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My country is the Minnesota–North Dakota territory/that’s where I was born an learned how t walk an/it’s where I was raised an went to school … my/youth was spent wildly among the snowy hills an/sky blue lakes, willow fields an abandoned open/pit mines. contrary t rumors, I am very proud of/where I’m from an also of the many blood streams that/run in my roots.
—Bob Dylan, 1963
You can change your name/but you can’t run away from yourself.
—Bob Dylan, 1967
At a 1986 press conference a middle-aged, slightly wizened rock ’n’ roller insisted, ‘I’m only Bob Dylan when I have to be.’ Asked who he was the rest of the time, he replied, ‘Myself.’ His creator, forty-five-year-old Robert Allen Zimmerman, had been a mere nineteen when he had reinvented himself as Bob Dylan: just three years older than the Arthur Rimbaud who wrote to his old teacher, Georges Izambard, in May 1871 and proclaimed, ‘Je est un autre’; barely three years younger than his maternal grandfather, Benjamin David Solemovitz, when, in 1906, he took off from Connor’s Point, Wisconsin, to rematerialize three years later working as a clerk for a fellow Jew, Abraham Friedman, in Hibbing, Minnesota, henceforth to be known simply as Ben Stone.
Back in Connor’s Point, Stone had had a sister named Ida, a year younger, by all accounts a pretty little thing. That is, until September 24, 1906, when a young Scotsman named John Young shot poor little Ida down, before blowing his own brains out with a .32 revolver. Young had been living in rooms adjoining the Solemovitzes’ for three years and had become more than friendly with Ida. But Young had refused to recognize the ostracism that would have resulted had Ida chosen to marry outside her faith. According to the Superior Telegram, ‘Young was madly infatuated with the girl … a difference of opinion is apparent as to whether the girl reciprocated his love.’ Her father, Sam, refused to countenance the possibility that his baby girl might have died for love. Ben, who was close to his sister and devastated by her death, undoubtedly knew better.
Leaving the family behind in Wisconsin, Solemovitz chose to reinvent himself seventy-five miles north, in Hibbing, at the heart of Minnesota’s Iron Range, a scabrous landscape shaped by intensive strip-mining that created both the largest man-made pit and the largest slag heap in the world. Founded by the adventurer Frank Hibbing in 1892, after he had cleared a road west from Mountain Iron, Hibbing was erected near to the spot where he had apparently awoken one crisp winter morn and uttered the immortal phrase, ‘I believe there is iron under me—my bones feel rusty.’
By the time Ben Stone had found employment with Abraham Friedman, the boomtown had already acquired eighty-eight hundred citizens, sewers, a municipal lighting plant, a fire department, and the largest grade-school building north of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. However, by 1921 the mining companies found that Frank Hibbing had not erected the town near to the best ore but directly on top of it, and the whole town, houses and all, had to be moved on rollers to the suburb of Alice, leaving street signs and tracks from the old Hibbing behind. Living on the edge of such a surreal wasteland was bound to affect anyone, particularly those for whom the Moving of Hibbing was merely local folklore.
Bob Dylan: I ran into a girl [one time] … She said I was a strange person and she told me why. She said, ‘You were born in a certain area where the ground is metallic.’ [1980]
Ben Stone had been just five in 1888, when his parents, Robert (‘Sabse’) and Bessie Solemovitz, abandoned the plains of Lithuania for the promise of Superior, Wisconsin. Though Stone left Superior behind in 1906, his heart and the heart of his family remained behind. When he died in May 1945 he chose to be buried in Superior, even though he and his wife, Florence—who had also lived in Superior when she had first arrived in America from Lithuania—had lived in Hibbing for nearly four decades. Their four children, and their grandchildren, all still lived in Hibbing save for their eldest daughter, Beatrice, who lived in Duluth with her husband Abraham Zimmerman and their four-year-old son, Robert. Whether ‘Beatty’ brought her son to the funeral of his maternal grandfather has not been recorded. Whatever the case, Florence Stone, née Edelstein, now found herself a widow at the age of fifty-three.
Florence Edelstein had been the eldest of ten children, the whole clan being presided over by Florence’s imposing father, Benjamin Harold Edelstein, a salesman from Kovno who had arrived in Hibbing from Superior, aged thirty-six, with his wife, Lybba, and his then six children in 1906, shortly before young Ben Stone hit town. Once established in Hibbing, ‘BH’ abandoned selling furniture and stoves and entered the entertainment business, purchasing the first of four Edelstein theaters, the Victory. As vaudeville gave way to the dependable escapism flickering off the movie screen, Edelstein expanded his operations to include the Gopher on Howard, the State, also on Howard, and the Homer on 1st. That a town of just eighteen thousand could support four cinemas in the forties suggests just how central the images conveyed from Hollywood became to postwar middle America.
Beatrice R. Stone was the second of Ben and Florence’s four children. Born three years after her brother Vernon, on June 16, 1915, she was a vivacious child and a devoted member of a large, and seemingly ever expanding, family unit. Though Hibbing would always be a curious place to grow up a Jew—the town was largely given over to Slavic Catholics and Nordic Lutherans—Beatty’s large family cocooned her. Hibbing offered few dating opportunities to the single Jewish girl—it was to the bright lights of Duluth, a town that among its hundred thousand citizens boasted some two thousand Jews, that the brash, recently graduated seventeen-year-old turned.
Ethel Crystal: We knew that all the worthwhile Jewish boys were in Duluth. To us, Duluth was a great big beautiful city with a large Jewish population, three or four synagogues to depend on, and plenty of people like us there to meet.
It was there, at a New Year’s Eve party to welcome in 1933, that she met Abraham H. Zimmerman, another first-generation American Jew, with four years on Beatty and a job with Standard Oil. The fifth of six children by Zigman and Anna Zimmerman, who had emigrated from Odessa to Duluth in 1906 during the great Eastern European exodus, the shy Abe was bowled over by this feisty young Jewess. In his quiet, steady way he began a long-distance courtship, which ended in June 1934, when Abraham and Beatrice were married.
The newlyweds were always going to choose Duluth over Hibbing, particularly given Abe’s steady promotion through the Standard Oil ranks, and they seem to have led a contented existence through the first twelve years of marriage, twice punctuated by the birth of baby boys: Robert Allen—his Hebrew name Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham—at five past nine on the evening of May 24, 1941, in St. Mary’s Hospital, a roll down the hill from their Duluth tenement; and David Benjamin, born in February 1946, also at St. Mary’s Hospital.
Though Beatty’s family remained ensconced in Hibbing, the young couple were part of a large clan of Duluth Zimmermans, comprising four uncles, one aunt, a dozen cousins, and one grandmother (Zigman had died in 1936). As Dylan himself truthfully recalled, ‘My grandmother had about seventeen kids on the one side, and on the other side about thirteen kids. So there was always a lot of family-type people around,’ as well as the aforesaid thriving Jewish community. A survey of the Jews in Duluth by Joseph Papo, conducted the year Dylan was born, counted 2,633 Jews in 827 family units, a third of whom were foreign born, four-fifths of those coming from Russia and Lithuania. Most were white-collar employees or owners of small businesses. According to Papo,
There is no serious, open anti-Semitism in the community and the relationship with the non-Jews is friendly. During the Brotherhood Week, the Temple Men’s Club arranges a special meeting to which the members invite non-Jewish men.
And yet, despite the calm insularity of the Duluth Jews, a year after the birth of their second son the Zimmermans returned to Hibbing. Young Robert was nearly six when the decision was made, by which time the striking view of Lake Superior from their house on the hill was well enough lodged in his psyche that he recalled it in the opening couplet to the 1973 song ‘Never Say Goodbye’: ‘Twilight on the frozen lake/North wind about to break.’ According to Beatty, ‘We moved back because that was my home town.’ In truth, it was a response to a serious family crisis. Shortly after David’s birth, Abraham Zimmerman was struck down by polio. Though he stayed in the hospital just a week, recuperation was slow and painful, and the option of returning to Standard Oil receded with each month spent at home.
Bob Dylan: My father was a very active man, but he was stricken very early by an attack of polio. The illness put an end to all his dreams … When we moved from the north of the country, two of his brothers, who were electrical fitters, opened a shop and they took him with them, so that he could mind the shop. [1978]
The grand opening of Hibbing’s newly refurbished appliance store, Micka Electrics, took place on June 6, 1947. Abraham’s older brothers, Maurice and Paul, had made him secretary-treasurer, initially unsure of how much responsibility he could take on. If ‘the illness put an end to all [Abraham’s] dreams,’ the move to Hibbing, while returning a delighted Beatty to her family fold, also gave their elder son a whole new landscape on which to graft his visions. Though he would later gasp for release from its suffocating conformity, to a young kid Hibbing could also be a wildly romantic place, with a sense of specialness that never left him.
Bob Dylan: I had some amazing projections when I was a kid … They were a feeling of wonder … [I] grew up in a place so foreign that you had to be there to picture it. [1978]
Bill Marinac: From Bob’s house to my house was a huge, abandoned iron-ore dump. Just below the dump was what we called the Willows—it was just willow weed—very thick and very high. It was like a forest for us … We kids used to camp out there and play there. This was our fort and clubhouse, it was our area. Of course, with ducks and all the woods, you couldn’t help but be close to nature. If you took a hike within ten minutes from home, you were in the woods. If you wanted to go fishing, that was within a half-hour from home.
But the Hibbing to which Beatty Zimmerman returned with her spouse and offspring in 1947 was coming to the end of its useful life. The need for iron to keep the Allied armies on the march had kept Hibbing economically buoyant through the latter half of the Second World War, but even the president of Oliver Iron Mining admitted to the Hibbing Chamber of Commerce the same year that ‘the greatest of all iron-ore mines is nearing [its] end.’ Young Robert would grow up in a town where every industrial dispute, and there were several through the fifties, would bring the local economy to a standstill, and where every miner had a store of stories from the old days if anyone had a mind to listen. And listening was what Bobby already did best.
Because of the suddenness of the move, and a temporary postwar shortage of accommodation, Abe and his family were initially obliged to join Beatty’s recently widowed mother, Florence, in one of the four ‘Alice Apartments,’ at 2323 3rd Avenue East, just south of Alice School. To make ends meet Beatty returned to work—as a clerk at Feldman’s. More so even than in Duluth, Bobby Zimmerman now found himself enveloped by relatives. Within walking distance of Bobby’s house at 7th Avenue East and 25th Street was Uncle Maurice, at 2620 3rd Avenue West. Grandma Anna Zimmerman had also left Duluth, and was now living with Maurice. Uncle Paul Zimmerman lived at 3505 3rd Avenue West. And that was just the Zimmermans. Great-uncles Julius, Samuel, and Max Edelstein remained in Hibbing, as did uncles Vernon and Lewis and aunt Irene, whilst his great-aunts Goldie Rutstein and Rose Deutsch lived barely twenty miles west in Virginia, Minnesota. The redoubtable BH, in his seventy-seventh year, continued to preside over the whole clan. Despite the protection such a large family afforded, Bobby still encountered his first bout of anti-Semitism at this time.
Larry Furlong: The kids used to tease Bob, sometimes. They would call him Bobby Zennerman because it was so difficult to pronounce Zimmerman. He didn’t like that … His feelings could be hurt easily. He often went home pouting.
The Jewish community in Hibbing in the late forties and fifties remained a small enclave, a minority in an essentially distrustful Catholic infrastructure. The response of the Jews was to look to the larger town of Duluth not only for cultural activities but for religious guidance. An indication of the problems of being a Jew in the North Country came about the time Robert Zimmerman’s bar mitzvah was due.
Bob Dylan: The town didn’t have a rabbi. Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year. He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of winter. He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff. He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes. They put him upstairs above the café, which was the local hangout. It was a rock & roll café where I used to hang out. [1985]
Needless to say, the L & B Café on Howard Street was not a rock & roll café in the winter of 1954, when young Bobby was undertaking instruction in Hebrew from Rabbi Reuben Maier in his rooms above the café, and the shy twelve-year-old was hardly at a stage where he was ‘hanging out.’ His bar mitzvah was as effusive and extravagant as the proud mother. At the evening proceedings that concluded Bobby’s bar mitzvah, in the ballroom of the Androy Hotel, four hundred invited guests beamed their beneficence down upon the boy-become-man. Many of the four hundred had come from Duluth and Superior, some even from the Twin Cities, to celebrate another man among them.
At this stage, Bobby continued to play the dutiful son. In public situations he seems to have confined himself to refining his powers of observation. A shy kid among the enforced hubbub of Hibbing High School, he had begun to jot things down, not poetry exactly—Robert Shelton’s biography details just two early poems, written at the age of ten, on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day respectively—just ‘things,’ a few observations to be revisited. Two further juvenile poems—presumably from 1957–58 as they refer to Bobby owning a motorbike—were kept by a schoolfriend. The pair, entitled ‘good poem’ and ‘bad poem’, show his disregard for conventional rhyme was ingrained. The opening couplet of ‘good poem’, ‘There is a boy in school/ Who don’t live by no rule’, is trumped by an even more convoluted couplet, ‘Jimmy, he thinks himself like/ Just cause he owns a motorbike,’ before he prophetically comes to the conclusion that this boy is ‘heading for a fall’.
Meanwhile, ‘bad poem’ illustrates Dylan’s storytelling gift for the first time as he describes an arm-wrestling contest between Melvin Raatsi and Boutang, interrupted by the appearance of Dale ‘coming on his machine’. The story, told in rhyme—‘“I’m gonna arm-wrestle you to death,” says Mel the boy/ “Shut up,” said Boutang, “I’ll take care of you like a little toy”’—peters out, but shows a vivid imagination already at work. When talking to TV host Les Crane in 1965, Dylan was at pains to separate these early scribblings from later songwriting impulses:
Bob Dylan: Well, I started writing a long time ago. You know how you write, you write these insane things down when you really don’t know what else to do. That’s when I started writing. [Now] when I started writing songs—that’s a different story. I started writing songs after I heard Hank Williams. [1965]
Hank Williams, country’s foremost singer-songwriter of the postwar era, was not the first to tug at Bobby’s heartstrings, but he was indicative of two important strands coming together: a nascent interest in music with a certain authentic twang that superseded technical considerations, and a fascination with those who died young, preferably at the height of their powers. Dylan himself recently rewrote the path by which he arrived at Hank Williams, suggesting that it was Johnnie Ray who first piqued his interest in the sounds coming out of the family radio.
Bob Dylan: Johnnie Ray … was popular and we knew he was different … He was an anomaly … After that, I started listening to country music … We used to get the Grand Ole Opry. [1997]
Dylan has surely mixed up his names. The singer most likely to have touched Bob as early as the year of his bar mitzvah (Ray’s main period of chart success being 1956–58) would have been Johnnie Ace, who had several Top 10 hits on the R&B charts in 1953–54, including the gorgeous ‘Never Let Me Go’ (rendered in equally exquisite fashion by Dylan himself, twenty-one years later, on the Rolling Thunder Revue). Ace learned the true meaning of losing a bet when he blew his brains out playing Russian roulette backstage at a concert on Christmas Day, 1954.
Via the hugely popular Opry radio show, Bobby learned the songs of ‘Hank Williams, Hank Snow, Hank Perry—all kinda Hanks!’ The Williams legend—dead drunk (literally) in the backseat of a car on the way to a gig in Canton, Ohio, on New Year’s Day, 1953, at the age of twenty-nine—was already being fueled by other country singers. But the particular album that struck him hardest at this time was by another Hank, the very much alive Hank Snow. The songs themselves, though, were drawn exclusively from the repertoire of a man who died eight years before Bobby was even born—the Blue Yodeler himself, Jimmie Rodgers.
Bob Dylan: When I was growing up I had a record called Hank Snow Sings Jimmie Rodgers … The songs were different than the norm. They had more of an individual nature and an elevated conscience, and I could tell that these songs were from a different period of time. I was drawn to their power. [1997]
If Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers gave the young Zimmerman a sound to call his own, James Dean, who appeared in 1955 in Rebel Without a Cause, dispensed the fury. The sense of a time bomb barely contained seemed directly to mirror the sense of isolation of a million teens. At this stage, Robert Zimmerman was just one more.
Bill Marinac: The two of us went to Rebel Without a Cause a couple of times. And he kept going. I think he went at least four times. He was one of the first to get a red jacket like James Dean. That was a good film, it made a really big impact on us. I think it was the times. Maybe you had to be there, in a small town in the fifties.
Bob Dylan: [I liked James Dean for the] same reason you like anybody, I guess. You see something of yourself in them. [1987]
In September 1955, James Dean was killed in an automobile accident near Paso Robles in California. He wasn’t even twenty-five. Closer to home, Anna Zimmerman had died of arteriosclerosis in April 1955, and the young Bobby most certainly attended his grandparent’s funeral, held at Duluth’s Tifereth Israel cemetery. The young Robert, though, was already becoming inured to death, not because of any particular death in his extended family but because, as he famously told Chris Welles of Life magazine in 1964, ‘I was born with death around me. I was raised in a town that was dying.’
As he entered the adolescent terrain, the physiological changes he was going through became fused with a dramatic change in the American psyche, foretold in a new language seemingly indecipherable to those not coursing with hormones: Awopbopaloobop alopbamboom!