In this month's "A Closer Look with Laura Oakes", Laura taps in to the anticipation surrounding "A Complete Unknown," the new movie on Bob Dylan's rise to fame, by honing in on Dylan's Minnesota roots.
Most people around here know the basics of Bob Dylan's origins.
Born in Duluth, raised in Hibbing, figuring out his path in Minneapolis, and then boom, it's off to New York and an unprecedented career the modern day music world hasn't seen since.
But how much of that remarkable life has been influenced by his time here, and how does he actually feel about his Minnesota roots?
A rare 2004 interview with CBS's Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes sheds a little light.
"Did you have a good life, a good, happy childhood growing up?" asked Bradley.
"I really didn't consider myself happy or unhappy," answered Dylan. "I always knew that there was something out there that I needed to get to, and it wasn't where I was, at that particular moment. It wasn't in Minnesota, no."
Dylan scholars - and there are many - echo that sentiment, describing him as restless, even as a kid, always on to the next thing, not one to sit still and just hang out like most teenagers in the 1950's.
Writer, musician, and podcast host T.D. Mischke explains.
"If you watch Bob Dylan just sitting, the leg is bouncing up and down the whole time. Energy is just coursing through him. He's, 'let's go,' you know? And no, he's not a relaxed guy. I mean, I think his mind was on fire. I think his talent was on fire. I think that he wanted to go take over the world. And I think he's one of the few guys who had the ability to do it," says Mischke.
In most published accounts about his early days, Dylan was the "cool guy". He rode a motorcycle. Had the cool, pre-hippie, hippie girlfriend. He was the driven kid who taught himself how to play the piano and guitar. The kid who would jam in chilly snow-covered garages with his friends.
The Hibbing High School "Experience"
He was also the kid who once even channeled his idol Little Richard on the custom Steinway piano during a student talent show in the Hibbing High School auditorium, a choice that unfortunately didn’t go as planned.
Bob Kearney was the school’s maintenance supervisor for 27 years and tells the story.
"Little Richard was very animated. I mean, he brings his hands up like this and bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang," demonstrates Kearney. "Well, the principal and superintendent at the time got afraid that he was going to break the Steinway. They closed the curtains on him. The only person that I've ever heard of that they closed the curtains on. They had to pick on him. I mean, he was a kid. See that, that's the bad thing."
"And that wasn't the worst thing," Kearney continues. So they closed the curtains, the kids booed. They booed because they closed the curtains on one of their own. What happened the next day was worse. It came out of administration that they (the kids) just didn't like his music. That's why they booed. Well, all it showed is at that moment, they weren't in touch with what the kids were doing. Do you know what I mean? Is it a slap in the face to them? Not really. It's just that they didn't understand. It illustrates kind of the gap between the grownups and the kids. Kind of like Elvis (Presley). I mean, when they looked at Elvis and thought he was the devil, well, he just pushed some buttons that hadn't been pushed before."
Kearney knows practically every detail about young Bobby Zimmerman (he legally changed his name to Bob Dylan in 1962), and his Hibbing High School years in the late 1950’s.
He also explained why the school itself, in the northern part of the state on the "Iron Range", is significant in this story.
"Hibbing was about a mile and a half northwest of here," says Kearney. "What happened was, the mining company found that the richest vein of (iron) ore was underneath the existing town. They made 'em a deal. They said, 'listen, we'll move you lock, stock, and barrel. We'll build you the best school in the country.'"
These were immigrant families from all over Europe, who had come to the Iron Range to work in the mines and make a nice life for their families.
To get them off of that valuable land, the mining company actually moved the town a mile and a half South.
"The big thing was that there was over 43 different nationalities that came into this area," Kearney continues. "Most of them stayed. They came together on a whole bunch of things. One thing was education. They valued education, they wanted their kids to be smart, they knew that knowledge is the only thing that no one can take away from you."
"There were more than 43 different nationalities that came into this area. Different languages. They would come to the school at night to learn English," Kearney explained. The people that couldn't make the classes, they learned from their kids because they valued education so much, it held them here. This was an anchor for the mining company, and the mining company knew that."
So the mining company made the Taj Mahal of high schools for these families.
"Tell me about that. Why?" Oakes asks Kearney.
"Well, precisely for what you said, it's an anchor, they wanted the people to stay here, they knew they valued education," Kearney said. "They wanted to educate their kids. So they said they'd built on the best high school in the country."
It was Bob Dylan's high school, Hibbing High School, and it was indeed the most elaborate school in the United States when it opened in 1924.
"This is marble from the Middle East," says Kearney walking through the school that is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and still offers tours.
Frescoes on the walls and ceilings, plaster and horsehair crown moldings, imported mosaic tile floors. Even school lunches reflected the local dishes of the immigrant families' homelands, served on bone china. Not only a school nurse on staff, but a doctor too.
In the auditorium, velvet seats, custom-crafted to the size of the kids, ranging from kindergartners to junior college students. 600-pound Belgian crystal chandeliers on cables so they could be lowered for cleaning. Fire hydrants encased in Tiffany glass. That Steinway grand piano, specifically designed and built for the space.
The school and it's extraordinary design features cost just under $4 million to build at the time, which equates to over $60 million today.
Dylan was an okay student, ran around with a pack of friends and had the girl. But his focus always was on music and performing.
Kearney say it’s no coincidence his short walk to school in the morning took him right through the fancy auditorium, but despite all of its promise as a safe, supportive place to hone his budding rock-and-roll skills, it was also a daily, painful reminder of the curtain incident.
"I think that's one of the reasons why he didn't recognize Hibbing for a long time, because that stuck in his mind that, you know, they did this to me and now you want me to mention you? No," says Kearney.
Dylan was rarely far from a piano or guitar. Clips still exists from 1958, where Dylan and his high school buddy John Bucklen recorded themselves up in Bucklen's bedroom playing songs like "Hey Little Richard" and "Jenny, Take A Ride".
Dylan Meets Some Musical Heroes
As Dylan grew restless with Hibbing and his high school scene, he'd often hit the road to Duluth, a larger, more happening place where some of the bigger acts of the day would play the Duluth Armory. When he got word another of his idols, Buddy Holly, was coming to town, 18-year old Bob and his buddy Louie Kemp bundled up and made the trip east to Duluth.
"We're standing in the cold armory with construction and renovation work going on behind us," explained Oakes who traveled to Duluth and visited the space. "Obviously, you can hear it. But you mentioned when we first walked in that this open space in front of the stage where Buddy Holly performed, talk to me again about what the scene would have been like back in 1959."
"Packed shoulder to shoulder with mostly teenagers," says Michelle Miller who is co-executive director of the Armory Arts and Music Center, a nonprofit working to restore the old building to its original glory.
"I believe ticket prices were $1.50 and people rode their cars, they hitchhiked, any means necessary to get to the armory on that night," Miller said about the famous show. "And it was really, really cold."
And on that cold night, Miller says Bob and Louie budged up through the throngs of fans until they were practically pressed up against the stage, just a few feet from Buddy Holly. Little did anyone know that Holly's plane would crash in an Iowa cornfield just three days later on February 3rd, 1959, known as 'the day the music died'.
A sign on an easel marks the spot now, with the words Dylan used to describe what he considered to be a sort of cosmic connection the two shared.
"This is the part that gets me," Oakes says while reading it. "When he talks about, 'Out of the blue the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye and he transmitted something. Something, I didn't know what, and it gave me the chills.' Tell me about the significance of this very spot?"
"So this is where he was standing, and this is where the magic happened," Miller said. "Shortly after, he moved to Minneapolis and started really focusing on his music."
The Duluth Armory was also the place Dylan bonded with another of his idols.
"Two years before in 1957, Johnny Cash performed here at the armory, and Bob Dylan hitchhiked here," Miller says. "Because he was only probably 15 at the time, and he came down himself to watch Johnny Cash. And, you know that they became fast friends. Bob Dylan actually was on the first episode of the Johnny Cash Variety Show. Bob Dylan was his first guest. When I've gone to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, there's contents of his wallet, Bob Dylan's wallet, and Johnny Cash's personal phone number is on a scrap of paper. So they were longtime friends, and he actually saw Johnny Cash here at the Armory in 1957."
The Road To New York Leads Through Minneapolis
Along with those Duluth trips, Dylan was also starting to discover the burgeoning Twin Cities music scene, and would catch a bus to see his favorite bands whenever he could.
After high school, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota, lived in the Jewish frat house though never pledged, went to class - sometimes- and lasted roughly four semesters before selling his electric guitar, buying an acoustic, changing his name, and jumping headfirst into the red-hot Dinkytown folk music scene.
Marc Percansky is a Minneapolis music promoter, author and Dylan historian. He recalls the Dinkytown neighborhood around the University of Minnesota campus at the time.
"They called it the Bohemia, like a little Greenwich Village," recalls Percansky. "I wrote that in my book, it's a mini Greenwich Village at the time, and it apparently it had a folk scene that they've never seen the likes of again."
"And where did he perform?" Oakes asks Percansky.
"The number one spot was the 10 O'Clock Scholar. He walked in there and the guy hired him. He passed a hat and he played with Spider John there, who was a big influence on him, taught him a lot of stuff. They learned from each other and he was already performing there."
"There were other clubs in Dinkytown," Percansky continues. "I'm not sure what they all were, but he played every one there. But that was the big one. He did go to St. Paul, a place called the Purple Onion on Snelling Avenue. Those two booked him, let him play enough to ply his trade and learn what he had to do. The songs he was singing, they were all traditional covers and whatnot, and he was just soaking it all up. I knew he must have known in his head he was gonna get out of there. And he did."
This time, it was off to New York for Dylan, to meet his folk icon Woody Guthrie, and the rest is history. CBS' Ed Bradley asked Dylan about that moment.
"Did your parents approve of you being a singer, songwriter, going to New York," Bradley asked.
"No, they wouldn't have wanted that for me," Dylan explains. "But my parents never went anywhere. My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn't possibly be where any place, else. He and his wife were in their own home. That to them was the capital of the world."
"What made you different," Bradley followed with. "What pushed you out of there?"
"Well, I listened to the radio a lot," Dylan said during that 2004 interview. "I hung out in the record stores and I slam-banged around on a guitar and played the piano, and learned songs from a world which didn't exist around me."
Bradley continued, "He says even then he knew he was destined to become a music legend. 'I was heading for the fantastic lights,' Dylan writes. 'Destiny was looking right at me and nobody else.'"
Yes, confidence was not a problem for young Dylan, who in short order became the king of the 60's counterculture kaliedescope, and the master of the protest song.
One of them, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", was captured during his 1965 tour of England in the 1967 documentary "Don't Look Back", believed to be the last documentary where the filmmaker was given autonomy over the content without requiring Dylan's approval.
The song was typical of Dylan's early music. It gives a generally factual account of the killing of a 51-year-old African-American barmaid, Hattie by then 24-year-old William Devereux Zantzinger, a young man from a wealthy white tobacco farming family in Maryland. The song tells of his subsequent sentence to six months in a county jail, after being convicted of assault.
In New York, Dylan burst onto a scene ripe for his deep thoughts and exquisite turn of a phrase. It has been an unrivaled 66 years-worth of fame, and some of its ultimate trappings says T.D. Mischke.
"From early on, he was never with anybody who was completely themselves," Mischke explains. "They were either putting on a show for him, or they were purposely ignoring him, thinking that's what he wanted. But no one was ever themselves."
Mischke continues: "And there's a famous story of his bus pulling up several years ago somewhere, and a woman comes walking by, an elderly woman, and she says, 'who are you people?' They said, 'oh, we're coming into town to play a concert. What's the name of your band? We're with Bob Dylan. Oh, I haven't heard of him.' And Dylan overhears that in the bus and he instantly shoots out the door and finds her to talk to her. Because he wants to feel that rare experience of talking to someone who's going to be completely themselves."
Dylan Comes Home
Bob Dylan has been married twice, has six kids, and has maintained his ties to Minnesota over the years. He owned a home west of the Twin Cities on the Crow River, and was even known to take in a Twins game from time to time. Dylan and his younger brother David Zimmerman also owned the historic Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis from 1979 to 1988 after being presented a deal by then-promoter and marketer Fred Krohn.
"So I put a prospectus together, got it to David Zimmerman, his brother, who got it to Bob," explained Krohn. Bob was interested, and so in December 1978 I think, I went out to his place in Loretto (Minnesota). Met with Bob for two or three hours. He had read and knew every detail about the prospectus, knew all the weak points, all the strong points, and said, 'this would be of interest to me if we can buy the Orpheum at the right price.' It was owed by Ted Mann - of the famous Mann's Theater in LA, married to Rhonda Fleming the movie star. I went to Ted, and he first said, 'well, it's probably going to be $10 million.' And I said, 'get serious. Get serious very quickly.' So finally we went back-and-forth and we came up with $900,000 which is what the block was worth, less the cost of tearing down the Orpheum. That's the only way you could appraise it. I went back to Bob, and Bob said, 'that seems like a reasonable price to me, let's go.'
"Were you surprised at his knowledge of the property, the ins-and-outs of real estate and the valuations, and that he was actually interested in this?" asked Oakes.
"Totally. I thought I would have to explain every detail of the idea to him and try to sell him on it, and he had, in the time he'd had my prospectus, done a really thorough review," Krohn explained. "I'm sure he maybe had a couple of people in New York that looked at it as well. Yes, he was much more savvy about real estate and business than I gave him any credit for."
Krohn, who eventually became President and CEO of the Historic Theater Group in Minneapolis, spent a fair amount of time with Dylan and his brother during their ownership years in the 1980's. He has more than a few stories, like the time when Dylan, a Jew, experimented with Christianity.
"So, since (Dylan) liked gospel-type things so much, I can remember booking Andraé Crouch and the Disciples at the Orpheum, because I knew I could get Bob down there," Krohn says. "And so he came down at about 4:00 and was in the box office and he said, 'don't tell anyone I'm here.' OK. So, as people were coming in, he kind of peeked out the box office door, and then one person saw him and the thing just spread. And I really think, regardless of what he said, he really wanted people to know he was there, you know? So, he was at the box office and was saying hi to everyone."
The Legend Immortalized In Minneapolis
Just a few blocks away from the famous Orpheum, a multi-story, three-faced Dylan watches over the city that launched him.
Tim Carroll is the Preservation Society Manager and Archivist for Hennepin Arts.
"It's a big project," says Carroll with full understatement. "It's one of the largest (Eduardo) Kobra murals at over five stories high. The wall had to be tuck-pointed and cleaned and primed in a very special way, using a particular primer that would hold this paint. And then a grid was created on it, and using drawings, they would actually project the drawings onto the grid. And then bit-by-bit they would do color blocking. So they might be using red one day and do all the red blocks. And then another day do blue or whatever. Then Kobra would be on a crane, and he would hand-paint these portraits of Dylan. A young Dylan. A mid-range Dylan. And the Dylan we know today, the Nobel-laureate Dylan. And they got this all done in a month."
"That's what I was going to say, you mentioned they did this so very quickly," says Oakes. "I can't even believe it went up that fast. I mean, it's very intricate, like the curls in his hair and the shading and everything. It just seems like this would be something that would take a long time?
"Well, all of that is airbrushed, but it's like an industrial airbrush machine. The color blocking was all done by rolling out paint," explained Carroll. "But again, he has a team of people, and they've done this so many times. They have it down to a science."
The colorful work was funded by a private donor. It also features an image of a half-acoustic, half-electric guitar, symbolizing the big controversy over Dylan's choice to 'go electric' at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Carroll says Dylan has seen the mural and likes it, but in true introverted Dylan fashion, is uncomfortable with being honored in ways that catapult him into the spotlight.
Carroll says he's most taken by the tagline on the mural, "The times, they are a changin'' from one of Dylan's first major hits, and the uncanny relevance of that phrase even today.
"This is going to be ten years old next year and that tag, 'the times they are a changin' has had so many interpretations over the last ten years," Carroll said. "This has been through three elections. It's been through COVID. It's been through Hennepin being reconstructed, George Floyd riots. That choice by Kobra, I think was brilliant. Because any day of any year, it can have a different meaning."
Still Going Strong
Bob Dylan has written more than 600 songs. Sold more than 125 million records. He has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Presidential Medal of Freedom, ten Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award.
Along his many phases and musical morphings, he also became an accomplished painter and metal sculptor, exhibiting his art all over the world. It's difficult to truly encapsulate it all, says T.D. Mischke.
"He is utterly, wholly, completely unique," Mischke says. "I mean on every level. Like everything he did to music, he started. The phrasing. The fact that he was the first one to write songs. Up until he started writing, most songs were 'I love her, she loves me, we love each other, we're going to get married.' There weren't many singer-songwriters before he comes along. Like with Elvis, he didn't write any songs. Sinatra didn't write any songs. You know, Dylan... 'I'm gonna write my own song.' He's just such an innovator in every single thing he ever did."
"He's the first guy to go to Nashville," continued Mischke. "There is no such thing as a rock-and-roller going to Nashville. He goes down there and does 'Nashville Skyline', this country type album, and all of a sudden it's cool to go down to Nashville and thousands of musicians go there. They say in Nashville, Bob single-handedly transformed that industry, just because he decided to go down there. What he did was cool. He could make anything cool."
To this day, Dylan is revered for his contributions to American music. There are books, articles, podcasts, and even radio shows dedicated to his body of work.
KUMD Radio in Duluth still hosts a show called "Highway 61 Revisited" after one of his most acclaimed albums.
"Here we have Bob Dylan himself, reciting the Night Before Christmas," declares the show's late host John Bushey as Dylan, in his own, eccentric way, breaks into a reciting of that Christmas story.
You don't hear much about what Bob Dylan is up to these days, other than still traveling on his bus from time to time, performing on what is known as the "Never Ending Tour." But the buzz is ramping up once again with the soon-to-be released biopic "A Complete Unknown" starring Timothee Chalamet, who helped prepare for the role by spending several days driving winter Minnesota roads alone and tracing Dylan's path.
"I think he's very proud of his Minnesota heritage, and I think in some ways the way I relate to it is, I think of the iron ore in his songs and the iron ore in his voice," Chalamet explained. "As a New Yorker, I'm a 28-year old New Yorker, I don't think my path would have really brought me out here, ever. So the first time I got here I thought, well, what a gift of Bob Dylan, to be in this guy's worldview."
And yet, at age 83, Bob Dylan is nowhere near done.
"He knows his place in life now. What he's accomplished is more than he thought would ever happen to him, because he didn't even want that Nobel," explained Marc Percansky. "He was a little nervous about showing up there. Not that he didn't want it. It was a little overwhelming for him to get that award because they don't give it to musicians. But his purpose in life is to write songs, record them, make albums, tour, and he's been following that path for going on 60-some years now. And he's not done writing. He still writes. He's always writing. We'll see some more albums out of him. You'll see."
Thanks to the following for their contributions to this story: Bob Kearney, Michelle Miller, T.D. Mischke, Fred Krohn, Tim Carroll, Dale Stark, Hennepin Arts, Marc Percansky, K.G. Miles, Paul Metsa, Ed Newman, Matt Steichen, KUMD-FM.