Cornerstone: A hometown visit

Somewhere on the Mesabi Iron Range, there is one less dining option, which would be completely irrelevant if it weren’t for one thing: it’s a Bob Dylan-themed restaurant in Bob Dylan’s hometown.

The name of the restaurant in Hibbing, Minn., Zimmy’s, is derived from the one that Dylan’s parents gave him, Robert Zimmerman, and the restaurant/bar had to close its doors in March, but the owners are exploring options for reopening them as soon as they can.

Those in Duluth, Minn., like to say that Dylan claims Duluth for his hometown since he was indeed born there, but the fact is, he spent his formative years and graduated high school in Hibbing, whether he likes it or not.

And for the most part, he doesn’t.

Dylan isn’t unlike a lot of other small-town Midwestern kids who leave home at the earliest opportunity.  It just so happened that this particular kid went on to become the poet laureate of rock n’ roll.

He was an outsider for a lot of reasons, not the least of which were that he was Jewish, relatively wealthy and eccentric.  I would have made a B-line for other pastures, too.

But as Dylan’s hometown, it certainly played a big role in shaping his worldview.

So a few years ago, I took the family on a pilgrimage to Hibbing, which felt like a long ways away from Fairbury in large part because it was.

As we got north of the twin cities, the farmland began to fade, leaving only rocks, grass and very tall trees.  It was a rainy day, too, and I only took one wrong turn, so things were going well.

When we finally got to Hibbing, there weren’t any big signs advertising “The Home of Bob Dylan” as one would expect.  As it turns out, Hibbing’s residents seem to be somewhat ambivalent about him.

Given that he hasn’t had many nice things to say about them over the last fifty years, the feeling is understandable.

But I still thought there would be some sort of museum or at least a place to buy cheap trinkets with his name on them.  You know, something like a T-shirt that said, “I visited Bob Dylan’s hometown and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

But if such a Bob Dylan tourist trap existed, I missed it.

The first place we stopped, since it was just a little after noon, was the café on main street, Binster’s.  Binster’s is a typical small town café, which is a compliment as far as I’m concerned. It’s one of those places where you’ll find a group of retirees or construction workers at an adjacent table and a menu that looks like it came from a truck stop.

While we were sitting there, my three toddler children that I’d drug on this seven hundred-mile pilgrimage attracted the usual smiles, and before we knew it, the retired schoolteachers at the next table were asking us about where we were from and what brought us to Hibbing.

In response, one of them said, “Well, you guys should have gone to Zimmy’s.  It’s just another block down the street, and they’ve got all sorts of Bob Dylan stuff in there.”

So after our meal, we took a walk and went in Zimmy’s to look around.  It was a very clean, well-lit, mostly empty place with memorabilia and pictures on the wall, but none of the memorabilia really sticks out in my memory.  It’s not as though they had hand-written lyrics or guitars that he had played hanging on the wall.  And the food was more gourmét.

Many people online have raved about the place, but as a classless Midwesterner not that different than the people Dylan ran away from, Zimmy’s wasn’t my kind of joint.  In the end, I was happy we’d eaten at Binster’s.

Our next two stops were to drive by Bob Dylan’s house and visit the museum at the library.

We finally found Bob Dylan’s home; it was the one with the cover of “Blood on the Tracks” painted on it, and I got a few pictures of it in the rain.  And no, there was no historical marker or plaque.   It’s just a house that’s not old enough to be really cool.

I remember my daughter Sophia, who was then only four, asking, “Does Bob Dylan live there?”

I explained that he didn’t live there anymore, which of course prompted the “Where does he live now?” question.

So I explained that I wasn’t sure where his house was, but that for the most part, he did a lot of travelling on a tour bus.

Accordingly, all my kids now think Bob Dylan is some guy who lives on a bus.  (They also think Elvis Presley is someone who sang “That’s Alright Mama” and died on a toilet, which they think is funny.)

So then we went to the museum at the library.  When we got there, the sign pointed us to the basement and then to a closed door to a room we had turn on the light switch for.

And what did we find there?  Some books about Bob Dylan and a display of his albums.  I could have stayed home and saw that.

The noteworthy thing we did pick up was a bookmark that had Bob Dylan’s grandmother’s recipe for banana bread that I still have in one of the pockets of my leather jacket. (For those of you at home, just make banana bread and add a few chocolate chips.)

The other real oddity in that room was a tile out of the bathroom from Bob Dylan’s house.  Why was this here?  So someone could point and say, “Bob Dylan peed here”? I believe there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I’ll leave that for you to unpack.

We finished up our visit to Hibbing before moving on to a family reunion in the next town over (the supposed pretext for the pilgrimage) by visiting the open pit mine on the east side of town.

It’s the largest open pit mine in the world, and it’s like a man-made Grand Canyon, only a lot creepier.  At the rim of this canyon was a place that sold tourist trinkets and featured a walkway so that we could go see one of the massive trucks that haul the ore out (They are twice as big as the biggest tractor you’ve ever seen.).

When I saw this, a couple of things ran through my mind.  The first was “What have we wrought?”  I’ve never been much of an environmentalist, but this grand hole made a pretty grand impression.

The other things I thought of were the comments that Dylan had made about how “the people up there” think this hole is beautiful, as though he simply couldn’t understand how people could feel that way, which speaks volumes about how he feels in relation to Hibbing’s natives.

And so we got our trinkets, loaded up the van and headed east of town to the reunion in Virginia.

I’m certainly glad we went, and I’d encourage others to, too.

What more excuse do you need for a drive than a big hole in the ground and a bathroom floor tile a rock legend might have urinated on?