”. Another such song is “Girl from the North Country” – probably Echo Star Helstrom, although other candidates have been proposed (see Sounes 2001, 81). Dylan returns to Echo Helstrom in a later song, “Girl from the Red River Shore” (the Red River of the North flows north along the Minnesota-North Dakota line to Lake Winnipeg in Canada) in the lines, “She gave me her best advice and she said ‘Go home and lead a quiet life’”. Years before Dylan wrote the song, Echo in an interview had mentioned giving exactly such advice to young Bob.

Two other early songs with North Country roots are about exploited farmers on the one side, and exploited miners on the other. “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” is about a farmer who is so depressed by a series of economic, natural and social disasters that he shoots his children, his wife and finally himself. The song is set in South Dakota, the state just west of Minnesota. When it was first published in Broadside magazine (February 1963), Dylan gave it a subtitle: “A True Story”. When Dylan later sang this song at Live Aid (1985) and suggested that maybe some of the money being raised could go to help farmers who were losing their farms, he planted the idea for “Farm Fest” concerts which tried to do exactly that.

The mining song “North Country Blues” is set in Hibbing. The ore mines worked well during the Second World War, when the country needed lots of steel, but in the 1950s, they began to close because South America provided cheaper supplies of iron ore. People lost their jobs: when Dylan was growing up, unemployment in the area was 15–25%. Some towns disappeared entirely. The men especially turned to drink and disappeared. In the song, Dylan notices the tension between husband and wife – North Country men are especially notorious for being silent and not communicating with their wives and children – and between the workers in Minnesota and the rich owners who live in cities “out East”. The song ends with lines which predicted early on the depopulation of both agricultural and mining Minnesota: “My children will go/ As soon as they grow. / Well, there ain’t nothing here now to hold them”.

Dylan’s songs are also full of references to and images from Minnesota. “The Walls of Red Wing” is about the juvenile detention centre in Red Wing, Minnesota (Dylan was never there, and details like gates of cast iron and walls of barbed wire are 100% inaccurate). The legendary U. S. Highway 61 runs from Dylan’s native Duluth (which pops up in “Something There Is About You”) south to Mississippi. When Dylan sings about the selling of “postcards of the hanging”, he is referring to the 1920 lynching in Duluth of three Negro circus workers accused of propositioning a white woman. When Dylan gazes out the window of the St. James Hotel in “Blind Willie McTell”, he is in a four-story Victorian Italianate masterwork hotel in Red Wing, Minnesota. The Black Hills of South Dakota provide refuge and recovery at the end of “Day of the Locusts”. “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum” are a couple of backwoods stock characters out of the Ole and Lena jokes popular in Minnesota. “Positively Fourth Street” may be in New York City, but a lot of people think that Dylan means “Fourth Street, Minneapolis”, where the rich students of University of Minnesota used to hang out.

The trains which litter Dylan’s songs are a memory of Hibbing: Dylan lived just five blocks from the tracks, and “railroad imagery is of course one of Dylan’s staple recourses”, as John Herdman (1982, 46) observes. One such train is the Duquesne Express, blowing Dylan’s blues away. Dylan’s trains can represent sex (“Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance”), escape (“Poor Boy Blues”) or – more often – some dark threat (“Stuck Inside of Mobile”, “Slow Train”). One of Dylan’s boyhood friends remembers the day Dylan nearly got run over by a train while riding his motorcycle.

Bells ring through many of Dylan’s songs. The Zimmerman house at 2425 Seventh Avenue in Hibbing was exactly one block from the huge Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church, and within hearing distance of St. James Episcopal Church, Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, First Presbyterian Church, First Lutheran Church, Wesley Methodist, Holy Trinity Lutheran and the county courthouse. Their bells rang on the hour, sometimes on the half-hour and when announcing a holiday or a funeral. Like Dylan’s trains, his bells may be celebratory (“Ring Them Bells”) or commemorative (“Chimes of Freedom”). In “Ballad for a Friend”, the bells represent memory, and the train represents death.

Many of Dylan’s larger ideas come from his youth in the North Country. One of these is his tremendous sense of lost history – the demolition of North Hibbing by shovels the size of a small hotel, excavating more earth than was dug out for the Panama Canal. Dylan (1964) remembers North Hibbing specifically in “11 Outlined Epitaphs”: “old north Hibbing . . . / deserted / already dead. . .” Some buildings and homes were moved, but many were erased, including Lincoln High School, which Dylan’s mother attended. Today, old sidewalks and streets lead to the edge of an empty abyss. Dylan remembers the specific loss, and the general loss. He walks through streets that are dead. “You can always come back”, Dylan sings in “Mississippi”, “but you can’t come back all the way”. It’s gone.

Another larger Dylan idea is his distrust of big cities, especially New York. This is not, as New Yorkers believe, the result of an inferiority complex. It is probably the result of a superiority complex: people who are hard-working, decent and good do not have to show off. Anybody who shows off is probably trying to cover up his low quality. Besides, America is a democracy. We’re all equal. “I never considered myself as being in the high falootin’ category”, Dylan once told an interviewer, and city slickers like to show off. Early on, Dylan sang, “I’m just average, common too/ I’m just like him, the same as you” (“I Shall Be Free No. 10”).

Young Bobby Zimmerman, of course, left his hometown of Hibbing for the bi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The “Thing” about Bob Dylan
• Section 1 Geographies
• Section 2 Receptions
• Section 3 Perspectives
• Index