Bob Dylan was born on this day in 1941, at Duluth, Minnesota. Since it's his birthday, and a big one, MPR this afternoon replayed this documentary, "Boy from the North Country," about his Minnesota roots. It's continuously interesting. First time I heard it, I was driving in my car, it happened to be on, and I ended up sitting in a parking lot, Target I think, listening for a half hour or more till it ended.
In The Guardian today, Dave Simpson interviews luminaries about their favorite Dylan song. Mick Jagger, for instance, votes for "Desolation Row," and it happens that within the first minute of MPR's documentary one learns that the opening lyrics to that song relate to a 1920 lynching in Duluth that Dylan knew about from his dad, Abe Zimmerman, an 8-year-old Duluthian at the time of the crime. Sometimes in these exercises the subjects can't resist the temptation to advertise their aficionado status by naming obscure songs that hardly anyone knows, but you could not say that of "Desolation Row," and I think the only song named more than once is "Blowin' in the Wind." I couldn't name one favorite without feeling guilty about having slighted a hundred, but I have a fondness for the long somewhat opaque ballads—"Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," "Tangled Up in Blue," "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts." If I was trying to show off, maybe I'd name "Abandoned Love," recorded in 1975 for Desire, but it didn't make the cut. Ten years later, it was included in the Biograph compilation. If you root around the Internet, even just at YouTube, you'll notice that, in a couple different stanzas, the lyrics to the Biograph version diverge sharply from what Dylan sang one night in a famous live show at a club in Greenwich Village—he was not on the playbill, but was at the club. When the evening's headliner, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, called him up, Dylan sang "Abandoned Love," and one of Elliott's fans had a tape recorder running:
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