Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World

Introduction

A Place Called Riddle In Todd Haynes’s film I’m Not There (2007), two of the characters who play oblique versions of Bob Dylan—Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) and a young (black) Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin)—converge in the small frontier town of Riddle, Missouri. While the action at first seems to take place in the nineteenth century, viewers slowly recognize that time is conflated with more modern times: Riddle’s future is threatened by the imminent prospect of a six-lane highway coming straight through town, and its residents are evacuating. Some scenes of Riddle are reminiscent of those depicting the amiable, democratic citizens portrayed by nineteenthcentury painter George Caleb Bingham; others suggest a ghoulish quality to frontier living, more murder ballad than ballot box. An Ophelia-like beauty, dead by her own hand, is displayed upright in a coffin onstage, her eyes wide open, as a ragtag Salvation Army band plays a dirgelike “Goin’ to Acapulco.” Haynes’s Riddle, Missouri, is surely the capital of what Greil Marcus has called an “old, weird America.” Indeed, riddles themselves—that is, enigmatic questions or statements—emerged early in Dylan’s career and were in full swing by the time of his 1965 press conference in San Francisco, when Ralph Gleason introduced Dylan to the gathered press corps, saying, “He’s here to answer questions about everything from atomic science to riddles and rhymes.” Dylan proceeded not to answer questions so much as to confound his questioners with more puzzling statements to decipher. When asked how he would define folk music, he responded, “As a constitutional replay of mass production.”1 The riddle of Dylan in Haynes’s film, with multiple characters playing multiple Dylans in overlapping narratives, speaks to the complexity of interpreting the singer and his songs. Haynes’s work argues that Dylan embodies a Whitmanesque breadth of American culture and history that can only be understood as embodied by different races, genders, religions, eras, and figures both legendary and historical . In a related way, Dylan’s physical and artistic geographies migrate from his xi Introduction Colleen J. Sheehy, John Barner, and Thomas Swiss place of birth and upbringing in northern Minnesota into the vast reach of the nation and beyond. Dylan’s own song and album Highway 61 Revisited tie his work to the historic blues road that runs through his hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, and parallels the Mississippi River south through St. Louis, Memphis, and on into New Orleans. Hence Dylan’s road to the wider nation, in spatial as well as cultural terms (he has called himself “a musical expeditionary”), posits Highway 61 as a route of geographic and artistic odyssey, and his song of the open road suggests it as a metaphorical space of encounters, tests and tricks, fantastical experiences, and reinventions. On this important route, Dylan writes in Chronicles, Volume 1, “I always felt like I’d started out on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere from it. . . . it was my place in the universe. . . .”2 Our efforts to “revisit” this highway serve as an organizing metaphor for the work of this volume. Dylan’s resistance to easy exegesis offers some reasons for the fact that followers and fans, fellow musicians and admiring artists, as well as journalists and scholars have demonstrated ongoing fascination with the singer for more than forty-five years. Ever since Robert Shelton’s first New York Times review and Tony Glover’s and Jon Pankake’s commentary in The Little Sandy Review, Dylan has sustained one of the most remarkable levels of critical attention of any contemporary artist. We can’t stop talking (and arguing) about him. We can’t stop analyzing his work and trying to figure out the person who created and performs it. And just when we think he xii / Introduction Todd Haynes, I’m Not There, 2007. Photograph by Jonathan Weak, The Weinstein Company. Introduction / xiii might be summed up, he adds to the corpus: releases a critically acclaimed album that reaches number one on the charts, writes a remarkable memoir that omits key events and record releases, becomes an archival radio D.J. whose play lists survey the breadth of the American songbook, lends a sour love song and lecherous leer to a Victoria’s Secret commercial, and creates a film with himself as “Jack Fate” that can only be read with a Shakespearian lens...