The Dylanologists (3 page)

Even in person, Dylan left people baffled. He didn't look like a cultural icon; he looked homeless. One day in 2009, a homeowner in Long Branch, New Jersey, called the police to report that an “eccentric-looking old man” had just wandered onto his property, which had a for-sale sign out front. A twenty-four-year-old beat cop reported to the scene and stopped the man for questioning. It was Dylan, and he told the officer that he was in the area to play a concert that night. But he didn't look like the photographs she had seen of Dylan in his prime, and he was acting “very suspicious.” He was wearing two raincoats, the hoods up, and his sweatpants were tucked into his rain boots. She wondered if he'd walked out of the hospital. He also didn't have identification with him, so she put him in the squad car and drove him to the hotel where he said his tour buses were parked. To her great surprise, the buses were there, and his people rustled up a passport and she let Bob Dylan go free.

Nina and the faithful saw what the world did not. They had placed an epic wager: Their man was not simply a songwriting giant, a performer par excellence and a figure of extraordinary literary merit. He was a man of lasting importance, unique in this epoch, an artist whose songs would be heard and discussed a hundred years from now. Future generations would laud them for their foresight.
They got it
.

When the world was bewildered by Dylan's many costume changes—the angry protest singer (1962), the hung-up, lovesick troubadour (1964), the electrified composer of entire albums of surreal poetic masterpieces (1965–66), the missing rock star (1966–67), the rough-hewn sage from the dark woods (1967), the country singer with the sweet voice on “Lay, Lady, Lay” (1969), the heartbroken man from
Blood on the Tracks
(1975), the Christian convert (1979–81), the lost soul (1981–91), the traditionalist (1992–93), the man obsessed with the past (1997), the raunchy bluesman from
Love and Theft
(2001), the memoirist cribbing lines from ancient books, old magazines, and everything else (2004), the elder statesman worthy of an honorary Pulitzer Prize and a Presidential Medal of Freedom (2008–12)—
they got it.

While heathens and fools complained about the voice, that wreck of an instrument “you could scour a skillet with,” as the novelist John Updike put it—
they got it
.

All weekend, Zimmy's was crammed with the people who got it. They paraded up to a stage in the corner to perform songs by Dylan and songs that he inspired them to write somewhere along the line. One was Mark Sutton, a PhD student in from Sydney who wore a scraggly red beard and a T-shirt reading
WHAT WOULD AHAB DO?
He was on a cross-country trip to research a dissertation zeroing in on Dylan's latter-day work. Mark had met a lot of Dylan freaks at the Sydney fan club, where they discussed their hero and drank their beer the Australian way—in great volume. Inspired after one outing, he wrote a lampoon of the prototypical Dylan tragic, and as he took the stage at Zimmy's with a borrowed guitar, he knew his composition was perfect for this crowd and this moment.

The protagonist in the song goes to hundreds of concerts, has every last bootleg, has memorized all the lyrics and tattooed some of them to his back, has followed Dylan's supposed spiritual journey by becoming a Jew, then a Christian, and then a Jew again, has learned how to crash his motorcycle just like Dylan did in 1966 . . . all of which was to say, as the kicker went, “I'm a bigger Dylan fan than you.” His knowing roast of Dylan freakery, and the competitive streak lurking just under its surface, brought down the house.

As Sutton finished, a man sitting at a table near the stage stood up and walked away. He wasn't smiling. He had a thin face and close-cropped white curls, and he wore a denim jacket over a button-­down shirt. He had been milling about the edge of the scene at Zimmy's all weekend. He spoke quietly with a few people he knew. Mostly he kept to himself. Nobody would have guessed it by looking at him, but if anybody could one-up the braggadocio in the parody, this was the man.

His name was Bill Pagel, and he was the ultimate Dylan pilgrim. He showed up in town one day in 2006, and he didn't leave.

4

The short story is that Bill was a Dylan collector, and he wanted to buy the Zimmerman house. The stout Mediterranean, plastered over in stucco, was in a tranquil neighborhood of maples and neat hedges. The Zimmermans brought it in 1948 and stayed until Abe died two decades later. Beatty sold the house and some of their furniture to a local couple with young kids, the Marolts. She left a lot of random stuff behind, silver salt and pepper shakers, Bob's ice skates, some poems her sons wrote. Angel Marolt gave them away or sold them for almost nothing or threw them out. (“If I knew now!” she cried years later.) Another two decades passed, and the Marolts were ready to move. Their Realtor decided they should tap the global market of Dylan fans.
People
ran a feature. A Californian came with a plan to turn the house into a museum, but the town stiff-armed him.

So instead the Marolts found a local buyer. The Frenches, expecting their third child, were in the market for a bigger place. Gregg French, a Frito-Lay delivery driver who had spent most of his life in Hibbing, was not a particularly avid Dylan fan but he did like saving money, and he noticed that the utility bills were cheaper at the Zimmerman homestead than at the other house the Frenches were considering. When he was asked about it later, he'd tell you it wasn't the Dylan tie that sealed the deal; it was the insulation. The Marolts accepted a $50,000 offer. The Sunday after the Frenches moved in, it hit them that what they thought was a house, others considered a shrine. Three fans pulled up in a car and got out to gawk. One broke a twig off a tree in the front yard as a keepsake. Another struck the
Thinker
pose on the front stoop while his friend took pictures. Then they jumped into their car and headed off down the road. “It's been somewhat nonstop ever since,” French said.

The Frenches had lived there for a decade and a half when Bill arrived from Wisconsin in 2006. He took a pharmacy job in Hibbing, in part because he figured it would be easier to buy the Dylan house if he already lived in town. He introduced himself to the Frenches and, in a friendly way, expressed interest in the place. Were they thinking of selling anytime soon? He didn't get a firm answer. According to the local gossip, a Realtor once told the Frenches that the house might be worth $1 million after Dylan's death, five to ten times the value it would have without the celebrity backstory. Anyone who actually spoke with French would realize he wasn't pie-eyed enough to expect that kind of Dylan premium in his lifetime. But it was clear to Bill that the Frenches weren't ready to sell yet. He rented an apartment next door and set about waiting, and when the wait stretched still longer, he bought the property immediately behind his dream home.

In Hibbing, insular as any small town, they weren't exactly sure what to make of Bill Pagel. Around friends, he was full of left-field wit and cracklingly dry Midwestern sarcasm. Around those who didn't know him, he was guarded, as if when they turned their heads he might just make a break for it. Some locals wondered, was he just another Dylan collector here to snap up artifacts? What did he want to do with that house? And exactly
who
was he again? Bill liked to keep his private life private, so it took time for them to figure out the answers to those questions.

He grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he spotted Dylan's debut record and bought it. He got in on the ground floor, 1962. The record sold only five thousand copies initially. He took to the music, bought album after album, then got the bootlegs and started going to the shows. As the years went on he earned a reputation in Dylan circles as a collector of paper. Like a lot of music fans, he bought the concert posters and programs, and he saved tickets and newspaper clippings and photographs. But he didn't pick them up in ones and twos. He collected in bulk. When he saw a flyer he would take all of them, and when others asked for a copy he would refuse to part with the extras. He started to document what songs Dylan played each night. He had vague ideas of publishing this information, but mostly he did it because he enjoyed the work. (Later, he launched a website, Bob Links, that tracked Dylan's tour and published set lists and reviews; as of 2012, it had had more than thirty million hits.) In the early 1980s, he quit his job and for two or three years dedicated himself to this task full-time. While following the tours—in 1981, he saw every show—and during visits to cities where Dylan played earlier, he would go to the library and pore over old newspapers for reports of concerts past. He logged many thousands of miles in his Volkswagen Rabbit and returned with reams of photocopies.

He saw all of America this way. There aren't many places Dylan went that Bill didn't. He was like a shoe-leather reporter running rumors to ground. He stopped in on promoters, club owners, anybody whose path had crossed Dylan's over the years, and in the process turned up all sorts of information, tapes, photographs, and ephemera. “He's a bloodhound,” Bob Hocking said. “He could work for the CIA.” Just the suggestion that something existed was enough to keep Bill searching for years.

Eventually, unable to physically fit all of this paper in his home, he rented climate-controlled storage units for the overflow. He had lived in a number of places over the years, and he'd rented ­containers for his stuff in Minnesota and Wisconsin and Arizona. Once he leased a unit somewhere in Nebraska, if he remembered correctly, where his truck had broken down while he tried to transport some of the paper back east. (He later consolidated his treasure, but he was vague about his current document storage situation. He had at least eight four-drawer file cabinets, banks of hard drives, and towers of archival-quality scrapbooks at home. But he also kept hundreds of boxes in undisclosed locations.)

Over time, his collection grew more varied. He spotted an out-of-print book on Dylan at a New York shop, and when they told him they had a whole box, he brought every last copy home. He acquired not the best prints a photographer made, but entire sets of negatives. He found a ticket from Bob's prom. He bought armfuls of 1957–59
Hematite
yearbooks from Hibbing High. They can sell for $5,000 if Bob penned an inscription, no matter how vapid. “Best wishes to you an' Dick in the future. Good luck in whatever you do,” reads a typical one. He paid for old Hibbing phone directories from some of the years the Zimmermans lived there, 1941, 1952, 1956, 1958, 1961, 1965. He came to own a ceramic candy bowl that once belonged to Dylan's grandmother. It sat on a faux-gold stand, and guitar-­strumming dandies serenaded fair maidens on the cracked lid, which was messily glued back together after, Bill was told, Bob busted it.

In 1993, Bill was in Hibbing for the town's centennial, and thumbtacked to a board in a historical display was a photo he had never seen before. It was a shot of young Bob that belonged to a woman who used to live next door to the Zimmermans. Attached was a handwritten letter from Beatty to her neighbor. Bill unfolded the note and read it with growing excitement. Then he ran to the nearest pay phone to call the woman.

According to the letter, Beatty had given the neighbor the family highchair—Dylan's highchair. When Bill called up, the proud owner invited him over to take a look. It was wooden, with a tray, wheels, and a seat back done in red Naugahyde. It was unclear whether she realized the chair might be worth money someday, but either way, she told Bill she actually used it to feed her own grandchildren. Now she was willing to sell it.

To someone who lacked the collecting urge, this opportunity might have raised several existential questions. Would it cross some kind of weirdness Rubicon to own this piece? What would another Bob Dylan collector do? What if it were, say, Shakespeare's? Wouldn't a museum curator snap
that
up in a second? Bill had no second thoughts. He was thrilled to discover it. He paid the woman and took it home. It's not on display; he tucked it under the eaves, hidden in the back of a crawl space facing a wall.

Once you own Bob Dylan's highchair, it becomes easy to rationalize any other purchase, which possibly explains how Bill ended up with the
other
Zimmerman house, the original one in Duluth, where they lived when Bob was born in 1941. By the turn of the century, it was beginning to disintegrate. The roof sagged. The front porch had rotted. The pipes were rusting. The structure looked unsound, perched high on a steep avenue that careened, straight and true, all the way down to Lake Superior half a mile to the east. This section of the city had turned rough. Drugs, gangs, prostitution, home invasions. Once, a Molotov cocktail had been tossed onto a porch across the street. Everything about the Duluth house said caveat emptor.

But when Bill saw the house put up for auction on eBay in 2001, he bought it. In fits and starts, he set about restoring it. He wanted to list it on the National Register of Historic Places, like the birthplace homes of other important figures. Relying on photographs unearthed from the 1940s, he had the metal railing on the balcony torn out and rebuilt to look like it did during the Zimmerman stay. For precision's sake, he counted each wooden tine in the photos. Workmen shored up the roof, repaired the stairs, reconstructed the skirt around the porch, and caulked the cracked wooden siding. The old photos being black-and-white, Bill had to guess on the color. He had the exterior painted a jaunty yellow with white trim.

Back in Hibbing, people snickered about all this. Even in Dylan circles, Bill's peculiar collection was regarded with awe, and some alarm. (One regular on a Dylan online discussion forum called the purchase of the Duluth house “creepy.”) Bill was aware of how his acquisitions appeared in the real world. “It doesn't look good,” he told me once. “Kind of makes me sound obsessive, doesn't it? That's the final phase, when you start collecting houses. Maybe that's when they should lock you up.”