“To Be Alone with Dylan on the Long Hot Summer Tour”

Review by Christine Hand Jones, Southern Methodist University

Thackerville, Oklahoma, home of WinStar World Casino, sits just across the Red River, as close to Texas as a person can get and legally gamble. On July 2^nd, 2026, on the eve of a long Independence Day weekend, the crowds poured in. And why not? How better to celebrate 250 years of American independence than throwing your money away on the flashing neon opportunity to win it all in The World’s Largest Casino, proudly owned and operated by the Chickasaw nation? I was there to gamble on an evening of entertainment at WinStar’s music venue, Lucas Oil Lodge, where Bob Dylan kicked off the July leg of his Long Hot Summer Tour.

Going in, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. The internet is awash in concert recordings despite the cell phone ban at these shows, and Dylan’s team publishes every set list on his website. Some guitarist changeups notwithstanding, there have been few variations to the concert sets and format. My expectations were also influenced by comments on Dylan’s recent performances from two famous Pauls. The first, Paul McCartney, told the hosts of The Rest is Entertainment podcast that he wished Dylan would play more recognizable tunes, saying, “I get it if he doesn’t want to do ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’—maybe he’s fed up with it. But I would like to hear it” (26:23). The second Paul, Noel Paul Stookey, of Peter, Paul, and Mary, told Rolling Stone that he was “saddened by” Dylan’s constant touring at age 85, because Dylan “wasn’t there. I mean, his body was there, but he didn’t reach out to me . . . I think an audience would be pleased if he tried to connect”

My knee-jerk reaction to these comments was to assume that the Pauls were simply out of touch with Dylan. No true Dylan fan would expect a concert of major hits or for Dylan to engage in stage banter. But closer reading made McCartney’s puzzlement and Stookey’s concern seem genuine. Paul McCartney explains his desire for fans to experience a moment of authentic healing and connection while singing a beloved song like “Hey Jude,” an experience he feels duty-bound to provide the otherwise divided crowds of “Trump’s America” (27:32). And Stookey’s concern is rooted in a belief that Dylan’s touring is “all he’s got . . . He hides behind a piano when he plays . . . It must be really, really difficult for him to have a real relationship with somebody.” Speaking of Dylan’s rare genius as a writer, Stookey goes on to say, “There’s a reason for Bob’s success. Not a lot of people could duplicate that success, and it must be very lonely for him to walk that road.” In light of these expressions of care from Dylan’s contemporaries, I replaced my first reactions with curiosity. Would the audience feel disconnected from Dylan? Would we witness a sad spectacle of a lonesome man and leave more alienated than before? Or would the concert defy those expectations, leaving us feeling more connected to Dylan and to each other?

By concert’s end, I found myself partially agreeing with the Pauls. Like Stookey, I could see plenty of loneliness in Dylan’s performance; like McCartney, I left believing in the artist’s duty to bring people into connection. However, I saw Dylan’s loneliness not as a barrier, but as a key to that connection. Dylan’s willingness to bring his loneliness into a crowded concert hall, lay it bare for all of us, and allow us to experience something true together created a spark of connection that no blinding casino lights could hold a candle to.

I had done my homework for the show by making a playlist of likely song choices for the evening, and I thrilled at the coincidence of crossing the Red River into Oklahoma just as I heard Dylan sing, “Well, the Rubicon is a red river / Goin’ gently as she flows” (“Crossing the Rubicon”). I was still more delighted to notice, as the casino rose into view, a series of gaudy replicas of famous international architecture on The WinStar’s façade. Halfway between recreations of London’s Big Ben and China’s Great Wall, I beheld Oklahoma’s own Roman Coliseum on my way in to hear Dylan sing “Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum / Dodging lions and wastin’ time” (“When I Paint My Masterpiece”). When we made it inside the Casino, we found a giant giveaway display of red, white, and blue Jeep Wrangler Rubicon SUVs. Yes, at the WinStar you can stay “in the land of Coca-Cola” and still go “round the world in a dirty gondola” (“When I Paint My Masterpiece”). We had found the new, weird America (with apologies to Greil Marcus): a strange pastiche of cultures swirling in a dizzying barrage of light, smoke, and sound.

The contrast, when we settled into our seats inside Lucas Oil Lodge and the house lights dimmed, could not have been more complete. If you’ve spent any time on Dylan fan accounts or followed news coverage of this tour and its predecessor, the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, you know the basics: a four-piece band, sparsely illuminated, Dylan on the keyboard wearing a pulled-up hoodie. There was no video displayed on the screens that flanked the stage, so combined with the lack of cell phones, we were thrust into nearly total darkness. Dylan and his band came on stage just ahead of the 8:00 pm start time, eager to begin or perhaps eager to have it over with. Five warm lights glowed from the stage. I knew where to look for Bob, but it still took me a minute to spot him, just left of center. His white hoodie shone brighter than his face, making it hard to tell who the shadowy figure inside could be. A couple of audience members shouted, “turn up the lights” and “pull down your hood” at Dylan. Dylan, of course, ignored them. But for most of the audience, the spell was cast. As one, we looked up and out, a miracle of attentive faces undistracted by smartphone screens.

Perhaps that scene description is unnecessary; as I’ve admitted already, this stage set up is nothing new for Dylan’s recent concerts. But it’s one thing to read about it, another to experience it, and still another to witness this hallowed haven after trekking through a crowded, buzzy casino floor, where every machine screamed for attention and patrons sat, hypnotized, pushing buttons with one hand while chain-smoking with the other. Is the secret to attention in our chronically distracted age as simple as a phone ban and a few lights in a dark room? We’ve been trained to look at whatever lights up, and on that night, all eyes were on Bob Dylan and his band. So what if Dylan was hiding behind a keyboard as Stookey had complained? He had already created connection by choosing an environment of simplicity and focus.

The four-piece combo’s musical choices added to the intimate club atmosphere. The drummer, Anton Fig, exploited the drums’ vintage tone perfectly, with rock ‘n’ roll back beats and big band toms and jazz brushes as each song demanded. The bassist, Tony Garnier, switched between electric and upright bass, often swapping plucked strings for his bow when a song’s mood called for a drone or a sweet, low melody. Dylan’s keyboard playing was quite strong—an improvement from the last time I saw him in 2012, when he had only recently made the switch from guitar as his main instrument. His playing created a moody atmosphere and steady rhythm that made space for the rest of the band to experiment. But the star of the show was guitarist Joel Paterson, a newcomer to the group, whose deft jazz and blues playing made for some of the most beautiful and exciting moments of the evening. Standouts for guitar included the songs “False Prophet,” “I Can Tell,” “Under the Red Sky,” and “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” which gave this blues guitarist plenty to work with and prompted enthusiastic applause. Overall, the band was tight, with only one hiccup in the transition from “It Ain’t Me, Babe” to “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven.” When Bob tried to go straight into one song from the other, it didn’t quite work, and, for a moment the band was trying to find the tempo. Undeterred, Bob forged ahead while the band paused, reset, and came back in.

Excellent as the rest of the band was, the crowd was most energized when Dylan played harmonica on two songs: “Under the Red Sky” and “I Shall Be Released.” His solo in “Under the Red Sky” marked the only time I saw an audience member in my section pull out a forbidden phone to start filming. (An usher quickly and kindly shut it down). Not many 85-year-olds can boast the lung capacity Dylan displays on the harmonica, but Dylan still has it, with dynamic musical phrasing to match. His singing was strong, too, mostly because he has chosen songs on this tour that don’t demand vocal gymnastics or melodic leaps. Dylan kept all the vocals centered in the low growling croon he has perfected on the last couple of albums, exactly the kind of hushed tone you’d expect in a quiet blues dive. In another victory for crowd connection, the audience leaned in to catch every word. And the first words from Dylan’s lips that night? “To be alone with you / Just you and me / Now won’t you tell me true / Ain’t that the way it oughta be?” (“To Be Alone With You”).

On this tour, Dylan’s been switching between “To Be Alone With You” and “Watching the River Flow” for an opener, and that night, I was grateful for the chance to hear something from Nashville Skyline, a personal favorite. But the style was less late sixties than fifties, featuring big, echoing tom patterns from the drums that transported us back to the time of Dylan’s rock ‘n’ roll-filled youth. Together with the dark, intimate setting, the song functioned as an invitation to the audience: though there may have been hundreds of us in the seats, for one night, we would be alone with Bob and his band, the last few stragglers nursing our drinks in a dark blues joint. With no screens to distract us, Dylan was the “only [one] in view while evening slip[ped] away” (“To Be Alone With You”). Perhaps if Noel Stookey had been to this show, he would have taken back his criticism, for what else could such a song in such an intimate environment be but a bid for connection? For a little over an hour, we got to be alone with Dylan and he with us—at least as much as one can be while surrounded by hundreds of strangers.

While Stookey may have been wrong about Dylan’s lack of connection, one need only skim the lyrics of the songs in the evening’s set list to find support for his claim about Dylan’s loneliness. The most recognizable song of the night was the crowd-pleasing kiss-off, “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” a masterclass in rejection, and a natural precursor to songs like the night’s three cover tunes, all of which belong in the lonely-hearts club. “I Can Tell,” made popular by Bo Diddley, is pure rhythm and blues heartbreak with its refrain of lost love. “Share Your Love With Me,” recorded by Aretha Franklin, sings of the shame of unrequited love. (Fans of Aretha’s version probably wouldn’t recognize Dylan’s, which traded her soulful setting for a country and western shuffle, but the lonely sentiment nevertheless rang true.) Charlie Rich’s “I’ll Make It All Up To You,” popularized by Jerry Lee Lewis, speaks of love and regret, with the lover repeatedly promising to do better. All three of these sad, deep cuts were originally performed by artists who are no longer with us—Dylan’s peers, whom he has outlived.

In reminding us of Dylan’s fallen musical comrades, those simple cover songs became meditations on death and the afterlife. Dylan explored that connection further in other songs in the set, such as “Man in the Long Black Coat,” which bemoans the loss of a woman who left abruptly with the titular man in black, leaving an apocalyptic wasteland in her stead. In concert, the music matched the spooky tone perfectly, with reverberating jazz guitar work and rumbling low piano chords adding to the sense of dread and despair. Similarly, in “False Prophet,” “guides from the underworld” accompany the narrator’s “songs of betrayal” as he goes “where only the lonely can go.” In “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven,” a meditation on lost love, the “The air is getting hotter” and “There’s a rumbling in the skies.” With those images, death and the afterlife stay close at hand as Dylan holds a conversation with his younger self through lyrics like “I’m just going down the road feeling bad” and “I don’t know what ‘all right’ even means” that echo the 1963 classic “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” Finally, after wandering through his lonely hellscape, he wonders “if everything is as hollow as it seems.”

That question—is “everything as hollow as it seems?”—felt especially relevant in the modern casino setting of the July 2^nd show, where even the roulette tables had been replaced with digital facsimiles, and the promises of quick cash and happiness slipped constantly out of the players’ grasp. Surrounded by so much loneliness both within and without the concert performance, it would be easy to take Noel Stookey’s comments to heart. But while Bob Dylan may be lonely, and even sad, this concert, this experience was not hollow. Stookey believes that Dylan’s “choice of words, his choice of subject material, and his capacity to put them together in a poetic form that defies prediction, but . . . always hits us in the heart . . . remove[s] him . . . from a normal relationship with people.” He speculates that such disconnection is “the price of his own genius.” I can’t speak to Dylan’s ordinary relationships, of course, but in a concert, among his fans, it is precisely that “genius” for “hit[ting] us in the heart” that connects us to him and to each other.

Even as Dylan’s relationship with his audience is strengthened by his lonesome confession, so too are his sad songs strengthened by the sparks of love and hope intertwined with their expressions of loneliness or despair. The nonsensical romp, “Under the Red Sky” has always had a music and lyrics mismatch. The red sky and the song’s scenes of casual, surreal destruction speak of deadly apocalypse. But the lyrics also promise a world made new, and the music is pure joy and whimsy. This concert’s performance was no exception with its exuberant tempos and fanciful harmonica solos. Perhaps this paradox is “the key to the kingdom” of which Dylan sings in “Under The Red Sky”: life and love are made all the sweeter by their proximity to death and sorrow.

Indeed, Dylan used much of the set list to meditate on death and dying. In “Black Rider,” Dylan argues with death or maybe the devil, refusing to go gentle into that good night. In “Crossing the Rubicon,” a song played in concert with steady, stately snare rolls that increased the song’s pressure with each verse, Dylan wonders how to “redeem the time . . . so idly spent.” Such songs express the anxieties of a man near life’s end, but they also offer glimpses of hope. To the black rider, Dylan concedes, “Maybe I’ll take the high moral ground / Some enchanted evening, I’ll sing you a song.” And in “Crossing the Rubicon,” even as the speaker acknowledges “dark days . . . in this world so badly bent,” he can also “feel the Holy Spirit inside and see the light that freedom gives,” and he looks for happiness “upon the hill.” In both these songs, death is both a villain and a savior—a thing to fear and a consummation devoutly to be wished. Such tension is at the heart of Dylan’s work, where loneliness is tempered with a buoyant hope: “If I survive then let me love – let the hour be mine” (“Crossing the Rubicon”). This desire for love in the face of doom returns in “Soon After Midnight,” in which an old man who has seen love, death, pain, and infidelity in his long life can still say “my day has just begun.” In this song, all that pain the narrator has walked through gives him reason to hope. Similarly, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” tells the tale of a man who’s been everywhere and seen everything, who has “traveled the long road of despair” and lost many loved ones. Still, he is determined to give himself over to love as he rambles across America.

Both “Soon After Midnight” from 2012’s Tempest, and “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You” from 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, derive their power in part from the speaker’s age and experience. It is because the speaker has lived long enough to see pain and heartbreak that these declarations of love are so remarkable. Homesickness runs through both songs. While young men run from home, older ones long to return to that place of rest. Another concert staple on this tour, “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” is also a homesick song, but from the perspective of a much younger man. The song has been covered by The Band and others and has been reworked by Dylan on many occasions, but the version I’m most familiar with is the piano ballad demo from the Another Self Portrait album in the Bootleg series. I expected to hear something similarly meditative and solemn played live. So this song, in concert, was almost unrecognizable at its start, with a jaunty musical treatment led by a guitar line pulled straight out of “Puttin’ On the Ritz.” On one hand, the music contrasted with the meditative, searching nature of the song’s lyrics, but on the other, it reinforced its chief sentiment: even at eighty-five years old, Dylan is still searching for new ways to express the song, still wondering when he will finally paint his masterpiece. We, the audience, are the lucky beneficiaries of that quest.

The last two songs of the concert brought many of these threads together: tribute to those gone before and meditations on legacy and death, loneliness, and hope. The penultimate song, “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” was a crowd favorite at the July 2^nd concert. Some audience members attempted to clap along with the rock ‘n’ roll bop’s infectious backbeat, but most were too entranced by the blues guitar solos to dance or clap. The song pays tribute to long lost bluesman Jimmy Reed, and it is a glorious homage, both musically and lyrically. Considering recent criticisms of this tour, one stanza stood out:

You won’t amount to much the people all said ‘Cause I didn’t play guitar behind my head Never pandered never acted proud

Never took off my shoes and threw them into the crowd Goodbye Jimmy Reed – goodbye and goodnight

I’ll put a jewel in your crown – I’ll put out the light

Dylan owes no one an explanation, needs no grand stage antics to connect with his audience. Instead, he simply calls goodbye to a friend who has gone ahead of him into the great beyond. The song is both a celebration of a well-lived life and a cry of longing to join his friend across the river.

That cry was made complete in the concert’s closing song. I knew to expect either “Every Grain of Sand” or “I Shall Be Released,” and for this show, I was happy when I recognized the familiar chords of the latter. Aside from mine and my husband’s quiet harmonizing, I didn’t hear anyone else in the crowd singing, so it wasn’t exactly the “Hey Jude” group singalong of Paul McCartney’s dreams, but “standing next to me in [that] lonely crowd” were hundreds of people, united by the haunting wail of Dylan’s harmonica and our deeply human desire for release. Together, we made all our sad songs better.

The audience rose to their feet and applauded, calling for an encore that wouldn’t come. As the stage lights rose, we just caught the faint outlines of Dylan’s white hooded form floating away into the darkness like a ghost. But this concert reminded me that Dylan is “nothing like [his] ghostly appearance would suggest” (“False Prophet”). Even as an octogenarian, Bob Dylan is still playing the songs that he loves, creating beautiful moments of joy and heartbreak. And on that July night in Oklahoma, Dylan’s quintessentially American music carried us over the Rubicon and back through the casino’s smoke and noise into the hot summer night.

Works Cited

 Dylan, Bob. Long Hot Summer Tour. 2 July 2026, WinStar World Casino and Resort, Thackerville, OK.

—. Lyrics to “Black Rider.” 2020. bobdylan.com, 2026, https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/black-rider/

—. Lyrics to “Crossing the Rubicon.” 2020. bobdylan.com, 2026, https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/crossing-the-rubicon/

—. Lyrics to “False Prophet.” 2020. bobdylan.com, 2026, https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/false-prophet/

—. Lyrics to “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.” 2020. bobdylan.com, 2026, https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/goodbye-jimmy-reed/

—. Lyrics to “I Shall Be Released.” 1967. bobdylan.com, 2026, https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/i-shall-be-released/

—. Lyrics to “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” 1964. bobdylan.com, 2026, https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/it-aint-me-babe/

—. Lyrics to “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” 2020. bobdylan.com, 2026, https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/ive-made-up-my-mind-to-give-myself-to-you/

—. Lyrics to “Man in the Long Black Coat.” 1989. bobdylan.com, 2026, https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/man-long-black-coat/

—. Lyrics to “Soon After Midnight.” 2012. bobdylan.com, 2026, https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/crossing-the-rubicon/

—. Lyrics to “To Be Alone With You.” 1969. bobdylan.com, 2026, https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/be-alone-you/

Michael Glover-Smith. Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think. McNidder and Grace, 2026. 244 pp.

Review by Robert Reginio, Alfred University

Any survey of Dylan’s work in film—as opposed to his appearances on screen in videos or other cinematic projects—is a salvage operation. Films like Eat the Document (1972) or Renaldo and Clara (1978) have been actively suppressed by Dylan and by the filmmakers associated with these films, following Dylan’s lead. The theatrical lives of these films were short-lived, Dylan retreating, it might be said, from poor ticket sales and critical disparagement at the time of their release. For us now, Dylan’s primary experiments in film circulate as bootleg copies or as a series of selected scenes online. As whole works of cinematic art, we often do not have access to the complete texts of these films besides less-than-pristine copies sourced from earlier copies.

Additionally, for the writer seeking to explore Dylan as filmmaker, the stunning, electrifying performance footage from the 1966 tour and the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue (arguably the centerpieces, respectively, of those two Dylan-directed and -edited films) have already been incorporated by other filmmakers. Martin Scorsese used the performance footage from both of these projects in No Direction Home and The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story. A documentary and a mockumentary, these two films neglect the seriously considered editorial work and cinematic patterning of Dylan and his cinematic collaborators. And it must be said that for many followers of Dylan’s work, it is the restored footage of these performances that makes both Scorsese projects worth the price of admission. It takes, then, concerted critical work to place these performance clips back into the cinematic experiments they came from, and to assess and evaluate films like Eat the Document and Renaldo and Clara as carefully conceived pieces of cinematic expression.

In his book Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think (McNidder and Grace, 2026), Michael Glover Smith surveys the production histories and the initial reception of these films to recreate them not as grab bags for single performance clips but as works of cinematic art that stand on their own. Smith’s assertion rings true that the films that Dylan had editorial or script control over are “commendable for [their] fierce independence” (consisting of the triad of Eat the Document, Renaldo and Clara, and 2003’s Masked and Anonymous) (156). The main takeaway from Smith’s book is a set of references to touchstone films for Dylan the filmmaker (often European avant-garde films) and a compendious set of filmographies (presented as two extensive appendices) supplementing the exposition of details related to the production histories of the films.

Smith’s book works well as a primer on the histories and broad contexts of these films in relation to Bob Dylan’s career. However, unlike Jonathan Hodgers’ 2024 monograph Bob Dylan on Film: The Intersection of Music and Visuals (Routledge), Smith eschews the kind of critical intervention that we find Hodgers making. Smith’s book covers the history of each film’s conception, development, and reception, whereas Hodgers’ text, which is a salvage operation of its own, can be recommended for its fine-grained analysis. Therefore, the two texts complement each other. Smith places the films in the practical world of production and editing, where Dylan as auteur exerts his primary influence, while Hodgers interrogates conceptual apparatuses like the auteur theory of cinematic production.

Smith relates that for Masked and Anonymous, Dylan left the difficult work of coordinating and collaborating to others, such as director Larry Charles. Unlike his work in the recording studio, where Dylan relies on a kind of telepathy between musicians to reconfigure a song, such a quasi-improvisatory mode of collaboration just doesn’t facilitate creation on a film set, where a director coordinates cinematographers, production designers, and others to express what is inherent in a script. Smith argues that Dylan’s role as script writer in Masked and Anonymous came after Dylan’s own exhausted response to the processes of directing and editing full-length movies like Eat the Document and Renaldo and Clara. Throughout his career, Dylan remained fascinated with film, but the intense collaboration of filmmaking itself, and Dylan’s awareness of the intensity of that process, led him to seek out someone else as director.

Dylan’s role in Masked and Anonymous, Smith tells us, rested primarily in the pre-production process: it is the script that most bears Dylan’s imprint. He left the more difficult work of directing to Charles, though, as Smith notes, the commanding musical performances in Masked and Anonymous by Dylan and his current touring band “alone justify the movie’s existence” (102). This brings us once again to a core issue: is this not true of all of Dylan’s films? It seems, in Eat the Document and Renaldo and Clara, the challenge for Dylan was to work in this medium as a filmmaker and not to use concert footage in a way that made the films mere vehicles for his live performances. Concert films they are not. Both these earlier films, in Smith’s recounting, seek to denaturalize the concert experience, rather than to replicate it. The core issue raised here is the play of visuals and music, where oftentimes the musical performances cast the rest of the filmic experiments in the critical shadows. Smith shines a light on these often-unstudied aspects of the films. That the book attempts to take Dylan’s work in film as such is one of its virtues.

In his introduction, Smith is correctly critical of Dylan’s interviews surrounding the release of Renaldo and Clara. Containing his most extensive comments about this film and his aim in the medium, these late 70s interviews have Dylan trucking in obfuscation, indicating a set of amorphous or archetypal themes that unify this sprawling project. Dylan’s 1984 interview with Martha Quinn about Dylan’s work (or lack thereof) in the new medium of music videos draws Smith’s attention. He notes that “Dylan’s comments about not wanting to ‘be the head of . . . ordering people around, telling them what to do’ and expressing his desire to not ‘do it myself’ but instead find a perfect filmmaking collaborator . . . go a long way towards explaining his subsequent forays into cinema” (10). What Dylan seems to have learned from his experiences with filmmaking earlier in his career is just how different the production of a film is from the production of an album. As an accomplished filmmaker himself, Smith is alive to the difficulty of learning this lesson. And yet he is right that the medium of film was not a passing fancy for Dylan, but something that attracted him throughout his career, from failures like 1987’s Hearts of Fire on to the 2021’s pandemic-era performance film Shadow Kingdom. In his introductory chapter, Smith makes the strong claim that the “most important thread” running through the Dylan filmography is “How does it feel to be Bob Dylan?” (Smith’s italics 12). Dylan’s deflections in the Jonathan Cott and Ron Rosenbaum interviews from the late 70s about Renaldo and Clara—his “New Age babble” and “pseudo-academic jargon” (6)—are of a piece with his deflections about the meanings of his songs: Dylan, in these instances, directs us away from his autobiography while opening the door to our own interpretive encounters with his art. Smith’s organizing rhetorical question (“How does it feel to be Bob Dylan?”), while potentially relevant to Eat the Document and Renaldo and Clara, limits the scope of the book by fastening the reader to a biographical paradigm of interpreting art. At the least, Bob Dylan as Filmmaker compels a reader to consider the difference between his songs (where the singer is not necessarily Dylan) and the films (where Dylan as cultural icon is an unavoidable presence). Smith narrows our focus to the standard stations of the Bob Dylan mythos, a mythos that bypasses an encounter with the strange world of Dylan’s films in favor of relating the biographical facts and fictions dedicated fans might already know. The book thereby makes familiar the unfamiliar worlds that the films under consideration create, and in so doing, reduces their strangeness and unfamiliarity.

This survey of Dylan’s work in film does not, however, lessen the importance of this book as primer for those fans who would like to go beyond the performance clips found, for example, in Scorsese’s documentaries. Written primarily for fans and not for scholars, the book shines a light on a network of cinematic references and genres that a reader can follow before turning back to each film with a renewed sense of its artistic impetus. An impressionistic film like Eat the Document, for instance, links to Dylan’s frenzied state of mind during 1966 (and especially during the controversial tour); additionally, the film seeks to rearrange audience expectations when it comes to a “concert film.”

Salient here, for Smith, are Jean-Luc Godard’s early films of the French New Wave. Smith writes that Dylan had “no road map” in putting together D.A. Pennebaker’s footage for Eat the Document (21). Smith writes about how Dylan sought to incorporate the discontinuous filmmaking modes set down by Godard in an “American” register. There’s a matrix of overlapping influences that Smith sketches for a reader. Godard, the student of American auteur cinema, especially film noir, reconfigured that tradition in a bracing way. Seminal films like Breathless were a touchstone for Dylan. Along with D.A. Pennebaker’s cinema verité Dont Look Back, Breathless influenced Dylan to re-see his own mythic American persona in the kaleidoscopic mélange of juxtapositions in Eat the Document.

While Smith does not hazard a reading of what Godard in an American key might mean for Dylan’s film, he clearly outlines continuities between Godard and Dylan’s editing of Eat the Document. As a result, the reader comes away from the book with a sense of Dylan as a student of European avant-garde cinema. Smith describes Godard’s A Woman is a Woman as containing “juxtapo[sitions of] the hyper-real with the hyper-fake,” which, according to Smith, Dylan was already practicing with his mid-60s pop music innovations. Equally interesting is Smith’s narration of the positive reception Eat the Document met in its early New York City screenings at the Whitney Museum in 1972. He puts to rest the notion that Eat the Document was completely “rejected” by audiences and critics. Citing positive reviews of the film during its initial screening at sites like the Whitney, the implication is that audiences aware of Godard and other avant-garde filmmakers would find nothing strange about Eat the Document.

On Renaldo and Clara, the other film besides Eat the Document that bears most heavily the imprint of Dylan’s creative cinematic decisions, Smith offers insights into its primary difference from (and development of) the style of Eat the Document. As an example, Smith details how the weaving of music and sound across cuts in Renaldo and Clara, rather than cutting completely between scenes and their soundtracks in Eat the Document, “dazzles in its complexity.” Smith implies that this is a significant advance from the earlier film (60). Smith tells us that Renaldo and Clara is about “Dylan’s struggle to achieve a balance between his personal and professional lives,” and Smith focuses his attention on moments of “emotional nakedness” in the film. In doing so, the study privileges a biographical framework for understanding Renaldo and Clara.

His example is the scene from the film in which Joan Baez (as the Woman in White) “holds a red carnation and watches as Dylan/Renaldo and Sara/Clara awkwardly attempt to make love” (64). The slash marks in this sentence link and disassociate the autobiographical and the fictional. Despite the purported “emotional nakedness” of the scene, there is a meta-theatrical frame. The film’s play with personas in some way militates against Smith’s reading of this scene and its prioritizing of its biographical resonances. The push-and-pull between the fictional and the autobiographical—a tension between a Fellini-esque self-referential theatricalism and the legacy of verité documentary—perplexes viewers of Renaldo and Clara to this day.

Smith is on firm ground when writing about Masked and Anonymous. The script (co-written by Dylan and Larry Charles) has as an explicit thematic focus the legacy of 1960s idealism and the decay of the American republic. Smith writes that “Dylan and Charles’s script, unsurprisingly, contains many allusions to and quotations from a raft of literary sources” (86). The legacy of Godard, though unmentioned here, still pertains, as many of Godard’s films explicitly interpolate literary references. The major difference lies in the way that Dylan’s appropriations are woven into the script, the “borrowed” phrases and language giving the extended lengths of dialogue a uniformly antiquated and poetic register. In his discussion of Dylan’s compositional methods, Smith quotes Larry Charles saying Dylan brought him a box of notes and quotes scribbled on hotel stationery. In piecing together these fragments, the two writers attempted to capture Dylan’s impression of America’s descent into a kleptocracy that nullifies the idealism purportedly attending the iconic past of Jake Fate/Bob Dylan. Smith is correct to see in Masked and Anonymous not only an extension of Dylan’s allusive and appropriative songwriting style, but also a prescient foreshadowing of the current political climate in the United States.

Such political concerns register in Smith’s study when they touch on Dylan’s status as an icon of the 1960s. “The most important references [in Masked and Anonymous] are those made to Dylan’s own career” writes Smith (97). He explores the way Masked and Anonymous critiques the cultural iconography surrounding the creation of “Bob Dylan.” But we can find a point of critical tension here: Smith does not analyze the history that Dylan is exploring in the film script. The focus remains fixed on Dylan’s career narrative. For many readers, this will be a helpful frame for beginning to understand the movie. However, for readers long familiar with Dylan’s biography, it may be that it is precisely the imbrication of history and Dylan’s career—a dialectic that has always been present in Dylan’s cinematic work—that seems the matter of this movie.

The suggestive manner in which Smith raises these ways of critically framing the movie offers the interested reader a path of return to this strange and wonderful film. In Smith’s reading, however, the transition away from the socio-historical contexts that Dylan and Charles are playing with in alluding to Dylan as a cultural legend leaves a reader in familiar territory. No doubt the film plays with that legend, but it is a legend that the script places in a variety of American historical and political contexts, something Dylan’s allusive songwriting style does as well. In a book that embeds the films in the context of the time of their making, we do not find a link between the formal daringness of Masked and Anonymous and the critique of American history that dominates the film’s thematic focus. How does it feel to be Bob Dylan? We gain a sense of how the films express this question in Smith’s book. How does it feel to be an American in the 21^st century? This is a question that seems pertinent to Masked and Anonymous, but it is a question a reader is left to answer on their own.

Smith does offer an insight, however, into Masked and Anonymous’s sometimes overwhelming panoply of random characters. He zeros in on the emotional bond between Luke Wilson’s Bobby Cupid character and that of Dylan’s Jack Fate, writing, “The warmth and affection between these two characters, in stark contrast to all of the other relationships depicted, which seem based on exploitation, is key to understanding the agenda of Masked and Anonymous” (98). This is a good way of winnowing down the gallery of odd characters that Dylan, more like a ventriloquist, feeds his lines through. The tension between the Fate/Cupid relationship could have been explored more fully, but again, this framework gives a newcomer to the field a clear sense of the movie’s drama. Smith writes that “Jack Fate is the calm in the eye of the [movie’s] storm, a blank slate upon which others project their insanity, and Charles gets a lot of comic mileage from the contrast between Dylan’s deadpan delivery and the over-the-top performances of everyone else” (100). Despite the mixing of metaphors, seeing Dylan’s affected stiffness as a feature of the movie and not a bug is an interesting argument. He shows how Dylan and Charles use meta-theatricality to explore, rather than critique, the emotions of the main characters: “It’s as if [Charles, as director of the film] took a Humphrey Bogart character out of the 1940s and plunked him down in the middle of a massively absurd science-fiction landscape—the resignation and world-weariness of the stoic film noir hero remain amusingly intact” (100). This summation accounts for the way both Dylan and Charles shaped the script and, from such shaping, the way Charles’s direction remains true to the guiding themes and forms of late-era Dylan. Smith argues that the film is skeptical about the role of the artist in society and the ways in which even era-defining art, such as Dylan’s music, fails to affect social change. Nevertheless, continuing to create in the face of such skepticism ultimately defines Dylan’s work not only in this film, but in his music.

In the latter portion of the book, Smith takes up three films that do not bear the artistic imprint of Dylan per se, but which carry his imprimatur. In writing on The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, Shadow Kingdom, and the big budget Hollywood film A Complete Unknown, Smith notes these films variously curate the myth of “Bob Dylan.” In doing so, the book reflects on how this trio of films link to that abiding skepticism at the heart of Masked and Anonymous.

Scorsese’s second Dylan documentary infamously includes a whole series of fabricated legends and stories about the Rolling Thunder Revue voiced through actors performing the role of “witnesses” to the tour. As Smith puts it, since “the Rolling Thunder Revue tour . . . was all about masks and disguises—including Joan Baez doing a convincing stint in full Bob Dylan drag—Scorsese figured the best way for him to capture the true ‘spirit’ of that tour was for the film itself to wear a disguise” (119). Rather than trying to right the historical record, as many critical commentators of the film attempted to do, Smith wisely takes these meta-theatrical gestures on their own terms. The result is a sense of this film as decidedly unsentimental; Scorsese’s fictional embellishments, with which Dylan gamely plays along, are not ancillary ornaments to a standard rock doc, but make the film into something which probes the sources of our fascination with Dylan and the legends that have accrued around his career. No critic has pointed out, as Smith does, that this film (in which Dylan speaks to the camera in a “documentary interview mode” about made up characters and fictional scenarios) contains perhaps some of Dylan’s best acting. Hitting again on an insight about this “documentary film,” Smith avers that “Scorsese ultimately turns the whole project into a fantasia about this American yearning” for redemption (125). The yearning of Dylan fans to see the restored segments of full Rolling Thunder performances seems, in Smith’s writing, to include the historical frame Scorsese overlays upon the film. “This American yearning for redemption” (a phrase Anne Waldman speaks in one of the film’s interviews) is a desire for an original in a land of false promises and phony commodities. It is a yearning for an origin story which can lend the present meaning.

Shadow Kingdom is linked to “Love and Theft”, according to Smith, because its recording in 2001, Dylan was playing around with the idea of a fictional documentary about the making of the album. While it is beyond the purview of Smith’s book to tease out an understanding about the use to which Dylan works imposture, recycling, and repurposing into the album and the “concert film” Shadow Kingdom, we nevertheless find Dylan once again turning to film in order to shape his legacy or influence the myths which have accrued around this figure, “Bob Dylan.” The film does so in a way that complicates viewers’ assumptions about the typically “seamless” work of the concert film genre that puts a spectator “in the room” during the performance.

In an inspired connection, Smith compares the “roadhouse” performance sections from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return and the “roadhouse” milieu of the “Bon Bon Club” that is the fictional setting for Shadow Kingdom. He writes that the most memorable episode in Lynch’s return to the world of Twin Peaks, “the genuinely avant-garde” eighth episode, “was shot in high-contrast black and white and posited that the birth of rock ‘n’ roll was explicitly linked to the creation of the atomic bomb. Dylan had likewise spoken of early rock ‘n’ roll as being ‘atom bomb fueled’ . . . and ‘atomic powered, all zoom and doom’” (134). The threading of rock ‘n’ roll’s emancipatory power with the nullifying power of the atomic bomb links the “American yearning” that suffuses The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story and Lynch’s brand of American surrealism.

In the last portion of the book, Smith analyzes A Complete Unknown by piecing together extracts from various interviews with writers, James Mangold the director, and other actors. Here the theme of loneliness comes to the surface: Mangold’s film, the book argues, expresses the strangely paradoxical place Dylan found himself in, as a genius beloved by many for his work who also remained at a distance from those adoring fans. It is interesting, then, that Dylan chose to represent his development as a songwriter in a very traditional Hollywood musical biopic instead of something more exciting and illuminating as I’m Not There, another film that deconstructs (while celebrating) the Dylan mythos.

Smith picks up the theme of the alienated artistic self to contrast A Complete Unknown with Todd Haynes’s movie. In Smith’s assessment of A Complete Unknown, the movie’s ability to tap into an audience’s affective response to its formulaic structure makes Mangold’s film an apt vehicle for conveying Dylan’s essential solitude. “Dylan is ultimately unknowable” writes Smith about A Complete Unknown: “His transition to rock ‘n’ roll may have been an artistic triumph, but the man himself remains cloaked in a mysterious sadness” (150). It’s a virtue of this melodrama, for Smith, that such emotional connection to the story of Dylan’s diligent iconoclasm exists in a film where the protagonist remains at arm’s length, a figure out of myth and legend whose essence slips our grasp while his music remains indelible.

The musical set pieces in A Complete Unknown (like the concert performances cut up in Eat the Document and found throughout Renaldo and Clara) are central to the film for Smith. In these scenes, he finds that the director James Mangold advances the plot, develops the characters’ relationships, and displays the power of Dylan’s musical genius. “The best example of this,” writes Smith, “is probably the virtuoso sequence where Dylan performs ‘Masters of War’ in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis while Greenwich Village denizens are glued to their TV sets in their apartments nearby. Which is also the exact moment Baez falls in love with Dylan. The music is not just the backdrop to the story; it is the story” (149). Smith’s argument is that in the genre of the Hollywood biopic, the power of the musical performances interweaves most seamlessly with the narrative thrust of the film.

Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think is best understood as a resource for those undertaking a fully engaged screening of Eat the Document, Renaldo and Clara, or Masked and Anonymous. Smith’s work is valuable since it considers the production history of these films and their cinematic precedents. After reading this book, one should not turn to these films as sources for galvanizing performance clips, as Dylan fans and scholars, one assumes, have already done. Smith’s book begins the work of seriously evaluating these films on their own cinematic terms. The book offers a set of appendices that trace Dylan’s references to movies in his non-cinematic work, going beyond a mere filmography to indicate Dylan’s movie references in everything from his music videos, his songs, and select episodes of the Theme Time Radio Hour. Rather than pro forma additions to the text, they give us the tools to begin seeing these films with new eyes and with the conviction that Dylan is immersed in the iconography and the visual language of film.

Robert Polito. After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace. W. W. Norton & Company, 2024. 336 pp.

Review by Anne Margaret Daniel, The New School

After the Flood is meant to cover Bob Dylan’s career from 1991 to 2024, but you can’t write about The Later Dylan standing alone—because he stands neither alone nor still. It’s not The Early Dylan or The Middle Dylan, either, it’s just Dylan. Today, tomorrow, and yesterday too—today and yesterday are the bookends holding tomorrow in place, and they’re all together. Dylan is Faulknerian—the past is never dead to him, and it’s not even past. Ancient footprints of Rome are also those steps he’s just taken; when he stands in the Baths of Caracalla or Shakespeare’s birthplace, I would wager that it seems to be both then and now to him.

Dylan’s last thirty years are no “sketchy coda” (xv), as Robert Polito rightly knows. From his fifties to his eighties, Dylan, Polito writes, is a man who revitalized himself and his art with a fresh, brilliant, intensified collage style of crafting songs; vast, staggering concert tours—over three thousand shows from 1991 through 2024; writing books—Chronicles, Volume One (2004) and The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022); creating a movie, Masked and Anonymous (2003) and inspiring other movies, I’m Not There (2007), No Direction Home (2005), and A Complete Unknown; hosting a weekly radio program, Theme Time Radio Hour (2006-2009); and exhibiting his paintings and welded sculptures in galleries and museums across America, Europe and Asia. (xv-xvi)

Past director of the Poetry Foundation, Polito is a renowned poet as well as a prizewinning biographer (for Savage Art, about the crime/noir novelist Jim Thompson). He’s also a colleague of mine at The New School University, where he was the founding director of our Graduate Writing Program and of the Riggio Writing and Democracy Honors Program for undergraduates. He’s been writing about Dylan for years, and was one of the first writers and critics permitted to use Dylan’s archives after they arrived in Tulsa. In the Helmerich Center for American Research there in 2018, while I was reading the Blood on the Tracks notebooks, he was deep in song drafts from Dylan’s 2012 album, Tempest.

The first chapter of After the Flood, “A: Stay Safe, Stay Observant” begins with the covid pandemic and the release of “Murder Most Foul” at midnight on March 27, 2020. Polito’s close reading of the near-seventeen-minute epic resonates with what Greil Marcus rightly notes as Dylan’s empathy. Polito is right that Rough and Rowdy Ways is Dylan’s real Nobel lecture, to him: I love this idea.

Then Polito moves back to Al Santos’s immortal intro of 2002, and deals with Dylan’s own self-dealing of the leadup to the time period capaciously covered in After the Flood. He’s right that Dylan himself in Chronicles dismisses the 1980s out of hand—and Polito says of the decade, “the whole shebang a lullaby of awfulness” (15)—but beware when Dylan’s categorical: he’s often trying to distract us from something. The 1980s also marked the beginning of his decades of thousands of nights of public performance around the world—every night on stage a revision, a confessional, a Nobel lecture, and an entertainment. He toured with dear friends—Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers; the Grateful Dead—who renewed his music and his confidence. Polito calls Biograph (1985) and its liner notes “at the time suggestive of a lavish funeral program” (17), but I must disagree: Biograph gave us, thanks to Jeff Rosen, the first ever box set, and also “Abandoned Love,” “Up To Me,” and “Caribbean Wind.”

After the Flood is at its best when unpacking, through what Dylan has written, made, and performed, the “memory palace” of its subtitle. Memory palace is a classical and poetic term, making it perfect for Polito; and it is also a grim one. There is a legend of the Greek poet Simonides who, after the sudden collapse of a full banqueting hall, recalled who was sitting where to help identify the badly disfigured victims. Cicero later told the story, and then it spread into Renaissance philosophy as a way to use both memory and imagination to recall or reconstruct information. To me, Dylan’s memory palace is more Platonic: the shadows on the wall of the cave. What’s real and what’s imagined? Someone else be the judge. All memory and fate are driven deep beneath the waves, and I can’t tell their order, if there is one. However, I like it that way.

The closest we can get to Dylan’s memory palace is in the archives in Tulsa, in which Polito has spent perhaps more time than anyone other than the Bob Dylan Center’s librarians and archivists. When Dylan sings “I got a head full of ideas that are drivin’ me insane,” you know what he’s talking about after just a day working there: the absolute nonstop oceans of drafts, revisions, fragments, splinters, phrases, words—written on notebook pages, hotel and doctor’s office pads, menus, even pieces of paper bags. Polito quotes Dylan’s conclusion from Chronicles after discussing his constant reading about the Civil War in the New York Public Library in 1961: “I crammed my head full of as much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind, out of sight, left it alone. Figured I could send a truck back for it later” (Chronicles 86). After the Flood works through what that truck has brought us over the past thirty years.

Polito intersperses personal reflections and autobiography with keen analyses of Dylan’s lyrics and influences, particularly in the songs of Rough and Rowdy Ways. Dylan brings that sense of reflection out in us all, whenever we reflect on what he means to us, and on his own influence over others. Polito’s writing style is both that of a poet and a critic, and suits a study of Dylan, since Dylan himself refuses chronological examination (indeed, examination of any kind has always made him unhappy).

The intense chapters on Dylan’s other albums of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s are lyric and sharp, the way they make Polito feel often nailed in a clever line: “Time Out of Mind is the country blues record Beckett might have made had he made country blues records: those magnificent sentences telling you all those dire things” (53; though with Beckett, it would have been three words instead of any magnificent sentence, unless you’re Lucky). The magpie snippings and distillations of 2001’s “Love And Theft” “might be approached as the call-to-order of a fierce trilogy of associated releases that spanning Modern Times (2006) and Tempest (2012) would refocus and deepen the career rebirth he confirmed with Time Out of Mind” (78). Polito, unsurprisingly, is particularly good on Dylan’s poetical borrowings in the songs of Modern Times. He’s written before on Dylan’s use of poems by the “Poet of the Confederacy,” Henry Timrod of South Carolina, on “When the Deal Goes Down,” “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” and, for the 2003 film Gods and Generals, “‘Cross the Green Mountain”; but Polito goes deeper now into Dylan and Walt Whitman (“Come Up From the Fields, Father”), Julia Ward Howe (“The Battle Hymn of the Republic”), and Nathaniel Shepherd (“The Roll-Call”). I particularly enjoyed the discussion of abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier and “Scarlet Town.”

“‘Cross the Green Mountain” has the distinction of a video to go along with it, in which scenes from the movie “Gods and Generals” are intercut with Dylan and his band as a family deputation come to witness the death of, and perform the interment of, a young soldier. The video was filmed in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, in Hollywood Cemetery. Apart from the many marked graves of men who died in battle from 1861-1865, and of George Pickett, who survived the ill-fated charge at Gettysburg that bears his name, Hollywood Cemetery contains the remains of 11,000 unidentified Confederate soldiers, commemorated by an immense granite pyramid. It’s as bleak and chilling a music video as has been made, with the feel of an ancient documentary from a time well before moving pictures; Larry Campbell once told me that filming in Richmond that day was the coldest he’d ever been.

Dylan is more than a Civil War buff or historian—I’d call him a Civil War descendant, myself—as he has told us himself many times, and in many ways, throughout his career. In Chronicles, Dylan writes of his early days learning Civil War songs in the Folklore Center, listening to Paul Clayton and “Ray Gooch” and Dave Van Ronk expound on the war, reading biographies of Robert E. Lee, Thaddeus Stevens, and other wartime figures, and above all poring over newspapers from 1855-1865 on microfilm in the palatial reading room of the New York Public Library. “In the South, people lived their lives with sun-up, high noon, sunset, spring summer. In the North, people lived by the clock.   In some ways the Civil War would be a battle between two kinds of time” (Chronicles 85). As he reads, Dylan recalls how past and present melded: “The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way” (Chronicles 85). My father, a Civil War historian, would have agreed with Dylan that “Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected” (Chronicles 86). Resurrected, but America was not Reconstructed, and is still roiled by eternal reach of a frightful aftermath. There are traces of the “war between the states” and the endless evil legacy of slavery on every one of Dylan’s original albums; Polito is right when he says, in a discussion of “Narrow Way,” that “Dylan’s ‘bleeding wound’ at the heart of everything American once again, then, is race”—the phrase stemming from a speech Henry Clay gave in 1850 about the bleeding wounds “related to slavery that needed healing if the United States was to survive” (211). The Compromise of 1850 did not stanch the wounds. Nor, as we now know all too well, did the Civil War itself.

The word Polito favors for Dylan’s late song style is collage, which is good and painterly—I’ve always thought of Dylan’s style during these days as mosaic, because I like the intimation of Moses in the word as well as its Greek root meaning belonging to the Muses. However, Dylan himself has devoted much time to painting recently, and with increasing acclaim. Collage has the feeling of creative development done with paper and brushes and pens. It’s also a movie term, and Polito chronicles in detail Dylan’s use of film scenes, particularly in his Deep Focus paintings.

Dylan on the road is the continually moving Dylan—for Polito, moving in every sense of the word. Polito interlaces his own concert experiences over the years with Dylan’s performances, and his own experiences listening to as advance copy of “Love and Theft” just blocks away as the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City happened—as well as his later determination that “the raw, cheerless tone of Masked and Anonymous . . . carries the distinctive whiff of a toxic post-9/11 fume” (96).

The alphabetical chapters start to move more slowly by Q, a happy grab-bag of quotations, and S, for Sinatra and Shadows in the Night (and its two related covers albums). I giggled at V for Venice and the Victoria’s Secret / Adriana Lima in angel wings / “Love Sick”—and also enjoyed Polito’s discussion in this chapter of Dylan’s looks and changing sense of fashion. W is for weird, and the speculation about Dylan’s health and frailty, his apparent “performing in pain” and “sore hands” (286) seemed weird in this chapter to me: he’s in his middle eighties now, and whatever health issues he has experienced or is experiencing, he’s clearly capable of spending his time on stage, and enjoying it, too. X has the potential to be the most Dylanesque of chapters, in that X is the universal variable, and indeed it covers some of the most bizarre Dylan moments of the last thirty years (except for Soy Bomb, a notable omission).

After the Flood ends with Z. Bob Dylan keeps on keeping on. When asked in May 1966 for the day he’d be arriving in Ireland, Dylan replied “I don’t know. I’m just told to be at a certain place and I go there. I’m just an entertainer. I don’t ask questions.” Still on the road, still throwing change-ups every evening, still seeing friends once more along the way—recently hanging backstage in Santa Barbara with bluesman par excellence Eric Burdon, who is almost exactly the same age (born May 11, 1941) and whose rise to fame with The Animals and “House of the Rising Sun” (in an arrangement borrowed from Dylan’s 1961 recording borrowed from Dave Van Ronk’s) was coincident with Dylan’s own. Dylan lives his many lives, laying down no weary tunes but freshening what’s old and still writing what’s new—and he seems happy to be doing it. The gentleness and lyricism of his latest shows are happily apparent, particularly to young people and new fans who haven’t heard him live—listening to the words, talking about them after the gigs. That’s the way. Dylan follows no alphabet from A to Z. He loops from letter to letter, tosses all 26 in the air and has Dadaist fun with where they come down. The chapters of After the Flood could run this way, too: it’s a fine book for dipping into time and again.