Bob Dylan settles down in Tulsa

What did Bob Dylan carry in his bag in 1966?

A business card from Otis Redding (they had just met, but the

singer , alas, would die soon after), Johnny Cash's phone number, and the contact details of a photographer, a journalist, a poet, and a guy who I had just started working for him.

The wallet and its contents will be on display to the public starting next Tuesday in a display case at the newly built Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, along with notebooks, letters, photographs, films, instruments, typewriters, memorabilia and hundreds of other objects. never seen before, taken from the personal archive of the singer-songwriter.

The bag, among 100,000 other items, was bought in 2016 by a city millionaire and philanthropist named George Kaiser.

He paid $20 million for a set that the musician had cherished over his successful six-decade career.

Kaiser's foundation, supported by a group of donors, has since released another $10 million to build a two-story museum.

Equipped with the latest technology, it is located in an industrial building in the arts district of this city of 400,000 people located on the Great Plains.

"Half of the money [for the center] we have put up, the other half is provided by local benefactors," specifies Ken Levit, executive director of a foundation whose social goals focus on equal opportunities and children's education.

The tycoon, who made his money from banking and oil, seems hell-bent on turning Tulsa into a cultural hub.

The 2,700 square meters dedicated to the author of

which the press and donors can see for the first time these days, share a block with the Woody Guthrie Center, also paid for by Kaiser and dedicated since 2013 to the American

legend .

Dylan has pointed out in a brief statement that as one of the reasons that made him accept the offer from Tulsa.

Guthrie, an Oklahoma native, was always more than just a hero to him.

The other reason is the city's proximity to the Cherokee Nation.

The Wall of Archives, on the second floor of the Bob Dylan Center, in Tulsa. Sue Ogrocki (AP)

Whatever their reasons, the choice seems to be the right one, perhaps because of the atmosphere of atonement that in times of

you breathe with the memory, which also has its museum, of the Tulsa massacre a century ago, when a white mob razed 35 blocks of a neighborhood known as Black Wall Street.

Or maybe because the city is criss-crossed on all sides by train tracks.

In one of the museum's panels, which recounts the childhood of the genius, this quote stands out among the dozens of memorable phrases that dot the route and that are also on the streets and printed on the buses: "I was always fishing in search of something in Radio.

Along with the trains and the bells, it was the soundtrack of my life.”

On a nearby wall, you can read this other one: “I don't break any rules, because I don't see that there are rules to break.

As far as I'm concerned, there are no rules."

In this celebration, like when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, Dylan is not there... nor is he expected.

Which hasn't stopped hundreds of

, the tribe of his ardent fans, from all over the world for the opening.

The singers Mavis Staples, Patti Smith and Elvis Costello also did not want to miss the party, and offer two concerts over the weekend, conveniently washed down with Heaven's Door, a whiskey owned by the honoree.

At one point during his performance on Friday, Smith hinted at his possible whereabouts.

"Bob's not here, but all of us are," she told the crowd at Cain's, a local temple of

“Oh no, he was actually joking.

He's everywhere fucking everywhere."

Staples, who opened fire the day before with an abrasive

walked through the rooms of the new museum that morning and stopped in front of one of the photos of him as a young man, more or less from the time when she was a member of the the Staples Singers and both, it seems, had a history: “You have to admit, it was cute,” she said, before recalling that her father, Pops Staples, leader of the band, decided to record

when he heard that song.

verse that says: "How many roads does a man have to walk / to be considered a man?".

"Pops lived in a time when he was forced to change the sidewalk if he was going to cross paths with a white man," the singer clarified, "so that touched his heart."

Mixed in among the Dylan parishioners, who wandered the room overwhelmed by so much information, was also Lisa Law, author of a famous photograph welcoming visitors.

She took it in 1965 at the Castle Solarium in Los Angeles, shortly before the musician traveled to Europe, "where he was booed."

In those previous days, she was able to portray him in privacy, while she doubled as "cook and masseur".

Lisa Law, at the Bob Dylan Center, surrounded by contacts from her photographs of the musician. Lester Cohen (Getty Images for The Bob Dylan C)

"Dylan kept everything," Mark Davidson, a musicologist and archivist in charge of managing the legacy, later confirmed in a still-naked office.

"He did it especially, since in 1964 he stopped stumbling and started living permanently in an apartment in the Village."

Davidson also clarified that the musician has had a collaborator for decades, Parker Fishel, dedicated to preserving and classifying everything related to his career in the same Manhattan office where, aware that he would never stop being the most pirated artist in the planet, they decided in the nineties to regularly release official pirated discs, as part of the so-called Bootleg Series.

The musician, who has sold his recording catalog to Sony and the rights to his songs to Universal, retains, however, the

of the file objects.

Among the treasures waiting in Tulsa are three jackets, including a leather jacket, worn by Dylan when he riled up purists by using electric instruments at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, as well as a letter from Pete Seeger (in which he asks that, "despite what people say", not think that it bothered him) and another from Johnny Cash (who had a great letterhead designed with western letters).

There are also Christmas cards from the four

;

a bag of mail sent by his fans that has remained unopened for decades;

photos of him in Wisconsin at age 16 with his first band;

press clippings;

home videos (in the one about his visit to the filming of

by Otto Preminger, he is seen talking to John Wayne as two envoys from the America that was and the one that was about to be) or historical concert posters, such as the one he offered on November 4, 1961 in a small room at Carnegie Hall.

Only 57 people attended.

Two years later, the young troubadour filled the theater to the brim.

Window dedicated to Dylan's relationship with Johnny Cash. Lester Cohen (Getty Images for The Bob Dylan C)

Davidson and Fishel have divided the ground floor, the heart of the museum, into a double path.

On the walls, supported by abundant unpublished sound material that the visitor listens to with a sophisticated audio guide, Dylan's life and miracles are told through his great milestones: his childhood in Hibbing, Minnesota, the dazzlement of New York, the unexpected fame that turned him into a generational reference despite himself, the mysterious motorcycle accident that took him out of circulation for a time in 1966, the maturity of the seventies, the divorce and the sudden conversion to Christianity after a revelation in a motel in Tucson, Arizona, two days after picking up a cross from the ground at a concert in San Diego.

That decision, recalls a press headline, dislocated his followers: "Too much Jesus for Dylan fans."

The museography also stops in his journey through the eighties, in which, he himself admits, he fell "into the bottomless pit of cultural irrelevance", in the subsequent artistic redemption, in his radio program, in the incursions in the cinema, in the Nobel and, finally, in his first steps in the plastic arts.

Made

, one of his iron sculptures, which he assembles with scrap metal that seems stolen from an abandoned train station, welcomes the museum, while a sample of his paintings closes the visit.

The other plot of the story is told in six cross-shaped installations, dedicated to six songs by the artist.

The curators had a hard time choosing them, but in the end they settled on, in that order,

and

.

From that selection – which ignited great debates between biographers and experts on Dylan at the (relative) gala dinner on Thursday – their respective writing processes are broken down, the circumstances of their recording and how they were (and still are) taken live.

Notebook with the lyrics of the song 'Tangled Up in Blue'. Lester Cohen (Getty Images for The Bob Dylan C)

Among the six, the section dedicated to

stands out , in which a mythical notebook is exposed in which he wrote the album

(1975).

Well, now we know that this object, which, as one panel recalls,

called “the Maltese falcon of Dylanology”, in reference to that mythical object in Dashiell Hammett's novel, which was made of the “stuff that dreams are made of”, were actually three elegant notebooks filled with the characteristic small print and squeezed from the composer.

They are exhibited in a free-standing showcase, which allows you to see them from the front and from the back.

At his side, a technological display that, like the rest, has been designed by 59 Productions, a company famous for having mounted the acclaimed David Bowie exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, allows him to enter the writing process of the song, the fourth most performed by the musician on his endless concert tour, that

that started in 1988.

The exhibition on the first floor is completed by a room that emulates an archive, in which you sit down to watch a multiscreen video about your childhood projected on the walls;

the reproduction of a studio in which the visitor can play at being a producer for Columbia, the label that has been faithful to the musician since the sagacious John Hammond hired him in 1962;

a jukebox with 162 Dylan songs handpicked by Costello;

some rooms to discover the work of some of the musicians who most influenced him;

and a reference library.

His volumes—studies on Dylan or music in general and books that influenced him literary—have been chosen by Joy Harjo, who, in addition to being the first Native American to become America's Poet Laureate, happens to have been born in Tulsa.

Exhibition by photographer Jerry Shatzberg, at the Bob Dylan Center. Lester Cohen (Getty Images for The Bob Dylan C)

On the second floor, which has a space for temporary exhibitions (they start with one by the photographer Jerry Schatzberg, author of the

album cover and other iconic images from the sixties) the Dylanian feast continues with a cinema with unpublished projections and a wall that exposes, encapsulated from floor to ceiling, more objects extracted from the archive.

Behind that "wall of memory" are the center's offices, where the library of filmmaker and collector Harry Smith is also treasured, whose

was fundamental in the

from the sixties.

A good deal of browsing through his books, recently acquired by the foundation, gives a measure of his extravagant legend and his vast interests: from Aztec architecture to Taoism, from the birds of Alaska to the customs of the Iroquois Indians.

Postcards sent by his fans to Bob Dylan, wishing him a speedy recovery after the 1966 motorcycle accident. Lester Cohen (Getty Images for The Bob Dylan C)

Davidson explains that the inaugural exhibition, which will rotate, shows "more or less 5%" of the archive.

Also, that the set, which is kept in a museum in the city, is open to consultation by experts by appointment and is waiting to be transferred to the new building, is a living organism in expansion.

In addition to the Smith library, the foundation has added the treasures of two great collectors: Mitch Black and Bill Pagel.

Both were satisfied with the result on Friday morning after their visit to a center that, they believe, "admits many readings."

"It serves for someone expert and for the young person who wants to find out about this story and take advantage of some idea," they said, completing the sentences to each other, as proof that there is no rivalry between them.

They have known each other “since 1979″.

“There are amazing things, like the last performance of [guitarist] Michael Bloomfield, who appeared in concert in 1980, shortly before he died.

Until now there was audio, but no video,” explained Pagel.

Having sold his stuff, he remains devoted to the hero: He has bought the musician's two childhood homes in Minnesota and is restoring them to create an exact replica.

Black, who donated his share (“sometimes in life you need to shed your skin to continue growing”), congratulated himself on what the opening of the museum means for them: “Sixty years ago, when we started, they considered us criminals.

And they pointed out to us: 'Be careful, that guy is recording the concert!'

Now they ask us for our material.

We have become heroes!”

Surrounded by walking encyclopedias like that pair, Davidson acknowledges that his job, guarding the artist's material with surely the most demanding fans in the world, is not exactly easy.

"But I think they chose me precisely because I'm not part of the tribe, so there would be a little distance," he adds.

Steven Jenkins, director of the center, clarifies that Dylan has not directly intervened in the selection of what and how what is told is told.

“He has let us work freely and obviously we have good friends among his collaborators.

If he ever decides to pay us a visit, I hope he tells us what he thinks, and that he happens to like him too.”

Davidson says that in the process he has received suggestions from those around him, ideas that seemed good to him and he incorporated without problem.

As he demonstrated in the documentary

(Martin Scorsese, 2019) or in

(2004), the first volume of his memoirs (the second has not yet arrived, but, at almost 81 years of age, he has promised a book of musical essays for the fall ), Dylan is a conjurer when it comes to building his own mythology to, behind that poetic smoke screen, keep his privacy.

And this museum is no exception: after spending three hours of close immersion, one leaves knowing more or less the same as he knew about his private life before entering.

"Oh, the mask," Archivist Davidson replies when asked how one of the world's most famous people manages to hide like that.

“There's a letter posted here that I think explains it well.

Dylan sent it to

[magazine] , at the beginning of his career, and in it he already talked about his discomfort with fame, and that then he was only revered by the

.

Around that time, they began to feature him in teen magazines, when he, unlike, for example, the Beatles, was not worth a teen idol.

When people later started rummaging through his trash, harassing him on the street, and harassing his family, he decided to become an intensely private person, and we respect that.

So much so, that I have never seen him, and I think I will die without having met him”.

Another of the phrases printed on the wall justifies more concisely that decision to build a character that allows all the focus to be placed on his work, which is, after all, the object of this enormous celebration in Tulsa: "Life does not consist in finding yourself, nor in finding anything.

Life is creating oneself and creating things”.

Subscribe here

Exclusive content for subscribers

read without limits

subscribe

I'm already a subscriber