Lord, it was nearly sixty years ago.

Long Beach, California. Jeff Hanna was in high school, a holding zone where hormones and anxiety are left to fester until they explode like Langston Hughes’s dream deferred.

Suddenly, a sound burst through the middling morass at laser speed, deflating the balls of confusion that teenaged Jeff was holding. That sound came from the iron ore town of Hibbing, Minnesota, by way of Greenwich Village. It was Bob Dylan, a young man who at first recharged old folk and blues songs, but who became known for his own wild-eyed compositions.

Hanna didn’t know what was going on. But, at the same time, he knew Dylan was the man who would lead him to know most everything that was going on.

After school, he’d go home, lock himself in his bedroom, and haltingly play the picking pattern to Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” until the halting gave way to the feeling that he’d mastered a magic trick.