Bob Dylan, the single most important artist in the history of popular music, will be 70 years old on Tuesday, May 24.

He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in the flinty, scruffy city of Duluth, Minnesota, which teeters on the hills that plummet down to the shores of Lake Superior — a lake so large it has tidal movement. But when he was 6 years old, his parents moved further north and west to the iron-ore town of Hibbing up on the Mesabi Range.

Iron ore built the town, and built the remarkably lavish Hibbing High School that Dylan attended: a school whose concert hall has a hand-plastered, hand-painted ceiling whose crystal chandeliers imported from eastern Europe are lowered three times a year for cleaning, and a stage large enough to accommodate the entire Minnesota Symphony Orchestra.