73
The phrase Dylan didn’t know what to do next is invalid
because often through the years Dylan didn’t seem to know
what to do, or care about what he was about to do—he just did
whatever he did, next. In 1971 he allowed Tarantula to be pub-
lished, for goodness’ sake. (Well, it had a compelling cover
photo.) And that year, he made his first public appearance
since the Isle of Wight, taking the stage at Madison Square
Garden in New York City for his friend George Harrison’s
benefit concerts for Bangladesh relief. He also recorded
“Watching the River Flow,” which is about time passing by,
and “George Jackson,” which is about a Black Panther who
recently had been killed in San Quentin State Prison. So
he was either chillin’, or returning to the political fray. Or
maybe he was looking for something altogether new: In late
1972 and early ’73, Dylan acted in Sam Peckinpah’s western
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, playing the role of Alias, one
of Billy’s cohorts. He contributed the ethereal “Knockin’ on
Heaven’s Door” to the soundtrack. He was all over the place,
and he was nowhere in particular.
What he wasn’t doing is what had made him famous:
producing landmark albums and playing (regularly) to the
people. Would he ever do these things again? The betting, in
the early ’70s, was that he would not. The betting was that he
could not—not anymore.
It is interesting to consider what Dylan’s legacy might
have been without his second act. Had he simply diminished
and then vanished after the motorcycle accident, he might
have forever been one of those “ ’60s Icons”—in his case,
the frizzy-haired folksinger who also made “Like a Rolling
Stone.” That’s a pretty good legacy, surely, but it would not
have been enough for Dylan. He was far from done.
In 1973 he recorded Planet Waves with the Band, and onthat album was “Forever Young.” Said Dylan, “I wrote it
thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too
sentimental.” Jakob Dylan, Bob and Sara’s youngest child,
has always felt the song was for him. It probably was—but
also for Bob himself, who was now only in his early thirties,
but had somehow lived a long time. Adult problems were
surfacing, and he and Sara were about to head into the dis-
solution of their marriage.
What caused it?
As with many broken bonds, it is difficult to definitively
say. There were certainly mitigating factors. “Marriage was
a failure,” Dylan later said. “Husband and wife was a failure,
but father and mother wasn’t a failure. I wasn’t a very good
husband... I don’t know what a good husband is. I was good
in some ways... and not so good in other ways.”
So: mitigating factors. We could investigate this pruri-
ently, but with Dylan there is no profit in it. What is interest-
ing is a look at a man who was 73 years old when he came into
Dylan’s life, a man named Norman Raeben.
In 1974 some of Sara’s friends came to visit, and Dylan
remembered later, “They were talking about truth and love
and beauty and all these words I had heard for years, and
they had ’em all defined. I couldn’t believe it... I asked them,
‘Where do you come up with all those definitions?’ And they
told me about this teacher.” The teacher was in New York
City, and what he taught—what he literally taught—was
painting. In the spring of 1974, Dylan visited: “He says, ‘You
wanna paint?’ So I said, ‘Well, I was thinking about it, you
know.’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t know if you even deserve to be
here. Let me see what you can do.’ ”
It is somewhere between complicated and impossible
to explain how Raeben, having agreed to take Dylan on as aWILLIAM E. SAURO/NEW YORK TIMES CO./GET T Y
60-79 LIFE_Bob Dylan 2020 Retreat.indd 73 FINAL 1/13/20 4:28 PM