On the ominous date of September 11, the Most Important Person and I will be in my home town of Northfield, Minnesota for the—groan—fiftieth reunion of my high school graduation. The classmates arranging it all have suggested I send them a few words about what I’ve been doing this last half century, but for brevity’s safe let me stick to one small but revealing encounter from right after I left high school. It was in the fall of 1959, and I was a lanky, still-pimply teenager with big ideas.
I had proceeded from high school to become a freshman at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where I wasted no time beginning a relationship with a lovely, very smart girl named Sheila, who would later became my first wife. Sheila had just come to the U. of M. from New York, hoping to continue studying with Saul Bellow, who’d already been her teacher at Bard College in the Hudson Valley. And we decided our souls could mingle.
At the same time, another kid arrived at the Minneapolis campus. Another kid with big ideas. He came from Hibbing, Minnesota, and his name was Bobby Zimmerman.
And I couldn’t stand him. Not that I knew him, exactly. I just saw him around everywhere. He annoyed me to a disturbing degree. He was just so insufferably cool. So, uh…impressive in a way I was far from sure I was. There was that Harvard book bag slung on his shoulder, the very last word. Dark glasses. His Chesterfield cigarettes were rolled up in the left sleeve of his black tee shirt. Black. Solid black. Not white or some normal color. Black.
You could puke.
At that moment, the arty coffee shop near campus was a place about the size of a largish dorm room and called “The Ten O’Clock Scholar.” (Some of the rock-history books reverently refer to it, mistakenly in my opinion, as just “The Scholar.” ) Anyway, the place was tiny, and it too was pretty cool. Every chance we got, Sheila and I installed ourselves behind a rattan screen that separated the rear table from the space in front and discussed, at length, Great Things. In front there was a dazzlingly ornate Italian coffee machine, complete with bronze eagles and all kinds of immaculate little tubes that steamed and hissed. There was a stereo on which was played either Vivaldi or folk music of the utmost refinement, like—say–Cynthia Gooding. Occasionally we’d slum with the inauthentic-but-fun Weavers. Sheila had once met one of the Weavers. She said he was a jerk. But talented.
And then came Bobby.
Somehow Bobby Zimmerman—who had started calling himself Bob Dylan— talked the manager into letting him use “The Ten O’Clock Scholar” for his very first singing engagement—maybe ever, maybe anywhere. And the night he began, Sheila and I happened to be behind the rattan screen, discussing, (let’s say), ecstasy. Our kind of subject. Context: John Donne. Vivaldi on the stereo.
And then Bobby arrived with his guitar, a Folger’s coffee can, and those damn Chesterfields rolled up in his sleeve. First he turned the stereo off. I barely noticed because I was explaining ecstasy to Sheila. But then, the singing began.
I paused in mid-ecstasy. What the HELL was going ON? That wavering, tuneless, whining …sound. That awful… noise. Who was making it? And WHY? I looked past the rattan screen. There sat Mr. Cigarettes in his sleeve, performing for a seemingly content audience of maybe six or seven people.
I managed enough decency to sit still through three songs. My speech on ecstasy was shot, but I ground my teeth and waited. I rolled my eyes. I closed my eyes. I hated it. Finally, after the third song, I decided somebody had to do something. I walked out front, got myself another cup of mulled cider, and then walked up to the kid who would become the foremost American musician of my generation and told him that we had been listening very patiently while he sang, but he’d been singing a long time now, so would he mind calling it quits for a while so we could turn the stereo back on?
Bob Dylan’s anger is legendary, and I am here to tell you that it is totally genuine. My request left the eighteen year old singer quite literally strangling, gagging with fury. Horrible sounds came from his throat. Luckily, rage paralyzed him, because if he could have done anything, he would have gladly killed me. I sauntered back to Sheila, and as we started talking again, I could hear the sounds of angry pacing and a coffee can being slammed around. But the stereo was back on.
Looking back, I don’t know whether to laugh at my callow, competitive, self-absorbed snottiness, or blush with shame. Dylan kept singing at the Ten O’Clock Scholar, though not (as I recall) when I was there. On campus, he and I would shoot hate-rays at each other whenever we crossed paths.
Within months, Sheila and I were out of there, on a bus to New York, leaving Minnesota behind for destiny.
And so was Dylan.