Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography - Part I

During one of our talks, Dylan conceded that I was "right on target" in discussing the inner Self that he could not repress, that brought him so much pain he had to make himself invisible, and provided him with the strength to reach for higher levels of consciousness.

Eric von Schmidt, folksinger, songwriter, illustrator, writer of children's books, was close to Dylan in his early professional years. He recalls: "Dylan's mind seemed to make strange jumps, like electricity. His mind was the most exciting... like a calypso mind, making instantaneous sorts of connections, relating seemingly unrelated things and putting them together into something marvelous. He doesn't go from A to B to C and so on — he can jump from A to G while other people are plodding on. He doesn't need to plod. He is able to make connections, not out of something he studies, but viscerally."

Von Schmidt recalls: "Dylan was continually inventing himself," as a circus hand, carnival boy, road bum, musician, and many other roles in what have come to be called the Dylan myths. One of those myths was that he had started running away when he was ten, got picked up by the police and sent home, and ran away again. But he never actually ran away as a child; he ran from, and within, himself, because of what his parents wanted him to be, what the educators wanted him to be, what Hibbing, Minnesota, wanted him to be.

He was going to be Bob Dylan (whoever Bob Dylan might be), not Robert Allen Zimmerman. As he matured, he built a new identity every step of the way in order to escape identity; he would pursue privacy as some pursue notoriety.

Echo Helstrom and Bob began going steady in Hibbing about a month after they met. He gave her his identification bracelet. "A symbol of our belonging to each other," Echo says. "We were really in love. Everybody laughs at kids when they fall in love, saying how they don't know what it all means or anything, but that's not true.

"By the time I met him it was just understood that music was his future. All along we knew there was no other way for him to get out of there, to leave Hibbing. I just knew he had to go on to his career, his singing. I accepted it on those terms, that when school was over, after graduation, he would be off and gone. Get out of Hibbing."

Echo's mother, Martha Helstrom, recalls: "Bob and John Buckland always talked big dreams together about how they were going to make it. They decided whichever got to be famous first would help the other one. They were always planning about being in the lime light, get all the world's attention, stuff like that. Elvis Presley — the idea was to be like him."

"When I first met Bobby he claimed he was an Okie, a real Okie," says Gretel Pelto, who was Gretel Hoffman back then while she and Bob were students at the University of Minnesota and residents of Minneapolis' student quarter, Dinkytown. "He never talked about Steinbeck because Bobby was, at least superficially, non-intellectual, a primitive. He sort of was one of Steinbeck's characters. He had a whole set of original stories that he was an Okie, that he was an orphan. And that he'd been on the road for years as a piano player.