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Overview
Howard Sounes’s Down the Highway broke news about Dylan’s fiercely guarded personal life and set the standard as the most comprehensive and riveting biography on Bob Dylan. Now this edition continues to document the iconic songwriter’s life through new interviews and reporting, covering the release of Dylan’s first #1 album since the seventies, recognition from the Pulitzer Prize jury for his influence on popular culture, and the publication of his bestselling memoir, giving full appreciation to his artistic achievements and profound significance.
Candid and refreshing, Down the Highway is a sincere tribute to Dylan’s seminal place in postwar American cultural history, and remains an essential book for the millions of people who have enjoyed Dylan’s music over the years.
“Irresistible . . . Finally puts Dylan the human being in the rocket’s red glare.” —Detroit Free Press
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802195456 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 560 |
| Sales rank: | 276,079 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Shortly after Fred & Rose was published, Sounes resigned from the Daily Mirror to pursue a career as a full-time author. His subsequent books have included a biography of American writer Charles Bukowski (Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life); biographies of musicians Bob Dylan (Down the Highway), Paul McCartney (Fab), and Lou Reed (Notes from the Velvet Underground); a book about Amy Winehouse and other musicians who died at the age of twenty-seven (Amy, 27); a history of the arts in the 1970s (Seventies); and Heist: The True Story of the World’s Biggest Cash Robbery.
For more information visit www.howardsounes.com.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
North Country Childhood
DULUTH IS AN IRON-ORE shipping town in northern Minnesota, built on a rocky cliff on the western shore of Lake Superior. Bob Dylan was born here as Robert Allen Zimmerman in May 1941. In a 1998 magazine article, Elvis Costello asked, '... what's Robert Zimmerman doing living in Duluth? That's in itself a story. His family had to get there from somewhere. There's folk music explained right there.'
Bob's father, Abe Zimmerman, was the son of Zigman and Anna Zimmerman, Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Zigman was born in 1875 in the Black Sea port of Odessa and grew up in desperate times. As the power of Czar Nicholas II faltered, he blamed Jews for the problems besetting the Russian empire, and thousands were murdered by mobs. Anti-Semitic hysteria reached Odessa in November 1905. Fifty thousand Czarists marched through the streets, screaming 'Down with the Jews,' and shot, stabbed, and strangled a thousand to death. In the wake of the massacre Bob's paternal grandfather fled the country, telling his wife and children he would send for them when he had found a place to settle.
Zigman Zimmerman caught a ship to the United States and found his way to Duluth, one hundred and fifty-one miles north of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Like many émigrés, Zimmerman gravitated to a place similar to the land where he was born. Duluth was a small but bustling port, like Odessa, with an almost Russian climate of short summers and long, bitter winters. Duluth was a fishing port, but its main trade was in the iron ore from the Iron Range, a necklace of mining towns to the northwest. The ore was transported by train to Duluth and transferred to ships that carried it to iron and steel works in Chicago and Pittsburgh. Zimmerman worked as a street peddler, repairing shoes. When he was established he sent for his Russian wife, Anna. She came with three children, Marion, Maurice, and Paul. Three more boys – Jack, Abram (also known as Abe), and Max – were born after the couple was reunited in America.
Abe Zimmerman was born in 1911. By the age of seven, he was selling newspapers and shining shoes to help the family. Although Abe was not tall and wore glasses, he was an athletic boy. He was also a musician, and the Zimmerman children formed a little band. 'Abe played violin. I played violin [and] Marion played piano,' says Abe's brother Jack. 'We had pretty good talent and played together at some high schools.' Abe graduated high school in 1929, a few months before the Wall Street stock market crash, and went to work for Standard Oil.
BOB DYLAN'S MOTHER, Beatrice Stone – whom everybody called Beatty, pronounced Bee-tee, with emphasis on the second syllable – was from a prominent Jewish family in the Iron Range town of Hibbing. Her maternal grandparents, Benjamin and Lybba Edelstein, were Lithuanian Jews who had arrived in America with their children in 1902, and came to Hibbing two years later. Her grandfather, known as B. H., operated a string of movie theaters. B.H.'s eldest daughter, Florence, who was born in Lithuania, married Ben Stone, also born in Lithuania, and they ran a clothing store in Hibbing, selling to the families of miners, most of whom were also immigrants. Beatty was born in 1915, the second of Ben and Florence's four children. Her siblings were named Vernon, Lewis, and Irene. Like the Zimmermans, the Stones were a musical family and Beatty learned to play the piano.
Although Hibbing was the largest of the Iron Range towns, the population was only ten thousand, and the Jewish community was small. 'It was quite difficult for us because there weren't too many young Jewish people,' says Beatty's aunt, Ethel Crystal, who was like a sister to Beatty because they were close in age. 'So we used to go to Duluth to visit our relatives.' They were in Duluth, at a New Year's party, when Ethel introduced Beatty to Abe Zimmerman. 'He was a doll,' says Ethel Crystal. 'Everybody liked him.' Abe was a quiet, almost withdrawn, young man, and Beatty was vivacity itself, but their differences were complementary.
Abe and Beatty married at her mother's home on June 10, 1934, three days after her nineteenth birthday. Abe was twenty-two at the time. The country was still gripped by the Depression. Sharecroppers from the Midwest were migrating to California. Newspapers reported the desperate crimes of gangsters like Bonnie and Clyde, who were involved in a shoot-out in St. Paul in March. John Dillinger was shot dead in Chicago a couple of weeks after Abe and Beatty honeymooned in the city. It was a strange, hard time, and it would be six years before they could afford to start a family. In the meantime, they lived with Abe's mother in Duluth.
It took the Second World War, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, to pull America out of the Great Depression. By 1941, Abe had been promoted to management level at Standard Oil, and he and Beatty had enough money to get their own apartment. Beatty was pregnant when they moved to 519 North 3rd Avenue East, a clapboard house with a steeply pitched roof and verandah, built on a hill above Duluth. They rented the two-bedroom top duplex. At five past nine on the evening of May 24, 1941, Beatty gave birth to baby boy at nearby St. Mary's Hospital. He weighed seven pounds and one ounce. Four days later when the child was registered and circumcised he had a name. In fact, he had two. In Hebrew he was called Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham. In the wider world he would be known as Robert Allen Zimmerman. Robert was the most popular name for boys in the country at the time. Almost immediately he was known as Bob, or Bobby. His mother said he was so beautiful he should have been a girl.
THE CENTRAL HILLSIDE district of Duluth was predominantly Jewish and Polish, with a synagogue at the end of the road. There was a general store, a European bakery, the Loiselle liquor store, and a Sears Roebuck at the bottom of the hill. The weather was determined by Lake Superior, so vast and deep it remained icy cold throughout the year. Even in mid-summer, Duluth could be shrouded in frigid fog. There was a fresh ocean smell and the cry of seagulls. Ships approaching the landmark Ariel Bridge sounded their horns and a horn on the bridge blasted in reply. These were the sights and sounds Bob grew up with as the Second World War raged to its end.
In 1946, a year after the war ended, Bob enrolled at the Nettleton elementary school two blocks from his home. The same year he gave his singing debut at a family party. Children were encouraged to perform for the entertainment of the adults. When it was his turn, four-year-old Bob stamped his foot for attention. 'If everybody in this room will keep quiet,' he said, 'I will sing for my grandmother. I'm going to sing "Some Sunday Morning."' It was such a success the audience demanded an encore. Bob obliged with 'Accentuate the Positive.' These were popular tunes on the radio at the time. 'Our phone never stopped ringing with people congratulating me,' said the proud Beatty.
Not long after, Bob had a second opportunity to perform, at the wedding of Beatty's sister, Irene. The relatives wanted Bob to sing again. Bob was reluctant, even when an uncle offered him money, but Abe persuaded him. Once again he prefaced his performance by telling the excited relatives, 'If it's quiet, I will sing.' It was another great success. Everybody cheered and clapped and one of Bob's uncles pressed money into his hand. With instinctive showmanship, Bob turned to his mother and said, 'Mummy, I'm going to give the money back.' It brought the house down. 'People would laugh with delight at hearing him sing. He was, I would say, a very lovable, a very unusual child,' Abe remembered. 'I think we were the only ones who would not agree that he was going to be a very famous person some day ... When he sang "Accentuate the Positive" the way other children his age sang "Mary Had a Little Lamb" people said he was brilliant.' As Beatty said, it was amazing her son was not spoiled by so much attention.
In February 1946 Bob was joined by a baby brother, David Benjamin. Around the same time Abe was stricken with polio, which had reached the level of an epidemic by that year. After a week in the hospital he came home and crawled up the front steps of the house 'like an ape,' as he described it. He stayed home for six months, and then lost his job at Standard Oil. Although Abe suffered his mis-fortunes manfully, the illness had a marked effect. He had been an active, even athletic young man. Now he had to learn to walk again. 'My father never walked right again and suffered much pain his whole life,' said Bob. 'I never understood this until much later but it must have been hard for him.' Without work, short of money, and needing relatives around to help them, the Zimmermans moved to Hibbing, where Beatty's family lived and where two of Abe's brothers ran a business.
Seventy-five miles northwest of Duluth, and separated from Canada by a hundred miles of forest and lake country, Hibbing had greatly expanded with the demand for iron during the Second World War. The population swelled to eighteen thousand and there was a busy downtown district around Howard Street and 1st Avenue. Mining dominated the town. The Hull-Rust-Mahoning mine was a gash in the earth three miles wide and more than five hundred feet deep. Local people called it 'The man-made Grand Canyon of the North.' They had good reason to look kindly upon the mine, for the prosperity of Hibbing correlated directly with the fortunes of the Oliver Mining Company. When demand for ore was high, as it was during and just after the war, Hibbing enjoyed better than average standards of living and full employment. It was said everybody who could breathe could get a job. The mine itself was a mile and a half north of town, but iron ore was everywhere. The town was surrounded by hills of red overburden, some large enough for houses to be built on, and cars coming back from the mine were covered in iron oxide, as were the nearest buildings. There was a saying in Minnesota that one should wash out one's ears after visiting Hibbing.
Hibbing was the quintessential small town, where American flags hung from every building on Independence Day and where virtually everybody knew one another, and probably knew their parents, too. People did not like to stand out or appear special. It was important to get on with one's neighbors; they were the same people who worked in Feldman's department store, taught at Hibbing High School, and sat at the next table in Sammy's Pizza restaurant. The feeling of community was perhaps stronger than normal because Hibbing was so remote, lying closer to Canada than to any major U.S. city. There were bears in the pine forests. The northern lights could be seen flashing across the bleak horizon. In mid-winter people had to dig through deep snow drifts to their cars. 'In the winter everything was still, nothing moved,' Bob has reminisced. 'Eight months of that ... you can have some amazing hallucinogenic experiences doing nothing but looking out your window.'
Originally, the town was established farther north. But when the Oliver Mining Company decided to expand in 1912, everybody had to move, jacking their houses onto wheels and rolling them down the road. They left behind a ghost town known as North Hibbing. To partially compensate the citizens for this upheaval, the mining company invested in grand civic building schemes including a new business district, the Androy Hotel, and a City Hall. The scale of these projects lent Hibbing a feeling of affluence. Many of the town folk had come to America as semiliterate immigrants and they wanted something better for their children, so the Oliver Company also raised an opulent high school as part of the rebuilding, complete with a luxuriously appointed auditorium copied from the Capitol Theater in New York.
The move from North Hibbing was still in progress when the Zimmermans came to town. There was a temporary shortage of housing, so they lived initially with Beatty's mother, Florence Stone, who had been widowed in 1945. She became like a second mother to Bob and David. Abe went into partnership with his two electrician brothers, Maurice and Paul, at Micka Electric on 5th Avenue. The brothers sold a range of household appliances and carried out wiring and electrical repair work.
In 1948 Abe moved his family to 2425 7th Avenue, Bob's primary childhood home. This was a two-story detached house two blocks from Hibbing High, where Bob and David enrolled, and a ten-minute walk from downtown where Abe worked. Entering the house, one walked directly into the living room. There was a central, two-way staircase that led to three bedrooms. The house was connected to 'city heat,' steam heat pumped underground to houses near downtown, so there was no need for a furnace. Abe converted the basement into a recreation room, cladding the walls in pine paneling. Bob carved his initials, B. Z., next to the wall-mounted telephone. He and David shared a bedroom at the back of the house with two windows, one looking south down 7th Avenue and one looking west on 25th Street. Under the window was situated a flat-roofed garage. The Zimmermans also owned a second garage, which they rented to a bakery as storage space. When the bread truck came in the late afternoon kids would gather around for leftover buns.
There were several boys of Bob's age in the neighborhood and, from the time they first moved to Hibbing, Beatty helped Bob make friends by organizing enjoyable parties for him. Children were invited to the house, or to outings to Side Lake, a picturesque spot outside of town. The friends Bob made in this way included the Furlong brothers; Bill Marinac, who later played bass in one of Bob's high school bands; and Luke Davich. The children played together in the playground adjacent to the high school and, when they got older, they rode their bikes to Bennett Park, or out to the manmade hills, skidding and sliding on the red overburden. In the summer there was fishing and swimming; ice-skating and hockey in winter. Sometimes it was fun to ride to the mine and peer over the edge at the trucks so far below they looked like toys.
In September 1949 the steam locomotives that worked day and night in the mine fell silent. There were no more horn blasts, or explosions. Miners across the northern states were striking for pensions and insurance rights from United Steel. This strike lasted two months; the miners struck again in 1952. The strikes were hard on Hibbing, but they created a feeling of solidarity. Shopkeepers knew their prosperity depended on the miners having money to spend and, with the support of the community, the miners got their demands. For Bob, it was an early firsthand experience of people pulling together to achieve justice.
When the strikes were won, the town boomed. A new consumer age was beginning and a large proportion of the iron for America's skyscrapers, automobiles, and domestic appliances was dug out of the mines outside Hibbing. There were few rich people in town, but there were not many poor people, and most citizens were slightly better off than the national average. Micka Electric was enjoying success and the Zimmermans became fairly comfortable. Abe and Beatty were soon prominent in various social groups and organizations. The family home had good-quality furniture and fitted carpeting. They ate from expensive china, had crystal glass, and sterling silver cutlery. A small chandelier hung over the dining table.
Bob flourished in a stable home where he was denied almost nothing and yet was not spoiled. He was particularly lucky to have such a loving mother. Beatty was a popular personality in Hibbing, where she worked part-time at Feldman's department store. 'I think one of the reasons he did have a pretty decent childhood was because of Beatty,' says boyhood friend John Bucklen. 'She was a very good mother, a very likable woman.' Around his tenth birthday, Bob wrote a poem for Mother's Day. It was an unequivocal statement of love for his mother. He wrote that he hoped she would never grow old. With a touch of melodrama, Bob added that without her love he would be dead and buried. Beatty was delighted with the poem, and showed all her friends. She kept it, together with other poems Bob and David gave her, in a footstool with a hinged lid.
The following year Bob wrote a Father's Day poem. This was slightly different. Bob's relationship with his father was not as close as that with his mother. Abe was a reserved man, very quiet, authoritarian and hard to know. He was articulate and could be witty, in a dry way, but he generally said little, being shy of company, and preferred to sit with the New York Times crossword rather than make conversation. While Bob's school friends remember Beatty as a radiant presence, Abe could seem disdainful. In his Father's Day poem, Bob affirmed his respect for his father, stating that he tried his best to please him. He added that maybe this was hard for his father to believe. There were times when Abe got 'real mad.' At these times Bob found it was best to keep quiet in case his father became even angrier.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Down The Highway"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Howard Sounes.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Author's Note and Acknowledgments,
Prologue: YESTERDAY IS GONE, BUT THE PAST LIVES ON,
Chapter 1: NORTH COUNTRY CHILDHOOD,
Chapter 2: BOUND FOR GLORY,
Chapter 3: CITY OF DREAMS,
Chapter 4: APOTHEOSIS,
Chapter 5: FULL POWER,
Chapter 6: COUNTRY WAYS,
Chapter 7: ON THE ROAD AGAIN,
Chapter 8: FAITH,
Chapter 9: GLIMPSES,
Chapter 10: NOT DARK YET,
Chapter 11: THE RETURN OF THE HAS-BEEN,
Bibliography,
Source Notes,
Index,
