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Description
"As I went out--" Those are the first words of "Ain't Talkin'," the last song on Bob Dylan's Modern Times, released in the fall of 2006. It's a great opening line for anything: a song, a tall tale, a fable, a novel, a soliloquy. The world opens at the feet of that line. How one gets there--to the point where those words can take on their true authority, raise suspense like a curtain, and make anyone want to know what happens next--is what I want to look for.
For me this road opened in the spring of 2005, upstairs in the once-famous, now-shut Cody's Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I was giving a reading from a book about Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." Older guys, people my age, were talking about the shows they'd seen in 1965--Dylan had played Berkeley on his first tour with a band that December. People were asking questions--or making speeches. The old saw came up: "How does someone like Bob Dylan come out of a place like Hibbing, Minnesota, a worn-out mining town in the middle of nowhere?"
A woman stood up. She was about thirty-five, maybe forty, definitely younger than the people who'd been talking. Her face was dark with indignation. "Have any of you ever been to Hibbing?" she said. There was a general shaking of heads and murmuring of no's--from me and everyone else. "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves," the woman said. "You don't know what you're talking about. If you'd been to Hibbing, you'd know why Bob Dylan came from there. There's poetry on the walls. Everywhere you look. There are bars where arguments between socialists and the IWW, between Communists and Trotskyists, arguments that started a hundred years ago, are still going on. It's there--and it was there when Bob Dylan was there."
"I don't remember the rest of what she said," my wife said when I asked her about that night. "I was already planning our trip."
Along with our younger daughter and her husband, who live in Minneapolis, we arrived in Hibbing a year later, coincidentally during Dylan Days, a now-annual weekend celebration of Bob Dylan's birthday, in this case his sixty-fifth. There was a bus trip, the premiere of a new movie, and a sort-of Bob Dylan Idol contest at a restaurant called Zimmy's. But we went straight to the high school. On the bus tour the next day, we went back. And that was the shock: Hibbing High.
In his revelatory 1993 essay "When We Were Good: Class and Culture in the Folk Revival," the historian Robert Cantwell takes you by the hand, guides you back, and reveals the new America that rose up out of World War II. "If you were born between, roughly, 1941 and 1948," he says--"born, that is, into the new postwar middle class"--
you grew up in a reality perplexingly divided by the intermingling of an emerging mass society and a decaying industrial culture.... Obscurely taking shape around you, of a definite order and texture, was an environment of new neighborhoods, new schools, new businesses, new forms of recreation and entertainment, and new technologies that in the course of the 1950s would virtually abolish the world in which your parents had grown up.
That sentence is typical of Cantwell's style: apparently obvious social changes charted into the realm of familiarity, then a hammer coming down--as you are feeling your way into your own world, your parents' world is abolished.
Growing up in the certified postwar suburban towns of Palo Alto and Menlo Park in California, I lived some of this life. Though Bob Dylan did not grow up in the suburbs--despite David Hajdu's dismissal of Dylan, in his book Positively 4th Street, as "a Jewish kid from the suburbs," Hibbing is not close enough to Duluth, or any other city, to be a suburb of anything--he lived some of this life, too.
Cantwell moves on to talk about how the new prosperity of the 1950s was likely paradise to your parents, how their aspirations became your seeming inevitabilities: "Very likely, you saw yourself growing up to be a doctor or a lawyer, scientist or engineer, teacher, nurse, or mother--pictures held up to you at school and at home as pictures of your special destiny." And, Cantwell says,
You probably attended, too, an overcrowded public... |
More articles from Daedalus
On Benjamin's '-abilities'.(Walter Benjamin), March 22, 2007
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