Celebrate Bob Dylan’s 71st by revisiting our March feature about the Minnesota-born troubadour
Minnesota is known for many things, most notably its lakes, strong musical tradition and some guy named Paul. A lesser known—but equally important—source of pride are the state’s museums. Nearly 600 sit within the state’s boundaries (that’s 1 for every 9,000 residents, twice the national average). Large, small, educational, shamelessly weird, we love them all.
So, it’s no surprise that, for our beloved state, May is now officially Minnesota Museums Month. The event will feature a host of events and special promotions, and is expected to become an annual affair.
To find out how Minnesota came to love its museums so much, METRO sat down with Ford W. Bell, a Minnesota native and president of the American Association of Museums on Monday. Bell was in town for the 2012 annual meeting of the American Association of Museum (the 106th annual convention served to showcase new technologies for museum and, yes, there was a dinosaur skeleton rigged to a Playstation controller).
Read the full interview here.
Scenes from Hibbing by Tate Carlson. See more from our visit to Hibbing here.
Paging Bob Dylan.
Nothing Bob did would surprise you. He knew he was going to be a musician. You could just tell that was going to be his life….I’m so proud of him. He’s a genius, but in Hibbing he’s just a hometown boy. No one gets put up on too big of a pedestal here.
— LeRoy Hoikkala, Dylan’s friend and bandmate from the late ’50s.
Read more stories from people who knew him when here.
“I knew I had to nail three things: the hair, ‘the ‘tude’ and his unavoidable mystique.”
- Kate Worum on how she created the illustration for our March issue commemorating the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s first album.
When you’re from a place like Hibbing, I would think, that means the big cities—the centers of commerce and culture—are always going to seem a little fake to you. They’re not going to seem like real life. They’re not going to seem like places where people have to struggle on a day-to-day basis, and you’re going to feel somewhat estranged, somewhat like a foreigner, and you’re going to feel that you know things that people who take an easier life for granted don’t know. I think all through his music, there is a sense of knowing things that other people don’t know. Not in a superior way, not in a “I know something you don’t know” way, but just “I know things you don’t know and you’re lucky you don’t know them.
“Perhaps the most inspiring thing about Bob Dylan to me is the fact that he has worn so many masks. There were no straight lines. His early work was most clearly influenced by great folk artists like Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson, but that was only the spark that began a blaze that has trailed American music and inspired for over 50 years. The man himself admits that he doesn’t understand how it happened, but he became a representative of his young and angry generation, and, even more so, an icon of that time in American history. He was a liar. He was a gypsy. He was in love with women and himself and God and the Devil and fighting the good fight and not fighting at all and writing a good love song and hating the woman who inspired it in the first place. He’s the most well-known face of American folk music, perhaps, but nobody really knows Bob Dylan. And that’s what I like about him.”
- Haley Bonar on the influence of Bob Dylan. Read more from other artists, including Sean Daley, Mason Jennings and Sims, here.
Ten reasons why Schell’s is cooler than you think it is
1. Schell’s was making craft beer before it was even called craft beer.
2. The company turned 150 years old in 2010 and it is the second-oldest family-run brewery in America (behind Yuengling in Pennsylvania), surviving Prohibition, both World Wars and the Sioux freaking Uprising. That’s cred.
3. Schell’s flagship Deer Brand Beer is better, and more affordable, than most easy-drinking lagers on the market. Bonus: collect all the retro labels!
4. Founder August Schell was born in 1828 in the heart of the Bavarian Black Forest, known as the “Schwarzwald” in Germany. Sounds pretty metal to me.
5. Third-generation owner (and music fan) Ted Marti sponsored a brass-and-drums oom-pah outfit called the Schell’s Hobo Band in 1948. The Hobos are still sponsored by Schell’s to this day, and were inducted into the Minnesota Music Hall Of Fame in 1995.
6. Schell’s Pilsner is an exceptional beer. Seriously. This baby has won several medals at the Great American Beer Festival, which—last I checked—is a pretty big deal. Get it on tap at Moto-i in Uptown to complement the addictive-as-crack steamed buns.
7. Bock Fest, the brewery’s annual February celebration. Pro tip: It’s best to go to Bock Fest in your early 20s on a party bus. At this age, your constitution can handle starting the drinking day at 8 a.m. Once at the gorgeous New Ulm brewery, you’ll imbibe outside, hear “Ring Of Fire” performed by a polka band every half-hour, rely on schnitzel for sustenance, wander drunk in the woods and witness your friends’ behavior degenerate into utter depravity. Good times.
8. The seasonal Snowstorm beer allows the Schell’s brew crew to let their hair down. The recipe is different every winter—and sometimes the company hits on something so killer, it adds it to the permanent collection (a la 1999’s feisty FireBrick concoction).
9. You might see peacocks roaming around the brewery if you stop by for a visit. The great Hunter S. Thompson had peacocks roaming around his compound, too. Just sayin’.
10. Schell’s saved Grain Belt. ’Nuff said.
- David Jarnstrom (see our odes to Grain Belt Premium and Summit Pale Ale here)
