From Duluth to St. Paul to "Key West": Minnesota Roots and "Transfiguration"

Chapter 4 of "I Don't Love Nobody": Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan's Rough and Rowdy Ways

Approximately four square miles of St. Paul and Minneapolis, from an old road map. Left X: Dinkytown by the University of Minnesota campus; Middle X: my childhood home; Right X: the site of the Purple Onion Pizza Parlor. Just to the north of the Purple Onion is the old Midway Stadium.

In the first months of my life, in the year John F. Kennedy would be elected president, the teenage Bob Dylan roamed the streets near my home. I grew up in a red brick and white stucco 1915 house in the Merriam Park neighborhood of St. Paul, less than a mile from the Mississippi. A hilly golf course—the Town and Country Club, where my older brothers and I would sled in the winter—was all that separated us from the Big Muddy. Minneapolis sprawled on the far side of the river and the main campus of the University of Minnesota was upstream about three miles. Here, in that early spring of 1960, the young Robert Zimmerman, newly self-christened “Dylan,” strummed the acoustic guitar he had traded for his electric, in the cafes of Dinkytown. In May, Bob began playing at the Purple Onion Pizza Parlor in St. Paul, in the Midway neighborhood. While the students of nearby Hamline College devoured slices, Dylan performed “Every Time I Hear the Spirit” and other folk covers from his early repertoire. According to his biographers, Bob traveled to Colorado in the summer of 1960 and cadged some new tricks from blues singer Jesse Fuller, including the use of a harmonica neck brace. Upon his return, Twin Cities musicians noticed he had improved dramatically.  

After a set at the Purple Onion, returning to his room above Grays’ Drugs in Dinkytown, Bob would have traveled west through the Midway and the rail yards of the Burlington Northern. This industrial area, on the far side of the new I-94 freeway from my leafy neighborhood, also featured a vinegar factory, storage silos of the cereal giants, a slaughterhouse, and a rendering plant—a facility whose odors flavored the air of my childhood games. Here in the center of St. Paul, train whistles signaling the arrival of grain or stock from rural Minnesota sounded each night into my dreams. First thing out of bed in the morning, I would hear the grain and pork belly prices on WCCO radio and I always imagined these were broadcast straight from the Midway. When I was around nine years old, my friend Charlie and I rode our bikes to the slaughterhouse, where we asked for a tour and witnessed “production” first-hand.

In Chronicles, Volume 1, Bob tells how he slept in a back room at the Purple Onion on the night before he walked to the highway and began hitching east to New York City in January of 1961. 

My mother bought our groceries at the Midway Center shopping plaza, a few blocks south of the Purple Onion. In 1971—in a few blinks, in another age of the world, after Dylan had already been through three or four versions of himself and I was eleven—I would leaf through the albums in the music department of the Midway Woolworth’s while my mother did the shopping in the supermarket next door. I loved the song called “I Want You” that played on the radio sometimes, and I looked for the singer’s records in the racks. I had no idea he had wandered these same streets just over a decade earlier.  

I moved away from St. Paul in 1978, at eighteen, but I’ve returned often over the years. In the summer of 2013 I saw Dylan play at Midway Stadium, the home of the minor league St. Paul Saints. (The stadium that existed in my childhood, pictured on the map, was demolished in 1981. A new, smaller park was subsequently built on the other side of Snelling Avenue. The second stadium has also since been torn down. Both were only short jogs from the site of the Purple Onion.) At dusk, as the first chords of “All Along the Watchtower” rang out, a freight train barreled by and sounded a long blast on its horn. From behind his keyboard, after a rollicking version of “Summer Days,” Bob dedicated a cover of “Suzie Baby” to its author, Bobby Vee, who was in attendance. Here’s what he said, based on a very clear recording:

Thank you everyone, thank you friends. I lived here a while back, and since that time I’ve played all over the world with all kinds of people. And everybody from uh, Mick Jagger and Madonna, and uh, everybody in there in between. I’ve been on the stage with most of those people, but the most beautiful person I’ve ever been on a stage with was a man who’s here tonight, who used to sing a song called “Suzie Baby.” I want to say Bobby Vee’s actually here tonight and maybe you can show your appreciation with just a round of applause. So we’re going to try to do this song like I, I’ve done it with him before once or twice.

Dylan did “Suzie Baby” with Bobby Vee “once or twice” in the late spring of 1959, after high school graduation and before he came to Dinkytown. Bob had travelled to Vee’s home of Fargo, ND to find the singer and his band, The Shadows. Earlier that year, Vee had filled in dates vacated by the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens, in an airplane crash that had occurred mere days after Dylan had seen the rockers at the Midwinter Ball at the Duluth Armory. This was the show Dylan alludes to in references to “Mystery Street” and Harry Truman in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” where Bob received a mystical view of his destiny. Now Vee had a hit on the charts and was heading back out on the road. The aspiring piano player from Hibbing—at that moment, using the alias “Elston Gunnn”—wanted to get started on the inspiration he had received from Holly. 

It turned out, however, that in the venues where The Shadows played, pianos were hard to find. So although Bob may have gigged with Vee “once or twice,” it didn’t last, and Bobby (still Zimmerman, no longer Gunnn, not yet Dylan) was soon off to the Twin Cities. Still, the two Bobbys had made a connection. In Chronicles, Volume 1, Dylan tells of visiting Vee in in 1961 at a show in Brooklyn (Clinton Heylin says it couldn’t have happened) when the pop singer “was on the top of the heap.” Dylan writes:

We had the same musical history and came from the same place at the same point in time. He had gotten out of the midwest too … I’d always thought of him as a brother. Every time I’d see his name somewhere, it was like he was in the room. 

So much a “brother” that Dylan apparently told a few folks after his early, brief interlude with The Shadows that he himself was named Bobby Vee. The musician would continue to play with the theme of overlapping artistic identities for the next sixty years. 

The Upper Midwest figures large in Chronicles. The story includes recollections of Bob’s childhood in Duluth and Hibbing and his time in Dinkytown. We know, of course, that some of the memoir is fabrication and that Dylan borrowed phrases from other writers to tell his story and create subtext. In this way, the singer builds a narrative both above and below the surface. Other researchers have ably deconstructed many of his tricks and added layers of meaning. But one of the achievements of Chronicles, and one of the great fascinations, is that Dylan uses his mix of collage and concoction and fact to tell a spiritually honest story. So, when he writes about the icy silence of the north woods in winter, we can believe his memory. When he writes about Vee, we can believe that Bob thinks of him as a “brother.” 

Dylan pays special attention to Minnesota artists. He begins with warm portraits of the musicians he met in Minneapolis, Tony Glover and Spider John Koerner. Later he mentions Judy Garland from the town of Grand Rapids. (He quotes Elton John’s lyric about Marilyn Monroe, saying he would have liked to have known Judy, but he was just a kid.) On the very last pages of his memoir Dylan offers an entire list of influential Minnesotans. He sketches them as he circles back to the book’s opening and a discussion with Lou Levy, head of Leeds Music Publishing. He mentions Levy’s great baseball fandom and then segues into a bit about Roger Maris, who in that summer of 1961 was busy breaking Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. Dylan notes that Maris was from Hibbing and says, “On some level I guess I took pride in being from the same town.” He tells us about Minnesotans Charles Lindbergh, Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis, and the early rocker Eddie Cochran. Most significantly, he writes about another author:

F. Scott Fitzgerald, a descendant of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and who himself wrote The Great Gatsby, was from St. Paul. Fitzgerald was called “the prophet of the jazz age.”

Late in the paragraph, he repeats a key word:

Native sons — adventurers, prophets, writers and musicians. They were all from the North Country. Each one followed their own vision, didn’t care what the pictures showed. Each of them would have understood what my inarticulate dreams were about. I felt like I was one of them or all of them put together. 

Here, Dylan, who spent those first days in New York City spinning tall tales about his origins and never mentioning Minnesota, claims a deep identification with other pioneers from his home state. In his early self-constructed mythology Dylan obscured his roots. By 2004, however, Dylan was willing to say out loud that he and these other Minnesota artists had a lot in common. “I was one of them or all of them put together.” And Chronicles, of course, is a highly personal tale “put together” with other people’s writing. On Rough and Rowdy Ways and in his memoir the singer cites hundreds of artistic influences, but here in the final pages of Chronicles he makes clear that he holds a special regard for other “native sons” from “the North Country.”  

And more than just regard. Dylan comments on his own experience by including these artists. His equates his Rimbaudian “I am another” outlook—mentioned just a bit earlier in the same chapter—specifically with the geography of his beginnings. In a striking instance from the excerpt above, Dylan creates subtextual commentary on the labels the culture inflicted on him during the height of his fame. He does this by applying the word “prophet,” in that unattributed quote, “prophet of the jazz age,” to F. Scott Fitzgerald. At the end of the paragraph, he doubles down, repeating the tag. Why is this remarkable? Because earlier in the book, in a long passage in the chapter “New Morning,” Bob expresses disgust with the “horrible” titles that had been put on him after his sixties records, such as “High Priest of Protest” and “Archbishop of Anarchy.” He goes on to say that he would eventually learn to live with “anachronisms of a lesser dilemma” such as “Legend, Icon, and Enigma.” Pretty much okay with those, I guess. But, he concludes, “Prophet, Messiah, Savior—those are tough ones.” And yet here he is, in the final pages of the same memoir, laying one of those terms on a fellow artist from Minnesota, not once, but twice. It seems that in Chronicles, written sixteen years before his 2020 composition “False Prophet,” Bob was already wrestling and teasing with this heaviest of monikers that had been put upon him—do I reject it? Or is it true?   

Another chapter in this book looks at the many “prophets” of Rough and Rowdy Ways, but while we’re on the subject, is there a line more beautifully demonstrative of the man’s meaningful ambiguities than “I ain’t no false prophet?” You hear it first as “I am not a false prophet” because of the common slang meaning of “ain’t no,” but then you remember that the double negative of “ain’t no” literally translates the phrase to “I am a false prophet.” (“Don’t follow leaders”) Conversely, the colloquial interpretation opens up the possibility that the singer, in his elder years, is accepting the title—I am not a false prophet: No, I’m the real thing. Second to none. The last of the best.  

And just to complicate things a bit more and add another layer of meaning, we might remember that the tune is stolen. Who is a “real” musical prophet and who is “false?” We can choose between the originator (maybe) of the blues progression that anchors the song, Billy Emerson, or the one who rocked the message to a live audience in the year of Our Lord 2024: Bob Dylan. This is the dynamic Dylan plays with all across Rough and Rowdy Ways. We hear echoes of an inspiration and we hear a new thing, a recreation. It’s all about the mirrors. As for Sinclair Lewis, perhaps Bob prophesied his own Nobel Prize when he mentions the author. Twelve years after the publication of Chronicles, the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes would have a second laureate of literature.

Speaking of those mirrors, and this one is only coincidence, F. Scott Fitzgerald and I both attended the same odious Minnesota private school in early adolescence: St. Paul Academy. Of course, he was there from 1908 until 1911, and I attended from 1972 through 1976.

As mentioned, according to his own report, Bob spent his last night in St. Paul, in January of 1961, sleeping in a back room at the Purple Onion. The next day, armed with a guitar and a whole bunch of Woody Guthrie tunes, and with Kerouac’s “Mexico City Blues” running through his brain, he hitched east. I remained in my St. Paul crib, two miles southwest of the Purple Onion, having only recently mastered the art of crawling. I wouldn’t encounter Bob’s music until he had already gone electric, fallen off a motorcycle, grown a beard, and trimmed it neatly. At this point he was, according to Chronicles, fantasizing about alchemizing a “perfume” that would make people regard him with indifference. He describes how he achieves this, to some degree, with the releases of Self-Portrait and Nashville Skyline. By 1971, my brother had acquired Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, and it soon came into heavy rotation on our bedroom turntable.  

Over his entire career, from Woody Guthrie to Billy Emerson, Dylan has played with concepts of inspiration and imitation. In his combative 2012 Rolling Stone interview with Mikal Gilmore, Bob handed the autobiography of Hell’s Angel Sonny Barger to Gilmore and claimed that with the death of Barger’s fellow rider Bobby Zimmerman in 1964 (it was actually in 1961), a “transfiguration” had taken place. Dylan says, “when you ask some of your questions, you’re asking them to a person who’s long dead. You’re asking them to a person that doesn’t exist.” The interviewer was understandably confused by this turn in the conversation, and you can forgive him for feeling fucked with—Bob has been known to do that over the years, and that’s certainly part of what’s going on here. But Dylan was also making a real point; next he tells Gilmore, who appears lost, that “you can go and learn about it from the Catholic Church, you can read about it in some old mystical books, but it’s a real concept.”

It doesn’t take much research to know that the Transfiguration refers to the moment that Jesus is revealed to three of the disciples in all His radiant glory. And so to “transfigure” is “to give a new and typically exalted or spiritual appearance.” In the interview, Bob goes on to say that “I’m not like too many others. I’m only like another person who’s been transfigured.” He says that reading the Barger book told him why he is “different than other people” and he continues by listing artists and others that he respects, including his fellow class of Medal of Freedom recipients: “People like that, and they are set apart too. And I’m proud to be counted among them.” 

For Dylan, Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre” applies to those who have stepped outside the mainstream into an alternate, elevated world. In the lyric of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”:

I was born on the wrong side of the railroad track

Like Ginsberg, Corso, and Kerouac 

Like Louie and Jimmy and Buddy and all of the rest 

Membership in church is not required. Belief in poetry and song is mandatory. When Gilmore asks Dylan if the “dark territory” in some of his recent songs (at that moment, Tempest) reflects a “religious struggle,” the artist scoffs:

Nah … I just showed you the book. Transfiguration eliminates all that stuff … You have to amplify your faith. 

Here again is where the open-minded reader might begin to understand why the musician would take an interest in the spiritual memoir of a boy from the Twin Cities. I do not claim in any artistic sense the company of the esteemed writers, musicians, and high achievers that Dylan cites in this interview or in Chronicles, Volume 1. But The Golden Bird is, above all, about the amplification of faith. Dylan frequently uses other artists to tell a story, and he is specifically drawn to creators who provide a reflection of his own Minnesota roots. From Duluth to St. Paul, drive about 150 miles down Highway 61. From there to “Key West,” just aim toward the horizon line.