Bob Dylan’s American Journey

Lord Growing

Last night (as I write this), my wife and I had dinner at one of our regular spots, the Loring Pasta Bar in Dinkytown. During my first 13 years in Minneapolis, it was a drug store. And Bob Dylan lived above that drug store 30 years before that.

Today, I went to the Bob Dylan exhibit a few blocks from there at the Weisman Art Museum. To my eyes, it has two sections. The first puts Dylan into the social context of Hibbing, Minnesota and the Dinkytown neighborhood where he nominally went to college. The second part displays cool and undoubtedly expensive collectibles from Dylan’s later career.

When I visited Washington DC a year ago, I promised myself I would really try to learn something by studying the “social context” type exhibits. But after a lot of traveling and schlepping bags around and figuring out the Metro system, I was more than happy to just gawk at the actual gun that killed Lincoln, Archie Bunker’s actual chair, Wilbur Wright’s actual mandolin.

The Weisman exhibit’s Minnesota section will not be traveling with the exhibit to other parts of the country (if I understand correctly), but it gives us the best of both types of museum experiences — insight into the Iron Range world Dylan was born into and what kind of environment he walked into in Dinkytown, as well as piles of “actual” stuff.

We get a couple actual pages of a high school term paper Bob Zimmerman wrote on the Grapes of Wrath (the paper is entitled “Does Steinbeck Sympathize With His Characters?” and we can see that the teacher felt Bob had over-used the phrase “You can’t help but like …”).

We get a couple actual copies of Little Sandy Review, the folk music magazine founded by Paul Nelson and Jon Pankake. It turns out the magazine was actually LITTLE — about 4 x 7 inches. I imagine it was sandy, too. I should have named this blog The Big Tidy Review.

There’s a copy of the real Anthology of American Folk Music — the analog thing you dropped a needle on. I’ve never seen it before.

And movingly, there’s a little white t-shirt with “Greystone Park Hospital” stenciled on it. The card next to it reads “Woody Guthrie wore this t-shirt during the five-year period from 1956 to 1961 that he was confined to Greystone State Hospital — he called it ‘Gravestone’ …” But it’s roughly at this time that the revealing historical context starts to slip away and we’re left with little else but these kinds of neat artifacts … not that there’s anything wrong with that. I like actual stuff, too.

We see the familiar “Mickey Mouse ears” camera with which Pennebaker filmed Don’t Look Back, uncorrected galley proofs of Tarantula, Bruce Langhorne’s actual tambourine (i.e., THE tambourine). There’s a genuine Lovin Spoonful souvenir spoon (which looks like a mighty small spoonful, in my experience). I half expected to see Lord Growing stuffed and mounted.

I spent two hours on it and needed another, especially if I was going to listen to the audio clips and watch the videos, at least some of which came from Scorsese’s recent documentary.

It’s an excellent exhibit, really. If you’re in — or can get to — Minneapolis before April 29, definitely do it and give it three hours. Then go have pasta at the Loring in Dinkytown. Most important, see some live music — check my Monochord Minnesota links, for example. There’s also a decent chance the brilliant Spider John Koerner is in town, and he is very much worth the trip from wherever you happen to be.

Editor’s Note: This is installment 19 of this thing where I’m trying to post something every day, all month long. Or was it all day, every month long?