SO I WATCHED THAT SUN COME RISING
FROM THAT LITTLE MINNESOTA TOWN:
TOBY THOMPSON REVISITED
A J Iriarte
(First published in The Bridge number 31)
At long last, a welcome paperback reprint of one of the most
sought-after (and collectable!) books on Bob Dylan. Originally
published in 1971 as "Positively Main Street. An Unorthodox View
of Bob Dylan", it also happens to be one of the few truly
essential titles in the ever growing bibliography on our
subject, already so vast that it will soon prove impossible to
encompass. "Positively Main Street" can be labelled a classic
without any undue qualms. The first thing worthy of notice is
that the book's subtitle has now become a far more accurate "Bob
Dylan's Minnesota", more suited to its contents and to the
present state of affairs in the field of Dylan studies.
The author, Toby Thompson, is described on the dust wrapper
to the original edition of the book as "a young writer and
musician whose articles on Bob Dylan attracted wide and admiring
attention when they appeared in 'The Village Voice'. He has also
written articles for 'The Washington Post' and 'US'". Now, all
these years down the line, Thompson teaches non-fiction writing
at Penn State University, is the author also of "Saloon" (1976)
and "The '60s Report" (1979) and has written for many
periodicals and magazines, including "Rolling Stone", "Esquire",
"Vanity Fair" and "Playboy". Additionally, after his inaugural
master stroke, he has kept largely silent on Dylan matters for
over thirty years, until Terry Kelly interviewed him for The
Bridge early in 2005. When he set out to write what would become
"Positively Main Street", however, Thompson wasn't even 'a young
writer', rather a maverick would-be journalist, a follower of
the so-called 'New Journalism' championed by Tom Wolfe, albeit
probably closer to Hunter S Thompson's 'gonzo' approach to that
discipline.
Fresh out of University and a long-time Dylan fan, Thompson
hit upon the idea of inquiring into Dylan's past, to find the
proverbial man behind the mask, at a time when Dylan was in
seclusion and nobody really knew too much about his origins (or
only the tall tales he had carefully disseminated). With this
purpose, Thompson travelled all the way to Hibbing in the fall
of 1968, hoping to track down Dylan's relatives and childhood
friends, intimately convinced that the articles he intended to
write about his investigative trip and potential discoveries
would get him into print for the first time and thus launch his
career. That he achieved his aim is, of course, a matter of
record. What finally became "Positively Main Street" evolved
basically from an original series of articles published in "The
Village Voice" from March 1969 and a follow-up article
commissioned by "US Quarterly", plus some material first
published in the "San Francisco Chronicle".
Thompson made two trips to Hibbing, and also visited
Minneapolis and Duluth. Rather than carry out proper interviews,
in the strict journalistic sense, he chatted with sundry
acquaintances, friends and relatives of Dylan's. Names now long
familiar, like those of B J Rolfzen, Dylan's English teacher at
school, or Ellen Baker, an acquaintance-cum-flirt of Dylan's
brief University days, to mention but two, first surfaced in
these highly entertaining pages. Thompson also more or less
stumbled upon Echo Helstrom, with whom he established an intense
relationship; he was the first one to make the connection
between Echo and Dylan's song Girl From The North Country. To
all this, add if you please that he also had a tense encounter
with David Zimmerman, and a more pleasant one with Dylan's
mother, who invited him out to lunch. How many reporters or
biographers can claim the same? What Thompson established with
his groundbreaking investigation was that Dylan was an ordinary
Joe ("I'm just average, common too / I'm just like him, the same
as you"), with a family, an education and a geographical
background most people could relate to. The underpinnings of the
myth, so to say, were laid bare for all to see, but in an
affectionate and caring manner.
Although 'gonzo' journalese can occasionally be hard to
digest, Thompson's highly literate prose proves on the contrary
pretty engaging, and it flows smoothly and with a certain
elegance, without any undue familiarities nor excessive display
of city 'cool' or 'hipness', a pleasant surprise given the
situation: a 'sophisticat' Ðas Michael Gray would sayÐ among the
hicks. Only a few patent concessions to the fashions of the day
or his journalistic models may now prove slightly irritating,
such as the extremely silly headings used for the book's
chapters (e.g. 'four gush', 'historogush', 'gushicon five',
etc.). Almost forty years down the line, Thompson has every
reason to be satisfied with the book. It is indeed a remarkable
achievement both as a journalistic investigation and as literary
work.
As a matter of fact, "Positively Main Street" reads like
a novel, now probably more so than when first published. As
Thompson himself admits nowadays (p. 187), he conceived the book
as a Bildungsroman of sorts, with the narrative dwelling as much
upon his gradual discovery of the background, setting and
details of Dylan's youth as on the shaping of his own
personality by these experiences. "Positively Main Street" is
all about growing up in America: not only Dylan in Minnesota in
the 1950s, but more so Thompson himself in 1968-69, when
confronted to Dylan's roots but also to the changes that
American society was undergoing. Upon his return from Hibbing,
Thompson was not the same na•ve young man who had set out on the
journey. He had learnt things about Dylan, but many more about
himself.
Of course, what Thompson discovered about Dylan mostly
holds no surprises for today's reader, but one should keep in
mind that Ðas Greil Marcus says in his cover blurbÐ "Toby
Thompson was there first". In fact, Shelton had been the first
to go to Hibbing, with Thompson coming in a close second, as the
book explicitly states, but more importantly, Thompson was the
first to publish his findings, and one might argue that his
approach was most attractive. Many of the oft-repeated anecdotes
on Dylan's childhood and early adolescence were originally put
down on paper by Thompson, and it always repays, at any time, to
go back to the original sources. In that sense, the book is as
invaluable now to researchers as it was when first published.
But it has nowadays acquired an additional virtue, bestowed upon
it by the sheer passing of time: it portrays vividly a place and
a spirit that are no more.
The Hibbing that Thompson visited was still very close
to the one Dylan had been brought up in, even if it was starting
to show the first symptoms of change (as Thompson notes during
his second trip there). That Hibbing, of course, has long
disappeared. Thompson is an excellent travel writer: he has a
feeling for space, with intensely rendered descriptions of
places, buildings and people, and either by chance or intention,
has also managed to capture the spirit of the time. This makes
his report infinitely more valuable today, when we are further
away from those more innocent times. Thompson's book operates as
a time capsule: it manages to take you back in time, what most
biographies fail to do to the reader's loss.
"Positively Main Street" is indisputably one of the few
books no serious Dylan fan or scholar can do without. If you
don't own the first edition or the 1972 paperback and cannot
afford shelling out from 100 to 150 dollars for the original
hardback, then this book is urgently beckoning to you. And even
if you do own the original, you may still wish to add this
handsomely produced paperback (albeit with a distressingly ugly
cover) to your collection. Besides, this is in fact an updated
version of the book. Although the text has apparently not been
revised, the book now includes a new preface by Thompson (also
published in issue 30 of The Bridge) and, as a so-labelled
"bonus track", the afore-mentioned extensive Terry Kelly
interview with the author from issue 21 of The Bridge, plus
Ðlast but not leastÐ previously unpublished photographs of Echo
Helstrom in Hibbing in 1969.
Toby Thompson, "Positively Main Street. Bob Dylan's
Minnesota", University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008
(ISBN: 978-0-8166-5445-1, 218 pages, paperback, $15.95)
Positively Main Street: Bob Dylan's Minnesota
by Toby Thompson
amazon.com .uk - .de.
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