The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

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.

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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.

Even small scenes depend on meeting places or club houses, and the Scholar quickly became the center of this movement. Red Nelson, who later bought the Scholar from Steve and Annie, said he was drawn to the place because of all the misfits that gathered there. The self-described “biker” says today, “It was incredible. I could hang around and drink coffee and meet all of these exotic people—intellectuals, real artists, real musicians.” Flo Castner remembers the high-powered chess matches that took place among artists, poets, and philosophers in the Scholar’s backroom. “It was a wonderful meeting place for activists and radical thinkers. At all hours you’d find some really serious chess games going on, and some really serious kibitzing.” In fact, at one point Castner says she made a pretty good living at pick-up chess matches, winning as much as $100 per game from the more arrogant sex. More than anything, though, the Scholar operated as a kind of switchboard for this secret society. Castner says, “It was grassroots energy, from the poets, the artists, and the activists. The Scholar attracted these similarly inclined people. You could always pick up a stimulating conversation and a good chess game, some great ideas, some exciting music. And networking! It was the grapevine, word of mouth, what’s happening, what’s going on.”
Mike Justen, the last owner of the Scholar (he bought it from Red Nelson in 1965), remembers the Dinkytown location vividly. “It had plate-glass windows, with random art kind of stuck in the windows. And there were curtains you could pull at night, so the performer whose back was to the glass would not be visible to the outside. It was dark. The whole place was essentially black or red, but it wasn’t threatening. A lot of the décor was the people.”

And the people were, in some cases, shockingly young. Dave Ray, for example, lived right down the street and regularly popped in. At the tender age of 15, he’d hooked up with Dave Morton at University High—the Southeast Minneapolis high school later known as Marshall-U, which was closed in the 1980s. At 18, Morton seemed very worldly to Ray. An aspiring poet, he’d also picked up the acoustic guitar, and he used to come over to Ray’s house and give him guitar lessons. “He was a beatnik,” says Dave Ray today. “He was a few years older, but it felt like 20 years older. You know how it is when you’re 15 and somebody else is 18. So we’d go down in the basement and play guitars.” Morton remembers it that way too. He was devouring beatnik literature and poetry, folk music, and radical politics, and he had a powerful influence on his young friend. “I was the original beatnik in Minneapolis,” he says. “At that time, Dave was in 10th grade. I would go over there to teach him some things on guitar. He was good.” So good, in fact, that within just a few years he would become a legend in his own right, in the seminal folk trio that came to be known as Koerner, Ray, and Glover.

Morton may have been Dinkytown’s first folknik. Looking back, he’s pretty sure he launched a movement… at least the one that made its first baby steps on the stage of the Scholar. “My partner and I were the first musicians to play at the Scholar. He was a graduate student in classics, named Vic Kantowski. He played the banjo, and he played a bunch of Old English ballads.” Shortly thereafter, the Scholar came to host regular hootenannies at the small stage up front under the windows. Local musicians frequented the open-stage nights, and the owners began to book traveling performers too, such as Odetta, Rolf Cahn, and Jeff Espina. At one point, the Scholar played host to a handsome young folkie from North Dakota named David Solberg—the artist who later went to Hollywood and became David Soul. (There he was known less for his strumming than his gunning—in Starsky & Hutch.)

Into this scene Bobby Zimmerman arrived. As small as the folk scene was, even fewer people were actually playing and singing. Bobby would have already set himself apart by being an aspiring performer, among just a handful of other players like Dave Ray, Spider John Koerner, Soupy Milton, and John Kolstad. Though Bob arrived as a bit of a rocker, his exposure to the Twin Cities through friends like Larry Kegan had hipped him to the nascent folk scene even before he got to town, and somewhere along the line someone turned him on to Woody Guthrie. The scene at the Scholar and a handful of other similar coffee shops like the Bastille and the Purple Onion, the record stores, and the bookstores was all about folk music of the widest imaginable variety—including the folkier and bluesier roots-rock that Dylan had already been turned on to in Hibbing. Dave Ray says, “There were all kinds of different styles, fingerpicking, classic Americana, Jewish folk songs, flamenco. And then blues impersonators like me.”

As the fall quarters wore on, Bobby Zimmerman seemed to pay less attention to his studies, and more attention to his new friends in Dinkytown. He’d learned to play the harmonica, and he’d taken to referring to himself as Bob Dylan, too—although he perhaps hadn’t settled on it, because he was still fond of prankishly calling himself all kinds of goofy names, including at one point “Bobby Vee.” At any rate, the funny little man was beginning to make his allegiances known, such as they were. Dave Ray remembers an incident when Dylan was chased out of the Sigma Alpha Mu frat house by his erstwhile brothers. “One night, he came over, running from the Sammies. He’d stolen a bunch of steaks out of their freezer. They were looking for him and he came to my house seeking sanctuary. I hid him in the basement for a few hours.”It was a typical Dylan moment, apparently. Nearly everyone who remembers him from his Dinkytown years agrees that Bobby was best known for looking out for number one, but not really in a malicious way. Just in a boyish way. He seemed to be searching for an identity, the way every 18- and 19-year-old does, and he seemed to be convinced that he would find it somewhere on the road to pop-music stardom. Many who knew him in 1960 in Minneapolis can’t help but feel that he was pretty cocksure, without a whole lot of substance to back it up.

On the other hand, jealousies were flaring. Dylan was already quite a lady’s man. A decade before the era of Free Love got underway, Bobby was a bit of a libertine. He seemed to have girlfriends in almost every port. He’d grown very close to Echo Helstrom in Hibbing, but at the same time he also had a girlfriend in St. Paul, whom he’d met at summer camp. On a trip to Minneapolis his senior year of high school, he met Bonnie Beecher and got romantically involved. (It’s widely believed that Dylan wrote “Girl from the North Country” thinking of Beecher, but he certainly had had enough girlfriends before he left the state to qualify a half-dozen women for the title.) Twin Cities friends remember Dylan as being very comfortable and forward with women to whom he was attracted. He was also known to hold long, deep grudges toward those who spurned him.
Flo Castner says she believed Bobby Zimmerman was in the middle of an identity crisis. “Dylan hadn’t found himself yet, hadn’t developed that poetic vision. He was much more into pop and rock. He’d only recently discovered Woody Guthrie. It was just a seed at that point, and hadn’t rooted and flowered yet. He was still bewildered and confused, stunned by what he was discovering. So he was this strange fish in this totally new pond.”

There were other reasons not to be inured to the boy from Hibbing. John Pankake, in fact, wasn’t too impressed with Dylan—not only because he didn’t think Dylan was a very good musician, but because he had sticky fingers. Already an obsessive folk collector, Pankake had a copy of The Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, a now-legendary collection of field recordings from the 1920s. He says Dylan swiped it. “In those days, Dinkytown was not like it is now,” he says. “In fact, in our rooming house, we didn’t lock the doors. So anyone could walk in off the street. It was like a small town in those times. Dylan had been up to my place listening to records and music and things, so he had an idea of what I had. And I assume he just came and helped himself when I was out. He lived in a white apartment building on 15th Avenue. A friend said they’d seen these records over there. So I went over one night and asked for them back. The next morning, I got them back.” (Not coincidentally, Pankake’s expertise in the field of folk music would grow so renown that he was asked to contribute to the liner notes of the album’s 1998 reissue on CD. He won a Grammy for those liner notes.)

Pankake saw Dylan perform several times at the Scholar, and at a handful of parties. “Dylan wasn’t very good,” he says. “He wasn’t Dylan yet. He was still Robert Zimmerman. He didn’t sound like Bob Dylan would later sound, and he didn’t look like Bob Dylan would look. He was just a college kid, a freshman. When he was playing his guitar, he looked to me like he’d recently learned the instrument. He sang some Odetta songs and some Josh White songs— singers whose albums were available at the time.” Dave Ray agrees. “He was just this square from up north.” He laughs, “Who knew? There was precious little of the future Bob Dylan to be seen in the guy.”

Castner says that Dylan actually got booed off the stage at the Scholar on one occasion, apparently as a result of his various attention-seeking antics. “He was being an obnoxious twit. In those days he was kind of schizophrenic.” Dave Ray says he heard that Dylan got booed for “sounding like shit”—and there are actually bootleg tapes from these years that would support such a theory. At any rate, Ray says it wouldn’t have been an uncommon experience for any musician, at the Scholar. “The audience was not bashful about telling you if you sounded like horse-shit.” Stan Gotlieb, who’d no sooner come to the University in 1955 than he’d immersed himself in Dinkytown folk for the next five years, agrees. He says, “Bob may have been booed off more than one stage in more than one venue, before he ‘made it.’ He was always reaching, trying to do—and be—more than he was ready for. Dylan always had more ambition and more chutzpah than talent. So much so that we didn’t recognize the talent that was there. He was an overachiever, and we were a bunch of self-appointed guardians of the one true music. I said, ‘He’ll never amount to anything’ and I count that as the first of a long series of bad predictions I have made in my adult life.”

***

There has been much written about Bob Dylan over the years, and his legend oddly seems to grow with each new biography and each new magazine profile. We can’t add much to the great volume of ink that has been spilled, other than to say that there are still dozens of people here in Minneapolis and St. Paul who remember that man-child, and who still can’t believe that Robert Zimmerman somehow became Bob Dylan within a few short months. Many of these people feel—rightly so—that we as a culture have come to be pathologically obsessed with celebrity and stardom, and that for every fame-starved Bobby Zimmerman, there is a Spider John Koerner or a Dave Ray or a Red Nelson—equally talented poets, musicians, social mavens who simply don’t have the interest or the inclination to do whatever it takes to climb to the top of the attention economy. But no. We embrace our local heroes, and we give them as much credit as they deserve—maybe more. Then again Bobby Zimmerman never belonged to us (he does belong to Hibbing, though), nor did Bob Dylan (who belongs to the world).

As a young man fresh from Hibbing, Dylan tried to conceal his true identity as a regular middle-class boy from a respectable Jewish family—a biography that was as plain then as it is today. And like all teenagers, he was struggling to find his identity, he was trying on roles, the more romantic the better. You could certainly say he had a clear vision of himself as a successful musician—but that would be with the benefit of hindsight, and the long view of a 40-year career and millions of records sold. Growing up on the Iron Range, he had a taste for rock ’n’ roll, the blues, “negro” music (as it was called back then); when he arrived in Dinkytown, he saw a vibrant new folk scene that combined bohemian culture, chess, art, music, and politics—just the way every generation of freshmen discovers an exciting new world, discovers itself in an exciting new world. Dylan, though, was a little different. To be sure, he quickly developed a singular mission to be a performer and songwriter, and the speed with which he achieved international fame after he left Minnesota for New York in January 1961 is breathtaking. It all happened so fast—within 18 months—it’s hard to believe the spark of his brilliance wasn’t apparent to his Dinkytown friends. In his early years, Dylan wanted desperately to have the kind of hard-knock life that Woody Guthrie had. He wanted to be a man of the soil, salt of the earth, he wanted his songs to ring with the truth of gritty, blue-collar realities. He wanted to be a sincere poet-bohemian in the style of Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarity. And yet he became so famous so fast that he would actually never be anything except a Hibbing yokel or a world-famous musician—although for a very brief time he was a University freshman. Almost as suddenly as he arrived in Minneapolis he was gone. A few months later, he was an international star.

This story was informed by two excellent books, one very recent, the other a golden oldie: Howard Sounes, Down the Highway (New York: Grove Press, 2001) and Toby Thompson, Positively Main Street (New York: Coward-McCann, 1971). Sounes’ book, in particular, contains groundbreaking research on Bob Dylan’s years in Hibbing and Minneapolis, and we give it our highest recommendation.—Eds

Next page: A TimelineA Timeline:

1958 The 10 O’ Clock Scholar opens in Dinkytown on 14th Avenue.

1958-1959 Robert Zimmerman makes frequent trips from his home in Hibbing to visit friends in the Twin Cities—friends he met at Jewish Camp during the summers.

1958 Dave Morton plays the first “concert” at the 10 O’ Clock Scholar.

1958-1959 Dave Morton and Dave Ray, both students at nearby University High, develop a friendship, play guitars. They hang out frequently at the Scholar. John Pankake and Paul Nelson begin collecting records and hanging out with other enthusiasts.

1958-1959 Dave Ray, Spider John Koerner, and Tony Glover meet and hang out at the Minnesota Folk Society which gives them access to other folk enthusiasts and recordings at the Library of Congress.

Spring 1959 Robert Zimmerman graduates from Hibbing High School.

Summer 1959 Bobby travels to Fargo from Hibbing to audition for Bobby Vee’s band.

Autumn 1959 Bobby enrolls at the University of Minnesota. He rushes Sigma Alpha Mu—the University’s Jewish fraternity.

Spring 1960 Bobby Zimmerman starts introducing himself as “Bob Dylan.” Friends know better, but indulge him.

Summer 1960 Bob Dylan learns to play the harmonica, gets a guitar lesson with John Koerner from Rolf Cahn—the only one in his life?

January, 1961 Bob Dylan leaves for Madison, Chicago, and New York City. He makes frequent trips back to visit family and friends during the next year.

Autumn, 1961 Dylan records his first album in New York.