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03/07/2006

Hibbing, Minnesota - by Michael Gray

The first in a series of exclusive extracts from Michael Gray’s important new book, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Continuum, 2006).



Hibbing, Minnesota


Hibbing is the least populous and the most important place in Dylan's Minnesota past. Up from St.Paul, old highway 65 is snowy by November. Flat, frozen fields, Dutch-roof barns, loblolly pines and stripped silver birch trees, Lutheran churches, dilapidated fencing, pick-up trucks more frequent than cars. A timeless scenery of telegraph poles and roadside mailboxes, the aluminium-grey road stretching out flat ahead; signs for Jumbo Leeches and Flathead Worms, snowmobiles for sale, 'MEAT RAFFLE every Saturday'. A hundred miles north of St.Paul you pass through McGrath, pop. 62, with its Catholic Church, Calvary Presbyterian Church and Pliny Graveyard. Then trailer-homes and more white clapboard than before, more and more picturesque old barns, grain-elevators like cocktail-shakers. The closer you come to the Iron Range towns, the narrower and emptier the road grows, and the taller the trees, and the more the banks of snow press in from the verges. The whole hushed place turns into Winter Wonderland, and cocooned inside it, Hibbing shines and twinkles like the set for an old Perry Como Christmas Special.

It would have been in Canada but for a mistake on an historic map. Deep in snow but easy to move around, it epitomises pleasant, old-fashioned small-town life. It's not such a small town, either. At 186 square miles, its grid of leafy, spacious streets is the state's largest by area. The people are exceptionally equable, and make you welcome. It almost makes you wonder why Bob Dylan ever left.

He lived here from the age of six. To begin with, he slept on the floor in Grandma Florence's house; later, in the front room at 2425, 7th Avenue East, his boyhood home, Bob practised in his first and nameless beat group, survived his Bar Mitzvah party and stared out of the window dreaming of escape. It was a mere couple of blocks' walk to Hibbing High School.

And what a school. You'd never know it from anything Dylan's let slip, but iron ore built Hibbing a school of palatial grandeur that cost four million dollars in 1920-23, with a sanitised medieval castle exterior in brick and Indiana limestone, hand-moulded ceilings, a 75-foot-long oil painting in the library, marble steps with solid brass handrails and, in the 1825 seater auditorium, six Belgian crystal chandeliers now worth a quarter of a million each and a stage that can hold the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra.

In 1958, with his second group, the Golden Chords, Dylan stood hammering on Hibbing High School's 1922 Steinway Grand piano (breaking a pedal in the process) and shouting out rock'n'roll songs at the annual student concert . . . and got laughed at, up there on stage in an auditorium so lavish and ornate, and with such acoustic excellence, that it almost justifies STEPHEN SCOBIE's conceit that 'Every stage Bob Dylan has played on for the past thirty years has been, after Hibbing High School Auditorium, an anticlimax.'

Bobby often explored North Hibbing's ghost-town, where everyone lived before they moved them two miles south to dig out the ore they were sitting on. The whole place is just snow-covered ground, close to the edge of the vast, vast hole far down below, filled like a lake of iron-brown water. This is the world's largest open pit mine: 'the biggest hole dug by man' on the planet, as Hibbing loves to boast.

Dylan's mixed feelings about Hibbing are expressed perfectly in that one last line from 'My Life in a Stolen Moment', and he and it have had a difficult relationship ever since he left. In fact Minnesota altogether has a problem with Dylan. They resent his having left: still resent his rudeness of forty years ago. Minnesotans hear tell he was difficult despite being shown much tolerance; they feel he bit the hand that nurtured him and/or denied his roots. Invoking the stroppy teenager, they're determinedly unimpressed by the great artist.

In consequence, to the soul's delight and the professional eye's puzzlement, there is no exploitation of Dylan's incandescent name by the Heritage Industry. Look at how poor Liverpool exploits Beatledom: it's one of the city's biggest revenue sources. Yet until the last two or three years, Dylan remained conspicuously absent from Minnesota tourism bumph. Now there is an annual series of low-key events called 'Dylan Days', and the street he lived on has been renamed Dylan Drive (though East 7th Avenue still remains the official postal address).

Hibbing's 1990s coffee-table puffery 'On The Move Since 1893' managed only this: 'Some contemporary well-known natives include Rudy Perpich; Kevin McHale; Jeno Paulucci, founder of Jeno's Pizza; Bob Dylan, folk musician, songwriter; Roger Maris and Vincent Bugliosi, Charles Manson Trial prosecutor'. 35 miles away, the Judy Garland Museum welcomes you to the Garland Birthplace Historic Home, Grand Rapids; in Duluth, Dylan's birthplace home is disregarded; in Hibbing, the many pilgrims who come to the 7th Avenue house must simply decide whether to ring the bell and disturb the present owner or not.

When the Zimmerman house went on sale in 1989, the realtor had enquiries from all over the Dylan-fan world, and thought he'd make his fortune. This came to nothing, and Greg French paid $45,000 for the flat-roofed, two-storey 1940s property in Mediterranean Moderne style, not because it was Dylan's but because it was the best bargain in the neighbourhood at the time.

Once, a state tourism 'PR specialist' called, to ask Greg if he'd consider doing B&B. That was their big idea for the boyhood home of one of the 20th century's greatest artists. Meanwhile downtown there's only the bar-cafe called Zimmy's to cater to the swell of Dylan-visitors, a swell that cannot but rise.

This extraordinary non-exploitation might seem bizarrely nose-and-face syndrome: a collective sulking at least as immature as the Dylan who said 'You're boring, I'm off' four decades ago. Yet the communal hurt is quite misplaced. Those who actually knew him in the past - ex-classmates like Larry Furlong and Margaret Toivola - feel neither spurned nor uncomprehending of Dylan's quantum-leap away. More importantly, Dylan has written beautifully in poetry and song about these places and their wintry magic. In interviews too, he has often re-affirmed his pride in his formative Iron Range, North Country roots.

It seems a shame, a relapse into immaturity, that in the SCORSESE film No Direction Home, as emphasised by the title, Dylan appears to have returned to being as dismissive of the place as he was when he first got up and left - and certainly less balanced about its virtues than when he wrote those early poems quoted above. This relapse seems especially regrettable since, at least in one way, the gulf between his hometown's constraints and Dylan's restlessness was always illusory. For Hibbing was also the birthplace of Greyhound Buses, and the road from there to Duluth, where Dylan was born, was Greyhound's earliest route. It was from way up here that those routes spread out and beckoned. The far-off was part of the business of Hibbing.

[Dylan quoted from: 'A Message from Bob Dylan' (sent to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee after his badly-received Tom Paine Award Bill of Rights dinner speech of 13 Dec, 1963); '11 Outlined Epitaphs'; 'My Life in a Stolen Moment'; 'the Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan - a candid conversation with the iconoclastic idol of the folk-rock set', Playboy, Chicago, Feb 1966.

By far the best and most detailed study of Dylan's Hibbing is Dave Engel, Just Like Bob Zimmerman's Blues: Dylan In Minnesota, Rudolph WI: River City Memoirs-Mesabi, 1997. Also good are Stephen Scobie's Alias Bob Dylan, Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Red Deer College Press, 1991 & Alias Bob Dylan Revisited, Calgary: Red Deer College Press, 2003. For historical interest, see also Toby Thompson's Positively Main Street: An Unorthodox View of Bob Dylan, New York: Coward McCann & Geohegan Inc., 1971 (& London: New English Library, 1972).]



© Michael Gray 2006



(NB Dylan - and Judy Garland - quotations omitted, for copyright reasons – Gerry Smith, Editor, The Dylan Daily.)

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