75
OPPOSITE: IN 1974, EVEN COVERED UP
against the cold in Chicago, Dylan remains
nevertheless distinctly recognizable. He
is more plainly his famous self when he is
actively giving back, as he has done before
and will again. At left, he is with his dear
friend George Harrison at George’s Concert
for Bangladesh in New York City. Below, he is
with dear friends Arlo Guthrie and Dave Van
Ronk in the same town for the 1974 Friends
of Chile concert. Van Ronk and Harrison have
since passed away; Guthrie and Dylan are
still singing.pupil, influenced the singer thereafter. Dylan, a guru to many,
has always been willing to accept gurus—Woody Guthrie,
Dave Van Ronk (it can be said), and now Norman Raeben. For
two months Dylan went to Raeben’s eleventh-floor studio in
Carnegie Hall and took lessons five days a week, and then “I’d
just think about it the other two days of the week.”
“He talked all the time,” Dylan remembered, “from eight-
thirty to four, and he talked in seven languages. He would
tell me about myself when I was doing something, drawing
something. I couldn’t paint. I thought I could. I couldn’t draw.
I don’t even remember 90 percent of the stuff he drove into
me... I had met magicians, but this guy is more powerful than
any magician I’ve ever met. He looked into you and told you
what you were. And he didn’t play games about it. If you were
interested in coming out of that, you could stay there and
force yourself to come out of it. You yourself did all the work.
He was just some kind of guide, or something like that.”
In Norman Raeben, Dylan had encountered an art teacher
who was a psychoanalyst and mystic to boot, and he bought
into Raeben fully. Always an inward-looking person, Dylan
began to look even more deeply into his soul, and there were
consequences, for suddenly Sara seemed strange to him, and
he seemed strange to Sara. “It changed me,” he said. “I went
home after that and my wife never did understand me since
that day. That’s when our marriage started breaking up. She
never knew what I was talking about, what I was thinking
about. And I couldn’t possibly explain it.” The acrimonioussplit would not be finalized in formal divorce until 1977,
when Sara would receive a large settlement of perhaps as
much as $10 million, primary custody of the children, and
temporary rights to live in the house in Malibu.N
orman Raeben often goes missing in the major
Dylan biographies, and this is curious since Dylan
did talk about him—something he doesn’t do when
he wants a thing to go missing. Perhaps it is that the Raeben
episode and influence seem simply too weird for Dylano-
philes (and writers), who have weirdness aplenty to deal
with already. The last thing they require is a septuagenarian
Yoda guiding Bobby through a pre-midlife crisis.
But facts are facts, and Dylan himself didn’t shy from
them. He saw Raeben as an instrument in the dissolution of
his marriage—a thing that pained him deeply, as “[I] figured
it would last forever... I believe in marriage”—and also in his
renaissance as a songwriter and musician. In an interview
with Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Cott after the motorcycle acci-
dent, he confessed to his problems with songwriting: “Since
that point, I more or less had amnesia. Now you can take that
statement as literally or as metaphysically as you need to, but
that’s what happened to me. It took me a long time to get to
do consciously what I used to do unconsciously.” He said
of his attempts to write for Nashville Skyline, “[I]t didn’t go
nowhere—it just went down, down, down... I was convinced
I wasn’t going to do anything else.”HENRY D ILT Z/CO RB IS/G E T T Y WARING ABBOTT/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY
BARRY FEINSTEIN
60-79 LIFE_Bob Dylan 2020 Retreat.indd 75 FINAL 1/13/20 4:28 PM