Norman Raeben, the art teacher who changed the way Bob Dylan made music
Though panned by Rolling Stone at the time, Blood On The Tracks is now regarded as one of Bob Dylan’s finest albums. It arrived at a very busy time for the singer-songwriter, who’d just come back from a 40-date North American tour with The Band – his first tour in seven years. He’d also recorded a live double album, Before The Flood, for Asylum. It would be his final record for the label, and shortly after its release, Columbia began courting Dylan, explaining that they would do everything in their power to bring him “back into the fold”.
Dylan commenced work on Blood on the Tracks in September 1974, returning to New York, which still swirled with the creativity that had served him so well in the past. Throughout the album, there is a constant sense of the past rising up and colouring the future. Dylan does his best to run from his own history but, in doing so, finds himself looking over his shoulder. Few songs evoke this desire to escape the past more than the album’s opening track, ‘Tangled Up In Blue’. “I was trying to deal with the concept of time, and the way the characters change from the first person to the third person, and you’re never sure if the first person is talking or the third person,” he told Cameron Crowe.
Dylan’s non-linear narrative approach may have been inspired by the art classes he’d been taking with Norman Raeben, a Russian-born painter and teacher living in New York. Dylan would later thank Raeben for renewing his ability to write songs and altering his outlook on his life with Sara, his then-wife.
Dyan began taking classes with Raeben shortly after experiencing a serious motorcycle accident. In Chronicles, he explains how the artist instilled in him a new interest in art, especially drawing. “What would I draw? Well, I guess I would start with whatever was at hand,” he wrote. “I sat at the table, took out a pencil and paper and drew the typewriter, a crucifix, a rose, pencils, knives and pins, empty cigarette boxes. I’d lose track of time completely … Not that I thought I was any great drawer, but I did feel like I was putting an orderliness to the chaos around.”
Dylan rarely spoke about Raeben in public, perhaps not wanting to throw light on someone he knew to be an intensely private person. As a result, his identity remained a mystery for many years. However, in 1978, he mentioned him during a promotional interview for his movie Renaldo and Clam: “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 him.”
During Dylan’s classes, the pair had talked in length, with Raeben offering advice about employing nonlinear narratives. Some have argued that all this talk of dreaming led Dylan to employ a language of dreams in songs like ‘Tangled Up In Blue’, in which people’s appearances, landscapes and ideas all shift and modulate – as though painted with an incessant brush.
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