Bob Dylan (48 page)

 

2) Broom:
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
(Polyvinyl). Okay, but they don’t do “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”—Boris’s favorite song.

 

3)
Clerks II,
written and directed by Kevin Smith (The Weinstein Company). Last line of the film: “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives.” Immediately jettisoned by Soul Asylum’s suicidal “Misery.”

 

4) Grates:
Gravity Won’t Get You High
(Dew Process). For “Inside Outside”—fast, desperate, cool, absolutely unafraid of how smart it is. “I might live to tell the tale,” says singer Patience, “of how young girls once rode a whale.”

 

5) Ellen Barkin: “It’s nighttime in the big city . . .”
Theme Time Radio Hour with Bob Dylan
(XM Radio). Every week, before Dylan as disc jockey begins spinning his discs and telling his tales, Barkin, the woman who so long ago in
Diner
couldn’t put her husband’s records back in the right order, now stands back and lowers the boom. After her opening line, what by now amounts to a poem in progress unfolds: “A woman walks barefoot, her high heels in a handbag . . . A man gets drunk, he shaves off his moustache . . . A cat knocks over a lamp . . . An off-duty cop parks in front of his ex-wife’s house.” Is he stalking her, or do they still sleep together?

 

6) Cat Power: Live on KEXP (eMusic exclusives). Four numbers recorded on the air with only guitar and piano, and likely a more complete summation of who this woman is and what she does than can be found anywhere else. It’s all so quiet you don’t know whether to hold your breath or scream.

 

7) Robert Plant:
Nine Lives
(Rhino). In 1982 the ex-Led Zeppelin dervish drifted in a sea all his own, a surfer on a wave that never reached shore. That was “Far Post,” then a B-side, nearly impossible to find since. It’s here. You can play it all day long.

 

8) Bob Dylan:
Modern Times
(Columbia). Inside the sometimes slack rhythms and the deceptively easy lines, a deep longing. For a trail of dead.

 

9/10) Peter Stampfel: Karen Dalton,
It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best
(1969: Koch, 1997) and Holy Modal Rounders,
Alleged in Their Own Time
(Rounder, 1975). On
Gala Mill,
the Drones cover “Are You Leaving for the Country,” a song learned from a recording by the ’60s Greenwich Village folk-scene jazz singer Karen Dalton (“My favorite singer in the place,” Bob Dylan says in
Chronicles of the Café Wha?
in 1961). She had an acrid voice, and she lived an acrid life, caught like a purse-snatcher in Stampfel’s song “Sally in the Alley.” He uses the lyrics to “Sally” to end his notes to the reissue of Dalton’s 1969 album; he
recorded it on the Holy Modal Rounders’
Alleged in Their Own Time
nearly twenty years before Dalton died. You’ll forget the Drones’ version of “Are You Leaving for the Country”; you may forget Dalton’s (on her just-reissued 1971 album
In My Own Time
). You won’t forget “Sally”—a nursery rhyme about a junkie.

Spring 2007
²⁰

 

“As I walked out—” Those are the first words of “Ain’t Talkin’,” the last song on Bob Dylan’s
Modern Times,
released in the fall of 2006. It’s a great opening line for anything: a song, a tall tale, a fable, a novel, a soliloquy. The world opens at the feet of that line. How one gets there—to the point where those words can take on their true authority, raise suspense like a curtain, and make anyone want to know what happens next—is what I want to look for.

For me this road opened in the spring of 2005, upstairs in the once-famous, now shut Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I was giving a reading from a book about Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Older guys—people my age—were talking about the Dylan shows they’d seen in 1965: he had played Berkeley on his first tour with a band that December. People were asking questions—or making speeches. The old saw came up: “How does someone like Bob Dylan come out of a place like Hibbing, Minnesota, a worn-out mining town in the middle of nowhere?”

A woman stood up. She was about thirty-five, maybe forty, definitely younger than the people who’d been talking. Her face was dark with indignation. “Have any of you ever
been
to Hibbing?” she said. There was a general shaking of heads and murmuring of no’s—from me and everyone else. “You ought to be ashamed of
yourselves,” the woman said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’d been to Hibbing, you’d know why Bob Dylan came from there. There’s poetry on the
walls.
Everywhere you look. There are bars where arguments between socialists and the IWW, between Communists and Trotskyists, arguments that started a hundred years ago, are still going on. It’s
there
—and it was there when Bob Dylan was there.”

“I don’t remember the rest of what she said,” my wife said when I asked her about that night. “I was already planning our trip.”

 

 

Along with our younger daughter and her husband, who live in Minneapolis, we arrived in Hibbing a year later, coincidentally during Dylan Days, a now-annual weekend celebration of Bob Dylan’s birthday, in this case his sixty-fifth. There was a bus trip, the premiere of a new movie, and a sort of Bob Dylan Idol contest at a restaurant called Zimmy’s. But we went straight to the high school. On the bus tour the next day, we went back. And that was the shock: Hibbing High.

In his revelatory 1993 essay “When We Were Good: Class and Culture in the Folk Revival,” the historian Robert Cantwell takes you by the hand, guides you back, and reveals the new America that rose up out of World War II. “If you were born between, roughly, 1941 and 1948,” he says,

That sentence is typical of Cantwell’s style: apparently obvious social changes charted into the realm of familiarity, then a hammer
coming down: as you are feeling your way into your own world, your parents’ world is
abolished.

Growing up in the certified postwar suburb towns of Palo Alto and Menlo Park in California, I lived some of this life. Though Bob Dylan did not grow up in the suburbs—Hibbing is not close enough to Duluth, or any other city, to be a suburb of anything—he lived some of this life, too.

Cantwell moves on to talk about how the new prosperity of the 1950s was likely paradise to your parents, how their aspirations became your seeming inevitabilities: “Very likely, you saw yourself growing up to be a doctor or a lawyer, scientist or engineer, teacher, nurse, or mother—pictures held up to you at school and at home as pictures of your special destiny.” And, Cantwell says,

So, Cantwell writes, “in this vision of consumer Valhalla there was a lingering note of caution, even of dread”—but let’s go back to the schools.

The public schools I attended—Elizabeth Van Auken Elementary School in Palo Alto, and Menlo Atherton High School in Menlo Park—were not built before World War I. They were built after the Second World War, part of the world that was already changing. The past was still there: Miss Van Auken, a beloved former teacher, was always present to celebrate the school’s birthday. When our third-grade class read the Little House books, we wrote Laura In-galls Wilder and she wrote back. But the past was fading as new houses went up all around the school. A few miles away, Menlo-Atherton High was a sleek, modern plant: one story, flat roofs, huge banks of windows in every classroom, lawns everywhere, and three parking lots, one reserved strictly for members of the senior class.
The school produced Olympic swimmers in the early 1960s; a few years later Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks would graduate and, a few years after that, make Fleetwood Mac the biggest band in the world. The school sparkled with suburban money, rock ’n’ roll cool, surfer swagger, and San Francisco ambition—and compared to Hibbing High School it was a shack. “I know Hibbing,” Harry Truman said in 1947, when he was introduced to Hibbing’s John Galeb, the National Commander of Disabled American Veterans. “That’s where the high school has gold door knobs.”

Outside of Washington, D.C., it’s the most impressive public building I’ve ever seen. In aerial photographs, it’s a colossus: four stories, ninety-three feet high, with wings 180 feet long flying out from a 416 foot front. From the ground it is more than anything a monument to benign authority, a giant hand welcoming the town, all of its generations, into a cave where the treasure is buried, all the knowledge of mankind. It speaks for the community, for its faith in education, not only as a road to success, to wealth and security, reputation and honor, but as a good in itself. This town, the building says, will have the best school in the world.

In the plaza before the building there is a spire, a war memorial. On its four sides, as you turn from one panel to another, are the names of those students from Hibbing who died in the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean and Vietnam Wars—and, on the last panel, with no names, a commemoration of the terrorist attacks of 2001. Past the memorial are steps worthy of a state capitol leading to the entrance of the building. It was late Friday afternoon; there were no students around, but the doors were open.

Hibbing High School was built near the end of the era when Hibbing was known as “the richest village in the world.” A crusading mayor, Victor Power, enforced mineral taxes on US Steel, operator of the huge iron-ore pit mines that surrounded the original Hibbing. Elected after a general strike in 1913, he fought off the mine company’s allies in the state legislature and the courts in battle after battle. When ore was discovered under Hibbing itself, Power and others forced the company to spend sixteen million dollars to move the whole town—houses, hotels, churches, public
buildings—four miles south. The bigger buildings were cut in quarters and reassembled in the new Hibbing like Legos.

Tax revenues had mounted over the years in the old north Hibbing; at one point, the story goes, when a social-improvement society took up donations for poor families, none could be found. But in the new south Hibbing, in a maneuver aimed at building support for lower corporate tax rates in the future, the mining company offered even more money in the form of donations, or bribes: school-board members directed most of it to what became Hibbing High, which Mayor Power had demanded as part of the price of moving the town. With prosperity seemingly assured, the town turned out Power in favor of a mayor closer to the mines. Soon a law was passed limiting public spending to a hundred dollars per capita per year; then the limit was lowered, and lowered again. The tax base of the town began to crumble; with World War II, when the town was not allowed to tax mineral production, and after, when the mines were nearly played out, the tax base all but collapsed. Ultimately, the mines shifted from iron ore to taconite, low-grade pellets that today find a market in China, but Hibbing never recovered. In the 1950s it was a dying town, the school a seventh wonder of a time that had passed, a ziggurat built by a forgotten king. And yet it was still a ziggurat.

 

 

When it opened in 1924, Hibbing High School had cost four million dollars, an unimaginable sum for the time. At first it was the ultimate consolidated school, from kindergarten through junior college. There were three gyms, two indoor running tracks, and every kind of shop that in the years to come would be commonplace in American high schools—as well as an electronics shop, an auto shop, a conservatory. There was a full-time doctor, dentist, and nurse. There were extensive programs in music, art, and theater. But more than eight decades later, you didn’t have to know any of this to catch the glow of the place.

Climbing the enclosed stairway that followed the expanse of outdoor steps, we saw not a hint of graffiti, not a sign of deterioration
in the intricate colored tile designs on the walls and the ceilings, in the curving woodwork. We gazed up at old-fashioned but still majestic murals depicting the history of Minnesota, with bold trappers surrounded by submissive Indians, huge trees and roaming animals, the forest and the emerging towns. It was strange, the pristine condition of the place. It spoke not for emptiness, for Hibbing High as a version of Pompeii High—though the school, with a capacity of over two thousand, was down to six hundred students, up from four hundred only a few years before—and, somehow, you knew the state of the building didn’t speak for discipline. You could sense self-respect, passed down over the years.

We followed the empty corridors in search of the legendary auditorium. A custodian let us in, and told us the stories. Seating for eighteen hundred, and stained glass everywhere, even in the form of blazing candles on the fire box. In large, gilded paintings in the back, the muses waited; they smiled over the proscenium arch, too, over a stage that, in imitation of thousands of years of ancestors, had the weight of immortality hammered into its boards. “No wonder he turned into Bob Dylan,” said a visitor the next day, when the bus tour stopped at the school, speaking of the talent show Dylan played here with his high-school band the Golden Chords. Anybody on that stage could see kingdoms waiting.