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games, no doubt about it; he always has. And the game-
playing tends to obscure his seriousness of purpose. He
becomes “the jester” in Don McLean’s lyrical survey of
American postwar music, “American Pie,” and yet at the
end of the day the jester will have delivered a veritable
canon of indelible songs, and will have performed, some-
times unevenly, for a gazillion people—more, certainly,
than any jester in history. He is still on the road on his
Never Ending Tour, a half century after leaving Minnesota
and landing in Greenwich Village, having changed his
surname from Zimmerman to Dylan along the way. As
you read these words, people are filing into a Bob Dylan
concert somewhere—in Anaheim or Zurich, in Boston or
Berlin or, now, Beijing.
He has traveled a long, long road from Hibbing, without
looking back and with, as he and the documentarians have
also said, no direction home.F
rom an October 20, 1963, Duluth News Tribune article
by staff writer Walter Eldot: “There’s an unwritten
code in show business that people like to be deceived.
Performers, therefore, must be legendized and molded into
a public image that is often quite different from what they
used to be.
“It happened to Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing—now
widely known as Bob Dylan, 22, folksinger and songwriter.
“His rise in barely three years has been almost asimpressive as the considerable fortune he has already
amassed, the character he has assumed, the reams of
reviews and stories written about him, and his Carnegie
Hall debut next Saturday.
“Who and what is Bob Dylan?”
Well asked, Mr. Eldot—even unto “the character he has
assumed”—a question we are still asking more than a half
century later.
Eldot and particularly the locals in Hibbing would
have remembered the Golden Chords kid who was bet-
ter than most, who had played dates with the touring pop
star Bobby Vee, adding handclaps and a touch of piano. By
the time of the Carnegie Hall breakthrough, these locals
were repairing to Bob’s senior year high school yearbook,
where he had written that his ambition was “To join ‘Little
Richard.’ ” Maybe they remembered, some of them, that
he had been Echo Helstrom’s boyfriend for about a year.
She was a beautiful blonde from the poorer side of town,
and may later have been the inspiration for “Girl from the
North Country” and songs on Blonde on Blonde. Be that as it
may—and Dylan, who called this girl “Becky Thatcher” in
Chronicles: Volume One, will never fess up—she was impor-
tant to Bobby, in several ways. “One of the reasons I liked
going there [to Echo’s house] besides puppy love, was that
they had Jimmie Rodgers records, old 78’s in the house,”
Dylan wrote. So he liked the fact that folks were compar-
ing Echo to Brigitte Bardot, but he liked this as well.GAYLE STEVENS, JOYCE KELLY & BOB HOCKING
08-35 LIFE_Bob Dylan 2020 Folksinger.indd 11 FINAL 1/13/20 4:16 PM