Bob Dylan in Oklahoma

by Stuart Isett

Starting in September, 2022, I partnered with the actor and playwright Mark Jenkins - who drove from his home in Wyoming to Denver to see Bob Dylan perform in 1963 - to explore the new Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa. Two Seattle-based artists and Dylan enthusiasts, separated by a generation, Mark and I are traveling through Oklahoma exploring how Dylan's art influenced the way we see the world. With Mark’s notebooks and my cameras, we will continue to wonder why Dylan agreed to put his personal archives in Oklahoma and through the voices and stories we find, seek out how the state reflects back on his uniquely American art.

As we traverse the state, with Tulsa as one of the great crossroads cities in America's Heartland, we will search out themes of justice, civil rights, faith, war and violence, inequality, crime and outlaws, beauty, love, Native American culture, protest, and of course, music. We hope to eventually put out a small, self-published book and exhibit.

The Rose Pawn shop. E. 2nd Ave, Tulsa, Oklahoma

Bob Dylan performing in Paris, 1966. Photograph by Barry Feinstein

Historian Sean Wilentz described Dylan’s 1966 performance in Paris, where he hung a giant U.S flag on the stage for the concert, eliciting “U.S. go home!” jeers from the French audience:

"…the curtains part, and there they see to their horror, attached to the backdrop, the emblem of everything they are coming to hate, the emblem of napalm and Coca-Cola and white racism and colonialism and imagination’s death. It is a huge fifty-star American flag. And Bob Dylan, the emblem of American rebellion and imagination’s rebirth, has hoisted it aloft."

"Was it a joke? But it is no joke…this Stars and Stripes stuff turns a musical challenge into an assault, an incitement…In England, the idol had traded insults with the hecklers, but in Paris, on this, his twenty-fifth birthday, he strikes first."

The Bob Dylan Center and downtown Tulsa.