Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Suddenly, unannounced, Dylan hit the stage with his band, to sing about wasting time inside the true Coliseum, in his first number, “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” More confusion. One of the two singers up front sounded like Dylan, but his face was covered by a weird, shiny semi-transparency that turned out to be a clear plastic mask. Three minutes into the show, Dylan had his audience thoroughly mystified, and—oddly, happily—it didn’t matter anymore that we were sitting in the New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

  Dylan’s motorcycle crack-up shortly after the release of Blonde on Blonde had caused him to reassess his life and his music, and prompted a prolonged withdrawal from concert touring. Yet contrary to one widespread view, the accident did not cause a caesura, and it did not stem Dylan’s creativity. During the ensuing year, folded into the protective Woodstock comforts of his new family and his bandmates, he completed his work on the film Eat the Document, and he laid down the hours of informal playing that became, much truncated, The Basement Tapes double album in 1975. The original tapes—since analyzed imaginatively by Greil Marcus—included a good deal of folk music and other writers’ songs, but also enough original and cowritten material, quite apart from cover versions of older songs, to fill at least two albums, and some of that material was stunning, including “Tears of Rage,” “I Shall Be Released,” and “Too Much of Nothing.” In retrospect, the tapes show that when Dylan had returned to the rock and roll of his youth in 1965 and 1966, he hardly had severed his roots in all sorts of popular American songs, including country and western, rhythm and blues, and the wide repertoire of the folk revival.

  Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert, Carnegie Hall, New York City, January 20, 1968. (photo credit 5.4)

  In October 1967, Dylan returned to Nashville to record the sparse, poetic John Wesley Harding with Bob Johnston, Charlie McCoy, and Kenny Buttrey. The album appeared in December, and over the next eight years Dylan released seven albums of original material and covers (beginning with Nashville Skyline and culminating in Planet Waves and Blood on the Tracks, as well as The Basement Tapes), an album of greatest hits, an outlaw-political-song single (“George Jackson”), the soundtrack album for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and a double album of performances of his comeback tour with the Band in 1974. He also played with the Hawks at a Woody Guthrie memorial concert at Carnegie Hall in 1968, published a book of his lyrics and prose poems accompanied with some of his line sketches, entitled Writings and Drawings, and played a minor role in the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid film, directed by Sam Peckinpah. Compared with his astonishing peak from 1962 until 1966, these have seemed like fallow artistic years for Dylan—but for any other musical artist, the results of his retrenchment would qualify as a strong achievement.

  Dylan’s biographers have written in detail of his personal turmoil during this period, spent largely offstage and out of the public eye: the beginnings of the fitful disintegration of his marriage to Sara Dylan, which left them basically separated by 1975; the business battles that caused him to break with his original recording label, Columbia (which in turn prompted Columbia, holding him to his contract, to release what has been called a revenge album of inferior outtakes and entitle it Dylan), before he returned to the label in 1974; the fierce strains with his manager, Grossman; and Dylan’s ill-starred decision, in 1969, to move his growing family back to the heart of Greenwich Village, followed by a later relocation to Malibu.

  Dylan also spoke of a kind of artistic crisis, as if, despite his productivity, he had lost touch with his basic gifts and aspirations. “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.1 I mean, you can’t sit down and write that consciously because it has to do with the break-up of time.” The “amnesia” became so bad that by 1974, Dylan felt as if, while chasing his muse, he was only going “down, down, down … I was convinced I wasn’t going to do anything else.”2 Yet Dylan remained open to fresh ideas—as much now, perhaps, as at any time since his career began.

  One of Dylan’s more interesting experiments—from the vantage point of his cultural genealogy, one of the richest; from that of his aesthetic, one of the most profound—had to do not with songwriting and performing but with painting. Dylan’s lyrics had always contained especially strong visual as well as narrative elements. In “Visions of Johanna,” he even wittily described the paintings in the museums where infinity goes up on trial, including Mona Lisa with the highway blues. During the Australia leg of the 1966 tour, he sometimes introduced one song as the tale of a painter with the name of an old P. T. Barnum circus performer who lived near Juárez, Mexico, and who had had an especially productive “blue period”: hence (ha, ha!), “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” In 1968, one of his own paintings, of various musicians and an onlooking circus elephant, served as album art for the debut album of the reborn Hawks, the Band’s Music from Big Pink, and in the early 1970s, when Dylan sang of one day painting his masterpiece, he also made a painted self-portrait as the cover art for his double album Self Portrait, and featured some of his drawings in the new book of song lyrics and writings.

  Dylan’s early absorption in Woody Guthrie’s work included Guthrie’s whimsical pencil drawings, which obviously influenced Dylan’s own sketches, as published in Writings and Drawings. His surviving song manuscripts dating back to the early 1960s contain several elaborate sketches and doodles. Suze Rotolo, a fine professional artist, had encouraged him to take his interests deeper, helping him to appreciate the work of, among others, her favorite, Red Grooms, whose madcap creations seem also to have influenced Dylan’s drawings. Dylan also delved into New York’s museums and saw many things for the first time, including an exhibition of Gauguin paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I found I could stand in front of any one of them for as long as I’d sit in the movies,” he later recounted, “yet not get tired on my feet.3 I’d lose all sense of time.”

  In the spring of 1974, after his tour with the Band, Dylan turned up at the studio of the painter and instructor Norman Raeben on the eleventh floor of Carnegie Hall—and immediately, whether he knew it or not, encountered a rich set of historical links, as well as a formidable, charismatic new teacher. Born in Russia in 1901, Raeben was the youngest child of the great émigré Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (born Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich), whose vast output of novels and stories on shtetl life earned him a reputation as “the Jewish Mark Twain.” (Sholem Aleichem became best known, nearly half a century after his death in 1916, for his stories about Tevye the milkman, which became the source for the musical Fiddler on the Roof.) From his father, Raeben learned to regard the sacred texts of Judaism not simply as religious and philosophical but as deeply metaphorical evocations of suffering and endurance, open to the realm of imagination—and fit for appropriation, alternatively comic and dark, as he sprinkled holy verse, sometimes in mangled form, in the speeches of his most ordinary characters, from Tevye to the schlimazel Menakhem-Mendl.

  Having moved with his family to New York in 1914, young Norman studied painting with some of the leading lights of the so-called Ashcan school, including Robert Henri, John Sloan, and George Luks. Six years before Sholem Aleichem arrived with his family, Henri, Sloan, Luks, and five other painters had caused a sensation with a group exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery of their realist pictures, many of which showed rough, poverty-stricken sides of Manhattan life. The work of the painters known loosely as the Eight, and especially Henri, would influence the work of their associate George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and, in time, the younger Norman Raeben.

  Norman Raeben, circa 1974. (photo credit 5.5)

  At some point before 1920, Raeben returned to Europe to connect with the more dynamic taproots of artistic innovation—which meant traveling to Paris. There, by his own account, he fell in with the bohemian circles that included Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and (most important) the expressionist Chaim Soutine, with whom, he said, he
shared lodgings. (Raeben’s widow, Victoria, later denied his more high-flown claims, although he may at least have been Soutine’s neighbor.) Soutine’s love of old masters, whom he studied in the Louvre, translated into heavy, bursting brushwork that could convey tenderness as easily as it did turbulence. The combination of inner expression, traditional influence, and Jewish metaphor, as transformed by Raeben—like him, Soutine, Chagall, and much of his circle were Jews—would have a profound effect on Bob Dylan’s songwriting. But by the 1970s, Raeben had given himself over mainly to teaching about both art and Judaism—in a studio fittingly located in defiant independence directly across Fifty-seventh Street from the Art Students League, where Luks, Bellows, Sloan, and Henri had taught.

  Norman Raeben’s Times Square, circa 1959–63, 24″ x 16″, oil on linen. (photo credit 5.6)

  Dylan, who had heard of Raeben from Sara’s friend Robin Fertik, sought Raeben out with the intention of learning more about Jewish philosophy, but he ended up spending two months working at Raeben’s studio, five days a week, from eight thirty until four. Dylan later described his fellow pupils as a thrown-together assortment: “rich old ladies from Florida—standing next to an off-duty policeman, standing next to a bus driver, a lawyer.4 Just all kinds.” Dylan does not appear to have been anyone special, at least to Raeben, who, though he knew of Dylan’s fame, regularly berated him as an idiot (much as he did the other students). It is unclear how much the sessions actually improved Dylan’s sketching and painting; at neither would he ever become especially skilled. But Dylan credited Raeben with nothing less than teaching him “how to see,” by putting “my mind and my hand and my eye together, in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt.”5

  Dylan has from time to time spoken of mentors whose principles or systems pulled him out of an artistic and spiritual trough. In the first volume of Chronicles, he relates how recalling a particular “mathematical” tone structure that he had learned years earlier from the old blues star Lonnie Johnson helped revitalize his playing in the mid-1980s. With Raeben, he learned to eschew conceptualization (the bane, in Raeben’s view, of the contemporary art scene), and to see things plain, as they really are, always aware of perspective, both straight on and from above, simultaneously. He also learned how to abandon the sense of linear time to which he had clung automatically, and to understand the artistic possibilities of pulling together the past, present, and future, as if they were of a piece, permitting a clearer, more concentrated focus on the objects or object at hand.

  That summer of 1974, working mainly in a house around back on a farm he had purchased in Minnesota alongside the Crow River (with his brother David’s house in front, closer to the road), Dylan pored over a small red notebook, writing lyrics for a new album that would capture the wounds, scars, and sorrowed wisdom of love. His writing included, early on, what would become “Tangled Up in Blue,” a song he would later describe as directly beholden to Raeben:

  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.6 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.

  Nor did it matter who the “she” was in the song, or how many shes there really were, or when anything happened; the song hangs together as one that took ten years for Dylan to live and two years for him to write.

  Indeed, it appears that Raeben affected Dylan and “Tangled Up in Blue” in several ways. Manic, brusque, and unsparing, Raeben would dress down his pupils as a means to help instruct them, sometimes revising students’ work right on the canvas in his loose rapid style, to show them how it was done. According to the artist John Amato, another student of Raeben’s at the time, Dylan was one day painting a still life of a vase—the quintessential artistic effort to stop time—and was working heavily in blue, a favorite pigment of novice students, when Raeben looked at the canvas dismissively, telling Dylan that he was all tangled up in blue. A few days later, Amato recalls, Dylan astonished his fellow students by bringing in lyrics of a now unknown song with that title. He would do the same, as far as his fellow students could tell, when he used as a title one of Raeben’s favorite terms of abuse, “Idiot Wind”—although the phrase more likely came from the poem “June 1940” by the proto-Beat writer and composer, legendary in older underground literary and artistic circles, Weldon Kees.*

  The new album, Blood on the Tracks, was full of blues, although only one song, “Meet Me in the Morning,” was written in standard twelve-bar form. It included songs of longing, gratitude, and fury, and an elliptical narrative about the Jack of Hearts that sounded like brave, possibly self-inflating allegory (even if it wasn’t). It ended with a grace note of hope, “Buckets of Rain.”

  Some of the stanzas in some of the songs were painterly. Part of “Simple Twist of Fate” (alternatively titled “Fourth Street Affair”) took place inside “a strange hotel with a neon burnin’ bright”:

  He woke up, the room was bare

  He didn’t see her anywhere

  He told himself he didn’t care, pushed the window open wide

  Felt an emptiness inside to which he just could not relate

  Brought on by a simple twist of fate.

  Dylan’s lyrics of aloneness conjured up the spirit and even the composition of a Hopper canvas.

  Curiously, Blood on the Tracks, now widely considered one of Dylan’s greatest albums, met with some harsh reviews upon its release in January 1975, as critics complained chiefly about what one called the “indifferent” musicianship of Dylan’s accompanists. Perhaps the sustained mood of resigned melancholy, occasionally broken by songs such as “Idiot Wind” and “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts,” blocked listeners from hearing the first mature musical reflections to come out of the 1960s and early 1970s by a popular artist who had survived them. But no matter; Dylan flew the coop and spent several weeks during the late spring of 1975 in France with the artist David Oppenheim, staying in touch by phone with Sara but spending much of his time in aimless, amiable dissolution, at one point meeting the king of the Gypsies in southern France.* Then, at the end of June, he turned up again in Greenwich Village.

  At some point that spring, according to Roger McGuinn, erstwhile mainstay of the Byrds, he and Dylan were tossing basketballs around at McGuinn’s home in Malibu. Dylan suddenly paused, grabbed a ball, stared out at the ocean, and said that he wanted to do “something different.”7

  Knowing that “different” could mean just about anything to Dylan, McGuinn asked what he had in mind.

  “I don’t know … something like a circus.”

  At the Rolling Thunder concert in New Haven, “When I Paint My Masterpiece” opened the show, booming and stately, with Dylan and Bob Neuwirth singing a duo that was a little ragged but forceful. With full orchestration, including a running mandolin line that sounded more Eye-tie than Okie, it was wholly different from the acoustic version of the song that had found its way onto a greatest-hits compilation a few years earlier. Above all, Dylan seemed to have a pent-up vehemence in his voice, at once elongating and spitting out the line about wishing he were back in the land of Coca-Cola—“Co-HO-LA,” he sang it, as if he wanted to make sure we knew exactly what that last word was. Musicians strayed all over the stage, none of them recognizable to me. At the song’s end, Dylan lifted what looked like a flower-bedecked sombrero to take off his mask, and sure enough it was certainly he, the now-unmasked marvel—except that Dylan’s face, which at first just looked pale, turned out to be covered by a thin coating of white makeup, or this is how I have remembered it. Because I have seen so much film from the tour of Dylan in thicker streaks of whiteface, my memory could be faulty (though photographers still seem to bear me out), just as I may be wrong about h
is wearing a plastic mask in New Haven.

  Dedicated by Dylan, quickly, to Leonardo da Vinci, the performance of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” turned the old favorite into another new song, performed with a syncopated, semi-reggae beat, highlighted musically by a concluding trading-off between rippling pedal steel guitar and Dylan’s first brief but blistering solo on his mouth harp (which brought great cheers from the audience). When Dylan and the band next played “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” one of the finest songs he would ever write, with a deliberate thumping beat, it became even more obvious that Dylan’s vehemence was a matter of diction and enunciation—that rather than slurring in a folkie drawl he was making certain that no syllable of the ballad could be mistaken.

  Then the proceedings began getting truly weird. Dylan introduced a tall, raven-haired female fiddler as Scarlet Rivera, knowing full well that she was a stranger to us all, but he spoke as if she should be a friend. “We’re gonna dedicate this to Sam Peckinpah,” he continued. Everyone recognized who he was—Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid had been released nearly two years earlier—but it seemed odd to call the name of a filmmaker, until the band moved into “Romance in Durango” from the as-yet-unreleased Desire, which began with a line about hot chili peppers and sounded appropriately south of the border.

  Everything went haywire during the next number. Dylan laid down his guitar, said something about “a true story,” and proceeded to act out another new song that started out being about diamonds and the world’s biggest necklace—a song I mistook to be about someone or something or some things called “Ices.” Punctuated by a blasting harmonica riff with the band in full swell, this was plainly rock music, but it also sounded incantatory, as if Dylan were half-reciting, half-shouting a bizarre short story while stretching out his arms and waving his fingers. The lyrics were completely unfamiliar and, thus, hard to follow, no matter how cleanly Dylan punched them out. Only when the band quieted for the lines beginning, “She said, ‘Where you been?’ ” did I begin to catch that this was a song about yet another romantic pas de deux. But “Ices” was soon done, Dylan announced an intermission, and the houselights rose. Everybody cheered and applauded, and some people whistled, but what had just happened deeply perplexed me, and I could not have been alone.