From left to right, Minnesotans & authors Matt Steichen, Marc Percansky, Ed Newman, and Paul Metsa (K.G. Miles, London, not shown)

Matt Steichen, his four sons, and Bill Pagel at Dylan’s boyhood home in Hibbing.

NEW: A Minnesota Book List, click HERE.
Our December 2024 book-of-the-month is Bob Dylan in Minnesota: Troubadour Tales from Duluth, Hibbing, and Dinkytown (2023) by K.G. Miles with contributions by Paul Metsa, Ed Newman, Marc Percansky, and Matt Steichen. The book explores Dylan’s Minnesota experience in 42 chapters with titles like “The Historic Duluth Armory and The Night the Music Almost Died”, “Hibbing High School”, “Talkin’ Moose Lodge Reunion Blues”, “Hibbing Library”, and “Al’s Breakfast Diner”. There is also a chapter on “Early Friendships: Larry, Louie, and Bobby”—our January 2025 meeting will be attended by one of those friends, Louie Kemp, for a discussion hosted by Daniel Singer that focuses on Kemp’s book Bob Dylan and Me. Throughout the book, there are eyewitness accounts of Bob and the Zimmerman family. The book also has maps for walking tours, a list of Dylan concerts in Minnesota, and an overview of the Duluth Dylan Fest, an annual week-long celebration of Dylan’s birthday (May 24th).
The book is a travel guide in one sense (it will fit in your back pocket, if you travel to the North Country), but also populates the scene with characters and the influences, inspirations, connections, and relationships that define the Minnesota in Bob Dylan. The story is often about Robert Zimmerman/Bob Dylan during the growing up years from Bob’s birth on May 24, 1941, to January 1961 when he set out, with a new name, for a pilgrimmage and voyage of discovery to New York City, but Bob’s connections to Minnesota don’t stop there—they coninue over the many decades, with important events like the rerecording of the five tracks for the album Blood on the Tracks (see elsewhere on this page) and onward to Time Out of Mind. Matt Steichen gives us a chronology of Dylan references to Minnesota that starts with the liner notes of his first album—he makes it clear that Dylan’s fanciful stories about his background does not mean he was rejecting his roots—As Matt recounts, Dylan himself has made it clear, even back in the early 60s, that he was proud of those roots. In introducing Matt’s chapter, K.G. Miles says that Matt supplied him with a eureka moment (Miles wrote “for me this was a glorious Bob eureka moment”) when Matt referred to New Morning, Planet Waves, and Blood on the Tracks as the Minnesota Trilogy.
Matt Steichen’s chapter in the book is “Feeling Minnesota: A Lifetime of Inspiration” and K.G. Miles also wrote a chapter entitled “The Steichens, A Minnesota Family of Bob Dylan Fans”. For Matt Steichen’s amazing contributions to all things Dylan, click HERE.

Bob Dylan in Minnesota joins two other Troubadour books: Bob Dylan in London: Troubadour Tales (2021) by Jackie Lee and K.G. Miles and Bob Dylan in the Big Apple: Troubadour Tales of New York (2022) by K.G. Miles. Miles has also published, with co-author Jeff Towns, Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas, the Two Dylans (2023).
Links to interviews with K.G. Miles
With Craig Danuloff
With Harold Lepidus
With the remarkable Princess WOW

In his K.G. Miles’ interview with Craig Danuloff of DYLAN.FM, Miles notes, about Bob Dylan books, “…not a lot of them are a great deal of fun. And I think Bob Dylan is a great deal of fun…the people around him…the characters and the people are..is a rich tapestry of musicians and fun people…We wanted to inject some great tales and tell some great stories about Bob Dylan…and his world…” This is a fun read, whether or not you are in Minnesota.
As Craig Danuloff observed, Bob Dylan in Minnesota, contains new and expanded observations for the Dylan enthusiast. Here are just a few examples:
Documenting the story of the traveling Rabbi that officated at Robert Zimmerman’s bar mitzvah in 1954.
Book Club member and advisor Christopher Vanni reports: “The fact I enjoyed learning the most was that Bob lived near the last Civil War survivor [Albert Woolson, 1850-1956]. It’s too perfect, isn’t it? Something he picked up from another age and transmitted through music.” We learn in the book that Robert Zimmerman may have been among the children who paraded by Woolson’s house in Duluth, a house quite close to the home of Abe and Beatty Zimmerman, each year on Woolson’s birthday. Zimmerman went to kindergarten in Duluth before the family moved to Hibbing.
Dinkytown: there are several theories about the origin of the name of Dinkytown, a neighborhood within Minneapolis that featured coffee houses, bars, and the acoustic folk music that Bob Dylan became devoted to starting in 1959, after he moved to Minneapolis to attend the University of Minnesota. He didn’t attend a lot of classes and, promising his hparents he would return to the University if he failed in his quest to have a life in music and performance, he left for New York in January 1961. We learn in the book that some of the Dylan-associated venues (for example, the Purple Onion) in Dinkytown are gone.

Blood on the Tracks
One of the most important stories of Bob Dylan’s ongoing connections to Minnesota is the rerecording of five songs for for the album Blood on the Tracks. That story has been well-told in Bob Dylan in Minnesota and in three other books:
Metsa, Paul, and Rick Shefchik. Blood on the Tracks: The Minnesota Musicians Behind Dylan’s Masterpiece. (2023).
Gill, Andy, and Kevin Odegard. A Simple Twist of Fate: the Making of Blood on the Tracks. (2005).
Padgett, Ray. Pledging My Time: Conversations with Dylan Band Members (2023)
The release in 2018 of The Bootleg Series Volume 14: More Blood, More Tracks gave us the studio recordings of both the New York and Minnesota sessions (no outtakes from the Minnesota sessions were included). I won’t retell this fascinating story, but here are some highlights:
Bob had completed the album in New York but had second thoughts about some of the songs. He asked his brother, David Zimmerman, for advice, and one thing led to another with a band of Minneapolis-area musicians and they rerecorded half othe album’s songs. Some of us like the New York sessions, some like the Minneapolis sessions, and some like both! Most everyone is fascinated by the comparison between the two recordings. The musicians went uncredited on the album itself, but got their due with the release of More Blood, More Tracks. The story of the sessions includes other interesting facts: the studio was called the quietest room in the world. Also, the amazing incident during which, after a playback of Tangled Up in Blue, Bob asked guitarist Kevin Odegard what he thought…and Odegard somehow was brave enough to call the take “passable” and elaborated to Dylan that if the key were changed from G to A, “it would have more power, more urgency, more tension. He [Dylan] looked down for a minute, and my heart kind of stopped. Finally he said, ‘Let’s try it’”. The musicians were Bill Berg (drums), Gregg Inhofer (piano and organ), Kevin Odegard (guitar), Peter Ostroushko (mandolin), Billy Peterson (bass), and Chris Weber (guitar).

A positively Dylan family, from left to right and top to bottom: Matt Steichen at the swing at Echo Helstrom’s house, Matt on the stage and at the piano at Hibbing High School, Steichens with LeRoy Hoikkala (the drummer of one of Bob’s high school bands), the Steichens at the opening of the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, fall of 2021, the Steichens at the Outlaw Show in Somerset in September 2024, with Book Club Member and host of the podcast Songs of Experience, Henry Bernstein.

For a companion book that we’ve featured in the Book Club, see EDLIS Café’s Bob Dylan’s Hibbing, our January 2024 selection. That book publishes pictures and commentary about Bob Dylan in Hibbing which often appeared first on the EDLIS facebook page. See: www.bobdylanbookclub.com/hibbing.
Some other titles (not yet read by me):
Thompson, Toby. Positively Main Street: Bob Dylan’s Minnesota. (2008); earlier edition published as An Unorthodox View of Bob Dylan Positively Main Street (1971)
Engel, Dave. Just Like Bob Zimmerman’s Blues: Dylan in Minnesota. (1997)

—Peter White, 2024