A scene at the beginning of “A Complete Unknown,” the new Dylan biopic movie, caused my memory to flash back instantly to St. Joseph resident Margy Hughes.
The scene shows Robert Zimmerman hitch-hiking with his guitar from Minnesota to New York City.
Twelve years ago, I interviewed Margy Hughes for a story published in the St. Joseph Newsleader. In the late 1950s, Hughes and Zimmerman were fellow students at Hibbing High School.
Hughes vividly recalled Zimmerman’s talent-show performance.
“He got up on that stage, stood by the baby-grand piano and just pounded and pounded on the keys,” Hughes recalled. “We thought it was just awful.”
Audience members (including Hughes) were cringing. Only “Minnesota Nice” prevented them from booing the no-talent upstart right off the stage.
But Bob didn’t care, then or in the future. It was his way or the highway. The last scenes of “A Complete Unknown” show pandemonium erupting at the Newport (Rhode Island) Folk Music Festival one summer night in 1965. Dylan and some blues-band musicians all plugged into loud speakers and launched into a few ragged rock songs, among them the riveting “Like a Rolling Stone.” To the folk purists who idolized Dylan, it was like witnessing the desecration of THE holy shrine to folk music.
Now, back to Minnesota:
After graduation in 1959, Margy Hughes and two of her good friends enrolled at the University of Minnesota, as did Zimmerman who intended to study English. But instead of hitting the books, he hung out on the streets and cafes of Dinkeytown near the university, soaking up music, performing songs himself.
Hughes and her friends would see Zimmerman now and then on the streets and say, “Hi, Bob!” But Bob didn’t say much; he kept to himself, Hughes recalled.
One day in 1960, Zimmerman caught wind that Hughes and her two friends (Marcia Banen, Rosemary LaMott) were going to drive back to Hibbing for a weekend visit. Bob asked if he could ride with, so Banen drove to Bob’s place to pick him up.
“He brought a whole bunch of stuff to the car, as if he was going to move back home,” Hughes said.
“How come you have so much stuff just for a weekend?” Banen asked him. “Because I just quit school,” he said. “I’m goin’ to New York City.”
As Bob went back to his room to get more stuff, the women in the car burst out laughing and buzzed with comments as they surmised Bob’s parents’ reactions.
“Can you imagine what his parents are going to say?!”
“I’m sure glad I won’t have to go into that house when he gets home!”
“Oh, I can just hear it! You just don’t DO that – quit college?!”
Bob returned to the car and off they went.
“I don’t think he said a word all the way back to Hibbing,” Hughes said. “Marcia kept trying to pump him for information, but he didn’t answer. If I remember right, he just kind of curled up and snoozed. He had messy hair and always looked like he just fell out of bed. He didn’t have much to say. Very private person. That’s the way he always was.”
During summers off from school, Hughes worked at Feldman’s department store in Hibbing, the same place Bob’s mother, Beatty, worked. One day Beatty, beaming with pride, showed Hughes and others news clippings from New York City – rave-ups of a brilliant Greenwich Village singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan.
As Zimmerman-Dylan became more and even more famous, Hughes and friends were flabbergasted.
“It was terrifically shocking to us,” she said. “We all laughed so hard because we couldn’t believe it, because we thought that kind of success for him would never, ever happen.”
In her memory, Hughes and her friends could still see and hear Bob pounding away almost like a maniac on that baby-grand piano in the Hibbing auditorium.
But Hughes and friends later admitted that, as Hughes said, “The joke was on us. Bob got the last laugh!”
