The Dylanologists Read Online Free

arts festival, a tradition that began with informal birthday bashes the Hockings started at Zimmy’s in 1991. The Dylan freaks were descending on the town in waves for a long weekend—by motorcycle from Ontario, by car from Fargo and Minneapolis, by jet from Australia and the Netherlands. They wanted to see the sights, breathe the North Country air, and raise their glasses to their hero, the Bard of Hibbing, Minnesota. He had been invited.
    The couple, Nina Goss and Charlie Haeussler, newlyweds at age fifty, had flown in that day from New York. They checked in to a hotel on Howard and left on foot to make the rounds to some of the key Dylan landmarks before retiring to the bar for the duration of the evening. This was their second visit to Hibbing, and it felt a little like a homecoming. Linda Stroback walked by their bar stools and, recognizing them, swept in for hugs. The restaurateur was hoarse and overbooked, and the festivities were only beginning. But Linda looked ebullient as ever, and so did Nina and Charlie.
    Ever since their first trip, they’d told every Dylan fanatic who would listen, “You must go to Hibbing.” The last time, Charlie had welled up at the sight of the piano Bob had banged away on at the high school. Nina had spent hours at Zimmy’s talking about William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman with Bob’s charismatic English teacher.
    Nina left town convinced of one thing: It was wrong to think of this place as too small, too parochial, to have spawned a genius of Dylan’s stature. She found the town to be a time capsule, a little community that encompassed the whole sweeping story of American growth. Immigrants drawn west, finding jobs and fresh starts, flourishing and assimilating. How different was that from the story of her big city back home? Hibbing had labor riots as the miners went to war with the big steel companies back east. It had a mayor whose advocacy for the workers and antagonism toward big business won him comparisons to the great populist Huey Long. It was the quintessential melting pot, and it had a vibrant Jewish community. It was more confining than a big city, of course, but more bustling than you’d expect from a little flyspeck up in the middle of nowhere. So yes, sure, Dylan had fled Hibbing, but by Nina’s way of thinking, it was only “the very first of countless places” he had spurned. He ran away from New York City, too. Only a fool would think he didn’t take a dose of Hibbing’s history with him in his veins. Now that she knew the place, she heard it in Dylan’s songs.
    She and Charlie had returned to Hibbing because if you’re a Dylan maniac, then being in the places where he became what he became is thrilling, if irrational. You could see the coffee shop where he ate cherry pie with his girlfriend. You could meet the guy who played drums in his high school band. And what hard-core fanatic wouldn’t want to drink beers surrounded by a hundred photographs of the man? “That,” Nina said, “is my idea of heaven.”
    She was an overachiever among the pilgrims, a recent convert who proselytized with zeal. Nina, who has a doctorate in literature and taught English at the college level, speaks and writes about Dylan in thickly layered sentences that unfurl like frantic attempts to grasp the truth. In 2005, having never listened to the singer before, she read his engaging and unconventional memoir, Chronicles: Volume One . She fell, and hard. “If anybody can say a book changed their life,” she allowed, “I would join that rarefied list of eccentrics.” It did not escape her notice that in 1961, she and Bob Dylan both shivered through their first New York winters. He was nineteen and on the make. She was a newborn. A few weeks after reading the book, she found herself in the eighth row of a theater in Manhattan thinking she had gone entirely crazy. Why was she falling in love with