Like a rolling stone: how Bob Dylan shed his past
It started on a few different occasions. It began when he changed his name; it began when he first picked up a guitar, and even further back, it began when he first listened to music that moved him; the career of Bob Dylan has no definitive start as so much went into making him the artist he became. However, if you were going to start the story of Bob Dylan somewhere, it would be on a bus from Minnesota to New York, where he decided to drop out of university, leave his life behind, and head to New York to become a musician.
When Dylan played one of his first-ever gigs in New York, he made out like he was trying to ascertain the sound of one of his biggest musical influences, Woody Guthrie. Before strumming his guitar or singing a single note when he took to the stage, he said, “[I’ve] been travellin’ the country, followin’ in Woody Guthrie’s footsteps.”
This quote might be misleading, as it sounds like Dylan was actively chasing something; however, when you look at his childhood and analyse how he speaks about his hometown, a much more likely explanation would be that he was running from something. That fateful night, when Dylan left Minnesota and started heading to New York, he did what he always knew he had to.
He never spoke highly of his hometown, Hibbing, and was happy never to return. “When I left there, man, I knew one thing: I had to get out there and not come back,” he once said in an interview, driving a wedge between himself and his hometown, something which persists despite the time that passed and Dylan’s success.
People from his hometown weren’t receptive to Dylan. He never felt welcome back home, and his subsequent badmouthing of it was enough for residents to turn their noses up at him and his music. “If Bob Dylan came here to sing tonight, I wouldn’t go,” said one resident in an interview in 2004. “Bob Dylan doesn’t care about Hibbing, so why should we care about him? Besides that, I don’t like his music.”
Dylan put his mindset into his music, embracing feeling like an outcast and putting it into his music. It was his ability to write in a way that resonated with people, felt honest and was emotive that made him such a stand-out artist. It didn’t take long for the world to embrace him as an artist, and Bob Dylan was suddenly the most famous person to come out of Hibbing.
Even though he was never very close with his hometown, he still attended his high school reunion in 1969. His motive isn’t clear; whether it was to rub his success in people’s faces or to reconcile with his past, it’s hard to tell. Either way, the night consisted of him standing in a corner for a short period of time before leaving.
“It was very different. My memory of that is of Bob standing in one corner and a lot of people going up and shaking his hand,” recalled one of his former classmates, “I didn’t like that… I would have been happier if he had just been able to sit down and be one of our classmates.”
Another classmate remembers the night slightly differently, as many people didn’t bother acknowledging the musician. “People in this town, they weren’t real receptive to him,” recalled his classmate. “I think they were jealous of him or didn’t think he was talented enough. That’s why he didn’t come back because he was not well received.”
Bob Dylan shed his past. His memories of being an outcast went into his art, and he was happier staying somewhere like New York, where his music was better received, and he fit in more. You could read into this in a couple of ways. Maybe he was just sick of his hometown and wanted to escape, finding something better in the process. On the other hand, it could also reflect a need for validation, which many artists have, which he wasn’t getting back home. Either way, he hardly went back after that school reunion and a rift formed between the singer and his hometown that could never be repaired.
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