Down the Highway, page 7
Those that followed or considered themselves part of the folk revival placed great importance on an elusive quality in music that might be described as authenticity. To be respected in the folk community, musicians had to perform traditional songs in a manner true to the original, while also making the songs distinctively their own. The starting point was to find and learn from the earliest and purest forms of the songs. This involved a degree of musical archaeology. Folk societies, including the Minneapolis Folklore Society, sent away to the Library of Congress for field recordings of hillbilly musicians, convicts, farm workers, and cowboys. Many of the recordings had been made by John Lomax and his son, Alan, the musicologists who had discovered Leadbelly in a Louisiana jail in the early 1930s. Some of the older songs sung by convicts, cowboys, and rural workers were known to academics as Child ballads, songs catalogued by Harvard professor Francis Child that originated in the British Isles and were still sung by descendants of immigrants, particularly in the isolated communities of the Appalachian mountains. These songs had endured through centuries, and across cultural and geographical divides, because they dealt with primal experiences – faith, love, and acts of violence – and because they were written in words both poetic and true. These were the timeworn songs Bob heard when he began frequenting the Scholar in Dinkytown and saw student musicians get up on stage to sing and play acoustic guitar.
BOB HAD FIRST VISITED the Scholar on trips into the Twin Cities when he was a high school student in Hibbing. He found a girlfriend there even before he had enrolled in college.
Bonnie Jean Beecher, the second significant girlfriend of Bob’s young life, was born a month before Bob in 1941 and raised in Minneapolis by upper-middle-class parents who ran a summer resort. She attended the University of Minnesota High School (U High) and began frequenting the Ten O‘Clock Scholar in her senior year. She met Bob there in the spring of 1959, shortly before her eighteenth birthday. He was with a friend, Harvey Abrams, playing guitar and singing a blues song. Bonnie loved blues music. She regularly visited New York, buying records by obscure artists like ‘Cat’ Iron and Richard ‘Rabbit’ Brown at Sam Goody’s record store in Manhattan. When Bonnie recognized the song Bob was playing, she struck up a conversation with the boys. ‘Harvey Abrams made some withering comment to this seventeen-year-old little girl who thought she knew something about folk music,’ she recalls. But Bob was pleasant. ‘He was not withering. He asked me how I knew [the song].’ Bonnie described her trips to New York and told Bob about her record collection. ‘I thought he was interesting and attractive and cool and probably knew some real beatniks.’ When Bonnie enrolled as a college student at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1959, to study Theater Arts, she and Bob had two classes together, Astronomy and a Theater History course, and they began a relationship.
Bonnie was a very pretty, elegant girl with long fair hair. She was intelligent, well read, culturally sophisticated, and knew as much about the blues as Bob did. She was the ‘actress girl’ – inasmuch as she studied acting – that Bob later wrote about in his poem ‘My Life in a Stolen Moment,’ the girl he fell heavily for but who kneed him in the guts. She was also probably the girl Bob had in mind when he wrote one of his most celebrated love songs, ‘Girl from the North Country.’ It is true Bob ‘fell hard’ for Bonnie, as he recorded in the poem, but she was far from being his only girlfriend in the Twin Cities. During his brief time at college, Bob conducted complicated relationships simultaneously, flagrantly, and passionately. Surprisingly, his girlfriends did not seem to mind his philandering ways.
Bob regularly visited his summer-camp girlfriend Judy Rubin at her home in St. Paul. On one trip across town with college friend Bruce Rubenstein, Bob said he was giving Judy ‘music lessons.’ He also dated Lorna Sullivan, a friend of Bonnie. Indeed, several of the girls he dated knew one another. One of his most significant girlfriends was Ellen Baker, whose father, Mike, ran the Minneapolis Folklore Society. This relationship was important partly because of the access it gave Bob to music he was then learning about. Bob attended folk music evenings at the Baker home, singing, playing guitar, and listening to Mike Baker’s extensive collection of Folkways records.* Ellen’s mother, Marjorie, took a maternal interest in Bob. He was invited to home-cooked Jewish meals and was always welcome to stay over if he did not want to go back to the fraternity house, which he tended to avoid. Marjorie fussed about his health, noticing that his teeth were dirty, for instance, and buying a toothbrush for him for when he visited.
Another female companion was Bob’s former girlfriend Echo Helstrom, who moved to Minneapolis in the fall of 1959 and got a job with a record distributor, Harold & Lieberman. She and Bob hung out at the Scholar and he asked her over to his fraternity house, telling her to ‘dress weird’ to impress the Sammies. Bob tried, unsuccessfully, to get her to spend the night. ‘We would make out,’ says Echo. ‘[But] I didn’t want to get involved with him again.’ Echo made it very clear she was finished with Bob when, on December 2, 1959, she married her boyfriend Danny Shivers and moved back to Hibbing to live with him.
Even though Echo had gone home to Hibbing, Bob had plenty of other friends to spend time with. One of his very best friends, Larry Kegan, was a patient at the University of Minnesota Hospital, following his swimming accident, and Bob walked over to the hospital to see his friend almost daily between his classes. Kegan noticed that when Bob visited he usually had a poetry book in his hand, sometimes the poems of Dylan Thomas.
Larry Kegan was not able to sit up, but an orderly would transfer him from his bed onto a gurney when Bob came to the hospital. Bob pushed the gurney to a piano in the recreation room and put Kegan in a position where his head lay next to the piano keys. Bob then played the songs they used to sing together, and Kegan attempted to sing along from his prone position. The bond of friendship was strong, and the visits meant a lot to Kegan, yet these visits were not something Bob talked about with others. It was part of his secretive nature to compartmentalize his life and, to his credit, he did not boast to friends about his loyalty to Kegan.
BOB ALSO MADE new friends in Dinkytown. One of the first musicians he met was John Koerner, known as ‘Spider’ John because of his rangy physique. An amiable young man from upstate New York, Koerner began playing guitar while studying aeronautics at the University of Minnesota. He dropped out of college after a year and a half of studying, thinking he could make his living as a traveling musician. When he got to California, he had second thoughts and joined the Marine Corps, soon after which he was involved in a car accident. As he recuperated, he read an article in Playboy about the new coffeehouse scene and how musicians played folk music in these places. He received an honorable discharge and returned to Minneapolis where he began hanging out at the Scholar and met Dave Ray, a straw-haired boy fixated with the music of Leadbelly. Together with harmonica player Tony Glover, they later formed the celebrated band Koerner, Ray and Glover. Bob and Koerner were part of a group of friends who gathered at the loading dock behind the chemistry building on campus and played music together, passing a bottle of wine between songs. As Koerner says, ‘We were all trying to learn together.’
These musicians were part of a convivial network of students who made up an extended bohemian community in Dinkytown. Another member of this community was Tova Hammerman, a flamboyant Jewish beatnik who lived with her boyfriend, Lynn Castner, in an apartment on Hennepin Avenue. Dinkytown musicians often dropped by Hammerman’s apartment to talk and play music and Bob was a regular visitor along with everyone else, eating free meals and sometimes sleeping over. Hammerman enjoyed discussing politics at these gatherings, but although Bob listened attentively he did not contribute to discussions. ‘He was a sponge. He was taking it all in,’ she says. Hammerman also got the impression that Bob was not entirely comfortable in her company ‘because I was too Jewish for him.’ Bob’s apparent reluctance to make friends with people of his own faith was something others would notice during his time in the Twin Cities. It was not that he was ashamed of being Jewish; it seemed more that he did not want to be limited in the eyes of others by being defined simply as Jewish.
When professional musician Rolf Cahn came through the Twin Cities, he stayed with Tova Hammerman and she arranged for him to give a guitar lesson to Bob and Koerner. ‘I have only had one guitar lesson in my life,’ says Koerner, and ‘I think, up until that time, Dylan probably only had one or two.’ They took turns going into a room with Cahn for half an hour, watching his fingers as he demonstrated techniques. It was true that Bob was not much of a guitar player, in the technical sense, and he did not have a very musical voice, but he had another quality that impressed Koerner. ‘It may not have been confidence, but it’s acting like confidence. You know, I’m doing this. Here’s my thing. Take it or leave it. [He was] definitely one of the most noticeable people [around] and there were quite a variety of interesting people.’
Along with Koerner, one of the foremost Dinkytown characters was poet and folk musician Dave Morton. He was tall, gaunt, and bearded and seemed much older than Bob, although in fact he was only two years his senior. ‘I was the only one with long hair and funny clothes,’ says Morton. ‘The beats looked like fuckin’ Frank Sinatra. They didn’t have long hair and a beard. I was just wild.’ Morton had been raised listening to folk and blues music, and was proud of the fact that his mother had taken him to a Leadbelly concert in 1948, making him the only member of the Dinkytown clique to have seen Leadbelly before he died the following year. Morton was also the first member of the clique to play folk music at the Scholar.
Budding musicians performed on the little stage in the window of the Scholar, usually while customers continued their conversations. There was a break between sets when performers got a gratis cup of coffee, and maybe something to eat in lieu of payment. Or they slipped out back for a swig of wine (the Scholar was not licensed to serve alcohol). Like most musicians, Morton had a limited repertoire of folk standards including songs like ‘Gypsy Davey.’ But he was slightly different from the other musicians in that he also wrote his own songs. These were topical songs about humanitarian issues and civil rights. The struggle for desegregation in the South was becoming a bloody business. In February 1960 a bomb exploded in a desegregated school in Arkansas. Two months later ten African Americans were shot in riots in Mississippi. Morton used the melodies of folk standards and then added lyrics of his own, based on events like these, to make a political point. It was a technique Woody Guthrie had used, and one that Bob himself would soon employ.
Although they became friends, Morton was critical of Bob as both a musician and a human being. Bob took little interest in intellectual pursuits and was apathetic about politics, as Tova Hammerman had noticed, despite the fact that Dave Morton and others tried their best to educate him about injustice in America. Morton also agrees with Hammerman that Bob seemed strangely uncomfortable with the fact that he was Jewish. ‘He didn’t like the Jewish boys [in Dinkytown]. He was pretending not to be Jewish,’ says Morton, although living in a Jewish fraternity house was something of a giveaway. ‘Is he nice? I don’t think so. Is he gracious? I don’t think so … He’s a kind of an introvert in a way, even though he pushes out … He was focused and he did what he wanted to do, and he did it pretty good. He wanted to be rich and famous.’
If Bob did not like Jewish boys, it seems the Jewish boys did not like him much either. That winter, the Sammies asked Bob to leave Sigma Alpha Mu. Bob told Bonnie Beecher that his father had refused to pay the rent at the fraternity house and that was why he was kicked out. His relationship with his father had been tense at times. ‘His dad was tough …very authoritarian,’ says Larry Kegan. ‘He thought Bob was wasting time with music.’ Yet Abe had always been generous and it was not in his character to deny Bob anything. The truth was the Sammies simply did not like Bob. He kept strange hours and did not join in their activities or share their interests, and his introverted nature made him seem aloof. At any rate, Bob was out of the fraternity and there was no going back. He told Bonnie the Sammies had ‘disowned’ him.
Bob’s living arrangements became complicated after he left Sigma Alpha Mu, changing almost weekly. Sometimes he had his own room, such as a garret he rented above Gray’s drugstore in Dinkytown. He also slept on the floor of friends’ apartments. For a while, he shared a place with Morton and Harvey Abrams on 15th Avenue SE. Bob also shared with another friend, Hugh Brown. Bruce Rubenstein helped Bob move into Brown’s place. ‘He dropped some pills on the floor. They were rolling around, little round pills, and he made a joke about [it being] dope,’ says Rubenstein. ‘But, in fact, it was vitamin E that he was taking to get his fingernails stronger.’
Now that he was out in the real world, Bob was frequently short of money, and he became so broke he had to pawn his guitar. Bonnie worried he was not eating properly and sneaked food from her sorority house pantry to wherever Bob was living. It was partly because Bob was not getting enough to eat that he made a strenuous effort to get jobs singing in coffeehouses; it never seems to have occurred to him to try and get a regular job. He earned a modest few dollars by playing on stage at the Ten O‘Clock Scholar but lost his spot there when he asked the owner for a pay raise. Bonnie drove Bob around town as he auditioned at new places, at times so desperate for work he offered to perform in exchange for food. Still, it was not easy to find places that would let him play. ‘I’m thinking, this guy is actually very good,’ says Bonnie. ‘Why won’t they let him play for sandwiches?’ Finally Bob got a regular gig at the Purple Onion, a pizza restaurant in St. Paul, earning five dollars a night, and sleeping on the floor when he had nowhere else to go. He also performed at the Bastille.
The Bob Dylan that appeared on stage in 1960 was very different from the commanding stage performer he would become. He looked much younger than nineteen, and his voice was not the mighty instrument it developed into, but in fact sweet sounding. Yet Bob inhabited the traditional songs that were the mainstay of the Dinkytown scene in a way others did not. Most of his contemporaries affected a nonchalance that tended to seem phony. Bob was not afraid to make mistakes, or to be funny, because there was humor in some of these old songs. When he performed a serious song, he did so with such commitment one forgot he was another white college boy singing the blues. The same innate confidence recognized by Koerner enabled Bob to make his audience suspend disbelief. These were the early signs that Bob had uncommon ability as a performer, and maybe even a special future.
DAVE WHITAKER WAS another important figure during Bob’s college life. Whitaker had been a friend of Dave Morton’s since they were at U High together. They had also been members of the radical group Unitarian Youth. Whitaker was a tiny man, weighing little more than ninety pounds, highly intelligent, liberal-minded, and well read. He could quote the beat poets as well as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and was knowledgeable about politics and social history. ‘He was the person that we knew that was an intellectual,’ says Bonnie Beecher. ‘He read a lot, a lot of weighty things: biographies, historical stuff, political writing. We kind of got our opinions from Morton and Whitaker.’
Considering himself ‘a total oddball, a right-brain person in a left-brain world,’ Whitaker’s first ambition was to become a hobo. ‘I remember my mother said, “Oh, you want to be a bohemian? Well, that’s all over.” But it turned out she was wrong.’ He discovered a new bohemian subculture in the literature of Henry Miller and the beat writers and, in the late 1950s, he embarked on an international beat odyssey. He lived on a kibbutz in Israel, met writer William Burroughs in Paris, sampled the skiffle scene in London, and visited Greenwich Village, New York, where he met up-and-coming folk artists like Dave Van Ronk. Whitaker socialized with poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in San Francisco, and went drinking with Jack Kerouac. In March 1960, he returned to Minneapolis, met, and made friends with Bob. ‘He was like a vessel waiting and wanting to be filled,’ says Whitaker. ‘I was his first kind of opening to the outside, ’cause I’d been out there. None of these other folks had been out and about, like in San Francisco with the beats. See, my main role with Dylan was telling him about life on the outside, that there was an alternative life out there. That there was a place for him.’
Before the friendship could mature, Bob and Dave Whitaker became rivals for the affections of Gretel Hoffman, a pretty student with chestnut hair. She was the daughter of radical, intellectual parents and another former student of U High. Gretel developed a love for folk music during her junior year at Bennington College in Vermont. She was studying for a career in modern dance, but changed her mind and came home to Minneapolis. While deciding what to do with her life, she enrolled in a class at the University of Minnesota. Gretel met Bob first, at the Scholar, and they formed a close friendship, despite the fact he was dating Bonnie Beecher at the time.
As Gretel explains, she and Bob spent hours talking idealistically about ‘The nature of experience and how people can do evil things to each other. [It was] very adolescent, as I look back on it.’ Gretel played guitar and she taught Bob folk songs she had learned at Bennington. Bob made an early attempt to write a song of his own and Gretel became alarmed when she heard the lyrics. ‘He wrote a song that he was nineteen now and he was not going to live to be twenty-one. He was, in certain respects, profoundly pessimistic.’ Bob, typically uneasy with his Jewishness, relaxed when an Israeli singing group came through town. Gretel, who was a Jew, shared a remarkable evening with Bob. ‘It was a very arousing kind of music. It was very lively. We were very excited about this music,’ says Gretel. ‘In a youthful kind of enthusiasm we just threw our arms around each other and kind of danced up and down … just hugging each other.’ Although Gretel did not fully realize it at the time, Bob was falling in love with her. Gretel had not thought of their friendship as romantic, partly because Bob – normally so bold with girls – had not made his feelings clear. ‘Bob and I were really becoming very close, spending a lot of time together, and I would suspect that our friendship might have turned into something else,’ she says. ‘I thought he was quite wonderful. I loved to talk to him. I loved to listen to him.’
