In the Pleasant, Cool Shadow
“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do” - B. Dylan
In the fall we sat on the steps of the old Armory on Main Street, gazing at the parade of car-top carcasses heading south after the deer hunt. Happy boys strumming ‘monkey Wards’ guitars purchased with paper route money, we were content to laugh at the procession before us, writing songs about girls and cars.
One of these cars certainly carried the young Bobby Zimmerman to The Twin Cities from his parents’ home in the northern terminus of U.S. 169; Hibbing, Minnesota.
Dylan’s parents Abe and Beatrice Stone Zimmerman
By 1964 we were strumming guitars on the Armory steps. Jim would tap out the Mersey beat behind us on the painted metal handrails leading into the auditorium. The Armory was our turf, where the Underbeats and a flock of regional bands took the spotlight to play the Big Hits of Mid-America. Foot-Stompin’, Liar Liar, Six Days On The Road, David Rivkin’s cover of Little Latin Lupe Lu by the Chancellors, Dale Menten’s Run, Run, Run (to set you free) and the biggest worldwide smash of them all, Surfin’ Bird.
The Armory and nearby Spectacle Lake Ballroom were our very own Cavern Club, Whiskey A Go Go and Grand Ole Opry gone local. It didn’t matter that we were bumpkins from the northern wilderness. After the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, I was a dog with a bone.
Jim and I formed a dozen garage bands around us. We mimicked regional hits at school dances mixed with British Invasion hits we heard KDWB and WDGY, the big city radio stations beaming loud and clear halfway to Hibbing.
Every summer from ‘55 to ‘65 I was off to day camp, YMCA camp and, for seven straight years, Camp Ajawah, home of Boy Scouts of America Troop 33.
The sunny morning of July 25, 1965 began quietly like any other Sunday. Between sessions the camp was empty, save us counselors, a nurse at the infirmary and our charismatic director Dave Moore, hunched over his small desk in HQ preparing to welcome a new batch of cubbies and scouts.
I strode a narrow path a half mile West of HQ in a reflective, serene mood. In the secret pocket of my safari shorts was contraband, the forbidden transistor radio I’d smuggled into camp in day one. Since February 9th of ‘64 I’d been captivated by the larger-than-life sounds emanating from the tiny gadget. Around midnight, wherever I happened to be, the miniature radio came alive with a world of entertainment unlike anything I’d heard from the local stations. Scrolling with my thumb on the tuner I’d join the Louisiana Hayride show from Shreveport until it faded; the next find might be WSM all the way from Nashville, KOMA from Oklahoma City or WLS, clear as a bell from Chicago.
A hundred fifty miles North of me on any given midnight, Bobby Zimmerman was glued to the same stations and, armed with a superior radio and the biggest antenna on earth, the Mesabi Iron Range. Bob, his younger brother David and their parents, Abe and Beatrice settled in Hibbing, a town not unlike my home town. The industrial revolution had rolled over the terrain long ago, rendering the rich deposits of taconite ore an open-pit wasteland. The earth north of Hibbing lay abused, scarred with the spoils of a collapsing gold rush. Downtown, along Howard Street the boarded up windows and shops foretold of hard times ahead. This was no place for a kid to grow up.
When I reached a point far enough away from the cub line tents to go undetected, I pulled the receiver from my pocket, slipped the earphone into my right ear and found the strongest signal. What happened next still rings in my right ear as I write this.
An anxious, wailing voice, mixed just barely above a raucous tack piano-driven electric band led into a hypnotic, delirious chorus. “How does it feeeel? How does it feeaaal? To be on your own? To be without a home? Like a complete unknown; like a rolling stone”.
I shivered through an eerie out-of-body rush. This strange new talk-sing music thing ended too soon. I wanted more. I wanted to hear it again, immediately. What was this sound blasting through my fourteen year-old brain? I stood there, stunned as the thing faded with a bluesy guitar figure, driving upward upward as it vanished into thin air. Bob Dylan had pierced my defenses, reaching into my heart right then and there, where he has lived every day since.
D.J. Perry St John came on the air and gave me all the information I needed in the aftermath of ‘what-the-heck-was-that?’
I tucked the title away in my elephant’s memory for insignificant pop music trivia, heading back to our tented encampment. I’d been branded by a lightning bolt so fierce it will remain burned into my aging bones until the day that I am no more.
The cubbies trickled in to Camp Ajawah by ones and twos. Next door to my tent, a bright-faced kid ambled up to the platform, backpack and sleeping bag in hand. Seeing no one inside, he glanced my way. I spoke first.
“Did you bring your mosquito netting?”
“Yep, in my pack”.
“I’m Kevin, your next-door neighbor”.
“Bobby Rivkin. How ya doin’?”.
“Ever heard of…” I froze as Bobby intervened.
“I know what you’re going to ask; my brother’s band, the Chancellors? I’m David Rivkin’s brother”.
That was all I needed to hear. Thus began the Summer of Two Bobs, both of whom would figure in my daily thoughts from that day forward.
A decade passed. Little Bobby Rivkin had grown up and we found ourselves together again in a recording studio making an album produced by my his older brother David. My stock was rising following another lucky break; a phone call I tried to dodge to avoid a frozen run South on the railroad.
David Zimmerman interrupted my Kojak reverie to send me to a Sound 80 studio session with the ubiquitous Dylan. The next thing I knew, we closed Tangled Up In Blue with lots of eye contact in the rapture of what only musicians know as ‘the pocket’.
Blood On The Tracks became in three dizzying months the fastest and bestselling studio album in Bob Dylan’s catalogue to that point, and he was just getting (re)started.
At this writing I have lived most of my life in the pleasant, cool shadow of Bob Dylan.