Chronicles - Bob Dylan [91]
Lou had never heard any of this kind of thing before, so there was very little feedback from him. Once in a while he would stop the machine and have me start over on something. He’d say, “That’s catchy,” and then want me to do it again. When that happened, I usually did something different because I hadn’t paid attention to whatever I just sung, so I couldn’t repeat it like he just heard it. I had no idea what he was going to do with all this stuff. It was as anti–big mainstream as you could get. Leeds Music had published songs like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” “C’est Si Bon,” “Under Paris Skies,” “All or Nothing at All,” Henry Mancini songs like “Peter Gunn,” “I’ll Never Smile Again” and all the songs that were in Bye Bye Birdie, a big Broadway hit.
The one song that had hooked me up with Leeds Music, the one that convinced John Hammond to bring me over there in the first place, wasn’t an outreaching song at all but more of an homage in lyric and melody to the man who’d pointed out the starting place for my identity and destiny — the great Woody Guthrie. I wrote the song with him in mind, and I used the melody from one of his old songs, having no idea that it would be the first of maybe a thousand songs that I would write. My life had never been the same since I’d first heard Woody on a record player in Minneapolis a few years earlier. When I first heard him it was like a million megaton bomb had dropped.
In the summer of ’59 after leaving home early spring, I was in Minneapolis, having come down from Northern Minnesota — from the Mesabi Range, the iron mining country, steel capital of America. I’d grown up there in Hibbing but had been born in Duluth, about seventy-five miles away to the east on the edge of Lake Superior, the big lake that the Indians call Gitche Gumee. Though we lived in Hibbing, my father from time to time would load us into an old Buick Roadmaster and we’d ride to Duluth for the weekend. My father was from Duluth, born and raised there. That’s where his friends still were. One of five brothers, he’d worked all his life even as a kid. When he was sixteen, he’d seen a car smash into a telephone pole and burst into flames. He jumped off his bicycle, reached in and pulled the driver out, smothering the driver’s body with his own — risking his life to save someone he didn’t even know. Eventually, he took accounting classes in night school and was working for Standard Oil of Indiana when I was born. Polio, which left him with a pronounced limp, had forced him out of Duluth — he lost his job and that’s how we got to the Iron Range, where my mother’s family was from. Near Duluth, I also had cousins across the suspension aerial bridge in Superior, Wisconsin, the notorious red-light, gambling town and I stayed with them sometimes.
What I recall mostly about Duluth are the slate gray skies and the mysterious foghorns, violent storms that always seemed to be coming straight at you and merciless howling winds off the big black mysterious lake with treacherous ten-foot waves. People said that having to go out onto the deep water was like a death sentence. Most of Duluth was on a slant. Nothing is