Transcripts

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BETH FRIEND: It's Willie Murphy's weekly gig at the 400 club on the corner of Cedar and Riverside in the heart of the West Bank, the local center of folk and blues music, the roots of the now nationally-known Twin Cities music scene. But the West Bank itself grew out of yet an earlier, artistically rich time and place, Dinkytown of the late 1950s and early '60S.

Centered on the corners of 4th Street and 14th Avenue, it was the commercial and social center on the northern edge of the East Bank of the University campus. Students lived above the shops and restaurants like Gray's Drugs, Bridgeman's, and Melvin McCosh's bookstore, which in the fall sprouted the sign, "Homecomers go home."

Red Nelson, like many others, came into the area in the late '50s, originally to go to school and got caught up in the social whirl of staying up late, drinking coffee, listening to music, learning how to play Go and chess, and hearing about all kinds of things one didn't hear about in the flat dusty prairies.

RED NELSON: We would hear about art, and we would hear about traditional music. And we came out of an era that Kirby Stone Four was a hot deal on 45 RPM records and AM radios and our 49 merks. So this was real culture for us, so we got imbued with the culture. We really became interested in it, and that's why we stayed there.

BETH FRIEND: Nelson, for a while, owned one of the more well-known Dinkytown coffeehouses, having traded his motorcycle to get it. It was The Scholar across from The Tub laundromat on 4th Street. The blue-jeaned clientele of students and faculty of poets, painters, and drifters who discussed and debated and played music with a fervor also parted with a fervor in furnitureless apartments, on bridges or water towers, and occasionally at someone's house.

Blues musician Tony Glover remembers the annual Spring Fete at bookstore owner Mel McCosh's home.

TONY GLOVER: He had a nice mix of people always. It was crazy intellectuals who could recite Chaucer and stuff and serious folk people who were intent on preserving a tradition and professional pool hustlers. And it was a nice mix.

BETH FRIEND: There wasn't much in the way of widespread drug usage then. A joint of marijuana was a big deal. It often came on a Pullman train via the porter from Chicago, and you'd sure have to know the right somebody to get it. The net effect of this lack of narcotics, says Red Nelson, was quite positive.

RED NELSON: One of the reasons, I think, that art forms went to their completion and that people actually developed a real stewardship of their art form was because there were no shortcuts.

BETH FRIEND: You just had to do it without the help of cocaine. There was either applause after you finished playing or there wasn't.

RED NELSON: We've had some terrible hangovers. There's-- in every genre, there's a drug to abuse. And fortunately for us, there was a lot of 3.2 beer.

BETH FRIEND: So a relatively drug-free music scene flourished in the middle of the straight and puritanical Midwest of McCarthy. Young guitarists filled the air with the sounds of traditional English ballads, American folk songs and blues. They listened to the likes of The Weavers and Josh White on records and in person.

[JOSH WHITE, "ONE MEAT BALL]

JOSH WHITE: (SINGING) Well, the little man walked up and down to find an eating place in town.

RED NELSON: One night, Josh White was playing down at Mama Rosa's, and he came up to party with us and so forth. And here, Gene was playing the guitar for him. Terribly embarrassed. And he says, just don't look at, don't look at, don't look at the strings. As you play music, you don't have to look at the strings. He said, yeah, I'll show you, and he grabbed the guitar and put it behind his back and strummed recognizably "Malaguena."

Outrageous. Things like that. OK, that kind of stuff, that happened.

BETH FRIEND: Supplementing the concerts and the coffeehouses, the more serious Dinkytown intellectuals, as Tony Glover would call them, would send away to the Library of Congress for tapes of rural folk music artists like Roscoe Holcomb or Lead Belly, and then pass the tapes around. The result of all this music making and sharing was that there were a lot of very good players around, and one of them was Bob Dylan.

A rock and roller from Hibbing, Minnesota, determined to be Little Richard, Dylan got hooked on folk in the course of the year and a half, he spent in Dinkytown. The quiet 19-year-old was intensely focused on his music, playing all the gigs he could, including the Purple Onion on Snelling in Saint Paul, where then-waitress student Charlotte Jarusik met him.

CHARLOTTE JARUSIK: Towards the time-- end of the time he was around before he left, he was getting into Woody Guthrie.

[BOB DYLAN, "SONG TO WOODY"]

BOB DYLAN: (SINGING) Hey, Woody Guthrie--

CHARLOTTE JARUSIK: But he was certainly-- I think all artists start by looking at other artists, and he was certainly developing his own style, but he was pulling it, like most people do, out of other traditions.

BETH FRIEND: Dylan went on to New York to transform the folk world with his acoustic debut album in 1962. The Dinkytown scene he left behind shifted to the West Bank, where, to this day, it nurtures the creativity of Midwestern music makers.

[BOB DYLAN, "SONG TO WOODY]

BOB DYLAN: (SINGING) Here's to Cisco and Sonny and Lead Belly to. And to all the good people that traveled with you. Here's to the hearts and hands of the men that come with the dust and a gone with the wind.

BETH FRIEND: This is Beth Friend.

BOB DYLAN: (SINGING) I'm leaving tomorrow, but I could leave today.