The Mysterious Norman Raeben

by Bert Cartwright

Norman Raeben was one of the most influential people in Bob Dylan’s life. It was Norman Raeben, Dylan said, who, in the mid ‘70s, renewed his ability to compose songs. Dylan also suggested that Norman’s teaching and influence so altered his outlook upon life that Sara, his wife, could no longer understand him, and this was a contributory factor in the breakdown of the Dylans’ marriage. It’s strange that, given the importance of Norman Raeben’s influence on Bob Dylan, he isn’t even mentioned in either of the big biographies published in the 1980.

Dylan first began to talk about Raeben in the round of interviews he did in 1978 to promote his movie, Renaldo & Clam, though for a while he wouldn’t specifically identify him. “There ain’t nobody like him,” Dylan told Pete Oppel, of the Dallas Morning News. “I’d rather not say his name. He’s really special, and I don’t want to create any heat for He was, Dylan told Playboys Ron Rosenbaum, “just an old man. His name wouldn’t mean anything to you.

Dylan’s interest in Norman began sometime in 1974, when several friends of Sara came to visit:

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.

Sufficiently impressed, Dylan looked up the teacher the next time he was in New York. It was the spring of 1974 when Dylan popped his head around Norman’s door:

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.’ So he put this vase in front of me and he says, ‘You see this vase?’ And he put it there for 30 seconds or so and then he took it away and he said, ‘Draw It’. Well, I mean, I started drawing it and I couldn’t remember shit about this vase — I’d looked at it but I didn’t see it. And he took a look at what I drew and he said, ‘OK, you can be up here.’ And he told me 13 paints to get... Well, I hadn’t gone up there to paint, I’d just gone up there to see what was going on. I wound up staying there for maybe two months. This guy was amazing...

When Dylan looked back upon what happened during those two months, he came to believe that he was so transformed as to become a stranger to his wife:

It changed me. I went home after that and my wife never did understand me ever 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.

Dylan talked about Norman at length to Pete Oppel, describing in more-than-casual words how Norman taught in his eleventh-floor studio in Carnegie Hall:

Five days a week I used to go up there, and I’d just think about It the other two days of the week. I used to be up there from eight o’clock to four. That’s all I did for two months...

In this class there would be people like old ladies — rich old ladies from Florida, - standing next to an off-duty policeman, standing next to a bus driver, a lawyer. Just all kinds. Some art student who had been kicked out of every art university. Young girls who worshipped him. A couple of serious guys who went up there to clean up for him afterwards — just clean up the place. A lot of different kinds of people you’d never think would be into art or painting. And it wasn’t art or painting, it was something else...

He talked all the time, 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 per cent of the stuff he drove into me.

It seems, then, that Norman was more interested in metaphysics than in technique. His teaching dealt with ultimate realities which could be expressed in a variety of modes. It is not certain that Norman made Dylan a better painter, but he clearly changed Dylan:

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…

It was some time later when I was finally able to identify Dylan’s mysterious man called Norman as Norman Raeben, born in Russia in 1901, who visited the USA with his family when be was three years old and emigrated for permanent residence when he was about 14. Norman’s father was the noted Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), a man best known today for having created the character Tvye, whose fictional life-story was adapted for the musical, Fiddler On The Roof. The most remarkable change brought about by the months Dylan spent in Norman Raeben’s studio was upon the way Dylan composed lyrics.

Dylan told Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Cott that following his motorcycle accident on July 29, 1968, he found himself no longer able to compose as freely as before:

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.

Dylan reiterated the point to Malt Damsker:

It’s like I had amnesia all of a sudden...I couldn’t learn what I had been able to do naturally — like Highway 61 Revisited. I mean, you can’t sit down and write that consciously because it has to do with the break-up of time...

In the interview with Jonathan Cott, Dylan described his albums John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline as attempts:

...to grasp something that would lead me on to where I thought I should be, and it didn’t go nowhere — it just went down, down, down... I was convinced I wasn’t going to do anything else.

It was in this mood of near-despair of ever composing as he once had, that Dylan had the “good fortune” to meet Norman, “who taught me how to see”:

He put my mind and my hand and my eye together, in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt.

The time with Norman helped Dylan’s psyche be redirected sufficiently for him to write some new songs, the songs that were included on what is still his most celebrated LP, Blood On The Tracks:

Everybody agrees that that was pretty different, and what’s different about it is that there’s a code in the lyrics, and there’s also no sense of time...

Dylan made further efforts to explain the concept of “no time” in the new songs to Matt Damsker:

Blood On The Tracks did consciously what I used to do unconsciously. I didn’t perform it well. I didn’t have the power to perform it well. But I did write the songs... the ones that have the break-up of time, where there Is no time, trying to make the focus as strong as a magnifying glass under the sun. To do that consciously is a trick, and I did it on Blood On The Tracks for the first time. I knew how to do it because of the technique I learned — I actually had a teacher for it...

In the Biograph booklet, Cameron Crowe’s comment on Blood On The Tracks seems to be the product of an uncredited observation by Dylan himself:

Reportedly inspired by the breakup of his marriage, the album derived more of its style from Dylan’s interest in painting. The songs cut deep, and their sense of perspective and reality was always changing.

“Always changing” is the product of the LP’s sense of no-time. Speaking to Mary Travers on April 26, 1975, Dylan commented upon the concept of time, the point he tried to make being not only that “the past, the present and the future all exists”, but that “it’s all the same” — something learned from Norman, Dylan told Jonathan Cott, who used to teach that:

You’ve got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s very little that you can’t imagine happening.

Dylan’s assertion to Malt Damsker that he didn’t perform the songs on Blood On The Tracks particularly well may be surprising but, he went on, “they can be changed... “. In fact, Dylan has continually reworked the songs, changing the lyrics again and again in such songs as “Simple Twist Of Fate” and “Tangled Up In Blue”. Dylan ties up ideas of time and change to the idea of song-as-painting with specific reference to “Tangled Up In Blue” on the jacket notes to Biograph, where he says of the song:

I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts but then you also see the whole of it. With that particular song, that’s what I was trying to do... with the concept of time, and the way the characters change from the first person to the third person, and you’re never quite sure if the third person is talking or the first person is talking. But as you look at the whole thing, it really doesn’t matter.

The dissolving of persons and of time in the Blood On The Tracks songs was a remarkable achievement; Dylan was to try to apply the same technique when he made his film Renaldo 8’ Clara. In tracing the influence of Norman Raeben’s thinking, Dylan called Jonathan Cott’s attention to Renaldo & Clara:

...in which I also used that quality of no-time. And I believe that that concept of creation is more real and true than that which does have time...The movie creates and holds the time. That’s what it should do —it should hold that time, breathe in that time and stop time in doing that. It’s like if you look at a painting by Cézanne, you get lost in that painting for that period of time. And you breathe — yet time is going by and you wouldn’t know it. You’re spellbound.

Small wonder, then, that Dylan was most annoyed by those who criticized the film’s length, and perhaps it is not inappropriate to mention a more recent statement of annoyance — at those who tried to pin down one of his no-time, no-person songs from Blood On The Tracks:

“You’re A Big Girl Now”, well, I read that this was supposed to be about my wife. I wish somebody would ask me first before they go ahead and print stuff like that.

Dylan once unconsciously created songs with the no-time quality of painting. Many times he spoke of parallels between song and painting — one recalls, for example, Dylan’s introduction of “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” in concerts in 1965 as “a painting in maroon and silver” or “a painting in purple”, but only after studying with Norman Raeben was he to recapture his apparently lost ability to write such songs, now with the notable difference of conscious composition. And if Blood On The Tracks was to be the first attempt to translate what Dylan had learned from Norman into song, it was Street-Legal which Dylan would come to regard as the culmination of the insights into the nature of time as no-time. As he told Matt Damaker:

Never until I got to Blood On The Tracks did I finally get a hold of what I needed to get a hold of, and once I got hold of it, Blood On The Tracks wasn’t it either, and neither was Desire. Street-Legal comes the closest to where my music Is going for the rest of time. It has to do with an illusion of time. I mean, what the songs are necessarily about is the illusion of time. It was an old man who knew about that, and I picked up what I could...