Was Bob Dylan a genius in the rough when he arrived at the University of Minnesota in the late 50s? Did he show signs of incipient greatness to those who hung around with him in the streets and cafes of Dinkytown? The Rake dug up this ancient history and discovered a thriving community of people who were there–who are here, 40 years down the highway.
It was fall, 1959 when 18-year-old Robert Zimmerman arrived from Hibbing, Minnesota. Bobby had always been interested in music, growing up on the Iron Range. He’d learned first to play the piano, then as a teenager, he picked up the guitar. His favorite music was the edgy, still-crazy rock ’n’ roll of the 50s—music that was at that time still considered a radical off-shoot of jazz. He stayed up late at night listening to the radio, in the crystalline air of the Far North, picking up stations from the deep, sultry South that played rock ’n’ roll, jazz, and the blues. Bobby was obsessed with music. A good middle-class kid with a prankster streak, he loitered at the Hibbing record store, picking through the slim offerings and harassing the clerks about this album or that single, laughing at the incompetence of these behind-the-counter nitwits who’d never heard of Leadbelly or Little Richard. As his abilities grew on piano and guitar, he started several rock ’n’ roll combos with his high school friends.
Already, Bobby had set his sights well beyond Hibbing and the Iron Range. Summers spent at Jewish Camp had hooked him up with friends who lived in the Twin Cities—among them Larry Kegan, who shared Bob’s love of pop music and had his own doo-wop group in St. Paul. In his later high-school years, Bobby Zimmerman took trips to the Twin Cities to visit his metropolitan buddies. Naturally, they turned him on to the best new music, the finest record shops, and even the worldly coffee shops that had sprung up around the University, where the beatniks hung out and played chess and solved the world’s problems. And the girls—Bobby was already crazy about the girls.
Picture the time and the place: In 1959, students across the country were still reeling from the age of McCarthy, still edgy with the constant threat of nuclear war, hanging like a thunderhead on the horizon—the real threat of what might happen if the Cold War suddenly got hot. The University of Minnesota, like the University of Wisconsin in Madison, increasingly became a gathering place for students who were beginning to question the dangerous world they were inheriting. Flo Castner, who was a student at the University in 1959 and a Dinkytown habitué, says, “You’ve got to remember what McCarthyism did to intellectual freedom, and independent academic research. All University research fell under the Defense Department, and everything was supposed to fit into our grand military and political schemes. Real research was dead. There were loyalty oaths. That was the climate.” Even though the Vietnam war was still three years away, there were plenty of reasons—beyond the eternal one of simply rejecting all authority—for students to feel anxious and indignant. And thanks to the baby boom and the GI Bill, there were more kids than ever before arriving at University. This equalizing effect meant that more middle-class and lower-middle-class kids were coming to school. Musician and longtime Dinkytown fixture Dave Ray remembers tuition was pretty affordable too. “The U. was a land-grant university, and anybody who could pony up the 75 bucks a quarter for tuition could go.”
A significant proportion of students were now coming from working-class families, and they brought a world of strange, fresh ideas with them. Bobby Zimmerman actually fit the stereotype of the traditional student pretty well. He was from a respectable professional family, albeit one from northern Minnesota. Ironically, even though Zimmerman hailed from the hardscrabble open-pit iron-mining country, he wasn’t really that sort of person at age 18—though he’d spend the rest of his life trying to become that kind of person. Or pretending to be that person. In 1959, though, he only knew that he liked rock ’n’ roll, and he seemed pretty sure of himself.
The summer before he arrived in Dinkytown, Dylan actually traveled to North Dakota to audition for Bobby Vee’s band. Not yet a star in his own right, Bobby Vee had a regular need for backup touring musicians, and when Bobby Zimmerman showed up in the summer of 1959 calling himself “Elston Gunn,” he let the kid play the piano for a couple of gigs. But they soon parted ways—Vee wasn’t overly impressed with Zimmerman. Anyway, Zimmerman was on his way to the big city.
When Bobby arrived at the University in the late summer of 1959, he was a typical Jewish boy ready to matriculate in general studies like Theater Arts and Astronomy. Of course, he’d brought along his guitar and his delusions of grandeur. But he still respected the wishes of his parents, who wanted him to be a good student. Zimmerman signed up for classes and made plans to rush Sigma Alpha Mu, the Jewish fraternity at the University where at least one of his cousins had rushed. But like so many abortive freshmen before him, Bobby suddenly and spectacularly went to seed. And like so many University freshmen before and since, the corrupting influence was Dinkytown.
***
You can’t make sense of the Dinkytown scene of 1959 without revisiting its center of gravity: The 10 O’Clock Scholar. First established on the University’s Ag School campus over in St. Paul, by 1959 it had moved to a location at 418 14th Avenue SE. Today, this spot is occupied by a Hollywood Video parking lot. But in 1959, the Scholar was a small hole-n-the wall coffee shop that held no more than a couple dozen people comfortably. For a while, it was owned by a character named Clark Batho, but soon it was bought by a young man from Rochester named Steve Oleson and his wife Annie Mossman. Oleson was an accomplished flamenco guitarist, and when he bought the Scholar, he had a natural affinity for folk music—a growing interest among a certain crowd of students who were hanging around the University’s business district.
In the beginning, it wasn’t a massive scene like punk rock was in the 1980s, or the rave scene in the 1990s. “It was a small scene,” says John Pankake, a longtime resident of Dinkytown and folk enthusiast. “Everybody knew everybody else. I knew a dozen or so people, and if you count people I was acquainted with but didn’t know, like Dylan, I probably could have named about 20 people who were interested in folk music.” In fact, Pankake had himself been turned on to folk music by a guy who lived in his boarding house—Paul Nelson, a friend who’d seen a Pete Seeger concert, got turned on to folk, and started spreading the word. Nelson himself became a fixture in the Dinkytown folk scene not only as a fan, but as a photographer. He shot the covers of several albums by Minneapolis folk artists—including Koerner, Ray, and Glover’s first two records—and he edited a folk newsletter.
Editor’s Note: this page was modified from its original form to clarify a reference to Clark Batho.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply