At 80, Bob Dylan finally gets a museum

TULSA, Okla. - True to form, Bob Dylan was nowhere to be found as a construction crew put the finishing touches on his museum this week. The smell of fresh lumber lingered in the air, the fire marshal was checking emergency sprinklers and workers were setting up a jukebox with Dylan’s greatest hits - in lieu of the reclusive genius himself.

A new museum and archive dedicated to Dylan and his work is set to open in Tulsa this month, the culmination of a six-year journey that began when local banking and oil billionaire George Kaiser’s foundation bought Dylan’s voluminous personal archive and pledged to create a home for it.

When the center opens Tuesday, the public will for the first time be able to see some of more than 100,000 items in Dylan’s personal archive - including multiple song drafts, rare recordings and videos, and historic such artifacts as the battered Turkish drum that inspired the classic song “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It promises a historic new look into the creative engine that has driven the singer’s 60-yearcareer.

Organizers hope the 29,000-square-foot, $10 million center will become a cultural touchstone in Tulsa, offering both fans and hardcore Dylanologists a greater understanding of the famously enigmatic and guarded musician, who at age 80 is widely considered the country’s greatest living artist.

“The scope of the material and its impact is almost without equal,” said Steven Jenkins, the Dylan Center’s director. “But we have no intention of trying to explain the Bob Dylan mystery. No matter how hard we try,the man at the core of all this somehow continues to remain elusive.”

Historian Douglas Brinkley, a patron of the center, said it will provide a deeper understanding of the artists’ body of work at a time when there has been a resurgence of interest in Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016 for creating “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

“The Nobel Prize caused skeptics - those who didn’t like Dylan’s voice or thought his artistry was only related to folk and rock ‘n’ roll - to wake up and realize he’s one of our greatest literary masters, a national treasure,” Brinkley said. “He’s one of those artists like Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams or Woody Guthrie who embodies the best of the American spirit and is loved around the world.” --A mural of Dylan’s moody visage from a 1965 photo now soars above the Tulsa arts district, on the side of an old brick warehouse complex that also houses the museum of Guthrie, the Oklahoma folk singer who was Dylan’s early musical hero.

The Dylan Center’s foyer is marked by a playful gate, a 16-foot swirl of iron castoffs and mechanical implements that Dylan welded and gave to the center one of several nonmusical artworks he has exhibited in recent years. In a wink to the city hosting his museum, he used a salvaged iron piece marked “Tulsa Oklahoma.”

In the main gallery, Dylan’s life is portrayed chronologically on the walls, with photos, reproduced concert bills and album covers showcasing his life - from his birth in 1941 in Duluth, Minn., to his current status as Nobel laureate, a traveling troubadour who is “Still on the Road,” as the exhibit puts it. Listeners with audio guides can stop to hear key performances, such as from his 1966 tour of Europe, when he scandalized some acoustic-loving fans by bringing out an electric guitar. Visitors can also listen to Dylan’s early influences such as Little Richard at listening stations, or remix some of his famous tracks in a mock recording studio.

Six concrete pillars showcase key Dylan works such as “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” where fans can follow the songwriting from first spark to the album release. A Dylan quote in the entry was the key inspiration for the project, according to Sean Wilentz, a Dylan biographer who helped shape the bio wall.

It reads, “Life isn’t about finding yourself or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself and creating things.”

The “Tangled Up in Blue” exhibit shows the lengths to which Dylan labors over a song: rewriting lyrics again and again, years after he first put pen to paper and despondent over the failure of his first marriage. Viewers can listen to an early version so intimate and spare it sounds like a diary entry.