This Date in Dylan: June 6

Shows with Tom Petty, Joan Baez, Paul Simon, Ronnie Hawkins, and 120 brides

June 6, 1968

Sorry to start with a depressing one - and one unrelated to onstage performance too - but this is the only 1960s June 6th where I can find evidence of Bob's activities. RIP Abe Zimmerman. Here’s what Robert Shelton wrote about the event in No Direction Home:

On the morning of June 5, Abe awoke feeling weak and “strange.” He stayed home, taking it easy. He was not feeling any better by the time Beatty returned from work. A little after 5 p.m., Abe suffered a fatal heart attack, collapsing on the living room sofa as Beatty summoned their neighboring doctor. At first, Bob was reluctant to appear, lest it charge the funeral’s atmosphere. He flew in alone the next day on a commercial flight. David met him at the Hibbing-Chisholm airport in drizzling rain. Bob had on the round black hat he wore on the cover of John Wesley Harding. He and David found the house filled with relatives and neighbors. Within minutes, Bob steered his mother and brother into a corner: “This isn’t a garden party. Let’s get these people out of here.” Beatty explained that this was the mourning tradition. Bob insisted the family should be by themselves.

David was struck by Bob’s demeanor. His older brother seemed to have quietude, firmness, and serenity befitting “a fifty-year-old man.” When the two discussed the funeral, David was startled by Bob’s familiarity with Jewish ritual, especially Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer through which the parent’s soul benefits from a surviving son’s piety. Early on Friday morning, David and Bob went to the Dougherty Funeral Home on First Avenue. Upon seeing his father’s body, Bob, previously restrained, was deeply upset. He took the death harder than either Beatty or David, as if he were caught up by all the things he and his father had never been able to say. (“I never knew my father,” Bob later told Woody Guthrie’s former agent.) By the time the funeral home opened to the lines of mourners, Bob, again his controlled self, stood in one corner, taking it all in like a camera.

June 6, 1978