10 LIFE BOB DYLAN
forward to the wider world, they might be native son Maris,
who is still rightfully regarded as Major League Baseball’s
all-time single-season home run king. Or they might be
McHale, who would grow very tall and would win NBA
basketball championships alongside Larry Bird in Boston.
In Hibbing, you could practice baseball and basketball
often enough to develop your skills.
But to come out of Hibbing and become an iconoclastic
singer and songwriter—his name mentioned, in the latter
pursuit, with such American legends as Berlin, Gershwin,
Porter and Guthrie—to become a Pulitzer Prize honoree,
to become one of the world’s titanic cultural figures of the
20th and early 21st centuries, to become a Nobel laureate...
Well, that was less than unlikely. It was impossible. For that
to happen, the individual would have to be a genius.
And Hibbing is the first evidence offered when people
assert confidently: “Bob Dylan is a genius.”
He is that, no doubt.
He was probably born a genius. Just as certainly, he has
always been ambitious, restless, open to experiment, self-
aware, ornery, provocative and tireless. Let’s put “inscru-
table” and “incomprehensible” aside this time. He’s pretty
scrutable, if one accepts his screwiness. And if one dis-
misses the nonsense that he has enjoyed disgorging in the
relatively rare interviews he has given through the years,
he’s comprehensible—just listen to his songs. Dylan playsTOP: BOBBY, ABOUT TWO YEARS OLD,
sits before his mom, the former Beatrice
Stone, who was called Beatty (said: B.T.)
by her friends, in the farthest right mother-
child pairing. Above is one of the boy’s
childhood homes, at 2425 7th Avenue in
Hibbing, a street since renamed Bob Dylan
Drive. Opposite: He’s already standing out
in a crowd in his first grade class at Hibbing’s
Alice School. He’s the boy in the striped
T-shirt in the back row looking away.LINDA & BOB HOCKING
JIM STEINFELDT/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY
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