Last Thursday, June 1, my wife and I took a mini-vacation and drove up to the Twin Cities to hear a concert by the Twin Cities band The Hopefuls (formerly the Olympic Hopefuls). They were the first band to perform in Mill City Live, a free summer series at the Mill City Museum. I can recommend the series and the venue. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, December 4, we made our way through the bitter cold to attend our first St. Olaf Christmas Festival, the event that more or less puts St. Olaf College on the national map. Televised annually on PBS and featuring the St. Olaf Orchestra and various college choirs, the two-hour festival is performed once each day for four consecutive days.

Before the festival began, a friend was quick to correct anyone who called the festival a “concert.” The latter word didn’t fit this religious event, in his mind. After attending the festival, I saw what he meant. This is a thoroughly religious event, a worship experience led by Lutheran clergy and incorporating Bible readings. St. Olaf is still strongly affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (the principal Lutheran denomination), and that affiliation is apparent in the festival. The program for the festival says that it is a “worship experience” and “an outgrowth of Christian conviction and an expression of the rich musical heritage at St. Olaf.” It also instructs attendees to hold their applause until the end, in keeping with a worship rather than an entertainment experience.

This 94th annual festival (it began in 1912) featured an impressive array of music from the 16th to the 20th centuries, from traditional Christmas carols to Ralph Vaughn Williams’ “Ring Out, Ye Crystal Spheres.” As interpreted by artistic director Anton Armstrong and others, the music and singing were superb. Particularly moving was a choral piece called “Gaudete,” composed by Steven Sametz and set to Medieval lyrics.

St. Olaf was founded in Northfield, Minnesota, by Norwegian Lutherans, so the Christmas festival is also something of a celebration of ethnic heritage. I wore my Norwegian sweater, one of dozens in the crowd who did so. Unfortunately, I missed the Scandinavian buffet preceding the performance, which featured pickled herring (a favorite of my grandfather), lefse, lutefisk (which I have yet to try), fruit soup, and more.

For many, including St. Olaf parents and alumni, this is a favorite Christmas tradition. Clearly, it touches many lives, and each performance is packed. Tickets to the festival are difficult to get, and we were able to do so only because my wife teaches at the college. However, you can experience the festival on the radio Friday, Dec. 23, 8 p.m. at 99.5 KSJN, Minnesota Public Radio’s classical station (also available at mpr.org). The festival will be broadcast on national radio December 14.

PBS will also broadcast a different event, “A St. Olaf Christmas in Norway,” on December 21, 24 and 25. This one-hour program was filmed in Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim during the St. Olaf Choir’s 2005 tour of Norway, which commemorated Norway’s centennial. The program will also be distributed internationally by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. Check out PBS’s web page for “A St. Olaf Christmas in Norway” and the festival’s broadcast page for more information.

Last week I wrote about my disappointment with Twin Cities commercial radio in my youth. Although I learned about much new music on local radio during my teenage years in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, there was still more new music that never got any airtime. Years later, when I realized what I’d missed, I saw that my feelings were captured well by Elvis Costello in his 1978 song “Radio, Radio”: “The radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools / tryin’ to anaesthetize the way that you feel.” Of course, I had to wait years to hear that song too.

The new generation should have less trouble exploring a wider range of music via the radio. That’s because 89.3 The Current (KCMP), a new station owned by Minnesota Public Radio, has been operating since January 24 of this year.

Locals will likely know that The Current replaces classical music station WCAL, owned by St. Olaf College. The college sold it to MPR, which changed the format to an eclectic mix of music. The sale angered many devoted WCAL listeners and created some controversy.

I was more sanguine about the station’s change. I figured I’d like the new format, and I could still listen to classical music on MPR’s classical station, KSJN. It turns out, though, that reception of KSJN isn’t all that clear here in my town of Northfield, hometown of the former WCAL and The Current.

It’s a good thing, therefore, that I’ve been impressed by The Current. The music is amazingly varied, mixing lots of brand new stuff with vintage music that most commercial stations wouldn’t play. I’ve heard Hank Williams, Chet Baker, and Johnny Cash alongside Beck and the Chemical Brothers. The focus is more on new music, and they play lots of stuff from performers I’ve never heard of, like the Mountain Goats, which is fine by me. They’re also good about playing lots of local music.

The Current reminds me of WXPN, another non-profit, “listener-supported” radio station. WXPN broadcasts out of Philadelphia, and I used to listen to it when I lived in New Jersey. WXPN introduced me to the music of Richard Thompson, Beth Orton, Richard Ashcroft, and many others, and it allowed me to keep up with bands such as The Jayhawks. I expect The Current will bring me more of the same.

Apparently the station is doing pretty well. The Arbitron ratings of listeners age 18 to 34 show The Current ranked 11th in the Twin Cities, higher than its closest competitor in the “adult album alternative” format, Drive 105. Remember, though, that there really isn’t a format for The Current. And don’t forget, there are no commercials.

My teenage years were deprived in an important way. While those living in many other places at that time–the late 1970’s and early 1980’s–heard a wide range of exciting new music on the radio, I was listening to the repetitive playlists of Twin Cities stations such as KQ92 (classic rock) and KDWB (top 40). So, while others elsewhere were learning about punk, obscure New Wave, early rap, and more, I listened mostly to older bands such as Led Zeppelin, Boston, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and George Thorogood and the Destroyers, all for the umpteenth time. On the pop stations you had Hall and Oates, Whitney Houston, Prince, and, ahh, I forget the others.

As good as much of that music was, I got tired of hearing “Stairway to Heaven” for the thirtieth time. I knew the radio situation wasn’t good, but I didn’t go out of my way to find other ways to hear new music. Some people around me, however, were doing exactly that during my high school years. A guy named Todd Enge brought rap music into the locker room, probably around 1980. At the time, I thought he was rather nuts to like such strange stuff. Jeff Richter and his buddies were listening to Elvis Costello’s “Punch the Clock.” The really cool guys, like Ed O’Gara, were going to concerts and had discovered the B-52’s, the Replacements, Black Flag, and the Dead Kennedys. (I’ve still not explored the latter two). And my good friend Tom Harkins had delved deeply into David Bowie and the Talking Heads.

I don’t want to overstate my case here. There was some new music to hear on the radio. Once my brain had assimilated the playlists of KQ and KDWB, I was drawn to interruptions in the formats. And so, like many others, I was excited to hear U2, Blondie, the Go-go’s, Devo, Human League, the Police, the Thompson Twins, the Violent Femmes, Gary Neuman, Icehouse, A Flock of Seagulls, Berlin, the Motels, Depeche Mode, the Pretenders, Men Without Hats, and more. There was even some local music (besides Prince) that made it through my media filter: bands called the Phones and the Wallets, and especially the Suburbs, who hailed from my neck of the woods.

But there was only so much variety on these very commercial stations. The masses still had to be counted on for dough, they had to be given their repetitive playlists, and people like myself, who disliked the repetition but didn’t go to concerts and obscure record stores and trade lots of music with friends to escape it, just had to make do.

When I showed up for my freshman year at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1984, I learned of still more music that had not reached my particular province. Andrew Halpern, from Holyoke, Mass., had some great Smiths music. I can still hear that group’s mysterious rhythms and haunting lyrics in the dorm hallway: “I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does.” A guy named Ramon had an album titled “Murmur” from a band called REM; he had a cool REM t-shirt too (with a bicycle on it, if I remember right). Someone from DC told me that Husker Du, a Minneapolis band, was really good. Scott Durschlag, a young radical, liked to play Elvis Costello’s version of “What’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding?” With the exception of Husker Du, of which I remain largely ignorant, all of those artists became an important part of my later youth.

I had heard none of that music at home. Looking back on it, it seems a damn shame that I didn’t have access to a more adventurous radio station. However, it’s also a damn shame that I didn’t go to some concerts and learn some more. I stayed close to my commercial media island, even while I suspected that exciting stuff existed far from the familiar shores of my surroundings.

Of course many people grow up in places much more musically isolated than the Twin Cities suburbs were in my youth. How well I remember traveling across the country on family trips and hearing rural radio stations that were years behind the times. The Internet and cable/satellite media are reducing much of that kind of regional isolation for kids who yearn to escape their own versions of commercial radio hell. However, it will always take some gumption and effort to reach beyond the deadening repetitiveness of the commercial airwaves.

Next week: 89.3 The Current brings a breath of fresh air to Twin Cities radio.

On a Daily Show January 25, correspondent Rob Corddry interviewed a local official in downtown St. Paul’s Rice Park. Corddry concluded the segment by an attempt at a joke: he began shouting about the cold weather, yelling, “Why would anyone in their right mind live here? It’s f—— cold!” As Corddry went on, the official–who was taken aback, as most Daily Show interviewees are–gave a stock regional reply that was probably missed by most viewers as Corddry continued his rant: “It keeps the riff-raff out.”

Corddry’s comment was similar to one uttered by Liam Gallagher, the snide frontman for the British band Oasis, at a concert I attended at Northrop Auditorium in Minneapolis in the late nineties. It was a cold winter night, and, though it was warm inside, apparently Mr. Gallagher didn’t like the weather. “Why the f— do you people live here?” he asked in between songs. I didn’t know how to take the comment–as a punk-rock insult hurled from the stage and part of the show, or as the comment of an insensitive, ignorant boob? I’ve always though of it as more of the latter, and I’ve never liked Oasis much since then. Certainly I’ve never bought another Oasis recording.

This week I continue my review of Bob Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles: Volume I. Last week’s review (see below) considered Dylan’s account of growing up in the northern Minnesota town of Hibbing.
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After arriving in Minneapolis on a Greyhound bus from Hibbing in the summer of 1959, Bob Dylan immediately traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic one and began to hang out in the Beatnik coffeehouses of Dinkytown, the area around the University of Minnesota. He had left “very narrow, provincial” Hibbing and never intended to go back.

Staying that summer in a fraternity house (he does not tell us that it is Sigma Alpha Mu, a Jewish fraternity at the university), he soon met kindred spirits in the big city and with their help began to soak up new influences. Folk records were not easy to come by at that time, so he learned of old and new folk singers–the New Lost City Ramblers, Dave Van Ronk, Blind Lemon Jefferson, John Jacob Niles, Woody Guthrie, and many others–by listening to records in libraries, at other people’s homes, or in record stores. He heard other performers who came through town as well. It was an informal education in folk music, from traditional English and American ballads to songs by newer folk artists.

Dylan calls this world of folk music his “parallel universe”:

“Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it…Folk music was all I needed to exist. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes… I had no other cares or interests besides folk music.”

During that first summer in the Twin Cities, he was playing his guitar “morning, noon, and night.” When he wasn’t practicing, he was performing in coffeehouses, pizza places, on the street, and at house parties, supporting himself with the little money he made. He often played with another young singer, John Koerner. It was the start of a performing career that would hardly pause until years later.

By the fall of 1959 he was living above Gray’s drugstore in Dinkytown. At this point he learned about Woody Guthrie’s music for the first time. “Stunned” by its power, determined to be “Guthrie’s greatest disciple,” Dylan sang nothing but Guthrie songs until local folk music maven Jon Pankake–a “classic traditional folk snob,” according to Dylan–confronted him and shook him up by comparing him to Jack Elliott, another folksinger influenced by Guthrie. Dylan had to finally admit Pankake was right. He still had a ways to go as an artist.

Although Minneapolis-St. Paul was much bigger than Hibbing, Dylan knew he was “still stuck in the boondocks” compared to another folksinger his age that he admired, Joan Baez. Baez had already been on television and had made a record in New York. Eventually, he knew it was time to go to the American cultural capital: “Just like Hibbing, the Twin Cities had gotten a little too cramped, and there was only so much you could do. The world of folk music was too closed off and the town was beginning to feel like a mud puddle. New York City was the place I wanted to be.”

Dylan left town one morning in the winter of 1961 with a suitcase, a guitar, and a harmonica rack and hitchhiked his way east to find Woody Guthrie. He was heading to a place “where life promised something more.”
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These are some of Dylan’s musings and memories on his life in the Upper Midwest. As with any autobiography, the reader must take the narrative with a grain of salt. Any writer has an agenda, and that agenda may not include complete truth and accuracy. Is Dylan attempting to create a youth worthy of his legend, falsely presenting himself as an earnest student at the foot of the folk music tradition? Tom Carson, reviewing Chronicles in the New York Times, is a harsh critic of Dylan’s book in this regard. For him, “calculated image-tending dominates the agenda” in the book as Dylan attempts to present himself as “a 20th-century incarnation of primeval Americana.” Carson writes:

“The voice is transparently fraudulent, eliding one side of the young Bob Dylan (his callowness) and playing fancy chess games with another (his ambition). Yet simply as writing, it’s some of the best fake ‘Huckleberry Finn’ I’ve ever read.”

Carson also comments on a strange omission in the book that I noticed as well: Dylan makes no mention of being Jewish. One must wonder why. Did his family not see themselves as Jewish? What was it like to be Jewish in Hibbing? Did it play any role in forming his identity? Not if this book is any indication.

Carson’s criticism seems too heavy, to my mind. Dylan might have grown up as a middle-class kid in Hibbing, relatively privileged compared to Twain’s Huck Finn, but why is his story not as authentic a piece of Americana as any other? If his autobiography bears any resemblance to what really happened, Dylan’s story is a remarkable one. To start in an obscure corner of America and end up in the limelight is no small feat. And going out of your way to master the old power of poetry and music–in effect creating your own apprenticeship independent of any formal school–is even more admirable.

For me, Dylan’s thoughts on the songs that influenced him and their considerable effect on him ring true. Such experiences are necessary for a person to choose the impractical, even scorned road of being an artist. These descriptions of his musical education are also what make him believable when he says later, about his days of fame in the 1960s, that he did not want to be the political spokesperson for a generation. He loved the art and craft of music–not just folk music in the end–and was not seeking anything more. He had mastered the power of the song and the lyre, and young people looked to him as a kind of prophet. His misfortune (as well as his good fortune) was doing so during a time of social upheaval.

The comparison to Huck Finn does not seem outrageous. Taking chances, lighting out on his own like Huck–these are elements of Dylan’s story. He left the familiar surroundings of home and took up a guitar on the street and in the humble coffeehouses of the Twin Cities, then left again to try to make it in the nation’s cultural capital, where failure was much more likely. In doing all this, in taking risks to pursue his dreams, he showed more courage than most of us.

Like people in other places, Minnesotans–Bob Dylan among them–usually know something about their native sons and daughters who become famous. In the closing pages of his new autobiography, Chronicles: Volume I, Dylan mentions other famous Minnesotans that he felt “akin to”: Roger Maris, Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Eddie Cochran, an early rock-and-roller. “They were all from the North Country,” Dylan writes as he remembers his youthful self on the brink of musical stardom in New York City. “Each one followed their own vision, didn’t care what the pictures showed. Each one of them would have understood what my inarticulate dreams were about. I felt like I was one or all of them put together.”

With a single-minded purpose, enraptured by the folk music that he would later master and transform, Dylan pursued those dreams from Hibbing to the Twin Cities to eventual success in New York and beyond. His songs have always had a passionate following and inspired extravagant praise, even among the intelligentsia. One leading literary critic, Christopher Ricks, recently published a book on his songs, Dylan’s Visions of Sin.

As for this first volume of Dylan’s Chronicles, it is powerful but also curious–powerful because it conveys the passion he has for music, curious because it employs a confusing, nearly stream-of-consciousness style of narrative that jumps around in time. The rewards of the book outweigh these weaknesses, however, as Dylan proves himself to be an unsurprisingly poetic prose writer, if often an idiosyncratic one.

Other reviewers can do more justice to Dylan’s commentary on his career and on music history; as for my views on those issues, suffice it to say that the book is strongest when Dylan is describing his musical influences and the apprenticeship that brought him to his first professional recording session in New York. Dylan wonderfully describes his experience of hearing the music and words of such disparate artists as Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Woody Guthrie, and many others. That said, I will focus on Dylan’s views on the Upper Midwest.

Out of Hibbing

Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the northern Minnesota city of Duluth in 1941. The family later moved farther north to Hibbing, a small town in the mining region called the Iron Range. Dylan recalls his early years in northern Minnesota with general fondness, and one wonders if he has made the focus of his picture too soft:

“The world I grew up in was…still mostly gravel roads, marshlands, hills of ice, steep skylines of trees on the outskirts of town, thick forests, pristine lakes large and small, iron mine pits, trains and one-lane highways. Winters, ten below with a twenty below wind-chill factor were common, thawing spring and hot, steamy summers–penetrating sun and balmy weather where temperatures rose over one hundred degrees. Summers were filled with mosquitoes that could bite through your boots–winters with blizzards that could freeze a man dead. There were glorious autumns as well.

“Mostly what I did growing up was bide my time. I always knew there was a bigger world out there but the one I was in at the time was all right, too.”

Though he professes acceptance of his life in Hibbing, there is a hint of dissatisfaction in his comment that he was simply “biding his time.” In another passage he recalls a visit to his hometown for his father’s funeral, when he sees again “the flimflam, …the Simple Simons” of small-town life. And he remembers the cultural divide that separated him, a lover of art and music, from his much more practical family. When a teacher tells his father that young Robert has the temperament of an artist, his father asks, “Isn’t an artist a fellow who paints?” The opportunities in Hibbing for an artistic youth would certainly have been limited.

Limited and remote as it was, the life of northern Minnesota, especially its radio, exposed Dylan to a wide variety of music ranging from polka to country to popular ballads. He loved rock and roll from the start and formed his own short-lived bands. He sought out and briefly played piano for Bobby Vee, a regional rockabilly singer from Fargo, North Dakota, who would later gain national success. Eventually blues and folk music would claim his soul, however.

Though northern Minnesota is on the American periphery in geographic terms, culturally it did no feel that way for the young Dylan. He claims to have felt connected to the musical currents of the entire country, including the South, from the very beginning:

“Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I came from…Duluth to be exact. I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere from it, even down into the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors. The Mississippi River, the bloodstream of the blues, also starts up from my neck of the woods. I was never too far away from any of it. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.”

With visions of Jack Kerouac’s road in his mind, Robert Zimmerman left Hibbing in the spring of 1959 on a Greyhound bus bound for Minneapolis, “looking for the great city, looking for the speed, the sound of it…” He had already experimented with new names when performing in northern Minnesota. Now he picked one that would stick. When he arrived in Minneapolis, he introduced himself as Bob Dylan.

Next week: Dylan arrives in the Twin Cities.

Weather Note

In our topsy-turvy climate, we are now enjoying record-high temperatures, with Minneapolis-St. Paul setting a record of 50 degrees today. We have beautiful sun in this midwinter thaw.