University of Virginia Library

As Evening's Empire Returns Into Sand ...

POSITIVELY MAIN STREET:
An Unorthodox View of Bob Dylan

By Toby Thompson
187 pp. $5.95 (cloth).
Coward-McCann, Inc. New York.

— Dylan

By Rob Buford
Cavalier Daily Staff Writer

There really wasn't any
fight over the review copy,
when it finally arrived. Besides,
I was the one who sent for it:
first, because it is about Dylan
(and free); next, because Toby
Thompson — according to the
publisher's write-up — went to
school here. Finally, because
Journalism (New or other) says
an unsolicited scoop should be
scooped.

I

The book is many things.
Bits and pieces of the ordinary
and the weird are collected
around two fairly distinct
volumes. These are highly
personal accounts by the
author of two separate
journeys he made to Hibbing,
Minnesota. He was looking for
traces, memories an
associations, of a kid named
Bobby Zimmerman.

This kid grew up and was
famous, and according to
Thompson, returned one time
to his hometown and "...that
hair, and those clothes.
Nobody had ever, I mean it
was spooky the way everyone
spaced right out over this weird
little man. Who came on so
funny, and just happened to be
Bobby Die-Ian."

The scrapbook-journal
method Thompson chose is
well suited to the nature of his
material. Along with the personal
recollections of many
who have known Dylan,
Thompson brings into play his
own strong identity attachment
to "our man." And what
about this Zimmerman?

II

First off, the relativist approach
will not work here. I
could tell you this book is no
Life of Mayakovsky. I could
bore you with the observation
that the interplay between volumes
is like that found in Don
Quixote, which means the teller
must constantly deal with the
published fact of the first part
in carrying off the second.

Bobby Zimmerman (1959)

As it happened, Trip One,
the result of the first trip to
Hibbing — a series of pieces the
Village Voice ran in the winter
of 1969 — led to an assignment
from Richard Goldstein of US
magazine for a follow-up (Trip
Two). Together, complete with
a Mulnesque format —
splashes of small impressions,
bits and pieces like fragments
of colored glass — Positively
Main Street is being published
today in New York.

Glimpses, not a sweeping
narrative, are what emerge.
Hibbing today is often tested
against the recollections the
traveler gathers from Dylan's
brother, his mother, friends
and others. And places, like
Crippa's Record Store:

When Bob used to go in
there, they invariably had
never heard of whoever he
wanted to hear. He bought his
first harmonica there, and
today they stock his records.
Milton Glaser's psychedelic
DYLAN adorns the wall,
though the local radio station
(all 1,000 watts of it) seldom
plays his stuff even now. They
say they are a "middle-of-the-road"
station, and most of the
Hibbingites would rather forget
the freak, anyway.

A main source for material
is Dylan's old high school girl
friend, Echo Helstrom ("Girl
from the North Country").
They had gone steady during
their junior year, and Echo
liked Toby enough to tell him
some things.

Gradually it begins to
unfold: a silent, chubby little
Jewish boy, with his greasy
slicked back hair, his guitar,
and his firm conviction that
Smokey Robinson is America's
greatest living poet: Bobby
Zimmerman, Hibbing High
School, Class of 1959.

Echo: In the late fifties
"the only rock and roll you

could get in Hibbing...was late
at night over a colored station
from Little Rock, Arkansas."

"It was that same year,
eleventh grade, that Bob came
over to my house and told me
he'd finally decided on his
stage name. Yes, it was
'Dylan'...after the poet." Also,
that year:

"The Hibbing High School
Auditorium, 1957. The Jacket
Jamboree Talent Festival and
Bobby Zimmerman! Hibbing's
original blue-eyed soul brother,
on dirty blues piano...(Jesus
Christ!)

"Electric Bob, mad for
volume, decides that the
group's several microphones
and amplifiers just won't do
the job. It's a big hall and Bob
wants to blow these Philistines
out of their seats as far back as
the last row...Fast and hard
enough to get in there and
destroy some brain cells.
Electroshock therapy!"

He broke the fortissimo
pedal on the upright Baldwin,
while the crowd laughed and
booed in confusion. As Echo
describes it, Dylan's "wild
imagination" sheltered him
from the reality of the
surrounding failure to
comprehend or enjoy. They
could never understand why a
nice boy like Bobby
Zimmerman would want to
stand up in public and sing and
carry on..."like a nigger!" His
love was oblivious to their
chagrin. He was entranced by
the very sounds he created.

III

Freshman year. The
University of Minnesota. He
pledged Sigma Alpha Mu. Bob
Dylan! A Sammy!?...Holy...!
Yes, well only a pledge, though
he lived in the house part of
that first year, before he
dropped out, and into
Dinkytown and The Street.

On the Second Trip,
Thompson met Ellen Baker,
who knew Dylan during what
she calls the "bohemian" days.
She drove stock cars then, and
Dylan — well, Dylan had his
guitar, and he was travelling,
setting up connections, and
getting ready for New York.

Dylan, himself, said later:
"My past is so complicated you
wouldn't believe it even if I
told you." But what develops
in the second half is the

humanization of a demigod. It
occurs that a chief danger for
folk heroes is in having their
pasts discovered, smudged with
the dull, commonplace,
everyday marks of camp
realism, or pure kitsch.

Mrs. Zimmerman likes Toby
too. She is at once suspicious
and trusting. If she is a
protective Jewish momma,
who works in a department
store, who drives the Cadillac
and takes the winters in Miami,
then she is no Portnoy's
momma, thank God. There's
something earthy, like love, in
Mrs. Z. And it gets across,
without sounding like a
patronizing pimp.

Bobby took care of Mother,
and before, had helped his
father in the family store: the
bad times were when they
would go out to repossess
someone's furniture, some
laid-off miner, on the margin,
and a family running on credit
and God's Will. And we are to
imagine an emerging sense of
outrage at the affront, the very
absurdity of bitter poverty in
the midst of great riches.

We are to follow Thompson
on what increasingly becomes
his own search for a personal
goal, a part of his own identity,
as much as for a glimpse of the
early Dylan. Trip Two takes up
with the writer contemplating
Ernest Hemingway's home in
Oak Park, Illinois. Somehow,
this jars loose the confession
that Toby "always wanted to
publish something about
Dylan," a fact which needs no
expression besides the book
itself.

The pre-pub copy says "Mr.
Thompson would like to be a
musician when he grows up."
And Mr. Thompson himself
tosses our way the following
scrap of local memorabilia:

"And the Charlottesville
scene (c. 1963) at Paul
Clayton's cabin...with Bob
apparently really getting into
riding bikes around town, up
and down the campus, blowing
the blue Brooks Brothers
button-down set's minds;

"UVA! and the evening
drinking at the Gaslight but
not much 'cause John Tuck,
the Gaslight's owner, never got
along with Paul very well, but
there had been good music
there, what with Caroline
Hester, Dick Farina, Joanie
(Baez) and god knows who else
from the city (D.C.) dropping
down." Those were folk days.

IV

Richard Goldstein says Thompson
puts you in U.S. Keds, that
"this is a real story about a real
writer searching out the underpinnings
of a personal myth, and
finding nothing but real country
with real people living in it...

"...there is more about young
Bobby Zimmerman here than any
pseudo-exclusive interview or documentary
hand job could suggest."
Which is true, but along comes the
risk that if you don't "like" the
writer, you won't like his writing,
which is the risk of getting overly
involved with one's subject in a
matter of biographical record.

The journals are really quite
amazing, and you find yourself
more and more appreciating
Thompson's basic honesty. If it's an
act, then it goes even further as
pure art. The picaresque, patchwork
form has some contradictory
holes in it, but for exactly this
juxtapositionary method, the message
begins to appear.

Vonnegut's Bokonon has a concept
of Dynamic Tension, which
applies beautifully in this book. In
two journeys, and from two
accounts, we see a cyclic restless-restful
symmetry. Dylan departed
Hibbing. He had returned
only a few times, once for his
father's funeral.

The last time was for his high
school class's tenth reunion. He
stayed long enough to sign a few
autographs — saw Echo, briefly —
and left as suddenly as he had
arrived. The inevitable drunk, some
monkey, picked the inevitable
fight. Bob split.

But in a way, going home is
what New Morning is about. We
read Thompson's boyhood-to-fame
epic, and yet we see it in such a
way that the road back home stays
at once both open and closed. It is
the realization that Dylan's Highway
61 is a two-way affair, and
the writer, we say, has felt some of
the things his hero has. (Or has
he..?)

Thompson never even met
Dylan. But Dylan knows his biographer,
ever since those Voice
pieces. Rolling Stone (Nov. 29,
1969) quotes Dylan: "That
boy...this fellow, Toby...has got
some lessons to learn." Something
in the series had gone too far. Nor
was shoddy publicity anything new
to Dylan. By the time of Thompson's
articles, the bad vibes were
reaching life size proportions with
the rumor that Bob doubtless was
heading for suicide (on Easter, to
boot). Or so they said. That was
just before Nashville Skyline, and
not long after John Wesley Harding.

And, of course, such speculation
as that was wildly tentative
compared with what they had been
saying a few years earlier — the
culture vultures — who intoned
solemnly about a vegetable —
invalid Dylan, ruined in his bike
mishap, which hadn't been so bad
after all. The talk had been bullshit.

Zimmerman's high school
English teacher compared his
poetry to that of Vachel Lindsay,
more than any other. Dylan, in "his
tight jeans and that kooky little
grin," a veritable lightning rod and
transmitter built into one, he never
wanted to stand still long enough to
humor the pot shooters and
rag pickers of Celebrity Land. They
didn't build Highway 61 for
standing still.

Finally, the story is exhumed,
touched up with a loving hand, and
delivered into writing from the
scrapheap of modern mythology.

V

And one other thing. Forever
tagged a Jewish momma, Mrs. Z.
did say something else about early
times: when he was a child, and,
she says, all along, Bob was "very
religious." He went to all the
churches — not just the synagogue
— every denomination and sect he
could find in Hibbing.

Jesus Christ! Dylan a religion
freak?!

Well, maybe not...

...but about five years ago I
experienced my one and only
Dylan concert. This is difficult to
describe, the feeling I recall from
sitting there, near the stage —
Friday night, indoors, in seats $5 a
shot in the front orchestra — with
some friends.

The feeling is more a sort of
composite vision, I suppose —
"Rainy Day Women...and Blowin'
in the Wind..." all mixed up oddly
together. It had been as if the sage
were living, before our eyes, outliving
the very culmination of his
prophecies, and in so doing had
become a modern myth, and then a
metamorphosis himself. By himself
(and "Mr. Tambourine Man")

Dylan a modern prophet: if the
"religious" part — anti-kitsch — is
unclear, then Toby Thompson's
book is a good place to go. It's
quite a zap.