Most of you reading this know I'm a big Bob Dylan fan. While he was born and raised in Minnesota, he spent just a year or so in the Twin Cities in 1959 before leaving for New York City. He was briefly enrolled at the University of Minnesota and living in Dinkytown. I was able to drive around the campus and see some of the places where Dylan was, though some of the buildings are now gone, as it was nearly half a century ago he was there.
I had a more interesting Dylan moment, if you will, when I was at James & Mary Laurie, Booksellers in downtown Minneapolis. Deep inside this twining bookstore, in the labyrinthine downstairs, I heard the opening notes of "Lo and Behold"...no, really.
Yes, The Basement Tapes was playing as I perused the cavernous, copious stacks in, appropriately enough, the basement. I was so tickled, I spent twenty minutes going through the extensive vinyl collection to find a Dylan album to buy and mark my experience.
Here's Dylan's version of "The House of the Rising Sun" - this is the kind of material he was learning and playing in Dinkytown before he left to find Woody Guthrie in the Big Apple:
And here's The Band from 1970 with a Basement Tapes cut, "This Wheel's On Fire". (That's also the title of Levon Helm's extremely readable and informative autobiography.) Those of you who've seen Absolutely Fabulous will recognize this is the original version of that show's theme song.
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