It’s 1957, just a few pages into Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan biography and the author is introducing his reader to Dylan’s high school girlfriend, Echo Helstrom. She’s 15 years-old and Bob has yet to make any impression on her. He’s a ‘clean-cut goody-goody kid’ who lives over the tracks from Echo in the well-to-do side of town. Their paths cross at the drug store where he has been playing upstairs at the Moose Lodge. Echo told it this way:

He walked in with another boy, John Buckland, and they came over and started talking to us. Picking us up, I guess. I think I had on my motorcycle jacket and a pair of jeans. Very uncouth, for Hibbing.

Predating The Crystal’s ‘He’s A Rebel’, The Shangri-las’ bad-boy melodramas, Janis Ian’s ‘Society’s Child’ and a thousand other teen operas, the story told by Echo flips the bad-boy trope and puts the girl in denim and leather and from the wrong part of town. Echo and Bob bond over their shared enthusiasm for the Blues and tear-up the town on his motorcycle. Before he’d graduated, the trope had turned back and the other girls in school look with nervous desire at Bobby Zimmerman, the nice boy turned hoodlum in his ‘big boots and tight pants’. He’s good-bad but he’s not evil.

In Chronicles, Dylan recalled of Echo that ‘Everybody said she looked like Brigitte Bardot, and she did’.

Postscript:

In Toby Thompson’s Positively Main Street: an unorthodox view of Bob Dylan (1972) his ‘gushing' pseudo-new journalistic account has Echo Helstrom at the centre of the story of Dylan and his Hibbing roots. He paints Echo, ten-years or so older, as a free hippie spirit, twisting and twirling away from a conventional image of the small town, High School, girlfriend. She recalls riding behind Dylan on his m’cycle and killing time together drinking sodas but the image of her as a Brill Building fantasy figure, teen-age delinquent, is choked off:

The drone of Muzak could be heard from another room.

“You hear that song!” – Echo shuddered – “the one they’re playing over the speakers? Do you recognise it?”

I listened for a moment and had to confess that I didn’t. It was standard, mid-fifties, C, A-Minor, F, G-Seventh arrangement, I knew that much.

“It’s ‘Angel Baby’, Echo moaned. “Bob used to call me that . . . Angel Baby, I mean.”
“For Christ’s sake”, I said, “Come on, I’m taking you home.”

Echo should have told her story to Nik Cohn, he’d have known both the song and where she was coming from . . . as Dylan would’ve

He don't comb his hair
Like he did before
And he don't wear those dirty old black boots no more
He used to act bad
Used to, but he quit it
It make me so sad
'Cause I know that he did it for me

Shangri-Las ‘Out in the Streets’

The teddy boys were waiting for Elvis Presley. Everybody under twenty all over the world was waiting. He was the super-saleman of mass-distribution hip. Unfortunately he had to be white. Otherwise one of the Chicago blues singers, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Howlin’ Wolf, would’ve done. He had to have the cowboy/Spanish element. He had to have the Adonis profile. He had to have the overtones of the queer boy’s pin-up, the packed jeans, the sullen long-lashed eyes, the rosebud mouth, the lavish greasy hair and gilded drag.
Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (1968)

Forget the Chicagoans he lists, over Elvis, Nuttall prefers Jelly Roll Morton as his choice of Romantic primitive American export to fire up his jaded post-war loins. His hipster subtext comes straight from the mouth of Norman Mailer’s White Negro, but I love that line about Elvis as ‘the super-saleman of mass-distribution hip.’

He later writes that Dylan was the ‘first sign popular music was transcending its commercial situation.’ His opinion being based on the broad acceptance of the ‘profound sourness’ found in the singer’s delivery. Capturing in two words what others have struggled, and failed, to achieve in the course of a book.