An Exclusive First Peek at the Bob Dylan Museum
Why the Nobel laureate chose Tulsa for his archive and cultural center. Says Dylan: "I like the casual hum of the heartland."
By Douglas Brinkley
A pensive Bob Dylan during a 1963 recording session. DON HUNSTEIN/COURTESY OF SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT.
When news broke in 2016 that Bob Dylan had given his vast archive of recordings and artifacts to the George Kaiser Family Foundation of Tulsa, people were taken aback. Why was this cultural trove going there, of all places?
Now we know the answer. That initial cache of Dylanalia has become the cornerstone of an entire museum: the Bob Dylan Center. Recently I asked the singer-songwriter, who is 80, why he'd chosen Tulsa. "There's more vibrations on the coasts, for sure," he explained. "But I'm from Minnesota and I like the casual hum of the heartland."
The BDC will certainly hum. When it opens in May, Dylan's visage—on the building's three-story facade—will gaze down on downtown Tulsa's popular Guthrie Green (named for Oklahoman Woody Guthrie). But that isn't to suggest the museum is a vanity project. It's indicative, instead, of the cultural moment, a time when our storytellers and renegade visionaries deserve recognition and respect. It's a time to marvel at the fact that a footloose Midwesterner with a guitar, who spent 60 years changing minds and changing the culture with his music, actually went on to win the Nobel Prize in literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."
Yes, there's the Louis Armstrong House in Queens, which is impressive but modest. The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle is partly a shrine to Jimi Hendrix, yet it's fueled not by scholarship as much as pizzazz. Elvis Presley's Graceland draws over half a million visitors a year, though it's more spangle than substance. Now comes an institution—a 29,000-square-foot edifice designed by Olson Kundig—devoted to a living musician. And it is a living monument: an entrancing, immersive, take-you-by-the-lapels destination that doubles as a campus for learning and exploring. The BDC doesn't just enshrine the artist; it celebrates the formational figures who made him what he is.
The center—a high-tech vessel holding the man's oeuvre and an overview of the man—will be the spiritual home of Dylan, a relentless performer who is forever on the road. When I mentioned that his tour bus was both man cave and tree house, Dylan's response was typically cryptic: "Man cave, woman cave, a cave is a cave. Dark as a dungeon. They don't travel well, no wheels. And the tree house, that's not it either. Neither one can move my bus. I try to leave it where we can get it quick. Sometimes we use it when I'm not on tour." Someday, perhaps, that magic bus may be parked in Tulsa.
The Dylan Center isn't open yet. So let me give you a taste. The spine of the place is the first-floor gallery, which will transport museumgoers through the bard's life and career. Visitors will feel swaddled in a cinematic Dylan "experience." They will linger in a virtual recording studio. They will be dazzled by galaxies of ephemera. A listening booth will resonate with the sounds of Chuck Berry, Ella Fitzgerald, Buddy Holly, and others who infused the imagination of Robert Zimmerman while he was a student at Minnesota's Hibbing High. There will be a jolting audiovisual trip back to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival—when Dylan blasphemously "went electric."
A 1981 concert poster.COURTESY OF THE BOB DYLAN CENTER.
The archive reading room (full disclosure: It's named after my wife, Anne, and me; we helped as advisers and patrons) is where historians can pore over, say, manuscripts of Dylan's novel Tarantula or the dime-store scrawl-laden notebooks that became the basis for Blood on the Tracks. The archive itself is the center's beating heart. Inside are countless Dylan drawings and paintings, once mere keepsakes, that are now being curated as if they were Rauschenbergs or Basquiats. Archive director Mark Davidson and his team are busy digitizing all of Dylan's music, from studio outtakes to every live performance.
The files here brim with bits of audio heaven: reels from a cold Wisconsin winter when Dylan, 19, recorded himself singing folk ditties; vintage tapes of Cynthia Gooding, the radio personality and Beat generation chronicler who interviewed Dylan just before his first album was released in 1962. Shelves bear thousands of books and records from the estate of folk music anthologist Harry Smith and the storied Izzy Young Library. (Young's Folklore Center, which opened in 1957 near NYU, was the vortex of the folk revival launched by budding musicians Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, and Eric Von Schmidt, and its cluttered offices served as Dylan's private university.)
Tulsa was already undergoing a cultural renaissance, thanks in large part to the civic and arts largesse of philanthropist Kaiser—an entrepreneur and lifelong Tulsan—when he acquired Dylan's papers and the idea of the BDC took seed. Cain's Ballroom had become the Carnegie Hall of Americana music. The Woody Guthrie Center, the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa Art Center, LowDown jazz club, and other venues helped make the city an economic engine. Last year, the Greenwood Rising Museum was inaugurated, commemorating the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which Black-owned businesses were savagely torched, killing scores and hospitalizing hundreds.
Tulsa has an authenticity that has somehow dissipated in other American music towns. Country legends Garth Brooks, Carrie Underwood, and Vince Gill (Oklahomans all) might conduct business in Nashville, but that city has gone corporate; their musical souls remain in the Sooner State. Likewise, I grew up in Ohio and am a proud Buckeye, yet Cleveland's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame doesn't capture the excitement of the music it represents. Austin has lost its weirdness. New Orleans has balked at building a truly serious National Jazz Museum. Which leaves Tulsa as the double-cheeseburger, jukebox-kicking Americana mecca.
The Native American collection at Gilcrease Museum, where Dylan's archive first lived, is a pivotal reason why Dylan, deeply knowledgeable about the saga of Indigenous peoples, chose Tulsa. (U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo, of the Muscogee Nation, will be the BDC's first artist in residence.) The Guthrie, too, was clearly a lure: Dylan, a close student of Guthrie, had learned along the way about everything from World War I's Green Corn Rebellion to the exodus of "Okies" during the Great Depression. And Dylan, a musicologist, has long absorbed himself in the Tulsa Sound, collaborating with Leon Russell and Jesse Ed Davis, who played on "Watching the River Flow."
The deeper answer to why Tulsa? Dylan embodies the individualistic Tulsa Way ethos. He's a vagabond, a troubadour, the soulful drifter who closes ballrooms after encores with a "See yo' next time" farewell. It makes sense that the Dylan Center is located off of Route 66, whose lore he enshrined in his epic song "Brownsville Girl," written with Sam Shepard.
Dylan has stayed mostly hands off about the BDC. True, he designed and welded a 16-foot ironwork structure for the entryway. But he won't be attending the opening. Even so, the giant oak tree that is Bob Dylan will reside here, along with the massive roots system of artists that influenced him, nearly 100 of whom are represented, from blues icon Robert Johnson to country-and-western star Hank Williams to comedian Lenny Bruce, who, at Village nightclubs in the '60s, helped prompt Dylan to become an outlaw figure.
A final muse who gets his due in Tulsa: English poet William Blake. Whether Dylan is songwriting, sketching, or engaging with religious texts, Blake's spirit is ever present. "Blake was an evangelizing poet," Dylan told me. "You can see it in his paintings and drawings as well. A Blake poem is the writing on the wall. It's the moving finger. He had the dread of life simplified and down pat. So, yeah, his work is inspiring in a way that tells you that whatever strange and out-of-the-way thoughts you have are not so strange after all, and that he put it all down before you did."
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Douglas Brinkley
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