Svd in Sweden with Kristin Lundell has been in Dylan's hometown in Northern Minnesota on reportage trip.
- A feature article
- God, how jealous we are!
Great travelogue with a myriad of fine details, interviews and well-chosen images. Everything from Hibbing high schools famous auditorium, restaurant Zimmys caring Dylan Heritage in town, a Dylanolog Bill Pagel who runs a website, Bob Links, about Bob Dylan.
And the young music student Iris Kolodji, who makes a lovely interpretation of You're gonna make me lonesome When you go.
- Great Dylan Classics there on harmonican in Hibbing highs auditorium!
The thesis of the story that there is a mutual silence between Bob Dylan and his old hometown is not really true.
- For sure we Dylanologs and bobgeeks thinks that!
Which we immediately brings up an example of!
They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
(Desolation row From the album Higway 61 revisited
The introduction to Desolation row, Bob Dylan's own Union of the speech, is a Dylan surrealistic Fellini Ballad of life in an American small town. An evocative ballad with a lyrical tone and a very melancholy spirit.
Of course it could be Hibbing and perhaps a small town anywhere in the Midwest!
According to the what myth teaches there are postcards from a mob in the 1920s in Duluth, (neighboring city of Hibbing, where all iron ore were outshipped from Mesabifields out over the Great Lakes and it was Dylan's birthplace) when three colored men were hanged without trial in a crude racist lynching. An image that Dylan had as a model for his surrealistic ballad.
Considerably more social realistic and grounded in the environment and with lawsuits from Hibbing's is the text, 4 Outlined epitaphs, on the back of the disc (vinyl) The times They are a-changing.
The town I was born in hold no memoires
but for the honkin foghorns
rhe rainy mist
an the rocky cliffs
I have carried no feelings
up past the the lake superior hills
the town I grew up in is the one
that has left me with my legacy visions
it was not a rich town
my parents were not rich
it was not a poor town
an my parents were not poor
(it was a dyin town)
/ _ _ _ /
but I was young
as so I ran
an kept runnin...
I am still runnin I guess
but my road has seen many changes
for I´ve served my times as a refugee
/ _ _ _ /
runnin yes...
but stopping for a while
embracin what I left
and lovin it - for I learned by now
never t expect
what it can not give me
Wise words from a very young man with a scarred man's face on the front panel of the vinyl. The picture is certainly inspired by a classic Woody Guthrie portrait!
Why not listen to a Dylantune, North country blues, which tells of Hibbings history with an early example of globalization influence in markets, miners' fate and impact of capitalism on a country district!
A very young Bob Dylan from Newport folk music festival in 1963 as a guitar playing storyteller with an old man's voice.
Small town, community, be cheering for the neighbor kid, everyone knows everyone, main stream, social control and the law of Jante!
There was a young poet and musician, Bob Zimmerman, with the feeling of having a special talent (an inner world of images and emotions) to find the way out of Hibbing?
Iron Barge The foghorns in the fog on Lake Superiurs as lighthouses in an inland sea where the ore was shipped away to the big cities and urban life in Chicago, Detroit or Montreal.
- Could it be the way out?
Or highway 61 down to Minneapolis - blues own way, St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans. The road, like so many colored musicians have been traveling in the opposite direction to escape oppression and injustice in the American South.
Somewhere there was another world!
Just belt and leg!
The truth is also that all burrows from Hibbing to Albuquerque once was founded by people who sought freedom and a new life.
Well some were certainly adventurers and on the run from both the one and the other.
Burg thus as part of the American project!
- As it now was a time to escape from!
Bob Dylan found his way out through a wild identfikation with Woody Guthrie and his lyrics and music.
Something that brought Bob to New York, Greenwich Village and a visit to the then sick folk singer Guthrie. What got Bob to write Song to Woody who became one of his first own songs.
In Chronicles, Bob Dylan's acclaimed memory chronicles, asks his first music publisher Lou Levy of Tin Pin Alley if he ever written a song about a baseball player.
That's when Bob hears about Roger Maris in The Yankees is going to break all records in terms of number of home runs. Roger Maris was from Hibbing Minnesota of all places.
There was no Bob had heard of!
No one else for that matter!
In the city up north!
Bob still feel a certain pride!
Over to be from the same town as Roger Maris!
- A homerun for Hibbing?!
Now the wintertime is coming
The windows are filled with frost
I went to tell everybody
But I could not get across
(It takes a lot to laugh it takes a train to cry - From the album Higway 61 revisited)
PS Of course a guy carry with him his homeland through life! Something that pervades Dylan's music and lyrics and he tough, almost like a Hemingway, refers to in Chronicles - the chapter Frozen River. There, Bob very interesting talks about the inspiration behind all the early great songs and origins of his artistic thaw.
Earlier we wrote like this from Kistalight på spaning 2010.
Dylan describes in detail and with great care about the background to his creating.Woody Guthrie, the great role model, as a singer and songwriter who got his head to burn and made him get started with the storytelling. One of the first songs are Song to Woody. The text in which Dylan has written. The melody is from one of Guthrie's old songs. Something similar was the background to Let me die in my footsteps. If you want to listen to a tribute to Woody's Dylan's poem Last thoughts on Woody Guthrie from Bootlegs series 1991st
Literary models were the French symbolistpoeten Arthur Rimbaud with his lettres and especially Je est une autre. Dylan followed by girlfriend Suze Rotolo rehearsals of Brecht and Weill's Pirate Jenny, and even there were brought ideas for future songs.
The shape, structure, the songs were inspired by Hank Williams versemaking. Of his producer at Columbia, John Hammond, get Bob a disc with the title King of The Delta Blues. The singer named Robert Johnson and Dylan teeth immediately when he sees the disc cover. Johnson is a bluesman with guitar and harmonica who write their own songs from the American South. Dylan writes down and copy Johnson's texts to find out the secret behind the construction of the sparkling allegories, the old verses, the free association, the crushing truths wrapped in a hard shell of abstract nonsense that flew through the air with the greatest of ease.
Woody, Pirate Jenny, Rimbaud and bluesman Robert Johnson is equal to true, perhaps topped with some additives grass and Dylan writes, that in a few years I would write and sing songs that It `s all right Ma, Mr. Tambourine Man, Hard rains a gonna cases and the like.
We as readers may not really benefit from the magic moment when no single great song created. Perhaps there is also no such magic. The songs were only there when the ice melted in the river and the tracks were well plowed and shoved. But we'll be there when Dylan carve furniture into their own little lair at 161 West 4th Street in Greenwich Village, and especially the table where many of the songs came to be. What he talks about in his chronicle River of ice. (Kista Light på spaning 2010)
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©Thommy Sjöberg
About the Svd-article!
ReplyDeleteThis was a great article. But I become disturbed at other people's descriptions and impressions of our town. I was in the class after David Zimmerman at HHS. We were very aware back then of David's brother.
In fact, David did a great impression of his brother at the talent shows. There was another group of singers then who did Peter, Paul, and Mary song and "Mr. Tamborine Man" and "Blowin' in the Wind."
Many of us, including David, went on to Hibbing Junior College as it was known back then. BJ Rolfzen was our teacher and as far back as 1967, he was already including Bob as a famous poet in the the American Lit curriculum.
One of my best friends became one of the English instructors at Mesabi Community College and definitely has a similar lesson in her curriculum.
What I'm say is that when I was growing up in Hibbing, I was surrounded by very aware, enlightened people, not like those described in the article. Unfortunately, we all left Hibbing because there was nothing to keep us there