My introduction to Dylan came through my older brother’s record collection. My brother Will was a sensitive soul, and I recall many times when he was angry or hurt he would lock himself away, put on his headphones and disappear into Dylan. In our early teens we had a reverence for his music. Even if I couldn’t explain it, I felt it. Oddly, at an age when your world is the size of your fist and nothing seems to matter, his work mattered to us.
A highlight of this walking tour is the Androy Hotel; its original sign atop the four-story building is riveting with nothing but the night sky as its backdrop. It is now apartments and 55-and-older housing, but it was once the social center of the town where Bobby Zimmerman celebrated his bar mitzvah with family and friends. It is easy for me to see him and his sly smile working the room — collecting envelopes — but it’s hard for me to grasp the teen Dylan preparing and studying to be a man.
I studied for nothing. Growing up, I didn’t even read comic books. I read the lyrics on record albums. When I took a class at junior college and the teacher asked what the first book I read was, I said that I never read books, only album lyrics. I said that I read Cat Stevens’s “Tea for the Tillerman” a lot. Other students laughed, and the teacher said, “Okay,” and moved on.
But I didn’t. Dylan has had a fascinating relationship with religion over the years, though celebrating faith and transitioning to manhood is alien to me. My devotion has been only to the music and the words that I’ve turned to for healing. They were what I leaned on both creatively and, eventually, spiritually. Putting an album on, lying in the dark and listening intently was the closest I ever got to having a religious experience — and still is.
Over 400 people attended Dylan’s bar mitzvah that day, and the family’s connections and history are, literally, around every corner on this tour. There’s the storefront where Grandma Florence and Uncle Lewis operated a clothing store. Down on First Avenue stood the Lybba Theatre, named after his great-grandmother. The building that once housed the family business, Zimmerman Furniture and Electric, is a stretch off the main road where side streets become more industrial.
The temperature is dropping. Steel cold. Freezing temperatures in spring are not uncommon in this part of the country. In Duluth, where Dylan was born and lived till age 6, it once snowed in August. I laughed when I read that Dylan said of Hibbing’s weather: “ … you couldn’t be a rebel — it was too cold.” I’m not laughing now.