Bob and girlfriend Echo, would spend time at the L&B after school. They smoked cigarettes and played the juke box. Bob’s favorite order was cherry pie a la mode.
Cafe L & B is located directly below the apartment 419 East Howard, near The Androy Hotel.
Echo Star Casey Helstrom, known as Echo Helstrom, was one of Bob Dylan’s early girlfriends when he was still Robert Zimmerman living in Hibbing, Minnesota. They were in high school at the time and their relationship lasted from the late 1950s into the early 1960s, before Dylan moved to Minneapolis and then to New York City.
Helstrom is often cited as one of Dylan’s early muses. Dylan’s high school relationship with her has been speculated to be an inspiration for some of his early music. Some biographers and fans theorize that she might be the inspiration for the song “Girl from the North Country,” although this claim is not universally accepted and Dylan himself has never confirmed it.
“Helstrom was a free-spirited blonde from the poorer outskirts of town, compared to the middle-class Zimmermans.”
Dylan and Helstrom together listened to rhythm-and-blues coming from long-distance radio stations in Chicago, Little Rock, and Shreveport.
“20 below zero, and running down the road in the rain with yo’ ol’ man’s flashlight on my ass… when we sat and talked in the L&B ’til two o’clock at night… Let me tell you that your beauty is second to none, but I think I told you that before. Well, Echo, I better make it. Love to the most beautiful girl in school – Bob.”
— Robert Zimmerman, inscription in Echo Helstrom’s 1958 yearbook (excerpt)[6]
“One snowy night in 1957, as Echo and Dee Dee were crossing Howard Street on their way to the L&B Cafe, they saw Bob standing on the corner playing his guitar and singing.”
Bob remembers;
“When it was time for my bar mitzvahed, a rabbi suddenly showed up. He came for only one year. He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of winter. He was an old man from Brooklyn, with a white beard and a black hat. Moreover, he was completely dressed in black clothing. They received him upstairs at Café LenB, the local hangout. Cafe LenB was a rock & roll cafe that I used to hang out myself. I used to go there every day either after school or after dinner. After studying for an hour, I regularly went to the cafe to enjoy the Whiskey Boogie Woogie. After the rabbi taught me everything I needed to learn for my Bar Mitzvah, he disappeared as suddenly as he had come. I never saw him again. He came and went like a ghost.”
“We’d pull into the Hibbing Rootbeer stand on Bob’s motorcycle when the weather was warm. One time, just outside my house on the old service road, he tried to teach me to ride it. He told me all about the controls, started it up and set me on board. Only trouble was my feet weren’t long enough to reach the ground. But I didn’t realize that until I’d already taken off. I made about twenty yards in first gear and thought I’d better practice stopping before I went any further, so I tried to put on the brakes; but something went wrong and the engine started revving and I hit a post or a tree and went head over heels. The motorcycle fell over and the rear wheel went crazy with sparks flying and gravel…Bob stood there with his mouth open and his eyes real big, not believing it.” — Echo Helstrom
“Down that street, Fifth Avenue, is where Bob’s uncle’s shop is. Zimmerman’s Furniture and Electric. They’re finally going out of business, after almost twenty-five years. Bob’s father used to make him do odd jobs around the shop. He and this other fellow sometimes would have to go out on a truck and repossess stuff. I think that’s where Bob first started feeling sorry for poor people. These miners would come to town, find a house, buy furniture on the credit their job promised them, and then got laid off when a mind shut down. Then Bob and his friend would have to go over and take away all the stuff bought from Zimmerman’s. Load it onto the truck and just leave. Bob hated that; used to dread it worse than anything.” — Echo Helstrom
“Bob in those tight jeans he wore, with his hands squeezed into the pockets as far as he could get them, and he’d drag me into Crippa’s or one of the other stores that sold records. He’d walk up to the clerk like that in those jeans and with that kooky little grin, and ask for some records he KNEW they wouldn’t have. The clerk would say, ‘Little Who?’ or ‘Fats What?’ and Bob would say, ‘Well, how about such and such; or so and so’s new one?’ He’d keep that up until the clerk was just about furious, and then he’d put on his hurt look and we’d leave, ready to burst from not laughing.” — Echo Helstrom
20 below zero, and running down the road in the rain with yo´ ol´ man´s flashlight on my ass. Now yo´ mother shines it in my face.
when we sat and talked in the L&B ´til two o´clock at night.
I was such a complete idiot, thinking back, that the car was in the driveway all night.
Let me tell you that your beauty is second to none, but I think I told you that before.
Well, Echo, I better make it. Love to the most beautiful girl in school. Bob
Echo Hellstrom´s 1958 Hibbing High School Yearbook, Hematite
In his memoir Chronicles Volume One, Bob Dylan writes “Everyone said she looked like Brigitte Bardot, and she did.”, which raises interest because Dylan stated in a 1961 interview “I dedicated my first song to Brigitte Bardot.” And at one of his first public performances, in his high school auditorium, he sang a song beginning “I got a girl and her name is Echo…”
She had taken accordion lessons, played the harmonium the Helstroms had at home and sang in the school choir. Like Dylan, though, she was into rock’n’roll and like him listened to R&B on the late-night radio station that beamed all the way up from Shreveport, Louisiana. They ‘went steady’ in 1957-58, when they were 16. In the 1958 High School Yearbook Bob wrote against Echo’s name: ‘Let me tell you that your beauty is second to none…. Love to the most beautiful girl in school.’ On May 2, 1958, they went to the Junior Prom together, in the school’s Boys Gymnasium, and both danced badly. The Helstrom household was a wooden shack three miles southwest of Hibbing on Highway 73, to which Bob would often hitchhike out after school. Matt Helstrom, Echo’s father, didn’t approve of his daughter’s young man any more than the Zimmermans approved of Echo, but when he wasn’t around, Bob would play Mr. Helstrom’s three guitars, or listen to his JIMMIE RODGERS records, and sing her songs out on their porch. In Chronicles, Dylan describes Echo’s father as ‘The kind of guy that’s always thinking that somebody’s out to take advantage of him’, whereas her mother ‘was the kindest woman – Mother Earth.’ Martha Helstrom (a name Shelton never gives, always calling her, irritatingly, ‘Mrs. Helstrom’) liked Bob, looked on the relationship with equanimity, and felt that Bob ‘seemed much more humble than his family. Both Echo and Bob seemed so sorry for the working people.’ Bob’s brother, DAVID ZIMMERMAN, told Shelton: ‘Bobby always went with the daughters of miners, farmers, and workers…. He just found them a lot more interesting.’ In 1968, working as a film-company secretary in Minneapolis to support a child from a failed marriage (cold rain can give you the Shivers), Echo looked back to the events that must have seemed lightyears ago. Without trying to claim more than her due in Dylan’s story, she told Shelton that they had both felt outsiders together, both misfits in conventional, old-fashioned, narrow-minded Hibbing. ‘We weren’t like the other people at school in any way. I just couldn’t stand being like the other girls. I had to be different.’ Bob was going to be a pop star and Echo was going to be a movie star. Mrs. Helstrom remembered a time when they were going to get married and have a child. ‘They planned to call their child Bob, whether it was a boy or a girl. You know how teenagers are.’ They were drifting apart by mid-1958, with Bob making it ever clearer that he was going with other girls and they broke up in early summer. She saw him around, but after he left for New York the next time she saw him was at the Hibbing High School Class of ’59 tenth reunion in 1969. Bob and SARA DYLAN turned up unexpectedly, and so did Echo. They spoke briefly; Echo was among the old friends who asked for, and received, an autograph. He signed it before he recognised her, then said ‘Hey! It’s you!’ and said to his wife, ‘This is Echo!’, and signed her programme ‘To Echo, Yours Truly, Bob Dylan’. That same year saw the release, on Nashville Skyline, of the re-recorded ‘Girl of the North Country’. They must either have met up or spoken on the phone again, after almost another decade’s gap, some time in the late 1970s: Echo told biographer HOWARD SOUNES that it was 20 years after their schooldays relationship that Bob confessed to her new intimate detail about it. Soon after talking to Shelton in 1968 (for a book that didn’t emerge till 1986) and more than 30 years before talking to Sounes, she had also talked – some might feel excessively – to TOBY THOMPSON, the gawky young author of the first book to explore the subject of Hibbing in relation to Bob Dylan, Positively Main Street: An Unorthodox View of Bob Dylan, published in 1971. He had reached Echo first in October 1968, very soon after Shelton; she was still in her basement apartment in Minneapolis, and gave him the new information that once, when she’d been listening to one of Bob’s Hibbing bands practising, when she’d deciphered his voice from within the over-amplified whole, he ‘was howling over and over again, “I gotta girl and her name is Echo!” making up verses as he went along. I guess that was the first song I’d ever heard him sing that wasn’t written by somebody else. And it was about me!’ It’s always seemed likely that a song from aeons later, ‘Hazel’ on Planet Waves, was also, on one level, about Echo. The album is full of warm memorialising about the Minnesota years – ‘the phantoms of my youth’, ‘twilight on the frozen lake’ – and to hear ‘Hazel’ – ‘dirty blonde hair / I wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen with you anywhere’ – is to feel a hunch that the song’s tender tale recollects fragments of feeling from the days when Echo and Bob were riding around, coming together from different sides of the tracks, united in wanting to get out of Hibbing – ‘you’re going somewhere / And so am I’. In 2004, in Chronicles Volume One, Dylan says that they last time he saw his ‘old hometown girlfriend’, ‘she was heading West. Everybody said she looked like Brigitte Bardot, and she did.’ And he memorialises her again: ‘my Becky Thatcher’, he calls her.
