A Simple Twist of Fate: The late, great Robert Zimmerman

Just got back from Hibbing, where my aunt's documentary, "Tangled up in Bob," screened twice to packed, appreciative crowds of locals and Dylan fanatics. (sign up on the site to find out when the DVD is coming, and for now, distribution is the big question. Listen to the MPR feature)

Like Hibbing's other claim to fame (aside from Kevin McHale), the world's largest iron ore open pit mine, the film is defined by empty space, the negativity of Bob Dylan's ties to this place. It chronicles the early years - starting in Duluth, ending in Dinkytown. The nut of it is the people that grew up with Robert Zimmerman, but then met Bob Dylan.

As one of his old university buddies said to me, he was a "pathological liar" whom they often didn't believe. They didn't buy it when he disappeared for a couple months and reappeared, claiming he'd cut a couple records in New York. He also variously claimed he'd been out west, an orphan and a carnival operator. This blank-slate kid from up north created a person like a jacket (the jackets came about when Rebel Without a Cause opened in Hibbing).

The man today is some kind of distant prince, under layers of grit and stories self-applied, and I guess that's what's so interesting about my aunt's film: it zaps away these layers to a tiny old core that was apparently doomed from the moment he went down Highway 61 to the U.

But then again, casting away the past and fashioning a fresh persona like some ad executive is the lasting boomer legacy – the rolling stones that can't handle the moss.

Dylan Days, a multi-day festival around his birthday, is a weird, ironic event in that particular flinty up-north way. It's basically a stubborn rejection of Dylan's rejection of Zimmerman, and of course a small town's bid for tourist dollars. Hibbing's downtown was strikingly busy and vital, though: several commercial streets of businesses that are usually doomed these days.

"Zimmy's" is the bar around which all social life revolves – it played host to a singer-songwriter contest with generally mediocre results. But the guy singing about the Wellstone assassination was funny, and certainly the favorites were three local dudes under the group "Kevin Garnett" who rapped Hurricane to perfectly selected samples from DJ Mosquito Beats. Their original entry was a well-done "I'm Bob Dylan, You're Bob Dylan, We're all Bob Dylan" rap. It deserved Internet video fame for sure. On the way out, Mary and I were treated to a badass freestyle on the Pat Tillman friendly-fire Army coverup conspiracy, which I really liked.

the childhood home

At the post-screening dinner with my family friends and the "stars" of the film, I sat next to Phil, the first subject, who hung out with him in the Dinkytown days. He was talented, but not some amazing person, Phil and another old scenester told me. They hung out, played at coffeeshops, after bar closing they tapped kegs in basements. Compared to today's local underground, culture goes in cycles, I thought. Who among the musician types I know will turn out to be the star? And how many more are just starry-eyed idolators?

After the screening I sat on a rock in the Hibbing Community College parking lot. Zimmerman's old English teacher came out. His contribution to the film was charismatic, and one experimental interview sparked my aunt's interest in doing the project. Just days after he and the 'star', professor of creative writing Natalie Goldberg, went around town in a moped, he suffered a terrible hip fracture and now requires a walker. Zimmerman sat in the front row of his class.

The cousin of Zimmerman's high school girlfriend (who was a blonde Lutheran vixen in leather) came over and said hi to him before he got in the car. A simple twist of fate – Dylan was Dylan, writing those anthems only two years after he got out of there. Like the chaotic butterfly conjuring a thunderstorm, if the teacher hadn't been there, if the girl hadn't been there, that guy wouldn't have become the Guy. The masters of war, the watchtower and its princes, it was all a crap shoot from a weird kid that played the piano. He couldn't have been Dylan without covering that place up – and in a very peculiar way, my aunt's idiosyncratic, shot-from-the-hip documentary exposes this invisible side – dragging the stubborn troubadour out of his myth.

Outside Zimmy's, the gruff Hibbing guy who claimed he got him stoned for the first time (and of course they say Dylan got the Beatles high for the first time, markedly damaging global civilization), told me, it was a terrible thing he gave up for stardom. "We sit here, bowing to his star, while he can't even go out for a beer with his friends."