Early “North Country Blues” in Hibbing.
HIBBING, MN.–I drove alone into the north country unguarded. I carried no expectation or pretense. A songbird hovered along a roadside lake. A good highway leads to connections.
Hibbing did not disappoint.
I thought Hibbing would be a nice companion piece to last summer’s trip to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Ok. Robert Zimmerman was born May 24, 1941, in Duluth, 75 miles to the east of Hibbing. But he spent his formative years in Hibbing. When Dylan was seven years old his father Abram moved the Zimmerman family to Hibbing where he opened [...]
Mark Baier is sitting in his warehouse in an industrial park on the far west side of Naperville, Ill. He picks up a Stratocaster and starts to play the Beatles hit “I Feel Fine.”
And why shouldn’t Baier feel fine?
The warm tones on a cold February afternoon are impeccable through his Victoria Amplifier. Baier created and designed the Victoria, the amplifier of choice for Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, John Legend, John Mayer, and many more. Mayer made the effort to find the Victoria Amplifier Company, lost in a shuffle of nondescript industries like Conley Steel and MidWest Stair Parts near the border of west [...]
NASHVILLE, Tn.–Bob Dylan began recording “Blonde on Blonde” in the fall of 1965 with the Hawks, the Ronnie Hawkins band that was still navigating the departures of Garth Hudson and Levon Helm. The sessions were sluggish and producer Bob Johnston moved the show (with Robbie Robertson and keyboardist Al Kooper) to Nashville, Tn.
Country Music Hall of Fame member Charlie McCoy became the connector.
The Nashville session player was visiting New York in the summer of 1965 to see the World’s Fair when Johnston invited him to play acoustic guitar on the 11-minute “Desolation Row” for Dylan’s “Highway 61 [...]
It should not come as a surprise that Bob Dylan loved Calvert De Forest, a.k.a. Larry “Bud” Melman.
Melman was an everyman David Letterman character with jiggly jowls and huge Harry Caray glasses that blurred boundaries between image and reality, just as Dylan does.
Melman was often placed within an incongruous setting–always a key to a fun time. Something like Dylan doing an album of obscure Frank Sinatra songs.
In his 2009 memoir “We’ll Be Here For the Rest Of Our Lives–A Swingin ‘ Show-Biz Saga” “Late Show” bandleader Paul Shaffer wrote [...]
