Think Bono takes a trip according to Dylan while in Minnesota?

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u2wedge

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If any of you have read Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Vol. 1, you may remember the section where Dylan maps out a journey for Bono to take if he's to find 'the real America'... Do you think that Bono may sing any Dylan tonight? Watchtower?

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IN his recently published memoir, "Chronicles: Volume One," Bob Dylan describes what may or may not be a typical night at home. He and a houseguest, Bono of U2, stay up all night and polish off a case of Guinness while talking about their shared literary hero Jack Kerouac and their mutual love of back-roads America. "I told him that if he wants to see the birthplace of America, he should go to Alexandria, Minn.," where, he explains, "the Vikings came and settled in the 1300's."

Dylan's Highway 61

Minnesota

A Little Traveling Music: Songs That Can Transport You (September 11, 2005)


Allen Brisson-Smith for The New York Times
Dan Austin Kimmel practices the guitar while Dan Bannick looks on in Hastings, on the Mississippi River.
Mr. Dylan then becomes Bono's unbidden tour guide, mapping out a road trip with specific instructions to follow an unnamed roadway along "the river up through Winona, Lake City, Frontenac."

Curious, I opened a road atlas to discover that the only road that follows the Mississippi through those towns is Highway 61, the fabled Blues Highway that runs from the Mississippi Delta through Duluth, where Mr. Dylan was born, and that Mr. Dylan mythologized in his 1965 masterpiece "Highway 61 Revisited."

I don't know if Bono ever made the trip, but if he did, he was in for some surprises. So I discovered in early June when, armed with a stack of Dylan CD's and accompanied by my former college roommate Doc Wilson, now a Chicago-based neuropsychologist, I drove from Winona to Alexandria, using Mr. Dylan's directions to Bono as my map. I ignored the Interstate - the town sits alongside I-94, about two hours west of Minneapolis the way most people drive it - and instead took the much longer route Mr. Dylan suggested. Obviously, Mr. Dylan, who grew up 150 miles northeast of Alexandria, in the remote Mesabi Iron Range town of Hibbing, wanted his Irish friend to see the countryside of his native state.
 
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