Slice
Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan
Editor's note: It's May 24, Bob Dylan's birthday. And as I do every year, I like to trot out and republish Seltzerboy's pizza-related birthday tribute to Mr. Zimmerman. Buon appetito! —The Mgmt.
Ever wonder how a shy Jewish kid from Minnesota’s Iron Range ends up becoming one of America’s most profound cultural figures? Slice offers no novel answers regarding Bob Dylan’s ascension to a pinnacle attained by few others. Still, now is a fine time to offer an interesting clue—well, interesting for pizza-blog-reading Dylanphiles.
Before hitchhiking his way from Minneapolis to Greenwich Village, Mr. Dylan toiled at any number of below-the-radar joints around the Twin Cities, including a St. Paul pizza shop known as the Purple Onion. In fact, after a gig there on a snowy winter’s night in 1961, Mr. Dylan shacked up in the back room of the restaurant (cut him some slack; these gigs paid no more than $5 a night) to catch some shut-eye. At the crack of dawn, Mr. Dylan awoke, suddenly realizing that “the Twin Cities had gotten a little too cramped, and there was only so much you could do. … The town was beginning to feel like a mud puddle.” Next stop, West 4th Street. While Chronicles: Volume One, Mr. Dylan’s memoir, is filled with scintillating scenes, this one jumps off the page—well, at least for pizza-blog-writing Dylanphiles.
Most people think it was his thirst to find Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez that brought him here. We don’t doubt the veracity of that notion. Still, we couldn’t help but wonder if sauce-and-cheese dreams sealed the deal for his sojourn east. Considering his vast societal contributions, we’ll look past Mr. Dylan’s soporific experience during his final night at the Purple Onion and even forgo any implications about the pie quality in the North Star State (having never been to the Midwest, I’ll leave the pizza brouhahas to the Slice maven). Besides, while New York may have pizza and music written all over it—with little doubt that both scenes were far superior in 1961—I’d like to give a tip of the pizza peel to any place that combines these two elements. Come to think of it, if something like this existed around these parts, I’d probably make such a restaurant my overnight quarters, too.
Two years passed before Mr. Dylan would conclude side two of his second studio recording, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, with “I Shall Be Free." Included in that song was what we believe to be his first mention of our favorite delicacy in song:
Now, the man on the stand he wants my vote/
He’s a runnin’ for office on the ballot note/
He’s out there preachin’ in front of the steeple/
Tellin’ me he loves all kinds of people/
He’s eatin’ bagels/
He’s eatin’ pizza/
He’s eatin’ chitlins/
He’s eatin’ bullshit
A politician preaching in front of a steeple? Where have we heard one that before?