JIM FUGLIE: View From The Prairie — ‘The New Boy Just Could Not Sing’

The new Bob Dylan movie, which was excellent, has generated a lot of talk about Bob, and newspapers and magazines are writing about it a lot. Here in North Dakota, The Forum has done a few stories because Dylan did a brief stopover there between Hibbing, Minn., and New York. He played with a couple of bands, briefly — including Bobby Vee and The Shadows — and then moved on. Pictured above is a photo of Bobby and Bob, taken some years later, I stole from The Forum. I don’t think they’ll mind me using it.

The Forum’s stories have pointed out his lack of musical skills, at least the kind of musical skills folks in Fargo wanted back then. I don’t know if you can get past The Forum’s paywall, but if you can, you can read Forum stories here and here and here.

Last time I checked, there was even a Bob Dylan mural on the side of a building in downtown Fargo. Here’s a story about that. I think you’ll be able to read that one.

But the best story about Bob’s brief stopover in Fargo comes from my friend, Debra Marquart, a distinguished poet, author and professor at Iowa State University. In her poem “Dylan’s Lost Years,” from her early book of poetry, “From Sweetness,” she writes of Dylan’s Fargo days. In it, she refers to a pair of brothers who played with Dylan once or twice, I think when they were members of Bobby Vee’s band, The Shadows. She changed their names in the poem, but Fargo oldsters will remember Ward and Dick Dunkirk, who played piano bars in Fargo and elsewhere for many years. Ward died young, about 20 years ago, but I think Dick is still around, although I don’t know if he is still playing.

They used to play at Fargo nightclubs, and I remember walking into the old Town House Hotel bar in downtown Fargo a few years back, well, maybe more than a few —it’s since become a Howard Johnson’s, and I think it’s still there, but the bar is gone — and there was one of them, I can’t remember now if it was Ward or Dick, playing the piano. A real flashback for me.

Anyway, Debra tells the story well. Here’s her poem.

“Dylan’s Lost Years”

By Debra Marquart

Somewhere between Hibbing
and New York, the red rust streets
of the iron range and the shipping yards
of the Atlantic, somewhere between
Zimmerman and Dylan, was a pit stop
in Fargo, a superman-in-the-phone-booth
interlude, recalled by no one but
the Danforth Brothers who hired
the young musician, fresh in town
with his beat-up six string and his
small town twang, to play shake,
rattle, and roll, to play good golly,
along with Wayne on keys and Dirk
on bass, two musical brothers
whom you might still find playing
the baby grand, happy hours
at the Southside Holiday Inn.
And if you slip the snifter a five,
Wayne might talk, between how high
the moon, and embraceable you, about
Dylan’s lost years, about the Elvis sneer,
the James Dean leather collar pulled
tight around his neck, about the late night
motorcycle rides kicking over the city’s
garbage cans. And how they finally
had to let him go, seeing how he was
more trouble than he was worth,
and with everyone in full agreement
that the new boy just could not sing.