BOB DYLAN
What did Norman Raeben teach the Bard of Hibbing and how did it turn into Blood On The Tracks? Michael Simmons investigates.
An expanded Blood on The Tracks – the 14th Bootleg series release – unveils BOB DYLAN’s legendary new york outtakes and adds new colours to his tortured 1975 masterpiece, painted in the shadow of his divorce from Sara. Exclusively for MoJo, survivors of the fraught sessions and the “brutal” art class that rebuilt Dylan’s style bring unique insights into his bleak mood and blaze of creativity. “Dylan was going to a very intense place,” they tell MICHAEL SIMMONS.
ART TEACHER NORMAN RAEBEN TAUGHT HIS STUDENTS TO pay attention. one student paints a detailed picture of the eleventh floor of carnegie hall in New York where he lorded over classes. “You could smell the musty sweat of dancers and paint. You could hear opera singers, pianists practising on a baby grand, the sound of dancers thumping.” tall windows to the ceiling in raeben’s studio let in plenty of light. he kept classes small – five or six students stood at easels – no one could sit. “he’d flick his cigar into your palette – he always had a cigar stuck between his teeth. if you were a favourite student, you’d leave with black and blue marks because he’d poke your shoulder: ‘You understand? You understand? You don’t understand anything!’” raeben was a russian émigré, the youngest son of the celebrated Yiddish scribe sholem aleichem (on whose stories the musical Fiddler on the roof was based). raeben claimed to have run with 20th century masters Picasso, chagall, modigliani and soutine, although it’s also been said that raeben’s imagination was wild in more ways than one. he became a teacher after a fire destroyed his paintings. another student of the 73-year-old described his fellow classmates as “rich old ladies from Florida standing next to an off-duty policeman, standing next to a bus driver, a lawyer. Just all kinds.” that student was bob dylan. after almost eight years off the road, dylan and the band had embarked on a two-month tour of large-capacity stadiums in January and February of 1974. grossing millions, it was a financial coup and the shows harkened back to the roaring, amps-on-11 dylan/hawks of ’66. but neither bob nor band were well-suited to the impersonality of arena rock and dylan called it an “emotionless trip”. it’s also said the tour revived the hedonistic side of the clean-living husband, father and former
Woodstock country gentleman. Dylan had acrimoniously parted with manager Albert Grossman and, on the family front, his marriage to Sara Dylan was troubled. The experiment of moving wife and kids to Greenwich Village in 1970 had turned into a privacy-deprived zoo of gawkers and garbologists. A plan to build a new home in Malibu got bogged down in design disputes and Bob and Sara began quarrelling. Friends describe Sara Dylan’s breathtaking beauty, deep intelligence and wit – and her dismissive disinterest in showbusiness. “He absolutely adored her and they really, really loved each other, but she never took root in something she could call her own, while Bob was getting all his dreams,” recalls one. “Her temperament wasn’t suited to the intensity of his job. To protect her, Bob had to keep her from the wolves and she thought he was holding her back.”
MEANWHILE, EVER THE HUNGRY ARTIST, Dylan’s interest was piqued after a private screening of the French film classic Les Enfants Du Paradis when he learned it was a favourite of an art teacher named Norman Raeben. “[Friends] were talking about truth and love and beauty and all these words I had heard for years, and they had ’em all defined,” he told Pete Oppel of the Dallas Morning News. “I asked them, Where do you come up with all those definitions?, and they told me about this teacher.” Through exercises ostensibly presented as drawing and painting lessons, Raeben taught his students to be awake and present in the moment. “Painting is not art – only life is art. Painting is a by-product of art,” says one student by way of explaining Raeben’s philosophy. “Art is the moment you’re alive in that process of creation.” Dylan recounted for Oppel his first meeting with Raeben in the spring of 1974. The teacher placed a vase in front of the singer for 30 seconds, snatched it away and told him to draw it. “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.’” Dylan attended class five days a week for two months. Although Raeben initially thought the scruffy musician was poor and offered to let him crash at the studio in exchange for cleaning it up, he came to learn otherwise. Friends say the gruff teacher continued to treat Dylan as harshly as other students, that he wasn’t interested in celebrity. “When Bob was in the class, it was just like he was anybody else,” remembers a classmate. Another Raeben student was Dylan’s friend Claudia Levy (then Claudia Carr – later she married Bob’s Desire collaborator Jacques Levy). After she told Dylan that she was looking for an art teacher, he wrote down Raeben’s info and told her “He will destroy you.” Levy confirms Dylan’s prediction: “All of your assumptions about what art was or what you were trying to do or how you inhabited your skin, Norman would turn on its ear.” Levy recalls several of Raeben’s key beliefs. “He used to say that nothing exists without the dark and the light. You can’t have form if you don’t have dark.” He also spoke of the difference between feeling and emotion: “Feeling is superior. Emotion is a reaction, but feeling is an exploration. It came from your depths, you had to understand that feeling.” Nor did Raeben have patience for anything that smacked of decoration. “If you were trying to do something and make it look good, you weren’t being real,” says Levy. “It was dishonest – it had to come from your soul. That was a revelation to me, ’cos I’d tried classes before Norman where they tried to make you do things like colouring inside the lines. He thought that kind of thing belonged in colouring books for people who were deprived (laughs).” Levy concurs with others that Raeben was a brutal taskmaster. “He’d say, ‘You didn’t see that! Are you trying to tell me you saw that? That isn’t there. Look at it again and then look at it again and then maybe you’ll see it.’ You would and he’d be right.” At least one favoured word would notably reappear in Dylan’s work. “Norman would call you an idiot. He would tell you all the time, ‘You’re an idiot!’ You could take it as an insult, but he’d say, ‘But don’t worry – I’m an idiot too. We’re all idiots’ (laughs).” Raeben’s cumulative effect on Dylan’s music was positive and profound. “He put my mind and my hand and my eye together, in
“NORMAN RAEBEN WOULD TELL YOU ALL THE TIME, ‘YOU’RE AN IDIOT! BUT DON’T WORRY – I’M AN IDIOT TOO.” CLAUDIA LEVY
a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt,” Bob told Jonathan Cott in Rolling Stone. But for reasons that remain cloudy, this artistic renewal hurt a marriage already showing cracks. “I went home after that and my wife never did understand me ever since that day,” he told Oppel. “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.” He responded by doing what creative people have always done: he turned his feelings into art.
BY SUMMER 1974, BOB AND SARA HAD SEPARATED and he’d retreated to a farm he’d bought north of Minneapolis. He was joined by his kids and younger brother David Zimmerman and his family, as well as 24-year-old Columbia Records A&R exec Ellen Bernstein. His mornings were spent writing songs in a red notebook. “He would play [a song] and ask me what I thought,” Bernstein told Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin. He’d also revise lyrics and share the results with her. “It was always different, every time he would just change it and change it and change it, constantly. You definitely had the sense of this mind that never stopped.” Raeben’s influence was evident. At least two songs had titles that were straight out of Norman’s class: Tangled Up In Blue (a criticism of colour choices) and Idiot Wind (“idiot” being an aforementioned Raebenism). The new works weren’t simple break-up numbers but detailed explorations of the tension between light and dark – love and its absence – in relationships. And while a painting may have spatial perspective, Dylan played with time. “You’ve got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s very little that you can’t imagine happening,” he told Cott. Dylan later denied the songs were autobiographical. In response to a claim that You’re A Big Girl Now was about Sara, Bob scoffed. “I don’t write confessional songs,” he told Cameron Crowe in 1985’s Biograph liner notes. “Emotion’s got nothing to do with it. It only seems so, like it seems Laurence Olivier is Hamlet.” As far as we know, Dylan never worked on a fishing boat outside of Delacroix or lived on a Montague Street like Tangled Up In Blue’s narrator. Yet Jakob Dylan’s manager told the New York Times that his charge once said that to his ears the songs were “about my parents”. And when those songs were heralded as Dylan’s return to top form, Bob confessed to his friend Mary Travers on her radio show that it was difficult for him to understand “people enjoying that type of pain”. There were references that reflected Sara’s biography, as well as other women. For instance, Ashtabula – as mentioned in You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go – is Ellen Bernstein’s home town. What’s rarely in dispute is that Dylan wrote a batch of songs that individually and in totality had as much depth as any in his career. He’d been previewing the songs for fellow musicians Michael Bloomfield, Shel Silverstein and Stephen Stills. Now he was eager to record them. After two albums on Asylum Records, he’d re-signed with Columbia and, through his original champion John Hammond, arranged recording sessions at Phil Ramone’s A&R Recording studio in New York with the esteemed Ramone as engineer. It had been the old Columbia Studio A where Bob had recorded everything from Blowin’ In The Wind to Like A Rolling
Stone and he was eager to return to the room. Ramone called on Eric Weissberg to join the sessions. The multi-instrumentalist had scored a hit record the prior year with Dueling Banjos from the film Deliverance and had known Dylan since the ’60s. Weissberg brought along his band – also named Deliverance and all studio vets: Charlie Brown on lead guitar, Tom McFaul on keys, Tony Brown on bass and Richard Crooks on drums. The inaugural session was Monday, September 16. “Our first record date happened to fall on the Jewish New Year,” John Hammond later wrote in his memoir. “Promptly at sundown Bobby brought out a Bible and some wine, and we drank a ceremonial toast.” Hammond told writer Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman that Bob said, “I want to lay down a whole bunch of tracks. I don’t want to overdub. I want it easy and natural.” He clearly wasn’t interested in colouring inside the lines.
DYLAN KICKED OFF THE PROCEEDINGS SOLO ON acoustic with one to two takes of a half-dozen songs. He was in confident voice and the songs riveted everyone, but 19-year-old assistant engineer Glenn Berger was perplexed by the conditions. “As a kid, I was trying to figure out how to make a great record – how do you make great art,” he tells MOJO. “I was working with artists like Paul Simon who’d take a year to make a record. It was confusing to me that Dylan didn’t have a producer on this record. Some people think that Phil Ramone produced it, but he was just hired as the recording engineer. There was no producer and nobody was taking charge of the recording process.” When it came time for the band to play, the confusion became a tension convention. Berger: “Normally if there was no arranger, the artists would run down their songs and allow the studio musicians to come up with head arrangements. So Dylan runs down the first song once or twice to get the changes, the feel of the song and the band is just getting the slightest idea of what this thing is about. Then without saying anything, Dylan starts playing another song (laughs). The guys don’t expect this so they’re playing the chords from the previous song and as soon as somebody hit a wrong note, Dylan waved them off and told them to stop playing. These studio musicians were used to working on great stuff. They were really excited to be playing on a Dylan album, but that excitement quickly dissipated. Before you knew it, the musicians were sitting silently behind their instruments.” On the New York outtakes disc in the new Bootleg Series box set, More Blood, More Tracks, one can hear the musicians vacillate between tentative licks, flubs and temporal screw-ups. The latter was exacerbated by the decision to put drummer Crooks in a drum booth and Dylan’s refusal to use headphones. Adding to the confusion, Dylan was playing in an open tuning and he’d throw in extra beats from one take to the next, so watching the leader’s hands didn’t help at all. There’s some fine playing on Meet Me In The Morning and outtake Call Letter Blues. But on most of the full group takes, these pros sound like a bar band. Despite the chaos, Berger was fascinated by Dylan. “Dylan seemed to be in this genius realm, as if he was tapped into the source and stuff was just comin’ outta him. I have this memory of seeing him rewriting lyrics and it looked like he was taking dictation. There was no hesitation. I regret I didn’t steal that piece of paper! (Laughs)” Berger has a theory about Dylan and the band’s miscommunication: “There was something about the emotional intensity of those songs and there was so much pain. Some part of the tension in the room had to do with the emotional state that Dylan was in. He was going to a very intense place and that might explain in part why he was completely oblivious to how he was treating the human beings in the room.” The first day literally ended with a whimper, not a bang. After a ninth attempt at You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, Dylan uttered a frustrated bleat and everyone packed up. The next day, bassist Tony Brown received a surprise. “I got a phone call from a woman,” he recalls now. “She told me to come in that night for another session. I asked if she’d called Eric, and she said, ‘No, Bob just wants you.’ I was so surprised – it was so unexpected.” With just Dylan and Brown, here’s where the sessions went from train wreck to sublime. The first song on Tuesday September 17 was a spare, uncluttered – and gorgeous – Tangled Up In Blue. Brown’s playing was tastefully orchestral, utilising octaves that gave the songs a sonic bottom line and set the template for the remaining New York sessions. “I tried to complement him, get into the feeling of the song, keep it sparse, try to hit the right notes instead of a lot of notes, do a little flourish when it seemed appropriate,” the
“I CONFESSIONAL DON’T WRITE SONGS. EMOTION’S GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. IT ONLY SEEMS SO.” BOB DYLAN
bassist explains. “I was tr ying to capture the drama in the songs. His songs are ver y visual, cinematic – you can see things when you listen to him – even if it’s a feeling or emotion.” Brown’s inspiration was Charlie McCoy’s economical bass playing on John Wesley Harding. “I loved how Charlie played with Dylan on that record. It was easy to think, ‘What would Charlie do?’” (The Dylan/Brown duets would comprise four out of five of the NY cuts on the original Blood On The Tracks.) Pianist/organist Paul Griffin and pedal steel guitarist Buddy Cage were brought in to add colour. Cage’s fuzzboxed solo on Meet Me In The Morning would be the album’s sole hard rock nod. There were two more sessions on September 18 and 19, but before they wrapped, one ambiguous incident would add to the session’s legend. It happened after one of the takes of Idiot Wind. Glenn Berger: “Dylan was doing Idiot Wind and I thought, This is so powerful. When has Dylan ever been this raw? The amount of rage coming out of him was so powerful. And when you hear something being cut in the studio where it’s directly from his mouth into that beautiful microphone and coming out of those huge speakers – you never hear it like that again. The power was overwhelming. And he gets to the end of the song and waits a few seconds and then turns to us in the control room and sarcastically says: (drawls) ‘Was that since-e-e-re enough?’” The question sucked the air out of the studio, rendering everyone speechless. Berger was shocked. “Many people have interpreted that sentence,” he says, but then people have made entire careers interpreting Bob Dylan. For some reason, Berger read it as a sign of insincerity, though he admits that, “Maybe it had been so powerful for him emotionally that he had to take away some of that intensity.” Others may see it simply as trademark dark Dylan humour.
AFTER THE FINAL TRACKS WERE CHOSEN AND sequenced, the record was mastered and acetates were cut. As often happens with Dylan, the acetates were distributed and bootlegged. The upside was that a buzz quickly spread – the raw emotional and musical simplicity blew listeners away, but Dylan was having second thoughts. Glenn Berger recalls him calling Phil Ramone in the studio. “I’d hear Phil say, ‘No Bob – it’s great. Maybe it’s your best ever.’ Phil would look over at me perplexed, like, Can you believe that Dylan is calling up insecure about this record? It happened more than once.” At his Minnesota farm over the holidays, Bob mulled options with brother David Zimmerman, who managed and produced local musical talent. One was folk musician Kevin Odegard, who received a call from David Zimmerman just after Christmas. Odegard had previously sung on publishing demos for Dylan songs. Zimmerman told him that Bob was in town and in the market for a rare 1937 0042 Martin guitar. Odegard called music shop proprietor Chris Weber who indeed had a very similar model. But Zimmerman’s follow-up request astonished Odegard. Bob wanted to re-record a song for his forthcoming album. Could Kevin help choose musicians? They decided on bassist Billy Peterson and drummer Bill Berg, both accomplished jazz cats who’d recently recorded with Leo Kottke and Cat Stevens. Fusionist Gregg Inhofer was hired on keys, as were Odegard and Weber on guitars. Everyone convened at Sound 80 Studio in downtown Minneapolis on December 27. “David said the album was too soft and not as ‘rocky’ as it could be,” recalls Odegard. “That it needed more of an edge.” The original plan was to record one song: Idiot
Wind, for which Dylan rewrote the lyrics, possibly feeling the New York lyrics were too autobiographical. (He later expressed concern with the rewrite as well. “I thought I might have gone a little bit too far with Idiot Wind,” he told interviewer Bill Flanagan in 1985. “I didn’t really think I was giving away too much; I thought that it seemed so personal that people would think it was about soand-so who was close to me.”) Dylan also overdubbed a Hammond B-3 organ on the track. “I could hear Highway 61 Revisited,” says Odegard. “He was channelling his inner Al Kooper!” It went so well, they followed up with You’re A Big Girl Now and a second session was scheduled on December 30 where they rerecorded Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts; If You See Her, Say Hello; and Tangled Up In Blue. Odegard takes credit for improving the latter. “We recorded it in the key of G and listened to playback and Dylan turned to me and said, ‘Whadda ya think?’ and it was quiet for about a year. I forgot where I was and I said, It’s passable. (Laughs) He said, ‘Whadda ya mean passable?’ I said, I think we should move it up to A – it would have more tension and urgency. You’re gonna have to reach a bit for the notes, but I think it’s gonna sound like a different tune. So Chris and I capo’ed up two frets, Bob went into the A position on his guitar. It had more energy and vibrancy and a completely different effect on his storytelling.” As opposed to the disorder in New York, the easy-going Minneapolis sessions benefited from simple planning. Dylan taught Chris Weber the tunes in the vocal booth; Weber would then come out and teach it to the others. Odegard also cites their mutual backgrounds. “We didn’t encounter Bob Dylan Superstar. We ran into a guy named Robert Zimmerman, a kid from Hibbing – also Bill Berg’s hometown. We were a bunch of guys from Minnesota hanging out – that was the key to the Minneapolis sessions. Similar backgrounds, similar radio stations – in the middle of the night Bob could pull in black Texas blues radio stations ’cos he was sitting right over the iron mines.” As cordial as the sessions were, Odegard sensed turbulence under the surface. “Bob didn’t smile a lot. You could tell he was going through something – he wasn’t Mr Happy. You could tell he was there to get these feelings out.”
BOB DYLAN GOT THOSE FEELINGS OUT FOR THE world’s benefit when Blood On The Tracks was released in January of 1975. It reached Number 1 in the US and Number 4 in the UK. It remains one of Dylan’s best-selling albums, but there were critical reviews upon its release. Future Bruce Springsteen manager Jon Landau knocked it in Rolling Stone for having been “made with typical shoddiness”. But most reviews, retrospectives and best-of lists over the last 43 years recognise it not only as one of Dylan’s finest, but one of the greatest rock albums of all time. Some say the greatest. “Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine,” sings Dylan in Shelter From The Storm – a boast he made good on with Blood On The Tracks. It’s up there with Frank Sinatra’s Sings For Only The Lonely or Richard And Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out The Lights – an album you listen to with a cocktail in one hand and tissues in the other when the one you love has gone. The album is evenly split: five tracks from New York, five from Minneapolis. There are those who prefer the New York acetate that was circulated and bootlegged, including Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman. “I thought it was incredibly haunting and revelatory and so close to the bone that I understood why he might have second thoughts. It was like eavesdropping on a conversation between people on the verge of divorce. The original version of Idiot Wind is one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard, so much more moving.” With More Blood, More Tracks, listeners have the opportunity to hear the New York sessions on both the one-disc and six-disc sets, and can decide for themselves if they have a preference. (The latter has the New York dates in their entirety; outtakes from Minneapolis are missing, and, oddly, no one seems to know what happened to them.) But no matter what versions you’re listening to, or which are your favourites, there is a singular power at the core of these songs. One of Norman Raeben’s students credits Dylan with being “incredibly generous to share these naked maps of himself.” It’s work that reflects Raeben’s belief that “Without humanity, your work will be shallow.” While writing this song cycle, Dylan dove into the heights and depths of what it means to love. Blood On The Tracks was a report on what he found.
“I THOUGHT, THIS IS SO POWERFUL.WHEN HAS DYLAN EVER BEEN THIS RAW?” GLENN BERGER