Bob Dylan had a show in the City of Groningen, march 1995. There is a rumour around this concert; that His Royal Bobness went biking in the area what we call High Land. I wrote a short story, based on that rumour. Twenty years later, as a celebration, I publish it again.
Note: The text is mine, translation and editing by Herman Grimme
When I first heard the story I thought: yeah, sure, and Aretha Franklin loves herring. But I knew that the man who told me Bob Dylan loves cycling in
What he
told me was that Bob Dylan, thé Bob Dylan, one of the key figures in the world
of pop music, tended to take a short break whenever he was touring Europe . He would rent a bicycle and take off for a day in
the area around Noordpolderzijl, a small town, widely known for having the
northernmost locks in the country.
Dylan supposedly
loved the view. The landscape of what we call the ‘High
Land ’ is said to remind him of the
area around his hometown, Duluth ,
Minnesota . I had no reason to question
the allegations of my contact. Yet, they sounded a little too good to be true. That
was: until three weeks later, when I had lunch with a friend, a die-hard Dylan fan.
I told him the story.
‘Hm’, was
all he said.
't Zielhoes
Then he
told me what he heard: Henk Scholte, established storyteller and folksinger, once
visited the only café in Noordpolderzijl, ‘t
Zielhoes. (The name doesn’t mean ‘The Soul House’, but ‘The Lock House’.)
He greeted the owner, the late Siert van Warners and asked him how things where
going.
“It’s a
quiet day”, Van Warners said, “right now my only customer is a funny American, drinking
coffee there at the bar.”
Scholte
looked in the direction Van Warners pointed to and almost had a heart attack.
Bob Dylan.
“That’s not
‘a funny American’!”, he yelled at the owner, “Thát is Bob Dylan.”
Van Warner
wasn’t impressed: “I don’t care who he is, as long as he pays for his coffee.”
I am a
journalist. One of the basic rules of journalism is that it’s only safe
to publish after the facts have been confirmed by three independent sources. I
thought: two might be enough and I wrote an article about it. Within a week
Scholte was inundated with phone calls from people who wanted to know all about
his encounter with Dylan. Somebody called national public radio en the story
was adopted by several web sites.
It also
kept wandering through my own mind and I thought: why not ask Bob himself? After
all, he has an official web site, and therefore an e-mail address (foggy@bobdylan.com)
and who dares wins.
It took a
while, but to my surprise I received a reply:
Dear, Mr. Herman Sandman,
The story is correct, though it happened quite some
time ago, somewhere during the early nineties. We were scheduled to play a show
in the city of Groningen .
Apparently, someone knew I liked cycling and also knew that the area you call
highland is not unlike the landscape around my hometown of Duluth , Minnesota .
I remember riding past places with names like
Usquert, Stitswerd en Zandeweer. We had coffee in a café with a strange owner.
He just sat there. But you know, I still liked it there, because it was the
first place where people didn’t gaze at me. As I was paying for the coffee I sensed
that he didn’t trust me at all, not knowing who I was. And yes, you are right: next,
a white bearded man came in. A fifty- year old Jesus lookalike with a hangover.’A
druid’, I guessed.
An even stranger thing happened the next day,
when we were in a town called Beecham (is that correct?). We went to a bar and
there I met David Crosby…
Very weird.
Regards, Bob.
I replied:
Dear Mr. Dylan,
That white-bearded
man was Henk Scholte. He is a famous storyteller and folk singer in a band
called Törf. The town you mention is not called Beecham, but Veendam, and it’s renowned
for its Jugendstil mansions.
The bar you went to is called ‘t Aaierdoppie. Sadly, it doesn’t exist anymore. The bartender, who looks like David Crosby’s twin brother, is called Bé Wever. Thank you for your getting back to me and I wish you lots of success in your further career.
Herman
Meryl Streep
A few weeks later, one of Scholtes band members told me that the man kept telling the story over and over, but, he grinned: “It seems that Dylan is not the only celebrity who drops by now and then. Did you know Meryl Streep is a regular visitor of
I didn’t.
Apparently,
the actrice visited the Groninger
Museum , a wildly coloured
modernist building, designed by Alessandro Mendini. Bono called it ‘spooky’.
I assumed Streep
had travelled anonymously or I would surely have heard about it through the
grapevine. The museum director, an über-extroverted man who lives and breathes
publicity, would immediately have climbed the Martini Tower
and rung the bell with a visitor that famous. The most intriguing part of the
story came much later, in little chunks. First, I heard that Meryl knew someone
at the museum, and later I heard about a local painter acting as her tour guide.
The more I asked about it, the better I could piece the story together.
While on
holiday in Thailand , the
painter from Groningen
and his wife happened to encounter Meryl Streep. Her husband got ill and the
artist offered his support. The couples stayed in touch and became friends, and
friends, as we know, visit each other from time to time. So, one sunny day, Meryl
Streep set foot in our lovely city, the jewel in the bright and shining crown
that is the Groningen
countryside.
I couldn’t
retrieve any details about what she did when she was here, but I assume she
went for the usual highlights: the Great Market Square, the statue of Uncle
Loeks’ Horse, The Jewish Quarter, The Martini Tower and of course The Groninger
Museum. And she bought herself a pair of jeans in the Herestraat, Groningen ’s main shopping
street.
This time,
my source was even more trustworthy than the bookshop manager, so I figured that
one source ought to be enough in this case, honouring the journalistic wisdom
that too much fact-checking can kill a good story. This was a good story. I
wrote another piece for my paper.
Bean soup
Not long
after, I had lunch again with the die-hard Dylan-fan, who works at the library.
While enjoying my bean soup, a local speciality, he smiled at the prospect of
my sons going to the local library in Slochteren, the village where we live. That’s
because the library is for some reason under the same roof as the local bank
and an art-gallery. I sighed. My wife and I had just survived a pancake-eating
ordeal with two little children in The Pancake Ship, which is what its name
suggests: a floating restaurant. It’s very popular among families with
children, because it’s unsinkable.
He prodded his
finger at my chest and looked threatening: “You know who loves pancakes,
especially the ones from The Pancake Ship?”
Not the
slightest idea.
“Walter
Trout.”
“Walter Trout? The Walter Trout? The famous American guitar player?”
“Yep.”
“No!”
“If you
don’t believe me, ask Peter.”
Peter is
the promotor of the biggest music venue in town. He is the one who told the
story to the Dylan-fan. Walter Trout appears to love pancakes so much, that,
even if he has a gig in Hamburg , about 200 kilometers from Groningen , he will demand
a car with a driver to take him to The Pancake Ship. Considering his sturdy
figure, Trout could well be a lover of pancakes, but there is a limit to how
far you can stretch a great story. After what I wrote about Dylan and Streep no
one would believe this episode. I hardly believed it myself.
But when I
checked it, Peter confirmed the story.
Wrong highlights
So, what can we learn from our visiting American
celebrities? Well, there’s no doubt that the Groningen Tourist Board have been
promoting the wrong highlights: it’s not the spooky Groninger Museum, The Martini
Tower, The Jewish Quarter or The Great Market Square that are the real favourites,
but the little lock café in the Highlands, the boutiques and clothes shops in the
Herestraat and The Pancake Ship.
The fact
that Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson actually played the Martini Tower
carillon during their visit in 2008 didn’t surprise me at all.
His clothes
didn’t match his age and his physique demonstrated the theory that a life-long habit
of mind-altering candy has its downside. One day you’ll have to settle the bill.
Homeland
More
intriguingly, Reed arrived on a Tuesday, while the concert, of the Dutch
première of Anderson ’s
composition Homeland, was on the Saturday.
He even arrived before Anderson, who got here on the Wednesday. I wondered:
what has he been up to in those five days?
‘A little bit
of sight-seeing’, the director of the Orchestra of the North of the Netherlands
told me.
Where, I
wanted to ask, but the concert was about to start.
So what did
he do? There must have been witnesses. No celebrity can wander around for five
days without being noticed. Did he get an espresso at Talamini, the Italian ice-cream
parlour? Did he sample the herring-and-onions at the stall of famous herring seller
Snip? A visit to the famous Groninger
Museum ? A guy has to eat
and drink and nobody stays in his hotel room for five days. And no traveller in
the world has dinner in his hotel five days in a row. Lou must have seen Groningen and Groningen
must have seen Lou.
But where?
That was the question. Nobody knew. But maybe people failed to make the connection, unprepared
as they were for spotting Lou Reed wander around their home town. Sometimes you simply can’t believe what you see.
‘Lou Reed? Get
out of here! Why would
he be here?’
Where?
Playing
music with Laurie up in the MartiniTower, that’s what I read in the local paper.
They had been invited by two avid fans who had arranged a guided tour of the Martini
church for the famous couple.
But that
won’t take five days.
So where?
Of course I
knew the answer all along. It was quite simple, really. He went cycling in the Noordpolderzijl area,
across our lovely Highlands .
A tip from
Bob.
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