Troubles at home sent Bob Dylan on the road: Exploring why he’ll never be comfortable in Minnesota
Anyone who grew up in a small town will understand why Bob Dylan felt the need to leave his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. Despite the midwest’s startlingly wide skies, the young musician found himself growing increasingly claustrophobic with life in rural America. The world was out there, and he wanted a taste. At 19, he left for good, hitching a ride with a couple of friends on their way to New York. Much has been written about those early years in the big city, but relatively little is known about Dylan’s days as a provincial mid-westerner. The question remains: what was he running from?
Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24th, 1941, just a few months before the bombing of Pearl Harbour. He was bought up by his parents, Abe and Beatty, in a wood-frame rented apartment that stood on the hill above downtown Duluth, Minnesota. They lived there until Bob was six, at which point they relocated 70 miles north to the town of Hibbing.
Dylan’s main memory of that time was one of penetrating cold and industrial clamour. “The heavy rumble of the foghorns (of the big lake freighters that) dragged you out of your senses by the neck,” he wrote in Chronicles. “As a child, slight, introverted and asthma-stricken, the sound was so loud, so enveloping, I could feel it in my whole body and it made me feel hollow. Something out there could swallow me up.”
As soon as he was old enough, Dylan disowned Hibbing. On arrival in New York, he set about crafting elaborate mythology about his adolescence. In interviews, he told tales of growing up in places far from Hibbing and recounted a stint in a (potentially fictitious) travelling circus. Dylan clearly wanted nothing to do with Hibbing and definitely didn’t like the idea that the town had influenced his mindset in any way.
As a teenager, his inclination toward creative pursuits made him an outsider. Hockey players, not musicians, were the height of cool, and Dylan’s fascination with rock ‘n’ rollers like Jimmy Cliff was not shared by many of his classmates. Indeed, a number of them still remember Dylan as something of an oddball. ”He was a little weird,” Jerry Starck, a barber who was two years behind him at Hibbing High told the New York Times, ”He still is.”
But whether he liked it or not, Hibbing did influence Dylan, if only because its wintry blankness provided the perfect backdrop for his imagination to thrive. “In the winter, everything was still, nothing moved,” he later wrote. “Eight months of that… you can have some amazing hallucinogenic experiences doing nothing but looking out your window.” In the 1970s, Dylan began to acknowledge that a piece of Hibbing had remained latched to his consciousness. ”I’m from someplace called the Iron Range,” he told an interviewer in 1972. ”My brains and feelings have come from there.”
By that time, Hibbing had decided to disown Dylan too. His attempts to erase the town from his story angered residents, many of whom never forgave him and, in 2004, were generally dismissive of the idea that his childhood home should be opened as a museum. Today, however, the Bob Dylan Collection in Hibbing provides a steady stream of tourism, providing the town Dylan regarded as a backwater with serious cultural cache. How many places, after all, can claim to have raised one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century?
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