Bob Dylan - The prophet and his mask

Who is Bob Dylan?

Spokesman for a generation of utopias, last bard of a lost tradition, a minstrel elevated to the rank of poet? Just when you think you've pinned him down to a definition, he's already off in the opposite direction. An enigmatic, elusive mask, in perpetual contradiction with his own image. Because the Dylanesque sphinx doesn't lend itself to the convenient simplifications of myth: its key isn't hidden in the stereotypes that time has stitched onto him.

“I didn't create Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan has always existed and always will”.

Bob Dylan is a character from the commedia dell'arte. Bob Dylan is the protagonist of a forgotten folk song. Bob Dylan is nothing that will ever be written about him.

PART ONE: THE SIXTIES

I was young when I left home

 A big sedan pulls up along the snow-covered sidewalks of New York, just steps from the Washington Bridge. The door opens to let out a boy with the slight build of an elf. It's January 1961, and the winter cold cuts straight to the bone. His gaze wanders among the skyscrapers, disoriented yet surprisingly bold. Robert Allen Zimmerman isn't even twenty yet, but his home state of Minnesota already feels far too provincial to him. His father's electrical supply shop in the mining town of Hibbing, where the family moved from Duluth when he was still a boy, is not for him. The songs he listened to at night on an old radio have fed his imagination with dreams he can't even name, and the dog-eared pages of his copy of "Bound For Glory" have made him dream of a life like that of folksinger Woody Guthrie. So he decided to hop on the first car headed for the Big Apple and leave everything else behind.

Rock'n'roll no longer seems to interest him much: he discovered it back in his high school band days, used it to invent his first stage name with Elston Gunn & The Rock Boppers, and explored it during his hitchhiking escapades through the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, playing piano in Bobby Vee's band. But ever since moving to Minneapolis to attend the University of Minnesota, folk music has taken over the center of his attention: his friends Dave Whitaker and Tony Glover introduced him to the mysteries of that timeless tradition, where it still seems possible to search for a sincerity that has otherwise been irretrievably lost.

And it's with a folk repertoire that the boy from Minnesota began performing in the coffee houses of Minneapolis and then in the strip clubs of Denver, between acts. "One night I was about to do it myself, the striptease...", he recalls with a bitter smile. His harmonica technique grew more refined, his guitar fingerpicking more personal, his voice more self-assured: New York is the next stop fate has set out for him.

Only a hobo

The bus bound for Greystone Hospital rattles along streets lined with snow. Young Robert gets off in front of the austere, imposing psychiatric hospital building and walks toward the entrance with hesitant steps. Before anything else, he has a tribute to pay: a pilgrimage to the room where Huntington's disease has confined his greatest idol, Woody Guthrie. Playing his guitar beside that bed to ease the old folksinger's suffering feels like becoming part of an ancestral legacy, sinking into the ocean of time only to resurface and face the present.

And the present, in an America on the dawn of the Sixties, pulses through the streets of Greenwich Village, where people debate the civil rights movement, in the clubs where the purism of the folk tradition is being rediscovered on the wave of the Kingston Trio, in the record shops where impossible-to-find vinyls are listened to, in the hootenanny nights where anyone can step up on stage, grab the microphone and accompany themselves on acoustic guitar.

When asked his name, Robert answers without hesitation: "Bob Dylan". His birth name, Robert Allen, feels too grandiose to him, fit at best for some Scottish king. What he's after is something more exotic: maybe Robert Allyn, like the West Coast saxophonist David Allyn; or Robert Dylan, like that poet with the alluring name, Dylan Thomas. But Bobby Dylan sounds too coy: Bob Dylan is perfect. A new name, a new life, even a new past, reinvented each time according to the inspiration of the moment, adventurous, romantic and legendary like the characters in the songs he voraciously learns every day.

"I wasn't looking for money or love", Dylan would later write of those days in his autobiography "Chronicles". "I was in a state of exalted awareness, determined to find my own way, devoid of practical sense and a visionary from head to toe. My mind was sprung like a trap and I needed no one's approval"¹. At first he limits himself to accompanying Fred Neil on harmonica, then his name starts appearing on its own on the bills of the Village's coffee houses, from the Café Wha? to the Gaslight, where he earns the respect of artists like Dave Van Ronk and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. To the more inattentive he seems like just another imitator: but in reality that boy absorbs, processes and assimilates every influence with astonishing speed, devouring every record Izzy Young plays for him at his record shop, the Folklore Center.

It's Gerde's Folk City that hosts his first important performances, first opening for John Lee Hooker and then solo: among the crowd is New York Times critic Robert Shelton, who on September 29, 1961 publishes a review destined for the history books. "Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist", reads the headline. And the article is a lightning-quick snapshot of young Dylan's artistic personality: "Mr. Dylan's voice is anything but pretty", Shelton writes, "he is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his back porch. All the ragged edges are left ragged, and a stabbing intensity pervades his songs".

A few weeks later and one of the most celebrated pages of rock mythology is already written: Dylan walks into a recording studio to take part in a record by Texan folksinger Carolyn Hester and to play harmonica on Harry Belafonte's "Midnight Special" (as documented in Through The Open Window); the legendary producer and talent scout John Hammond, who had already discovered the likes of Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin, hears him and it's love at first sight. "Although only twenty, Dylan is the most singular new talent in American folk music", old Hammond will write bluntly in the liner notes of Dylan's debut album. In no time at all, Bob Dylan, after being turned down by labels like Folkways and Vanguard, signs with Columbia Records, and in November 1961 records his first album in just two days. "I felt like I was floating on a cloud. I couldn't believe I was looking at records in store windows and that soon I, myself, would be among them".

Bob Dylan is a collection of folk and blues standards, somewhere between Jimmie Rodgers and Robert Johnson, performed with a fervor that often betrays his desire to make a mark at all costs. "I was playing folk songs with a rock'n'roll attitude", Dylan would later confess to Cameron Crowe in the liner notes of Biograph. "That's what made me different and allowed me to stick out and be noticed. Somehow because of my primitive rock'n'roll background I was unconsciously crossing the two styles".

The guitar marks out the path with precision, the harmonica accompanies the journey with liveliness. But it's Dylan's rough, nasal voice that brands every song, emerging as if from some unplaceable time and place: certainly not from the fresh-faced, round features of a boy from Minnesota with a Huckleberry Finn cap pulled down over his brow. A voice capable of turning its own apparent unpleasantness into the keystone of an entire poetic dimension, one that, according to Dylan himself, rests on the coincidence of the symbol of beauty with a real, tangible texture made of dust and soot.

His vocal range shifts easily from the falsetto of "Freight Train Blues" to the vehemence of "Gospel Plow", though it's especially when the tone turns drier that young Dylan gives his best, as in the stark "In My Time Of Dyin'", in "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" and in the emotional crescendo of "The House Of The Rising Sun", whose arrangement, borrowed from his friend Dave Van Ronk, would become the model for the famous version recorded by the Animals in 1964.

Alongside the traditional imagery of trains, highways and wandering hobos, it's above all the shadow of death that dominates Bob Dylan's repertoire, from "Fixin' To Die" to "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean". "There was nothing cheerful about the folk songs I sang. They weren't trying to please anybody, and they weren't oozing with sweetness," he recalls in "Chronicles". "They were either making you happy or sending you away, or making you force your way closer to see what it was about"¹. Attention, however, inevitably focuses on the record's only two original compositions: "Talkin' New York" is a classic urban talkin' blues, describing with sarcastic detachment the Greenwich Village scene, from which the protagonist flees with his eyes fixed on the skies of the West; "Song To Woody", which borrows the melody of Woody Guthrie's "1913 Massacre", is instead an open tribute to Dylan's great mentor, caught between the disciple's naive, devoted gaze and a nostalgic longing for a bygone era.

Released in March 1962, the album sells barely a few thousand copies, and in the corridors of Columbia Dylan starts being whispered about as "Hammond's folly". But it won't take long to prove the skeptics wrong.

A restless hungry feeling

At Suze Rotolo's house, politics is a constant topic of conversation. Her parents have long been left-wing activists, her sister works with Alan Lomax and his vast archive of folk culture, while young Suze has decided to join an organization fighting for racial equality, the Congress of Racial Equality.

Dylan has been seeing her for several months now. She talks to him about the civil rights struggle, takes him to the theatre to see Brecht's plays, and lets him listen to the folk recordings collected by Lomax. He, as usual, soaks up every word like a sponge, led on by his insatiable curiosity. After all, in America at that time, it seems impossible not to talk about politics. Since the mid-1950s, the American conscience has been shaken by landmark events such as the Supreme Court's condemnation of school segregation and Rosa Parks' historic act of defiance against the ban on Black passengers sitting in seats reserved for whites on buses. Since then, sit-ins, protests and freedom rides — bus trips organized by activists into the Deep South to support the civil rights struggle — have multiplied.

For Dylan, who by now is no longer content simply to perform folk songs from the past, there could be no better source of inspiration to start writing his own material. His first attempts, like "The Death Of Emmett Till", closely follow the model of topical songs, based on retelling current events, without much originality. But already in "Let Me Die In My Footsteps", which tackles the subject of bomb shelters and the nuclear nightmare, Dylan begins to show his own personality. It's no coincidence, then, that the newly founded magazine "Broadside", devoted precisely to politically charged songwriting, publishes the lyrics of a new Dylan song in its very first issue: it's "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues", a satirical talkin' blues that targets a far-right organization, the John Birch Society, mocking without much subtlety the anti-communist paranoia inherited from the McCarthyist witch-hunts.

Dylan is a torrent in full flood: at every show there are new songs to perform, written by borrowing melodies from tradition and dressing them in new words. "What I did to break out of my musical straitjacket," he would later write in his autobiography, "was to take simple folk changes and put new imagery and attitude to them, use catchphrases and metaphors combined with a new set of rules, which in turn gave them new insight"¹.

In the CBS television studios, the tension is palpable. Someone raises their voice, harsh words fly. A young man with tousled hair storms out, slamming the door, guitar slung over his shoulder. Dylan's new manager, Albert Grossman, has arranged for his protégé to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, already the stage for Elvis Presley's epoch-making performances. But just before going on, network representatives tell Dylan he won't be allowed to perform "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues", for fear of legal action against the broadcaster. Dylan refuses to sing anything else and walks out of the studio amid controversy. His growing reputation as the new name of the American counterculture only grows stronger as a result.

Starting in the spring of 1962, Dylan returns to the studio to record the new material he's gradually writing. His second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, is released at the end of May 1963, after Columbia decides to withdraw the promotional version of the record released the previous month and replace four of the songs originally included — among them the scandal-causing "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" — with four new songs recorded by Dylan, again in April (the album's outtakes can be found on the 2025 collection Through The Open Window).

"The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind".

Often it's the simplest line that carries the evocative power of an anthem. It manages to capture the spirit of the times, transfiguring it into a universal value.

It's not easy to set aside the rhetorical excess that followed, but the original version of "Blowin' In The Wind", which emblematically opens The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, is a march of sober solemnity, one that manages to avoid the trap of overstatement. Dylan wrote it in one sitting, certainly without imagining it would end up becoming the very image of his own stereotype. Modeled on the gospel song "No More Auction Block" and printed in the pages of "Broadside" magazine a full year before the release of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, it distills, in its urgent questions, all the yearning for a radical shift in perspective that truly seems to be in the air in those days.

Compared to his debut album, the growth in Dylan's songwriting (documented in meticulous detail in 2010 by another collection, The Witmark Demos) is astonishing: even in the new songs where he dons the guise of the protest singer, Dylan's poetic expressiveness manages to transcend the constraints of the genre. "Masters Of War" is a taut, merciless invective against all those who fan the flames of war, made even more livid by a relentless, circular guitar arpeggio. "Talkin' World War III Blues" is an ironic journey through a post-bomb world, "Oxford Town" recalls the riots that followed the admission of the first Black student to the University of Mississippi. But it's above all the hypnotic "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" that transcends the anxieties of its historical moment to rise to the level of allegory for a deeper apocalypse. It isn't radioactive fallout, it isn't the Cuban missile crisis, which in those very days had brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of world war: it's rather a kind of new universal flood, the one Dylan describes with his "hard rain". The nursery-rhyme structure, inspired by the ballad "Lord Randal", lends itself to the vivid visions of a collective nightmare made of diamond highways and trees with bleeding branches.

Love is a restless torment, as in the delicate arpeggio of "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", written during the months apart from Suze, who had gone to study in Italy. She is indeed the girl seen arm in arm with the young folksinger on the album cover, in an image with a romantic, cinematic feel. And the lessons of English folk ballads, learned by Dylan during his trip to Britain in early 1963, make "Girl From The North Country" a soft, nostalgic enchantment, whose echo would soon be picked up by the voice of Paul Simon.

In July 1963, the sanitized version of "Blowin' In The Wind" performed by Peter, Paul & Mary climbs the American charts, reaching as high as number two. For Dylan, it's the first chance to break through to a mainstream audience.

During the summer, Dylan shares the stage at numerous concerts with the queen of the folk revival, Joan Baez, whom he had known since 1961 in New York. "There was something lethal about the way she looked, shiny black hair that fell down to the nimble curves of her hips, long eyebrows slightly raised," he recounts. "As illogical as it seemed, a voice told me that she was my counterpart, that with her my voice could find a perfect harmony"¹. The relationship between the two goes beyond mere friendship and artistic affinity. Their performance at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival is a real consecration for Dylan, with all the most famous names in American folk joining the chorus of "Blowin' In The Wind" (which can also be heard in Through The Open Window). On August 28th, both take part in the March for civil rights in Washington, where Martin Luther King delivers his historic "I have a dream" speech: in front of a crowd stretching as far as the eye can see, an emotional Dylan steps up to the microphone and performs two new songs with Joan Baez, "When The Ship Comes In" and "Only A Pawn In Their Game".

With Tom Wilson's assistance as producer, Dylan continues to record the new songs that, in January 1964, will make up his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin'. From the cover onward, Dylan's new record appears marked by a stern, shadowy tone. His essential, dramatic folk-blues proclaims the injustices of the present and the yearning for change, following the lesson of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. But while the old-generation minstrels were driven by belonging to the very family of the dispossessed they championed, Dylan lives in a time shaped by the Pasolinian paradox of a protest movement with intimately bourgeois roots.

The role of anthem falls to "When The Ship Comes In", inspired by Brecht's "Pirate Jenny", and to the title track, which prophesies the advent of a new era through biblical imagery that is both menacing and redemptive. The social commentary draws on the retelling of tragic real-life events, drawing close in songs like "Ballad Of Hollis Brown" and "The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll" to the dry, raw style of his friend Phil Ochs. Dylan caustically retraces American history in "With God On Our Side" and takes a stand in "Only A Pawn In Their Game" on the death of Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist murdered a few months earlier, portraying his killer as merely a pawn in a larger scheme of power.

More than any other chapter in Dylan's discography, The Times They Are A-Changin' seems to suffer from being a product of a specific historical moment. The exceptions are "Boots Of Spanish Leather", which revisits the theme of "Girl From The North Country" with the same melancholic sweetness, and the song of distance and incompleteness that is "One Too Many Mornings". The closing "Restless Farewell", meanwhile, sounds like a genuine declaration of independence by Dylan from the scene he had been lumped together with.

On the other hand, disillusionment is a feeling that has been creeping through America ever since President J.F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. Barely a month after that traumatic event, Dylan is invited to the annual banquet of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which intends to award him the Tom Paine Award for his contribution to the civil rights struggle. Dylan takes the stage visibly uneasy, probably drunk. Facing an audience he can't relate to, made up of middle-aged people in evening wear eager to congratulate themselves on their liberal views, he jokes that the world shouldn't belong to the old. Then he goes so far as to say he sees something of Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in himself, at which point the guests' boos drown out his words. In truth, Dylan's speech runs deeper than it appears to his listeners, shifting onto an individual level the responsibility for having helped create the climate in which Kennedy's assassination came about. But the misunderstanding he receives is, for Dylan, the final confirmation of an unbridgeable distance from the rigidity of political activism.

It ain't me you're looking for, babe

The young man with his forehead pressed against the car window watches America speed past his eyes. The road disappears into the horizon with its load of promises, while his fingers keep hammering away at the typewriter resting on his knees. Cities, landscapes, encounters, sensations: everything flows in a whirlwind of verses.

In February 1964, Dylan sets off with a handful of friends on a coast to coast journey in Kerouac's footsteps. Sitting in the back seat of the car, he writes vivid new words nonstop. The boundaries of the folk song feel increasingly suffocating to him: he's now more drawn to the free suggestions of French symbolist poetry, from Rimbaud to Verlaine. And indeed, his records begin to feature actual poetic compositions, like the "11 Outlined Epitaphs" printed in the liner notes of The Times They Are A-Changin' and the "Some Other Kinds Of Songs" that will appear in the subsequent Another Side Of Bob Dylan. This is how "Chimes Of Freedom" comes to life, the most literarily ambitious song Dylan has written up to that point, in which the power of nature becomes a sign of the tolling bells of a long-awaited liberation.

On the radio is the buoyant "I Want To Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles, who had just landed in the United States those very days for their first American tour. Dylan struggles to hold back a pang of envy: "they were doing things nobody else was doing. The chords they used were outrageous, really outrageous. But to do things like that you needed to play with other musicians."

Dylan never felt at ease within the rigid schema of protest folk. "Songs with a message, as everybody knows, are a drag," he will state in a famous 1966 interview with Playboy. "Anybody that's got a message is gonna learn from experience that they can't put it into a song." His is not a retreat from the struggle, but a recognition of how the distorting lens of ideology ends up turning everything into a grotesque caricature: a deranged truth that absolutizes one aspect of reality at the expense of all others. "It's not that dedicating yourself to the cause of peace and racial equality is pointless: it's dedicating yourself to the cause that's pointless," he states shrewdly. Because the moment an ideal is reduced to a flag to wave, that's the beginning of its hollowing out.

But right at the moment Dylan realizes the time has come for him to take a different path from that of the protest movement's militants, he discovers he's already trapped in the stereotype of the charismatic spokesman of a movement he never actually belonged to. "It was kind of like finding yourself in an Edgar Allan Poe story," he recalls, "where you're not at all the person everyone thinks you are, even though they keep calling you that, prophet, redeemer..." A paradox that, in the collective imagination, still continues to this day to attach meaningless ideological labels to Dylan's name.

In June, back in New York after another trip to England, Dylan records his fourth album, Another Side Of Bob Dylan, in a single night, with the help of Tom Wilson and a bottle of Beaujolais. This time, Dylan makes things clear right away: "It ain't me you're looking for, babe/ I'll only let you down," he announces in "It Ain't Me, Babe". Dylan was older when he played the part of the preacher than he is now that he's stopped trying to be someone else: what he declaims in a metallic voice in "My Back Pages" is the overcoming of the naive opposition between the world of the young and the world of adults in which the revolutionary utopia of those years was caught up.

Another Side Of Bob Dylan takes on a more personal, less censorious outlook, from the playful yodel of "All I Really Want To Do" to the bitterness of "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)". "To Ramona" is a gypsy ode trembling with passion, "Ballad In Plain D" a venomous recrimination over the end of his relationship with Suze Rotolo, which Dylan himself will later confess he regretted writing. The rhythms become jagged, from the piano boogie of "Black Crow Blues" to the relentless Hitchcockian parody of "Motorpsycho Nitemare", a hint of his coming desire to break free from the classic structures of folk. The record, however, bears the marks of the transitional moment Dylan is going through and fails to even crack the Top 40.

His appearance at the Newport Festival in July 1964 raises the first doubts among his most devoted fans, centered as it is on songs from Another Side Of Bob Dylan and on a new, dreamlike composition titled "Mr. Tambourine Man". On October 31st of that same year, Dylan's concert at New York's Philharmonic Hall is recorded for a possible live album, but the record will only see the light of day in 2004, as part of Dylan's "Bootleg Series", under the title Live 1964. It's Halloween night, and Dylan immediately seizes the chance to play with his own reflection: "I've got my Bob Dylan mask on," he jokes with the audience. The performance alternates between humorous and committed tones, with the audience's laughter punctuating songs like "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and the then-unreleased "If You Gotta Go, Go Now". Dylan introduces a handful of new songs, from "Gates Of Eden" to "Mr. Tambourine Man", and tellingly leaves "Blowin' In The Wind" out of the set list.

In the euphoria of the hall, Dylan ironically introduces "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" as a "very funny song": but as soon as the verses start flowing from his lips, the audience falls silent, holding its breath. Joan Baez's entrance is greeted with an ovation: the blending of Bob's rough-edged voice with Joan's crystalline one lends an added charm to "With God On Our Side", "It Ain't Me, Babe" and "Mama, You Been On My Mind", where their constant mutual teasing turns every duet into a duel.

Dylan's thoughts, however, are already turned in another direction. In January 1965, Dylan enters the studio to record the material gathered over the preceding months, ready to bring to life one of the most revolutionary albums of his career: Bringing It All Back Home. This time he's backed by a proper band, with Bruce Langhorne on guitar and future Lovin' Spoonful member John Sebastian on bass.

This isn't a simple matter of plugging in: a mere electric overdub would have sufficed for that, the kind Tom Wilson — once again at Dylan's side as producer — would go on to devise months later for Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound Of Silence" Simon & Garfunkel. The heart of that epochal turning point that will come to be known as the electric turn lies instead in the creation of a new language (as the compilations No Direction Home and The Cutting Edge would later document): rock discovers for the first time that it is no longer just a matter for screaming girls, but that it can boldly address Poe and T.S. Eliot, Genesis and Revelation, as equals, reborn in a new, distorted, high-voltage vision.

Bringing It All Back Home is an album built on contrasts. The contrast of musical forms, first of all, suspended between the electric first side and the acoustic second. And, on a deeper level, the existential contrast between the self and a world trying to smother it.

The whirlwind manifesto of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is an instant shot of adrenaline. Dylan rattles off lines like flaming arrows, dragging the riff of Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" Chuck Berry somewhere entirely unknown. It's to these very notes that director Don A. Pennebaker would shoot the first music video in rock history, in which a scowling Dylan flips through a series of cue cards bearing the song's words, against the backdrop of an alley where poet Allen Ginsberg is locked in an endless argument.

Everything conspires to lock life into a pattern: the secret lies in managing to escape before getting trapped, as Dylan suggests over the scratchy rock-blues groove of "Maggie's Farm": ⟦Q1⟧. Freedom is a prize reserved for those who manage to break out of prison: that's the intensity that fascinates Dylan, from the self-assurance of the "hypnotist collector" in "She Belongs To Me", who never looks back and can't even be touched by the law, to the gaze of the woman at the center of "Love Minus Zero/No Limit", who has long since left arguments and verdicts behind and knows perfectly well that there's no success like failure.

Ferrying the album from its first half to its second is the invocation to the muse of "Mr. Tambourine Man", written for Another Side Of Bob Dylan and originally performed with Ramblin' Jack Elliott Ramblin' Jack Elliott in the version that can be heard on No Direction Home. ⟦Q2⟧, Dylan sighs, ⟦Q3⟧. Amid the guitar's enchanted filigree, the magical tambourine man, like a vision dreamed up by Fellini's "La strada", arrives to guide us toward a more intimate level of awareness of experience.

And indeed, in "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" Dylan's cold, claustrophobic recitative, set against a razor-sharp guitar line, confronts a journey through a world stripped of meaning, where the scaffold awaits anyone who refuses to conform. “Se i miei sogni-pensieri potessero essere visti/ Probabilmente metterebbero la mia testa in una ghigliottina/ Ma va tutto bene, ma’, è la vita e la vita soltanto”. It's pointless to try to silence the heart's yearning: as Dylan hints in "Gates Of Eden", everything endlessly points beyond itself, toward the true substance of reality's mystery. "There are no truths outside the Gates of Eden."

"My poems are written in a rhythm of unpoetic distortion," Dylan states in the album's liner notes. "A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet." The age-old debate over Dylan-as-poet is nothing more than yet another contrived misunderstanding. Dylan certainly has nothing to do with any academic notion of poetry: as Alessandro Carrera writes, "when Dylan is a poet, he isn't one on the basis of the literary self-awareness that shows through in his lyrics." But even when his lines can sound literarily naive or pretentious, it's the voice that delivers them that transfigures their power. "Being destined for music, and thus lacking formal self-sufficiency, prevents songs from being poems, but it doesn't stop them from being poetry"²: because poetry, to quote Clemente Rebora, "is discovering and establishing affinities and echoes and correspondences between heaven and earth, within us and between us."

Sitting on a barbed-wire fence

A gunshot.

A house collapsing into the void.

A kick that flings open the door of the mind.

From Greil Marcus to Bruce Springsteen, the first listen to “Like A Rolling Stone” is an experience that can never be erased from memory. That dry snare shot that flings open the road to a majestic, fearless sound seems to mark the watershed of an entire universe.

As the summer of 1965 approaches, Dylan has decided to stop singing. The role he keeps playing on English stages during the acoustic tour undertaken between April and May has long since stopped meaning anything to him. "It was a ritual of self-confirmation," says American critic Greil Marcus, "and the opposite of an event, which consists of staging something new, something unexpected, in which anything can happen"³.

Don Pennebaker's camera, which follows him at every moment for the filming of the documentary "Don't Look Back", is the most direct record of his dizzying transformation: every interview, every conversation, every glance becomes, for Dylan, an occasion for an exhausting dialectical clash. The press keeps provoking him, trying to pin him back down to the cliché of the protest singer, and he answers with an arrogant game of the absurd. Backing him up in his ruthless sarcasm is a small inner circle of chosen few, among whom the figure of his friend Bob Neuwirth stands out: "his tongue was as sharp as a whip, it put everyone on edge"¹, Dylan notes. And among the duo's favorite targets is the person most out of place on Dylan's English trip: Joan Baez. Throughout the tour, Dylan never once deigns to invite her up on stage with him: a blatant act of ingratitude that inevitably cracks the relationship between the two.

On the flight back to the United States, Dylan begins sketching out a convulsive outpouring in which to pour all the rage simmering inside him. "I was playing songs I didn't want to play, singing words I didn't want to sing," he recalls. "Then I found myself writing this long piece of vomit, twenty pages long, and out of it I took 'Like A Rolling Stone'."

It's a feverish drive that leads Dylan to shut himself away in his house in Woodstock — which in those years had become the residential town of choice for New York artists — filling page after page with those torrential verses. Dylan is searching for a sound denser and more powerful than the electric folk of the first side of Bringing It All Back Home, something capable of surpassing even the crystalline vibrations of the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man", which at that very moment is climbing the American charts: while the Beatles, about to release the album "Help!" and still more tied to the 45rpm single format than to the LP, would only embark on their psychedelic adventure a few months later, what Dylan has in mind is an uncompromising challenge.

And so, in mid-June, Dylan enters a New York studio to record "Like A Rolling Stone", with the decisive contribution of Michael Bloomfield, the formidable guitarist then playing in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and of Al Kooper, who found himself sitting at the organ almost by chance.

A rock'n'roll liturgy built on the chords of Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba," "Like A Rolling Stone" is an invective in which every syllable presses hard on the next with an ever more brazen, sardonic sneer, while the galloping guitar and piano chase an epic climax that rises on the wings of the organ. It isn't simply a vindictive smirk of scorn aimed at the haughty "Miss Lonely" who has fallen from grace, the song's declared protagonist. It's a far more radical question that Dylan's cutting voice means to insinuate with its provocative edge: is there anyone willing to give up everything to truly live up to their own desires? Being fully honest with one's heart means being ready to give up every false certainty: "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose." "This was the kind of drama that 'Like A Rolling Stone' unleashed in Bob Dylan's music," observes Greil Marcus, who devoted an entire essay to the song, "you reach that moment where you risk everything"³. Freedom, then, is the stuff "Like A Rolling Stone" is made of: the razor's edge of that constant risk on which existence itself is staked.

Stringing together a saraband of Siamese cats, jugglers, chromed horses and emperors in rags, Dylan's unstoppable creative streak stretches out to six minutes: unthinkable for the record industry of the time to release it as a single. "Like A Rolling Stone" is therefore cut in half and pressed on the two sides of a 45. But public protest is so fierce that it forces the label to backtrack and reissue the song in its entirety.

On July 25, 1965, just five days after the single's release, Dylan shows up at the Newport Festival, stronghold of the intellectual circle of folk-revival purists.

Could that kid in the leather jacket and boots stepping onto the stage, brazenly wielding an electric Fender, really be the same Bob Dylan who just two years earlier was leading the chorus of "Blowin' In The Wind" dressed as a working-class folksinger? And what is that deafening roar pouring over the crowd like a flow of molten lava?

More than a premeditated affront, Dylan's gesture is one of pure, candid madness. Dylan is impatient to let everyone know about the new path he's taking, and when he hears the Paul Butterfield Band perform, he immediately goes up to Bloomfield and asks him, without a second thought, whether the group wants to back him on a couple of songs along with Al Kooper.

"Maggie's Farm" hits the crowd right away with a nervous energy that makes the version on Bringing It All Back Home⁴ pale by comparison. Bloomfield's stinging guitar plays off against Dylan's mocking voice. The volume is so loud that the words are almost impossible to make out, the band's sheer force overwhelming every detail. The crowd starts to grumble, boo, protest in confusion: legend even has it that Pete Seeger, backstage, tries to cut the power cables with an axe. After "Like A Rolling Stone" and the raw, crackling blues of "It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry," Dylan leaves the stage: there hadn't been time to rehearse any more songs with the band. The audience feels cheated, and what breaks out is something like an uprising. At the microphone, Peter Yarrow of Peter Paul & Mary looks around, lost, then tries to calm things down by announcing that Bob is coming back with an acoustic guitar. But when Dylan reappears on stage, shaken and wounded in his pride, to sing "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and "Mr. Tambourine Man," it sounds like a final farewell, certainly not a defeat.

With the echo of the Newport boos still ringing in his ears, between late July and early August Dylan goes back into the studio to carry through the trajectory of the stone thrown by "Like A Rolling Stone," which in those very days is climbing the charts in America and Britain. Dylan decides to part ways with Tom Wilson for reasons never fully explained, replacing him with a far less intrusive producer, Bob Johnston, after having even considered reaching out to Phil Spector. The recording sessions take up less than a week in all and are dominated by typical Dylanesque chaos. By the end of August, Highway 61 Revisited hits record store shelves, its cover showing Dylan in a loud floral shirt and a biker t-shirt, shooting a defiant stare into Daniel Kramer's lens.

Riding the wake of "Like A Rolling Stone," Dylan unleashes a string of amphetamine-fueled rock-blues blasts, starting with the pounding drums and acid phrasing of "Tombstone Blues" all the way to the devilish rush of the title track, which a whistle - thrown in by chance during the recording - turns into an irreverent jeer.

Over the fateful tolling of a piano that seems to herald the final judgment, "Ballad Of A Thin Man" takes the stage, marked out by Dylan's voice like an irrevocable sentence of condemnation, while Kooper's organ swirls like coils of acrid smoke. Wondering about the identity of the "Mr. Jones" Dylan takes aim at in his scornful indictment is a fairly pointless question: suffice it to say that the most widely accepted version has him matching one of the many journalists Bob enjoyed humiliating. But what Dylan is really out to skewer with the Kafkaesque theatre of the absurd of "Ballad Of A Thin Man" is certainly not just some reporter: his target is rather the smugness of those unwilling to go beyond the illusory comfort of their own limits, ending up not even realizing what's happening around them.

The epilogue unfolds with the solemn descent through the Dantean circles of “Desolation Row,” a procession of hungry souls peering out from every window in search of hope to feed on. The electric arrangement initially tried out in the studio fails to capture the song's essence, so Johnston brings in guitarist Charlie McCoy from Nashville, who weaves a poignant acoustic counter-melody around Dylan's raspy voice.

Across the more than ten minutes of "Desolation Row," Dylan pushes his poetic technique of lifting historical and literary figures out of context to its furthest extreme, turning them into emblematic images of the human comedy. From Romeo to Cinderella, from Cain and Abel to the Hunchback of Notre Dame, from Einstein to Casanova, the characters of "Desolation Row" seem suspended between loneliness and waiting as in an Edward Hopper painting, struggling to fulfil their own destiny against a world that seems to deny their true face. Dylan belongs to them, the prisoners of Desolation Row: for everyone else, those content to stifle their own cry, new names and new faces must be invented, because their own no longer mean anything.

The ghost of electricity

"Judas!"

The shout comes from somewhere out there, in the darkness of the crowd. Someone laughs, someone applauds, other voices rise up. Dylan sways insolently in his grey suit, leaning into the microphone with a fire in his eyes. "I don't believe you..." The guitar chords are unmistakable. "You're a liar!" he accuses, with a contemptuous tone.

Unbeknownst to everyone, at the end of 1965 Dylan had married the model Sara Lownds, whom he had met the previous year in New York. In January 1966, their first child, Jesse, was born. While his life is changing so quickly, Dylan goes back into the studio to follow up on Highway 61 Revisited, which had reached number three on the American charts.

After "Like A Rolling Stone," Dylan had put out two more singles in quick succession: a rancour-soaked "Positively 4th Street" and the more predictable "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" But with his new album Dylan wants to fully realize the sound he's been chasing ever since he decided to pick up an electric guitar: "that thin, that wild mercury sound. Metallic and bright gold," as he would famously put it in a 1978 interview with "Playboy." An alchemical blend of harmonica, organ, guitar and piano, a philosopher's stone touching on blues, pop, folk and rock.

Dissatisfied with the early New York sessions, Dylan is talked into it by producer Bob Johnston, who convinces him to move to Nashville to record, with a handful of local session players, the final chapter of what would come to be remembered as his "electric trilogy," Blonde On Blonde. In the home of country music, Dylan arrives once again accompanied by Al Kooper, but this time alongside him is a new guitarist, Robbie Robertson, who had already been playing since the early Sixties with Ronnie Hawkins' Hawks, and who had taken Bloomfield's place on stage from the end of August 1965. Once again, the recording sessions are dominated by utter spontaneity, with the musicians working day and night to keep up with Dylan's pace and the relentless flow of his verses: the result is the first double album in the history of rock.

Blonde On Blonde sets sail aboard Rimbaud's drunken boat, cutting the moorings of rationality and handing the helm over to the beat poetry of Kerouac and Ginsberg. Musically, it's the crowning achievement of the quest begun by the electric Dylan, but poetically it lacks the same lucid tension found on Highway 61 Revisited: Dylan's verses venture into a dreamlike, surreal vertigo, where mules wear jewels and binoculars, railroad men are bloodthirsty, and Mona Lisa looks as though she stepped out from under the iconoclastic brush of Marcel Duchamp. It's a journey that finds its ultimate destination in the sleepless hallucinations of "Visions Of Johanna", with the organ's silver thread stitching together Dylan's hypnotic voice, and the harmonica marking the passing of each verse alongside the shimmer of the cymbals. The visions take hold of the mind, replace the self, and blow the consciousness apart: and in the end, the visions are all that remain.

The album opens with the boozy chants and ramshackle fanfare of "Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35", which matches the success of "Like A Rolling Stone" by reaching number two on the American charts, despite being banned by many radio stations for its drug allusions. A veiled sensuality runs through tracks like "Just Like A Woman" and "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat", said by biographers to have been inspired by Dylan's relationship with Andy Warhol's favorite actress, Edie Sedgwick. For the arpeggio of "4th Time Around", he even borrows the melody from the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood". And the light-footed dance of "I Want You", with its floating rhythm and romantic yearning, is as close to a pure pop song as Dylan had written up to that point.

"To live outside the law, you must be honest", proclaims the songwriter from Duluth in "Absolutely Sweet Marie". As if to say that the only consistency that doesn't condemn you to servitude is loyalty to the desires of your own heart. In the wake of Highway 61 Revisited, there's no shortage of long, loose-reined rides like "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again", nor of scorching blues numbers like "Pledging My Time" and "Obviously Five Believers". But it's for the album's final side that Dylan reserves the most intimate of his dreams: "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands", a mystical contemplation with the breath of the stilnovisti, in which eros is sublimated into agape, concealing from its very title a reference to his wife, Sara Lownds. When Dylan, in the dead of night, calls his fellow travelers together to record it, no one knows it's going to be an eleven-minute-plus track: so they all keep playing as if suspended in some unreal dimension, bracing after every verse for an ending that never seems to arrive.

"Judas!".

Dylan turns his back to the audience, an insolent smile on his lips. "Play it fuckin' loud!", he snaps at the band. The drums make their imposing entrance, with the rest of the group following close behind. Dylan turns to face the crowd with a theatrical gesture, as if to say, "Here's what you've got coming". "Once upon a time, you dressed so fine…".

As soon as the recording of Blonde On Blonde is finished, Dylan is back on stage, embarking on his first world tour. Al Kooper has left the scene, worn down by the constant booing that greets the electric portion of every show, but Dylan now has the full lineup of the Hawks at his side — the core nucleus of what will become The Band.

Every night, the audience splits down the middle: it almost seems as though many people go to Dylan's shows just to have something to criticize. As Allen Ginsberg observes, "if Dylan has sold out, he's sold out to God. Which means he's received the commandment to spread his beauty as far as possible. Whether great art could be achieved through a jukebox was the challenge, and Dylan has proven that it can". Dylan has become a symbol everyone thinks they own: and while they accuse him of trading his ideals for the vanity of pop, it's precisely by passing through a jukebox that his poetics becomes more subversive than ever.

When the tour reaches Great Britain in May, Dylan seems worn down by the excesses of his grueling battle on the road (and by the effects of the substances he relies on to sustain it). Once again, director Pennebaker is there to capture it all, for a new documentary titled "Eat The Document": Dylan comes across as a hallucinated oracle in dark glasses, perpetually fleeing from his own shadow.

It's in a theater in Manchester that the definitive clash between Dylan and his audience takes place (even though for years bootleg recordings mistakenly attributed that memorable performance to a London concert at the Royal Albert Hall). Its official release, however, would have to wait until 1998, with the fourth volume of the "Bootleg Series", Live 1966.

As usual, Dylan takes the stage alone with guitar and harmonica for the acoustic first half of the show. Every note seems sung in a trance-like state, each syllable delivered with an ecstatic cadence, almost as if trying to reassemble them into the words of some new language. It's as though Dylan were being pulled under by his own songs, vanishing into a kind of narcotic rapture amid the verses of "Visions Of Johanna", "Desolation Row" and "Mr. Tambourine Man". The harmonica launches into long, acid-tinged improvisations, and even a limpid ballad like "Just Like A Woman" ends up wrapped in a hypnotic fog. Nothing could be further from the stereotype of the traditional folksinger, in other words — and yet the mere presence of an acoustic guitar is enough for the audience to applaud, confirming the underlying prejudice fueling the protests.

When Dylan returns with the Hawks for the second half of the show, his opening salvo leaves no room for doubt, immediately confronting the crowd with the arrogance of a clattering, sarcastic "Tell Me, Momma". Mickey Jones's drumming is more thunderous and forceful than ever, Robbie Robertson's guitar spares no blows, Garth Hudson's organ has an almost tangible density; and Dylan unleashes a magnetic, cutting voice that sounds like a continuous weapon of provocation. The powerful electric reworkings of older songs like "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" and "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" seem intent on rubbing salt into the wounds of those who refuse to accept this new course.

Dylan commands the stage with the intensity of a shaman, while the clash with the audience grows ever more bitter, the opposition making itself heard through slow, mocking claps. Dylan mutters incomprehensible half-whispered phrases to force everyone into silence, then launches into a "One Too Many Mornings" whose epic, gut-deep delivery renders it almost unrecognizable. Then, after the sinuous organ spiral of "Ballad Of A Thin Man", all that's left is the final slap of "Like A Rolling Stone" to complete Dylan's declaration of war. The reluctant prophet has definitively become Judas. How much longer can he keep his balance on a tightrope strung at such a dizzying height?

There must be some way out of here

Whoever stares the sun in the face is always left blinded.

On a July morning in 1966, Dylan fixes his eyes on the ball of fire dominating the sky and loses control of his motorcycle. "I remember someone, when I was a kid, telling me never to do that". But it's not enough to hear — one must learn to listen.

For some time already, Dylan's gaze had been dazzled by a light too intense to withstand: his headlong rush through the visions of the ghost of electricity, culminating in the 1966 tour, had to come to a halt one way or another. Fate decreed that it would be a motorcycle accident that brought it to a stop. But Dylan prefers to turn it into a kind of Hasidic tale: the unheeded warning, the sunlight, the darkened sight. Because that was the day he decided to turn the page.

"The truth was that I wanted to get out of that insane race," he would confess in his autobiography. "The fact that I had kids had changed my life, more or less cutting me off from everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me, and I was seeing things through different glasses."

Dylan takes advantage of his long convalescence to withdraw into a personal exile of his own, cancelling all the dates planned for the continuation of the tour. At his house in Woodstock, in the company of his family and a few friends, the only tasks he devotes himself to are editing "Eat The Document" and writing his "novel" "Tarantula", a free-wheeling, stream-of-consciousness ramble inspired by beat literature, which will be published in 1971.

While the Beach Boys release "Pet Sounds" and the Beatles release "Revolver", Columbia puts out a Greatest Hits in an attempt to keep attention on Dylan's name alive. But at that moment, nothing could be more foreign to Dylan than the music scene around him: it's a different territory he's interested in exploring. Between the summer and autumn of 1967, right in the middle of the summer of love, his friends from the Hawks join him in Woodstock and start jamming with him in the basement of a pink-brick building nicknamed "Big Pink". In the relaxed atmosphere of those days, Dylan lets himself go in search of his own roots and their meaning: old classics (from John Lee Hooker to Johnny Cash, by way of Elvis Presley and Hank Williams) sit alongside new songs of only seemingly nonsensical nonsense, populated with characters who seem to have stepped straight out of Harry Smith's "Anthology Of American Folk Music".

The "Invisible Republic", as Greil Marcus called that timeless dimension of popular tradition and American oral culture that Dylan wants to draw from: "in that basement, you could believe in the future if you believed in the past, and you could believe in the past only if you could touch it, change it, shape it like the clay from which the past itself had shaped the present". In an era when the radical rejection of the past seems to be the only fixed point on which to build a new society, Dylan then decides to reclaim tradition as an original given, capable of reviving itself through comparison with present-day reality.

"It makes you think that the writers of traditional music managed to extract from their songs the fact that mystery is a fact, a traditional fact," he had explained to "Playboy" in 1966. But who had really grasped what he was talking about? "Traditional music is too unreal to die. It doesn't need to be protected. It will always be there." A death that is not primarily a denial of life, but rather the sign of its mystery.

What would come to be remembered as the "Basement Tapes" present themselves with the look of a sort of lo-fi ante litteram. This isn't simply a matter of recording quality: imperfection and incompleteness become a forceful, defining part of Dylan's poetics.

Robertson's guitar sounds lazy and languid, the organ notes spread out like golden dew. The drums are almost always absent, and Dylan's voice often slips into a conversational tone with a rural twang, lending a strange, ironic atmosphere to songs like "Lo And Behold!" and "Million Dollar Bash". Dylan moves through the galloping country of "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" and the carefree rock'n'roll of "Odds And Ends", the dramatic sense of fatalism of "This Wheel's On Fire" and the drunken stagger of "Please, Mrs. Henry"; he borrows the melody of Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill" for "Nothing Was Delivered", and turns the classic folk theme of the flood into one of his typical recriminations in "Down In The Flood".

The apathetic pace of "Clothes Line Saga" is the best representation of Dylan's sense of detachment from current events: even when news arrives that the Vice President has gone mad, nothing manages to disturb the calm of the family gathered to watch the laundry drying in the sun. "Well, there's nothing we can do about it," Dylan mutters indifferently.

Compared to the whirlwind of the moment, Dylan is by now somewhere else entirely. "I'm Not There" is his most personal confession, improvised under his breath in an almost unintelligible murmur: as Alessandro Carrera explains, Dylan is "like someone who would like to be there to offer help, and who sometimes really does offer it, but never forever, never for long, and you can never count on him being there the next time, because he isn't the right person, because he isn't there, he's gone, and whether it's a fault or a fate is hard to say, because fate isn't something you choose, and sometimes neither are faults."

And yet, from that elsewhere he has chosen to inhabit, his gaze manages to catch the essence of the present out of the corner of his eye with more clarity than those immersed in it, as when he sketches, with bitterness and solemnity, the state of America in "Tears Of Rage", or when he describes the wait for happiness with the certainty of a promise in "I Shall Be Released". What before was just an empty label now seems to truly take on meaning: Dylan reveals himself as a prophet insofar as he is a conduit to a reality at the root of appearances.

An acetate is drawn from the "Basement Tapes" and sent out by Dylan's publishing house to various artists interested in covering the new, self-penned songs by the songwriter from Duluth: the most successful cover is Manfred Mann's version of the circus-like "Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)", which tops the English charts in 1968. Robbie Robertson and co., for their part, use the material from those sessions to compose their debut under the banner of The Band, released in 1968 under the telling title "Music From Big Pink". Dylan's own tapes, meanwhile, remain a hidden treasure for a long time, helping to give rise to the first bootleg in history, "The Great White Wonder". It's only in 1975 that an official collection, The Basement Tapes, sees the light, curated by Robertson with the addition of numerous Band tracks. But the result falls short of expectations, limiting itself to a small fraction of the vast repertoire available.

Over the years, a handful of isolated tracks will sporadically resurface from the archives to appear on compilations such as Biograph, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3, and the soundtrack to Todd Haynes's film "I'm Not There". But to really explore the mare magnum of the basement tapes, one has to turn to the monumental collection The Basement Tapes Complete, released in 2014 as the eleventh volume of the "Bootleg Series": six discs unwinding like one great medicine show, populated by Bible salesmen and carnival freaks, drunken lovers and two-bit hucksters. One moment they're calling for the salvation of the soul, the next they're urging surrender to vice. The hermetic goes hand in hand with the trivial, culminating in the gospel-folk liturgy of "Sign On The Cross", the dazed monologue of a preacher who seems to have stepped straight out of the pages of a Flannery O'Connor story.

When Dylan, at the end of 1967, returns to a recording studio in Nashville, it's to bring to completion the path begun in the basement of that pink building. But once again, his road takes a different direction than one might naturally have expected: instead of bringing along his trusted comrades from the Band, Dylan decides to rely only on the bass and drums of Charlie McCoy and Ken Buttrey, both of whom had already worked alongside him on Blonde On Blonde, with the addition of Pete Drake's pedal steel. The result is a stripped-down record that combines a soft, pastoral feel with taut, penetrating language, anticipating the spirit of the Byrds' country-rock on "Sweetheart Of The Rodeo".

While rock soars off into the lofty flights of psychedelia, Dylan seems to be heading in the opposite direction. "I didn't know how to make the kind of records everyone else was making, and I wasn't interested either. The Beatles had just put out 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', which I didn't like at all... I thought it was an overly self-indulgent album." John Wesley Harding announces, right from its cover, a radical distance from the kaleidoscope of colors of the music of its time: a black-and-white photo on a grey background that looks like it's been pulled from some old album, depicting Dylan alongside a local carpenter and two Bengali musicians passing through Woodstock. For the first time, Dylan writes the lyrics before the music, in an effort to get to the heart of his words by eliminating every superfluous digression. Dylan will call it "the first biblical rock album", and indeed its verses are woven through with references to Holy Scripture as never before.

It's the image of the outlaw that dominates John Wesley Harding: the title refers to a figure from the old West, and the whole record is threaded through with outsider figures struggling against the barrenness of the world around them. But this isn't a Manichean opposition between good and evil: from the drifter of "I Am A Lonesome Hobo" to the immigrant of "I Pity The Poor Immigrant", the outlaw always coincides with the sinner, saved only by awareness of his own betrayal. His counterpart is the landlord of "Dear Landlord" (according to some, an unflattering reference to manager Albert Grossman), who puts a price on the soul and on dreams.

In the unresolved drama of this opposition, a voice rises in the desert to point the way forward: in "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" it is St. Augustine himself, appearing in a dream to reveal to every soul that its destiny is not solitude; in "As I Went Out One Morning" it is the Enlightenment hero Tom Paine, who steps between the protagonist and the wicked maiden trying to lead him away from the truth; in "Drifter's Escape" it is a divine bolt of lightning that saves the drifter from his unjust trial. All of them prophetic icons that seem to call for a conversion of existence, urging us to look away from the falsehoods on which everything is built and embrace the law of compassion, as proclaimed by the parable of "The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest": "When you see your neighbor carrying something/ Help him with his load".

The ideal synthesis of this journey is the mystery-laden dialogue between the two protagonists of "All Along The Watchtower", dramatically introduced by a piercing harmonica and the dark tread of bass and drums. The joker, in whom it's not hard to glimpse a reflection of Dylan himself, seems overcome by bitterness at the meaninglessness in which businessmen and ploughmen live. The thief, with his enigmatic messianic aura, is the only one who truly understands his anguish, and comforts him by saying that the two of them are not among those for whom "life is a joke". Time is growing short, and that world of lies is about to fall like ancient Babylon: the unsettling atmosphere of the final verse, built on images drawn from the prophet Isaiah, loops back as in an Escher drawing to the beginning of the story, sketching two riders approaching on the horizon amid the howling wind.

Jimi Hendrix would turn it into a storm of distortion on "Electric Ladyland", capturing its most apocalyptic essence: Dylan would be so struck by it that from then on he would always perform it in that version, and over the course of the Nineties would even come to reinterpret other songs from the album in the same key. But on John Wesley Harding, Dylan's voice is pensive and meditative, and the arrangements are sober and traditionalist, right through to the country-tinged close of "Down Along The Cove" and "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight": the contrast with the glittering sounds of Blonde On Blonde is disorienting, and Dylan himself shows he's well aware of it, mocking in the album's liner notes any pretensions to interpret his music. Although the album was released, at Dylan's explicit request, without much fanfare, anticipation for the return of the most influential songwriter of his generation was such that John Wesley Harding climbed to number two on the American charts: recognition for one of Dylan's most internally coherent records, even though over the years it would often be unfairly dismissed as a minor chapter.

Take me as I am or let me go

Barricades in the streets, cars in flames. Slogans shouted until they lose all meaning. The television switches off, and the voices of children take over once more. It's a sunny day in the American countryside.

Hope has become utopia, and utopia has turned into violence: this is what always happens when an idea tries to impose itself on reality. "The events of those times, the whole cultural babel, were imprisoning my soul, they sickened me". The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the French May, the protests against the Vietnam War: "I had the most serious intentions of staying well clear of all of it. I was now a family man, and had no intention of appearing in that group photograph"¹. Dylan's stance is a value judgment, not a mere act of flight.

It is only in February 1969 that Dylan gives in to pressure from the record label and returns to the studio to record new material. In 1968 his only official appearance was at a concert in memory of Woody Guthrie, who had died in October 1967: his performance alongside the Band is convincing, as attested by the spirited version of "Grand Coulee Dam" included in the 2001 collection Live 1961-2000. But when Dylan sets foot again in Nashville to work on a new album he has only a couple of songs with him, including the languid "Lay Lady Lay", originally written for the soundtrack of John Schlesinger's film "Midnight Cowboy" but delivered too late to be used. Dylan quickly writes a few new tracks and has fun playing with his friend Johnny Cash: of the brilliant sessions with the Man in Black, however, only the passionate duet on "Girl From The North Country" is released, opening Nashville Skyline (the rest would surface in 2019 on Travelin' Thru 1967-1969).

The break with the past is more radical than ever: Dylan even alters the unmistakable trademark of his own voice, adopting a deep, caressing timbre that fits perfectly with the smoothed-out edges of his new music. The story that he changed his voice after quitting smoking is just another red herring: Dylan is aiming, with growing awareness, to hollow out his own image from within. "I recorded a quick album that had the appearance of a country-western album, and I made sure it had a nicely reined-in, domesticated sound", he would confess in his autobiography. "The music critics didn't know how to judge it. I even used a different voice. People scratched their heads"¹.

Nashville Skyline, released in the spring of 1969, is a well-crafted country record, but it sounds mercilessly lacking in inspiration next to Dylan's previous output. It soothes without ever scratching, and for the old fans that's more than enough to brand it reactionary. For the first time Dylan includes an instrumental track, "Nashville Skyline Rag", but it's nothing more than filler to make up for the shortage of new songs. Between the playful smile of "Country Pie" and "To Be Alone With You" and the saccharine sweetness of "Tell Me That It Isn't True" and "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You", the best moment comes from the sense of regret in "I Threw It All Away", despite the clichés of its throwaway philosophy on love.

Commercial fortune keeps smiling on Dylan's new direction, carrying Nashville Skyline all the way to number three on the American charts. Dylan even appears on television on "The Johnny Cash Show": by now all that's left to complete his return to the stage is a full concert. But Dylan is careful to stay well away from the "three days of peace, love and music" at the Woodstock Festival: "I wasn't around", he would note sarcastically in "Chronicles"¹. In reality, everyone knows that Dylan lives right in Woodstock, and his house starts being besieged by hippies who claim him as their spokesman.

Dylan feels the need for a change of scenery, and at the end of August 1969 he flies to Britain with his wife Sara to take part in the Isle of Wight Festival. Backed once again by the Band, Dylan takes the stage in a white suit, a few tufts of beard and his new country voice: it's enough to further fuel the audience's bewilderment, among whose ranks are even the Beatles. The concert, officially released in 2013 as a bonus disc to the tenth volume of the "Bootleg Series", Another Self Portrait, turns out to be an uneven performance, caught between the effective rendering of some of the more recent songs, like the infectious choral take on "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight", and the lack of bite in some of the most celebrated classics, culminating in a stumbling "Like A Rolling Stone" in which Dylan even forgets the words.

But even that isn't enough. The louder the clamor of the "Woodstock Nation" grows, the more urgently Dylan feels the need to shake off the weight of his own reflection. So he hands producer Bob Johnston the outtakes from Nashville Skyline along with a handful of more recent recordings, to put together an album that would look like his definitive repudiation. "I released an album that was so bad that people would stop loving me and stop buying my records, which is exactly what happened", he recalls. "So I painted a self-portrait for the cover, and since I had no title in mind I thought I'd just call it Self Portrait".

The opening line of Greil Marcus's review for Rolling Stone leaves no doubt as to the impact of Self Portrait: "What is this shit?". Dylan's self-parody borders on the grotesque more than once, as in the opening "All The Tired Horses", where a female chorus keeps repeating a single couplet over an overwrought string arrangement; Dylan's own voice is nowhere to be heard, and it would be hard to imagine a clearer statement of intent. The accumulated material ends up filling an entire double album, on which Dylan alternates between a crooner's register and his old nasal twang. Covers dominate, with Dylan slipping into the role of easy-listening singer across a string of cloying, mawkish interpretations, from "Blue Moon" to "Let It Be Me".

The most emblematic moment of "Self Portrait", however, is the embarrassing version of "The Boxer" by Simon & Garfunkel (said by many to have been written precisely about the songwriter from Duluth), on which Dylan sings both vocal parts of the song, splitting himself into his two different timbres: a hall-of-mirrors trick that seems designed to prove it's impossible to look at his self-portrait and make out a single face. And yet, in tracks like "Gotta Travel On" and "Days Of 49" one almost seems to catch a spark of the real Dylan, the one who tries at all costs to stay hidden: a factor that makes the effect of Self Portrait even more ambiguous. All the more so since the backward journey toward Tin Pan Alley that Dylan would undertake in the new millennium, starting with Love And Theft, suggests that the disguise of Self Portrait, with its Elvis or Sinatra costume, can't be dismissed so easily as a mere joke.

It's no coincidence that the recording sessions later released in 2013 as Another Self Portrait reveal the substance hidden behind Dylan's iconoclastic gesture. By stripping away the more intrusive overdubs added during production — largely responsible for the album's syrupy, saccharine sound — and digging out from the bottom of the drawer a handful of songs with far more depth than much of what actually made the final cut, the collection confirms just how deliberately, at the time, Dylan's choices were steered toward the worst possible outcome.

Dylan's self-destructive parabola thus sublimates itself into a caricature of his own mask. But by now the process has spun out of control: "one day in 1968 the lights went out. From then on I had, more or less, a kind of amnesia: it took a long time before I could consciously do what I had previously done unconsciously." The shattered image recomposes itself along different contours. A new decade is about to begin.

Bob Dylan is dead. Bob Dylan is ready to be born again.

PART TWO: THE SEVENTIES

If dogs run free, why not me?

The blue of the sky is fierce and dazzling as Bob Dylan crosses the campus courtyard beneath the stern towers of Princeton University. They've offered him an honorary degree in music, and he's accepted without giving it too much thought. Perhaps to mock once again those who see him as a counterculture hero, perhaps simply out of narcissism.

It's 1970: the Beatles have announced their breakup, Simon & Garfunkel have decided to go their separate ways, and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin will tragically die soon after. It seems rock has come to the end of an era.

Having spent the first half of the Sixties building his own myth and the second half trying to destroy it, the Dylan who steps into the dawn of the Seventies is a two-faced figure, in whom the desire to shake off his own shadow battles with the temptation to surrender to the pursuit of the past. "I figured I could just get up and go back to doing what I'd always done, but I found I was no longer able to do it."

The speaker's voice echoes through Princeton in the June heat. "His music remains the authentic expression of the troubled and engaged conscience of young America," he proclaims solemnly. The air seems to grow even more suffocating. "The troubled conscience of Young America! Here we go again. I couldn't believe it. I'd fallen for it once more"¹.

Giving in to the lure of bygone days, after all, is just the flip side of running away. Dylan dutifully collects his diploma, only to later recast the episode in his own way through the venomous lines of "Day Of The Locusts". But the contradiction runs deeper, and a single song isn't enough to exorcise it.

Meanwhile, Dylan tries his hand at writing new songs for a stage play: American poet Archibald MacLeish has shown him the script of a work he's writing, titled "Scratch" and inspired by Stephen Vincent Benét's short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster". But Dylan's songs, among them "New Morning", "Time Passes Slowly" and "Father Of Night", don't reflect the poet's cynical vision at all, and the collaboration between the two collapses before it even begins. Dylan is left with material he isn't quite sure what to do with (some of it recorded even before the release of Self Portrait) and decides to give in to pressure from his record label, which is eager to redeem the songwriter's image as quickly as possible after the recent critical drubbing.

Barely four months after the release of his previous album, Dylan puts out a new one, with a decidedly programmatic title: New Morning. "I recorded anything I had lying around, fragments, melodies, odd phrasings, it didn't matter," he recalls in his autobiography. "That my records were still selling surprised even me. Maybe there were good songs in those grooves and maybe there weren't, who knows, but in any case they weren't the kind that make a tremendous thunder roar in your head. Those I knew, and I knew full well that none of the new ones belonged to that category. It wasn't that I'd lost my talent, it was just that I didn't feel the wind blowing at full force"¹.

Dylan's new morning sounds like a faded copy of the previous decade's glory days. And yet, however uncertain it still is, it really is a new beginning: Dylan stops hiding and starts venturing out to rediscover his own face, even if he's feeling his way forward along the road.

New Morning bears the marks of its author's uncertainty and ambiguity: when he risks the soulless jazz skit of "If Dogs Run Free" or the saccharine waltz of "Winterlude", Dylan comes across as disoriented and cloying, weighed down by female backing vocals and bland arrangements. But things change when he tackles sturdy rock ballads like "Day Of The Locusts" or "Went To See Gypsy", in which he imagines himself face to face with Elvis in Las Vegas.

Back to his familiar nasal drawl, Dylan turns for the last time to producer Bob Johnston, joined on this occasion by Al Kooper, who nevertheless struggles to find his footing. Indeed, the early sketches of the songs — almost all essentially piano-based — are almost always more convincing than the versions released on New Morning, where Kooper's organ isn't enough to recreate the mercurial sound of Blonde On Blonde.

In the jaunty sparkle of "If Not For You" you can hear an echo of George Harrison's pop sensibility; he helped write the song during a rich session that remained unreleased until 2021, with the release of Bob Dylan – 1970. In "Sign On The Window", Dylan keeps dreaming of a domestic idyll that might finally let him feel at peace: “Mi costruirò una baita nello Utah/ Prenderò moglie, pescherò trote arcobaleno/ Avrò un mucchio di ragazzini che mi chiameranno pa’/ Dev’essere questo il senso di tutto”. But compared to the bucolic landscapes of Nashville Skyline, New Morning is steeped in a more restless spiritual tension, from the invocation of "Father Of Night" to the spoken word of "Three Angels", which unfolds over an organ carpet with a liturgical tone.

We can’t regain what went down in the flood

New York: a scraggly-haired, oddball-looking guy, with a big pair of glasses perched on his face, rummages through the trash can next to Bob Dylan's house. His name is A. J. Weberman, and he has proclaimed himself the first "Dylanologist": his mission is to uncover, in Mr. Zimmerman's garbage, proof of his idol's capitalist corruption. It will end in a brawl in the middle of the street after one harassment too many, but the fact is that ever since Dylan decided, at the end of 1969, to move back to the Big Apple, his life has become impossible, hounded by zealots staging pickets in the name of a self-styled "Dylan Liberation Front". "The worst moments of my life were the times when I tried to reconnect with the past," he notes in "Chronicles", "like when I came back to New York. I didn't know what to do: everything had changed"¹.

New Morning is hailed as the return of the "real" Dylan and climbs to number seven on the American charts, but Dylan keeps a low profile, trying to avoid the spotlight. To see him back on stage, we have to wait until August 1971, for the benefit concert in aid of the people of Bangladesh organized by George Harrison at Madison Square Garden. His performance alongside the former Beatle, as can be heard on the double album credited to "George Harrison and friends" drawn from the event, "The Concert For Bangladesh", is confident and sharp: Dylan slips perfectly into the role, sticking only to classic songs and even agreeing to sing the anthem everyone was waiting for, "Blowin' In The Wind".

Columbia takes the opportunity to put out a new compilation, More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits, which doesn't limit itself to simply stringing together old hits: besides a live version of a forgotten gem like "Tomorrow Is A Long Time" and a few Basement Tapes songs re-recorded specifically for the occasion by Dylan together with folksinger Happy Traum, the album also contains two previously unreleased tracks, "Watching The River Flow" and "When I Paint My Masterpiece", in which the Duluth songwriter addresses, with renewed wit, the very creative crisis he is facing.

Dylan is searching for his own identity, for the direction to take at the crossroads between past and present: in November 1971 he even tries on the role of protest singer again, releasing as a single "George Jackson", a topical song dedicated to the death in prison of the controversial Black activist, presented in both an acoustic version and a "big band" version. Having left New York behind, he moves to Arizona, but even just hearing Neil Young's "Heart Of Gold" on the radio becomes an obsession for him: "I said to myself, 'This is me. It sounds like one of my songs, but it's not, and I'm not the one singing it!'"

At the suggestion of screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, Dylan agrees to write the soundtrack for Sam Peckinpah's new film, "Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid", a tense, bitter western starring his friend Kris Kristofferson. Dylan is also given a part in the film, playing an enigmatic member of Billy The Kid's gang named Alias. Dylan relocates with his wife for three months to Durango, Mexico, to take part in the shoot: a hellish experience, marked by family arguments and tensions with the cast.

The soundtrack, recorded in Burbank, California, after a failed session in Mexico City, comes out in the summer of 1973 and is almost entirely instrumental. The atmospheres of Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid are steeped in romantic frontier scents, evoked by spare, nostalgic acoustic guitar lines, barely underpinned by a discreet bass, providing the perfect backdrop to the film's scenes: Joey Burns and John Convertino must have taken note, when it came to creating Calexico. Amid the dusty percussion of "Cantina Theme (Workin' For The Law)", the banjo-and-fiddle gallop of "Turkey Chase" and the epic flute of the closing theme, there are only two proper songs on the record: while "Billy", presented in three different versions, is a classic outlaw ballad in the vein of John Wesley Harding, what remains indelible is the desperate prayer of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door", with its aura thick with lyricism and its gospel-tinged backing vocals. Backed by names of the caliber of Roger McGuinn and Bruce Langhorne, it's Dylan's first single to crack the American Top 30 since "Lay Lady Lay". Not to mention, of course, one of those songs destined to be etched into the collective memory like few others.

West Coast: that's where the new epicenter of rock seems to be gravitating. Robbie Robertson has also taken up residence in California, and in 1973 Dylan decides to follow him, moving among the palm trees of Malibu, where over the years his home will grow into a veritable castle. Taking advantage of being close by, Dylan and the Band spend the summer playing together again and start nurturing the idea of going back on tour. But first, Dylan needs a sign of change: so he leaves Columbia and signs with David Geffen's up-and-coming label, Asylum, which already boasts the likes of Jackson Browne and the Eagles on its roster.

Columbia's revenge isn't long in coming: in November 1973, the label releases, without the artist's knowledge, a collection of leftovers sarcastically titled Dylan, aimed solely at further tarnishing the songwriter's reputation: a handful of ramshackle covers plucked at random from sessions dating roughly back to the Self Portrait period, including an embarrassing rendition of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" and some disjointed reworkings of classics like "Can't Help Falling In Love".

Dylan doesn't pay it much mind: in the meantime he has recorded a new record with the Band in Los Angeles in just a couple of days, meant to serve as the launching pad for the long-awaited comeback tour. The record, in stores at the start of 1974, was supposed to be titled "Ceremonies Of The Horsemen", a line taken directly from "Love Minus Zero / No Limit", but Dylan ultimately opts for the more ambiguous Planet Waves.

Despite the great expectations tied to the names involved and the amount of time that had by then passed since Dylan's last proper album, Planet Waves comes across as an uneven work: for the most part, Dylan settles for offering harmless love odes ("On A Night Like This", "Hazel", "You Angel You"), while the Band continues along the trajectory begun with "Cahoots", winking at the soft rock then on the rise. What redeems the record, though, is one of the most celebrated songs in Dylan's entire catalog, "Forever Young": Dylan dedicates it to his newborn son Jakob, with the outlook of someone who knows he cannot determine his children's fate, but has learned that being a father means asking, every day, that their path reach fulfillment. The song is presented first in its more meditative guise, solemnly adorned with guitar flourishes, and then in a livelier version, driven by Rick Danko's bass and Dylan's harmonica.

It isn't the only memorable moment on Planet Waves: the sobbing of Robertson's guitar, barely brushed by Garth Hudson's organ, provides the perfect backdrop to the anguished farewell song "Going Going Gone", while Richard Manuel's piano introduces the somber march of "Dirge", in which Dylan lashes out, his voice thick with resentment, at an addressee who is really nothing more than a projection of himself: “Ho sentito i tuoi canti di libertà e l’uomo spogliato per sempre/ Che sfoga la sua follia mentre la sua schiena viene frustata/ Come uno schiavo in orbita viene percosso fino ad essere domato/ tutto per la gloria di un istante, ed è una sporca, marcia vergogna”.

As an epilogue, Dylan then adds, at the last moment, the bare confession for voice and guitar of "Wedding Song", an intimate tribute to his wife Sara that revisits the theme of mystical love at a level the American songwriter hadn't ventured to explore since the days of Blonde On Blonde.

Although, for the first time in Dylan's career, the record enters the charts straight at number one, sales ultimately fall short of expectations. Meanwhile, though, the tour marking his grand return to the stage has already begun. What Dylan doesn't know is that, compared to eight years earlier, things have changed a great deal: rock concerts have become a massive commercial machine, dominated by self-reference and spectacle.

"From the very moment I stepped onto the stage for the first show, I knew that getting through that tour would be the hardest, toughest thing I had ever done." Dylan tries to adapt to the situation, needing to find that part of himself which seems to have gone missing. "I think I was just playing a part on that tour. I was playing the part of Bob Dylan, and the Band was playing the part of the Band. It was a meaningless thing. People came to see us mostly because they wanted to see what they had missed out on the first time around." Once again, the rift between present reality and the mirage of the past: "It wasn't the same as before at all. When we had needed that approval from the audience, it hadn't been there. But this time it didn't matter."

From the final dates of the tour comes a double live album as a souvenir, Before The Flood, the first live record in Dylan's discography. Once the euphoria of the moment wears off, though, the record reveals all its limitations: Dylan's vocal performances come across as strained and overblown, sacrificing nuance for flat emphasis, while the Band, compared to the tension of 1966, often seems to lapse into mannerism. Before The Flood represents Dylan's version of the stadium rockstar: nearly all the songs, mostly dating back to the Sixties, are belted out with a fervor that is an end in itself, and the old fire only flares up again here and there, on the sardonic "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" and "Ballad Of A Thin Man".

Things don't change much in Dylan's acoustic set either, which alternates with Robertson and co.'s classics, from "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" to "The Weight". Riding the wave of the Watergate scandal, the furious rendition of "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" draws an ovation from the crowd when Dylan proclaims that the President is naked. And the grand finale, complete with "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Blowin' In The Wind" right on cue, receives a triumphant reception, despite all the rhetorical flourish on display.

Dylan seems to have decided to accept his fate as a living legend: all that's left for him to do is prove he can still pull it off, in his own way.

When I paint my masterpiece

"Show me what you can do." In a gruff, surly tone, the old painter shows his aspiring pupil a vase, then immediately hides it from view. "Now draw it." The man standing before him is no ordinary figure, but the old painter doesn't seem to care. "I started drawing, but I couldn't remember anything about that vase: I had looked at it, but I hadn't seen it."

To become aware of how to resolve the dichotomy he had been wrestling with since the days of New Morning, Dylan needed the help of a painter: his name was Norman Raeben, and it's thanks to him that Dylan arrived at the new artistic approach he had been searching for.

It wasn't the first time Dylan had dabbled in painting, but Raeben's lessons were something different. "He didn't so much teach you to paint or draw as teach you to make your head, your mind and your eyes communicate with each other, to make you visually realize what is real. He looked into your soul and told you who you were."

That's how Dylan came to grasp something he would only be able to put into words years later: "Yesterday, today and tomorrow all exist in the same space." The conflict between past and present can only dissolve into an eternal here and now. "A song has to be heroic enough to give the impression that it has stopped time."

Back on his own in the spring of 1974, in a New York already stirring with the first rumblings of the punk revolution, Dylan went back to haunting the clubs of the Big Apple and attending Raeben's lessons, beginning to apply the techniques he'd learned from the painter to his own lyrics. The return on the road for the tour with the Band had further strained his relationship with Sara, which had already seemed to be in crisis for some time. "She could never understand what I was talking about or what I was thinking, and I wasn't able to explain it to her either": Dylan felt his wife growing ever more distant, and the torment of that distance runs deep through the new songs that took shape during the summer of 1974, on a vacation in Minnesota with his children.

In September of that year, Dylan, having patched things up with Columbia, recorded in New York a first version of what would turn out to be one of the most intense high points of his entire career: Blood On The Tracks. Having dropped the idea of working with a proper backing band, Dylan opted for the barest of accompaniments, sketching out a spare, essential set of songs built from acoustic brushstrokes and soft swells of bass, over which the moan of the harmonica, the caress of the pedal steel and a faint keyboard backdrop would slowly make their way.

“Love is so simple, to quote a phrase”: does Dylan really believe it, when in “You're A Big Girl Now” he echoes the words sighed by Arletty in “Les enfants du paradis”? It might seem like a natural act, something as innate as breathing or eating. But sometimes it's not even a given that you can get the food to your mouth, as “Idiot Wind” suggests. No, there's nothing simple about love. Because to love means overcoming the estrangement that separates us from others, the idiot wind that blows every time we open our mouths. And yet the wistful melody of “Simple Twist Of Fate” suggests it can't all just be a simple twist of fate.

Going against the wind is the way of love, and there's no harder road. What he's trying to grasp is far more than a mere break-up album: love is transfigured into mysticism, following the Stilnovist archetype of that mysterious “Italian poet from the thirteenth century” who appears in “Tangled Up In Blue”. And so the apparition conjured up by “Shelter From The Storm” – silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers tangled in her hair – is swept away by a perspective that predates the very creation of the world: “La bellezza cammina sul filo del rasoio, un giorno la farò mia/ Se solo potessi rimettere indietro l'orologio all'ora in cui Dio e lei nacquero”. The beauty that will save the world is also the beauty that no one can ever possess.

This is no longer just a feeling, but the search for a vanishing point in which everything is reflected: “Ora devi andartene, lo so/ Ma io ti vedrò nel cielo/ Nell’erba alta, in quelli che amo”, Dylan confesses amid the only seemingly carefree mood of “You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”. The most terrible torment is discovering that, in trying to reach that point, you've ended up destroying with your own hands the very promise you'd glimpsed.

What emerges forcefully from what would come to be remembered as the “New York Sessions” (collected in 2018 on More Blood, More Tracks) is Dylan's soul laid bare, stripped down and vulnerable as never before. But the Duluth-born songwriter, back home with his family in Minnesota for the Christmas holidays, decides to improvise some new recording sessions in Minneapolis with a group of local musicians. This is how the definitive version of Blood On The Tracks came about, released in January 1975, with half the tracklist replaced compared to the earlier versions.

The Minneapolis versions aren't simply new variations, but genuine rewrites, often lyrically as well. Just compare the mournful tread of "Idiot Wind": where affliction once dominated, a different emphasis now takes hold, a vehemence made of anger, resentment, sarcasm. Perhaps it's the need to gain some distance from a fragility too openly exposed, or simply the worry that something so bare might go misunderstood. Dylan's voice seems to want to rise into a howl of pain, the drums lend more energy to the way he attacks the verses, and the organ sound becomes urgent and enveloping.

The beating heart, though, always remains the same. And it has everything to do with the great equation between life and the journey, as Dylan proclaims at the end of the circular trajectory of “Tangled Up In Blue”, just as the very line of time seems to dissolve. Perhaps the secret lies in the almost wisdom-like simplicity of “Buckets Of Rain”, the soft folk nursery rhyme with which Dylan chooses to close the record: “La vita è triste / La vita è una fregatura / Fa ciò che devi e fallo bene”.

There's a job to be done, and nothing left to do but get back on the road.

The Rolling Thunder is now at hand.

You came down on me like rolling thunder

The slender silhouette of a girl with long raven hair emerges from the shadows of Greenwich Village, crossing the street with a violin case slung over her shoulder.

A car pulls up, she exchanges a few words, they invite her to get in. Before she even has time to grasp what's happening, she finds herself in a recording studio in the dead of night, playing violin alongside Bob Dylan. The girl's name is Scarlet Rivera, and until moments earlier she was just another street musician: now, instead, she is about to leave an unmistakable mark on the sound the Duluth songwriter is searching for as he looks to follow up Blood On The Tracks.

Since Dylan has taken to haunting the clubs of the Village again, the web of relationships he's been weaving is leading him in new directions. At the Other End, which at the time hosts a young Patti Smith on stage, he runs into Jacques Levy, already a collaborator of Roger McGuinn and director of the controversial stage show "Oh! Calcutta": the two immediately set to work together on a song called "Isis", and after writing verses for hours they head straight back to the club to play them for everyone.

Ideas are pouring out non-stop as they haven't in years, and in mid-July 1975 Dylan decides to go into the studio to record the new songs he's writing with Levy. But the session, which also features Eric Clapton, immediately proves too crowded and chaotic to work: only "Romance In Durango" survives, a galloping western number with a tex-mex flavor colored by horns, accordion and mandolin, inspired by memories of his time on the set of "Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid". The collaboration with the former Cream guitarist will continue nonetheless with the duet "Sign Language", which Clapton would include the following year on his "No Reason To Cry".

When Dylan returns to the studio at the end of July, on producer Don DeVito's advice the lineup has been drastically trimmed: besides Scarlet Rivera, the only musicians left alongside Dylan are essentially Rob Stoner on bass, Howie Wyeth on drums, and guest of honor Emmylou Harris, whose duets with Gram Parsons had enchanted Bob. Nearly all the songs destined to make up the American songwriter's new album are born in the rush of a single session, at the end of which Dylan runs out into the street, euphoric as never before.

Desire is the most cinematic chapter in Dylan's discography: every song is a succession of urgent images, following a plot masterfully devised with the help of Jacques Levy. From the very opening of "Hurricane", with its galloping congas and its tight, driving breaks, we find ourselves plunged into a screenplay that offers no respite: Dylan's razor-sharp voice tells, like a film noir, the story of the Black boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, wrongly accused of murder and sentenced to life in prison (in 1999 the film "Hurricane", starring Denzel Washington, would be dedicated to him). Dylan went to visit him in prison after reading his autobiography "The Sixteenth Round" and decided to join the fight for his release. But "Hurricane" has nothing to do with Dylan's recent, uncertain attempts to engage again with current events: it's a flow of lightning-fast rhymes that captures every scene like a movie camera, with the gypsy-like swirls of Scarlet Rivera's violin accompanying the molten rhythm of the percussion.

The same epic quality pervades the more than ten minutes of "Joey" too, which, amid interweaving accordion and violin, recounts the deeds of New York gangster Joe Gallo, with a sense of tragic inevitability worthy of a scene from "The Godfather". Dylan's take on the story turns the mob boss into a romantic outlaw figure, inevitably stirring controversy (including criticism from Lester Bangs).

In "One More Cup Of Coffee (Valley Below)", center stage is taken by the image of the dying "king of the gypsies", whom Dylan had gone to visit during his trip to France with painter David Oppenheim in the preceding months: a vision steeped in melancholy, to which Emmylou Harris's counter-vocal and the violin's arabesques lend a gypsy aura.

The album's only weak spot is the digression of "Mozambique" (included in place of the far more significant "Abandoned Love", which can be found on Biograph), which tries to use the beaches of Mozambique, newly independent from Portugal, as a symbol of freedom, but ends up amounting to nothing more than a trivial tropical postcard.

Between the cult of Isis, the Great Mother, and the icon of Black Sara, patroness of the gypsies, Dylan's eternal feminine takes on, in Desire, a connotation more steeped in mysticism than ever. The slow, implacable tread of the piano introduces the ecstatic hallucination of "Isis", in which Dylan channels into a surreal narrative his own conception of marriage as a refuge from the storm, a place to return to in order to renew one's "yes". In the lament of "Oh, Sister", Dylan pushes all the way to the source of the mystery of the union between man and woman: “Siamo cresciuti insieme/ Dalla culla fino alla tomba/ Siamo morti e siamo rinati/ E poi misteriosamente salvati”.

Then, a piercing harmonica accompanies the profane litany of "Sara", an extreme act of contemplation directed at his increasingly distant wife. "Radiant jewel", "glamorous nymph", "mystical child", "sweet love of my life": "Sara" is a page of memories so personal that one feels a strange sense of discomfort even approaching it. The night Dylan recorded it, she was right there before his eyes, and no one had ever heard that song before. The plea with which it closes — and Dylan's willingness not to confine so intimate a moment to the private sphere — is the tangible sign of an almost desperate desire to recover something at risk of being lost forever.

The release of Desire is delayed until January 1976, since Dylan is forced by Columbia's lawyers to alter some passages in the lyrics of "Hurricane": it will prove to be one of the most successful tracks in his entire catalog, topping the American charts. But in the meantime, Dylan has already embarked on a new adventure.

After ten years of wrestling with his own double, Dylan is once again at the peak of inspiration, in a state of grace comparable only to that of the months between 1965 and 1966. When it comes time to go back on the road, he's no longer willing to accept the compromises of the previous year's tour with the Band. So Dylan recruits, from among the clubs of the Village, a motley crew of old friends and allies, from Joan Baez to Roger McGuinn, from Ramblin' Jack Elliott to Bob Neuwirth, and invites them to join a kind of traveling circus in his wake: the "Rolling Thunder Revue". Jacques Levy directs the show, playwright Sam Shepard is enlisted to help turn it into a film, and Allen Ginsberg joins the troupe as its official bard.

Dylan's picaresque traveling show moves from city to city without announcing its arrival, relying on word of mouth and favoring small venues. In an America busy celebrating the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, what Dylan has in mind is a pilgrimage along the roads of the "invisible republic": "an old-time medicine show, a musical extension of the commedia dell'arte", as writer Larry "Ratso" Sloman will describe it. And just as in the commedia dell'arte, Dylan takes the stage with his face painted white (or even wearing a transparent mask), restating more explicitly than ever the leitmotif of the irreconcilable antinomy between identity and appearance.

Along the way, the caravan is joined by names such as Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie and Gordon Lightfoot: the audiences at the shows grow larger and larger, culminating in the triumphant finale at New York's Madison Square Garden for a benefit concert in support of Rubin Carter's cause, dubbed the "Night Of The Hurricane", which Muhammad Ali also attends. In 2019, Martin Scorsese will dedicate a stunning documentary to this adventure, one that perfectly captures the spirit of the Dylanesque circus, blending truth and fiction in equal measure.

The recordings of the "Rolling Thunder Revue" concerts are officially released in 2002, as part of the "Bootleg Series", with the double album Live 1975 (followed in 2019, to the delight of completists, by a hefty 14-CD box set, The 1975 Live Recordings): an essential document that captures Dylan at a moment of unrepeatable vitality, backed by a tightly-knit group of friends (starting with the backing band rechristened Guam). The glam-tinged jaggedness of Mick Ronson's playing, the legendary guitarist of David Bowie's Spiders From Mars, Rob Stoner's supple, sinuous bass, and T-Bone Burnett's faithful guitar work all combine to produce a blazing, pulsating sound. "I never heard Dylan sing so powerfully," Allen Ginsberg will say. "He sounds like an emperor of sound."

Dylan begins to think of his songs as a painting in constant flux, to be reinvented every night in an endless attempt to paint his own masterpiece. So "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You" is completely rewritten, transformed from a country serenade into a vibrant statement of intent, while "It Ain't Me Babe" is delivered with liberating fervor. David Mansfield's mandolin underscores the majesty of the chorus of "The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll", and the riff of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" gives Dylan's visions a force that is even more overwhelming than the original.

When left alone with his acoustic guitar, Dylan confronts every syllable with relentless clarity, offering dazzling interpretations of both old and new songs, from "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" to "Simple Twist Of Fate". The duets with Joan Baez, from the sparkling "Mama, You Been On My Mind" to a cover of "The Water Is Wide", are an opportunity to renew the game between the two, with Joan taking the stage disguised as Dylan and Bob teasing her by brushing her lips in front of the microphone. But the most emblematic moment of the "Rolling Thunder Revue" shows comes with "Isis", in which Dylan plunges into a feverish recitation, setting aside the guitar to focus on theatrical, histrionic gestures, accompanied by Scarlet Rivera's electric violin.

A few months after the release of Desire, in the spring of 1976, Dylan once again summons his fellow travelers and decides to stage a second "Rolling Thunder Revue". But the spirit has changed, and innocence has given way to anger. During rehearsals comes the news that folksinger Phil Ochs, an old friend of Dylan's and a longtime victim of depression, has taken his own life: Dylan disappears for days, and when he returns his mood is dark and surly.

The tour yields a television special and a live album, Hard Rain, both recorded during one of the final shows. Under pouring rain, the concert is charged with palpable dramatic tension, heightened by the presence of Sara, who has surprised Dylan by showing up and finding him in the company of other women. "There's a lot about Hard Rain that makes it an extraordinary snapshot — like a punk record or something. There's so much energy and anger in it…" recalls Rob Stoner. "We all sang and played like our very lives depended on that performance, and that's the spirit you can hear on the record that came out of that show."

Although it only partially represents the many facets of the second "Rolling Thunder Revue", Hard Rain is once again stunning in its intensity. The edges grow sharper, Dylan's voice more forceful: "One Too Many Mornings" takes on a violent grandeur, "Maggie's Farm" turns acidic and biting, even "I Threw It All Away" trembles with unease and regret. Over the rolling bass and the sharp electricity of the guitar, the lyrics of "Shelter From The Storm" wound like stab wounds. At its peak, the merciless rage of "Idiot Wind" blazes in Dylan's eyes, leaving audiences stunned with a single glance. Once again, the extreme he has reached seems to leave no way back.

Sacrifice was the code of the road

The chords of a guitar, the light of a candle, the beat of a half-sketched rhythm. She watches him, aloof and alluring, a cigarette held between her fingers, her makeup heavy, accentuating her features. He is nothing but a backlit profile outlined against a brick wall. "We could travel, you would play and I would dance… We could become famous: Renaldo and Clara."

During 1977, Dylan works on editing a film based on footage shot during the 1975 "Rolling Thunder Revue". Although the songwriter from Duluth clearly believes strongly in his cinematic project, which will hit theaters in early 1978, "Renaldo And Clara" turns out to be a spectacular flop.

The film's greatest weakness is that it remains permanently caught between documentary and fiction. On one hand, "Renaldo And Clara" gathers various concert excerpts (some of which will be released as an EP to coincide with the film's release) and episodes drawn from the wanderings of the "Rolling Thunder Revue": Dylan and Ginsberg visiting Kerouac's grave, the meeting with Native American chief Rolling Thunder, the people of Harlem interviewed about the Rubin Carter case… On the other hand, Dylan casts his fellow travelers as actors, having them improvise a series of scenes with a rather thin plot, centered on a kind of brothel run by an elderly gypsy madam, and above all on the ambiguous triangle between Dylan/Renaldo, the Woman in White — an effigy of death played by Joan Baez (but sometimes also by Sara Dylan) — and Clara, who instead represents freedom and wears Sara's face.

Beyond the amateurish quality of the acting and the film's excessive length, what makes it even harder to watch is that the editing doesn't follow a chronological narrative, but instead proceeds through symbolic, chromatic and conceptual suggestions. A kind of initiatory journey in which the echo of Norman Raeben's teachings resurfaces: "This film creates and contains time," Dylan states. "We stopped time, we grabbed hold of it." But apart from die-hard fans, almost no one is willing to sit in a cinema for hours trying to solve yet another Dylanesque riddle.

The news of Elvis Presley's death in August 1977 feels to Dylan like the loss of a part of his own artistic soul: "I thought back over my whole life, my whole childhood. After Elvis died I didn't talk to anyone for an entire week. If it hadn't been for him and Hank Williams, I probably wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now."

But Dylan has to face a far harder trial: the legal battle with Sara over the divorce and custody of their children, which occupies much of 1977. The end of the marriage is a wound that leaves Dylan drained and hardened: for him, the only possible response is to hit the road once again for a new tour.

The last time Dylan took the stage was at the end of 1976, for the Band's farewell concert immortalized in "The Last Waltz". With long hair, a thick beard and a white hat on his head, Mr. Zimmerman delivered a handful of songs alongside his old friends, from "Forever Young" to a rock-solid "Baby Let Me Follow You Down", right through to the chorus of "I Shall Be Released". This time, though, he has something different in mind: a colorful, dazzling sound, complete with horns and backing singers.

Dylan's first world tour since 1966 kicks off in Japan, yielding a double live album, At Budokan, subsequently released in April 1979. Branded by some critics as little more than a Las Vegas-style show, At Budokan suffers from having been drawn from one of the tour's earliest dates, with a band still searching for its own identity. Yet Dylan still shows a willingness to juggle with his own music, letting the pleasure of entertainment take precedence over drama.

Just listen to the gleaming, Van Morrison-esque renditions of "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Love Minus Zero / No Limit", with a chattering flute dancing amid organ flourishes and string trimmings, or the unexpectedly reggae-inflected reworkings of songs like "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Knockin' On Heaven's Door". Granted, at more than one point the arrangements tip over into baroque excess, as in "Maggie's Farm" or "All Along The Watchtower". But even the presence of a seemingly out-of-place instrument like the saxophone occasionally manages to carve out its own role, lending a Springsteen-esque breadth to the surge of "Like A Rolling Stone".

Before the tour reaches Europe, Columbia asks Dylan for a new album to promote. So the songwriter heads into the studio with his new backing band in Santa Monica, California, and in a matter of days knocks out Street Legal (again with Don DeVito's input), which is promptly released in June 1978.

Despite the lukewarm reception it initially received, the 1999 remaster does justice to an album that aspires, more than ever, to recapture the sound of Blonde On Blonde, bolstered by Steve Douglas's saxophone and a trio of backing singers (Carolyn Dennis, Jo Ann Harris and Helena Springs), who lend the record unprecedented black-music shadings.

The experience of divorce returns with all its baggage of resentment in the dead-end arguments of the drab "Baby, Stop Crying" and "We Better Talk This Over". But Dylan wants to come across as self-assured, wants to make us believe he has already put the pain behind him: he flaunts an arrogant indifference in the malevolent blues of "New Pony", tinged with voodoo and lust, and declares from the very slang expression used as the album's title that he's "doing fine", an engine ready to hit the road again. And in "Changing Of The Guards" he voices his full need for a change capable of wiping away the lies: "⟦Q1⟧".

The reality, however, is that Dylan finds he doesn't know what to hold onto in order to start over. Love, in "Is Your Love In Vain?", carries the uncertainty of an unresolved question mark: many have accused its lyrics of chauvinism, but it's really just the desire to regain the everyday solidity of a point of reference. The battle seems to have left him exhausted, drained of energy: "⟦Q2⟧", he sings in "Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)". "⟦Q3⟧".

All that's left is the possibility of begging for an answer: in the bitter, dust-choked air of "Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power)", Dylan seems to be addressing some mysterious shaman, asking him which way leads to the truth. As in the pages of Desire, an arcane mysticism hangs over the imagery of "No Time To Think", amid tarot figures and destinies ruled by the stars.

The closing section of "Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)" aims to match the mounting tension of "Like A Rolling Stone". In the end, Dylan is forced to admit he cannot fill the void in his soul by his own strength alone: “C’è un nuovo giorno all’alba e sono finalmente arrivato/ Se sarò qui al mattino saprai che sono sopravvissuto/ Non posso crederci, non posso credere di essere ancora vivo/ Ma senza di te non sembra la stessa cosa/ Oh, dove sei stanotte?”.

An unforeseen event is the only hope, Montale once wrote. And an unforeseen event is exactly what happens to Dylan one night at the end of 1978.

"Towards the end of a show, someone in the crowd realized I wasn't feeling too good. I guess it was obvious, actually. At one point somebody threw a silver cross up on the stage. Now I usually don't pick things up that are thrown on the stage. But I looked down at this cross. I said, 'I gotta pick that up.' So I picked it up and I put it in my pocket". Nothing more than a tiny sign, on the surface. And yet, as Dylan himself had prophetically sung back in the days of the Basement Tapes, "that sign on the cross is the thing you might need the most". Who knows whether he ever thought back to the lyrics of "Sign On The Cross" in those days. "I needed something tangible, something to grab a hold of. I had tried different kinds of religions, and I needed something I'd never tried before, and I looked into my pocket and I found it".

A week later, when Dylan steps onto the stage for yet another show, almost no one notices the small silver cross hanging around his neck.

PART THREE: THE EIGHTIES

Gonna change my way of thinking

There was a field, near the railroad tracks of Hibbing, Minnesota. As a boy, Bob Dylan used to spend whole hours kneeling there, pulling up tufts of grass while he waited for the train to pass. “I binari avrebbero vibrato ed io mi sarei morso le labbra/ E avrei stretto la presa mentre il fischio ululava/ Rannicchiato mentre il motore ruggiva/ Avrei salutato timidamente il fuochista/ Contando i vagoni mentre scorrevano via”⁶.

That train is one Dylan has never stopped waiting for. A train bound for salvation, to leap onto by grabbing its very last car. How many times has he sung about it, borrowing the lines of the classic "People Get Ready"... In the basement of the Basement Tapes, with the traveling caravan of the Rolling Thunder Revue... "There's a train a-coming", Curtis Mayfield announced in that anthem. "You don't need no baggage, you just get on board".

Until, one day, the train arrived.

When we talk about conversion, we tend to picture mystical visions and heavenly epiphanies. What actually happens, far more simply, is the unfolding of a web of encounters. Despite his more or less fanciful statements, that's exactly what happened to Dylan. In the band for Street Legal, many musicians shared a Christian faith: David Mansfield and Steven Soles were both born-again Christians, as was Dylan's old friend T Bone Burnett, along with backing singers Helena Springs and Carolyn Dennis. During the disorienting moments of the long 1978 tour, Dylan began putting his questions to them. The answers he received started leaving an ever deeper mark, so much so that, by the end of the tour, the lyrics to "Tangled Up In Blue" contained an explicit reference to the Gospel of Matthew. And it's precisely a passage from that Gospel that inspired one of the new songs he premiered at the last shows of the season, "Do Right To Me Baby (Do Unto Others)": "Whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them."

But as always, it's a woman who proves the main instrument of grace for Dylan: in this case, African-American actress Mary Alice Artes, the "Queen Bee" credited in the liner notes of Street Legal (later celebrated in almost courtly-love terms in "Precious Angel"), with whom the American songwriter had a brief but significant relationship. It was she who first introduced him to the Vineyard Fellowship in Los Angeles, an evangelical Protestant church founded in the 1970s by pastor John Richard Wimber.

The train advances slowly. The silhouette of the locomotive appears around the bend. Some had given up hope it would ever arrive, others didn't even know why they were waiting.

The word itself says it: conversion is a movement, a shift in perspective. "The closest thing I can imagine," observes journalist and writer Amanda Petrusich about Dylan's conversion, "is the precise moment someone falls in love — when they finally meet the man or woman they will marry, or see a newborn child for the first time. In that moment, the mind is overwhelmed by a wild certainty that makes the knees tremble, a kind of divine mandate to love and be loved"⁷. In the words of a theologian like Romano Guardini, "in the experience of a great love, everything that happens becomes an event within its orbit." In Dylan's own words, "when I get involved in something, I get involved totally, not marginally."

At the Vineyard Fellowship, Dylan attends a Bible study course for over three months and receives baptism (according to legend, in none other than Pat Boone's swimming pool…). "Have you ever seen a woman give birth to a child? Well, it's a painful thing… A baby doesn't know anything about the world around it, and that's exactly how you feel after being born again." An existential rebirth that Dylan immediately feels must be matched by a new musical grammar. So much so that, at first, the idea is to entrust his new songs to the voice of backing singer Carolyn Dennis, without singing them himself.

In March 1979, however, after a concert at the Roxy in Los Angeles, Dylan meets Mark Knopfler, the mind, voice and guitar of Dire Straits. It wasn't the first time Dylan had come across the English band's music, who at the time had just finished recording their second album, "Communiqué". But that performance leads him to ask Knopfler to collaborate on his next record.

A month later, the two meet up at the historic Muscle Shoals studios in Sheffield, Alabama, the home of soul music. Producing is Jerry Wexler, widely credited as the inventor of the term rhythm and blues and a pillar of the Muscle Shoals sound. The sessions are unusually orderly, and within a handful of days the record is ready: on August 20, 1979, Slow Train Coming hits record store shelves, the first album of what would come to be remembered as Dylan's "Christian period".

The unprecedented warmth of the groove on "Gotta Serve Somebody" — bass, drums and electric piano locked in an embrace — immediately signals that something has changed. The guitar stays in the background, Dylan's voice rasps as ever, but the soul inflections of the backing singers soften it. The Gospel of Matthew appears once again (the warning against serving two masters), but rewritten in the language of the old bluesmen (“Devi servire qualcuno/ che sia il diavolo o che sia il Signore/ ma devi servire qualcuno”). Above all, it's played by stealing all the secrets of Black music: as Alessandro Carrera writes, "no white man could have matched his appropriation of gospel and rhythm and blues"².

On "Slow Train", it's Mark Knopfler's guitar that claims center stage, sketching a world oppressed by the slavery of evil. Fixers and faith healers, con men and oil barons. And again, over the horns of "When You Gonna Wake Up", gangsters in power and outlaws writing the rules. The call to open one's eyes to the corruption of the world is nothing new for Dylan: through his new faith, he's specifically trying to find an answer to the problem of evil. Looking the Adversary in the face, the nameless serpent that slithers through the reggae nursery rhyme of "Man Gave Names To All The Animals". A dualist strain of Christianity, entirely centered on the battle between Good and Evil, in the manner of another notable convert, Philip K. Dick. There's a battle underway, and one must decide which side to take: at bottom, the heart of Slow Train Coming lies entirely in that choice of allegiance.

"Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking", he proclaims emphatically over a riff as sharp as Eric Clapton's. It's precisely this imperative to change that gives Dylan fresh creative momentum, especially since it's an openly against-the-grain challenge. For an outsider like him, nothing could suit better. The intensity of "I Believe In You", the voice that at one point cracks in the song's emotional crescendo, springs exactly from this, from the awareness of a radical opposition to worldly mentality: “Mi mostrano la porta/ Mi dicono di non tornare/ Perché non sono come vogliono loro”.

Thus, the album's closing section is devoted to awaiting a justice that is not of this world, a kingdom in which every wrong will finally be set right. And "When He Returns", accompanied only by Barry Beckett's piano, takes on the feel of a psalm for the end of days.

Hanging in the balance of the reality of man

"It was as if a sword had gone through my body," recalls Nick Cave, remembering the first time he heard the notes of "Gotta Serve Somebody" coming out of a bar jukebox. "I looked around, wondering why everyone else's lives hadn't been instantly changed by hearing it." Not everyone, though, takes it the same way. John Lennon, for instance, simply found it "embarrassing". He went on to write a spiteful musical reply, tellingly titled "Serve Yourself". What's certain is that Dylan's conversion leaves people wrong-footed. Beyond the splashy headlines (like the one in the "New Musical Express": "Dylan and God: It's Official!"), it's Greil Marcus who best captures this sense of bewilderment, in his review of Slow Train Coming: "Listening to the new Bob Dylan album is a little like being hit on in an airport. 'Hi,' a voice seems to say, as Dylan swirls his around the gospel chords of 'When He Returns'. 'Can I talk to you for a minute? Are you new in town? You know, a few months ago I took God into my life, and…' 'Ahh, sorry, I've got a plane to catch…' 'and if you don't too, you'll rot in hell!'"⁸.

The fact is, as soon as an artist starts talking about faith, he often ends up being treated like Kierkegaard's clown, the one nobody took seriously even when he tried to warn the village that his circus was on fire… We easily identify with the search for God, but as soon as someone claims to have found the answer, we feel uneasy. It seems like a shortcut, something that can't carry the same artistic dignity as the question itself. And yet the Bible has always been at the center of Dylan's songs. So where's the scandal? Perhaps in the fact that, this time, he doesn't treat it as cultural or wisdom-literature baggage. This time he really seems to believe it. And so, he throws us back on Dostoevsky's great question: can an educated man, an intellectual of our times, truly believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ?⁹

Dylan has no doubts on the matter, and indeed decides to proclaim it loudly on stages across America. Musically, Slow Train Coming wins over both critics and audiences. And on the strength of this reception (which culminated in a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance awarded to "Gotta Serve Somebody"), the American songwriter sets off in November 1979 on his "Gospel Tour". Dylan doesn't pull any punches: no old hits, just Christian songs and long sermons about the imminent arrival of the Apocalypse. Naturally, the crowd splits in two, just like during the 1966 tour. And he doesn't hesitate to lash out at anyone demanding rock'n'roll with curses of eternal damnation… If there's one thing that seems foreign to his vision of Christianity, it's the category of mercy. But in the end, as Greil Marcus puts it, it's nothing but the trademark of the same old arrogant, ruthless Mr. Zimmerman: "what did you expect, that he'd change?"⁸.

Besides the songs from Slow Train Coming, Dylan unveils a string of new religious-themed songs, alongside a few classic hymns. An exceptional record of his live form at the time is offered in 2017 by Trouble No More, the thirteenth volume of the "Bootleg Series" (essential listening if only for the DVD featuring Dylan's sermons, recited for the occasion by Michael Shannon in the role of preacher…). A blazing spirit animates especially the unreleased tracks, at times hurled like darts ("Solid Rock", "Saved"), at times stretched into solemn liturgies ("Pressing On"). Dylan's actual idea, in fact, was to follow up Slow Train Coming with a live album, which surely would have captured that inspiration in the most authentic way (not by chance, some of his most powerful gospel numbers, like the relentless "Ain't Gonna Go To Hell For Anybody" and "Ain't No Man Righteous, No Not One", would only ever be performed live). Instead, in the middle of the tour, Dylan returns to the Muscle Shoals studios with Jerry Wexler and, in four days, records some of the new songs he's been performing onstage — but without managing to reproduce the same energy.

Accompanied by a cover art steeped in the crudest religious kitsch, Saved marks a spectacular misstep for Dylan in June 1980: the sound is far more washed-out than on the previous record (not helped by the absence of Mark Knopfler's guitar), and the songs almost never manage to find a true identity of their own. Compared to Slow Train Coming, Dylan seems intent on portraying a more joyful side of faith, starting with the quivering hymn of thanksgiving that is the title track. The result, however, ends up making even potentially strong songs cloying, like "Covenant Woman", which revisits the theme of woman as an instrument of salvation, or the Gethsemane meditation of "In The Garden".

Dylan spends the summer of 1980 in the Caribbean, and it's there that one of the period's most enigmatic and inspired songs is born, "Caribbean Wind", rewritten over several drafts and unjustly left off the official albums (two different versions can be heard on Biograph and Trouble No More). In the year-end concerts, a handful of old pre-conversion songs also resurface: it's the first sign of a new phase on the horizon. When Dylan returns to the studio in California in the spring of 1981, it's to redeem the failure of Saved: this time the direction seems to be a more straightforward return to rock, with production first by Bumps Blackwell and then by Chuck Plotkin (already at work with Bruce Springsteen), alongside the presence of high-profile guests such as Ringo Starr, Ron Wood and Benmont Tench of the Heartbreakers.

But even the final chapter of his "Christian trilogy," Shot Of Love, turns out to be a disappointment. Left off the tracklist are some of the best songs of the bunch, from the delicate piano ballad "Angelina" (available on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3) to the millenarian blues of "The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar" (belatedly recovered for the album's CD reissue). In their place, room is made for blander tracks like "Heart Of Mine" and "Trouble", in which only the ashes seem to remain of Slow Train Coming's fire. The rewrite of Paul's hymn to charity in "Watered-Down Love" slides into catchy rhythm and blues, while the solemn piano of "Lenny Bruce" (dedicated to the caustic American comedian who had died fifteen years earlier) ends up sounding all too overwrought.

Between the nostalgia-soaked harmonica of "In The Summertime" and the razor-sharp guitars of "Property Of Jesus", Shot Of Love conceals a genuine masterpiece: "Every Grain Of Sand", the lyrical high point of Dylan's religious trilogy. Over a circling arpeggio, Dylan draws on the verses of William Blake to dig into a soul wounded by sin: “Nella furia dell’istante posso vedere la mano del Maestro/ In ogni foglia che trema, in ogni granello di sabbia”. And it's right there that the innermost essence of reality is revealed to him as if through a crack of light: “Sono sospeso nell’equilibro della realtà dell’uomo/ Come ogni passero che cade, come ogni granello di sabbia”.

Around the time of the album's release, Dylan is back on the road, first in Europe and then in America. Once again, Trouble No More captures the full conviction of the tour's live performances (especially the European dates that summer): from the scorching rock-blues of "Slow Train" to the relentless groove of "When You Gonna Wake Up?", the live versions of these songs keep overpowering their studio counterparts. But the doubts stirred up by Dylan's Christian turn mean the new shows get a cooler reception than expected (not helped by the triumphant buzz around Bruce Springsteen's near-simultaneous tour for "The River").

The radicalism of those early days as a born-again, for Dylan, is by now fading into memory.

Power and greed and corruptible seed

A clattering racket pours out of the television. The bassist is pounding the strings, the guitarist's bandana swaying like a shaman's headdress. The drums march along squarely behind them. It sounds like an old blues number, but improvised in the style of the New York Dolls. And who's that singer, with the skinny white tie over the dark suit? He looks like Bob Dylan, sure, but wasn't he busy playing the preacher? What's he doing on David Letterman fronting that strange, late-punk outfit?

Let's rewind the tape: after 1981, Dylan decides to take a break from touring. For the whole of the following year, gossip churns over his faith: is he still a born again christian? Has he gone back to Judaism? What's he doing wearing a kippah in Jerusalem?

At the end of 1982, he shows up outside Frank Zappa's house and buzzes the intercom to ask if he wants to produce his new record. An explosive collaboration, in some parallel universe: in our own dimension, however, the chemistry between the two never clicks, and Dylan also tries reaching out to David Bowie and Elvis Costello. In the end, whether by choice or by default, he turns back to Mark Knopfler, who in the meantime has started climbing the charts with his Dire Straits.

In the spring of 1983, Dylan goes into the studio in New York, and after a month of work the record is practically ready. At that point, though, something goes wrong. Knopfler leaves for the Dire Straits' European tour, but Dylan is in a hurry to finish and isn't willing to wait for him. Perhaps he feels the pressure of the two previous flops; whatever the reason, he decides to go back and tinker with the recordings: overdubs, reworkings, and above all a reckless overhaul of the tracklist, which, just as with Shot Of Love, leads him to ultimately release an album that doesn't fully live up to its potential.

This time, however, not even the wrong choices manage to sink Infidels, which despite everything turns out to be one of the high points of Dylan's output in the Eighties. Knopfler's fluid guitar conjures up perfect countermelodies for Dylan's voice, while the sharper phrasing of former Rolling Stones man Mick Taylor – the band's exceptional second guitarist – provides the ideal counterbalance. And a decisive contribution to the record's unmistakable sound comes from the rhythm section of the Jamaican duo Sly Dunbar/Robbie Shakespeare, who spread Caribbean flavors between the energy of the bass and the synthetic accents of the drums.

Infidels is more or less universally regarded as Dylan's farewell to his Christian period. And yet the religious soul is anything but absent from the new album: it's certainly not a missionary record like Saved, but its biblical vocation oozes from every track. If the problem of evil lay at the heart of the American songwriter's conversion, here the great Augustinian question (if God exists, where does evil come from?) resonates with even greater urgency. A dark side dwelling within everyone's soul, never so looming and tangible as here.

Who is the man born with a serpent in his fist that Dylan sings about over the sibylline dance of "Jokerman"? Who is the son of Leviticus and Deuteronomy who walks on water handing out his bread, the jester who manipulates the crowds and shapes our dreams? Maybe he's the very embodiment of evil, the gnostic demiurge, the prince of this world. Maybe he's our dark double, the emblem of our own contradictions. Or maybe he's just the umpteenth self-portrait of Robert Allen Zimmerman. The video shot by Larry Sloman and George Lois for the song – the video that projects Dylan into the MTV era – cites Sumerian idols and Aztec deities, Mantegna's Christ and Michelangelo's Moses, Bosch's nightmares and Batman's Joker. "I believe in the book of Revelation," Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1984. "The powers that be will end up playing the role of God, if they're not already doing it, and in the end a man will come along and everyone will think he's God." Could he be the prince clad in scarlet whose birth "Jokerman" foretells? He certainly bears a strong resemblance to the protagonist of "Man Of Peace", that "great humanitarian" and "great philanthropist" who steps forward over a marching-paced roar of guitars, as if he had emerged with his sulphurous grin straight from the pages of Vladimir Solov'yov's "A Short Tale of the Antichrist". "Could be the Führer, could be the local priest/ You know sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace".

The first title Dylan had in mind for the album was "Surviving In A Ruthless World". And indeed, the world told by Infidels is one that knows no compassion. A world in which good is like a treasure lost in the mud, per the image conjured by "Sweetheart Like You". A world in which man has invented his own fate, as "License To Kill" declares: because man "worships at an altar of a stagnant pool/ and when he sees his reflection he's fulfilled". The infidels the album's title speaks of are none other than all of us, inconsistent and carnal.

There's no escaping one's own double, no avoiding the need to face it head-on: "I And I" is the album's sharpest moment, marked by Knopfler's aching guitar and the piano's dark notes. The story goes that Dylan once asked Leonard Cohen how long it had taken him to write "Hallelujah". "Ten years," Cohen is said to have answered thoughtfully. "And how long did it take you to write 'I And I'?" "A quarter of an hour...", Bob supposedly replied with a smirk. Yet, beyond Dylan's proverbial bragging, there's no denying that "I And I" is the most intricately written song on Infidels. A mysterious woman in whom the depth of time is reflected. A man who has nothing left to say, except that he once tried to follow the road of truth and justice. A world nearing its end, where nothing new ever happens. And, above all, the terrible gaze of the inner enemy cast out of Eden, the incurable pain of that wound the Bible calls original sin. “Io ed io/ in una creazione in cui la natura di ciascuno non dà onore né perdono/ Io ed io/ uno dice all’altro, nessuno vede il mio volto e resta vivo”.

The least convincing episodes on the record, in the end, are those most tied to contingency: the tribulations of the people of Israel concealed within the brazen riffs of “Neighborhood Bully,” the denunciation of nascent globalization set to the conventional rock chords of “Union Sundown.” More than political statements, though, Dylan's words once again sound like biblical sermons, like Old Testament invectives: yet they still earn him the predictable accusations of Zionism and indifference to politics.

And to think that, instead of songs like these, there could have been room for the tracks that would later be revealed on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3 and on Springtime In New York (the sixteenth installment of the “Bootleg Series,” dated 2021, the natural follow-up to Trouble No More): “Foot Of Pride,” “Someone's Got A Hold Of My Heart,” “Lord Protect My Child,” “Julius And Ethel”… And, above all, “Blind Willie McTell.” The wobbly piano, the diamond strings of the acoustic guitar, the voice that seems to come from another dimension: our land is condemned from New Orleans to Jerusalem, Dylan announces, and its latest prophet bears the name of the old blind bluesman who gives the song its title. Because only the song of the slaves has the dramatic weight and sense of time needed to interpret all the contradictions of mankind's “corruptible seed.” “With 'Blind Willie McTell,' Dylan performs an oblique, even inverted rite,” observes Alessandro Carrera. “He isn't asking Blind Willie McTell to pass on to him the power of the blues; he's asking him whether the blues is truly dead”². Leaving this song off the album, then, may well signify Dylan's own awareness that no one, not even him, still has the right to sing the music of the fathers: “nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.”

And so here we are at that fateful date of March 22, 1984, when Dylan appears for the first time on the screens of “Late Night with David Letterman.”

At his side is none of the musicians who worked on Infidels, but a brand-new group formed two-thirds from members of a Los Angeles latin-punk band, the Plugz: Charlie Quintana on drums and Tony Marsico on bass, plus J.J. Holiday on guitar. Legend has it that the song Dylan opens his television performance with, Sonny Boy Williamson's “Don't Start Me Talking,” had never even been rehearsed… Improvised or not, what's certain is that the three songs played on David Letterman have the same brazen cheek as the days of the electric turn: “Jokerman” and “License To Kill” (later released on Springtime In New York) throb with a garage fury that makes the album versions pale by comparison. At one point Dylan takes the guitar off his shoulder and starts wandering around in search of the right harmonica. The others look at each other, bewildered, and keep on playing. Something never seen on live TV before… But when Bob finally starts blowing into the harmonica, what's offered up to the cameras is a Dionysian celebration.

Who knows what Infidels would have sounded like, had it been recorded with those unruly Californians… Truth be told, someone even tried to make that alternate reality materialize: Canadian songwriter Daniel Romano, in 2020, imagined it on his “Daniel Romano's Outfit Do (What Could Have Been) Infidels By Bob Dylan & The Plugz.” A marvelous fantasy. Because, in the end, the point is that everyone has their own Dylan, and Dylan never belongs to anyone.

Never gonna be the same again

Cowboy boots, tousled hair. The old rock star walks into the bar while a girl listlessly strums a Creedence song onstage. His name is Billy Parker, but he looks an awful lot like a certain Bob Dylan. He's retired from the scene and drives around in a beat-up pick-up truck, rarely leaving his farm in Pennsylvania. The girl, of course, chases after him in disbelief: “I'm a singer too! Why did you stop playing? You were the best!” And he, shooting her a sidelong glare: “Don't you have anything better to do? If you try to sing one of my songs I'll get myself a lawyer and tell him to skin you alive…”

As an actor, Dylan is decidedly not much to speak of. To make matters worse, the film he appears in in 1987, “Hearts Of Fire,” is even worse than his acting: an utterly predictable love triangle with Fiona Flanagan and Rupert Everett, in which Richard Marquand (the director of “Return Of The Jedi”) and Joe Eszterhas (the screenwriter of “Flashdance” and later of “Basic Instinct”) trot out every single cliché about the world of rock music.

It works well, though, as a metaphor for the Dylan of the mid-Eighties. With a good dose of self-irony, Bob genuinely feels like Billy: a veteran, a survivor, a stranger (a more or less common fate, in those years, for the great rock icons of the Sixties). Always torn between playing along and bowing out. “I hadn't disappeared from the scene, but the road had narrowed, had almost come to a stop,” he would confess years later in his autobiography. “The mirror had turned around on itself and I saw the future, an old actor rummaging through the garbage cans outside the theater where he had once triumphed”¹.

To begin with, nostalgia was already proving a reliable way to fill stadiums, and even Dylan agreed to fall in line with the spirit of the times. Between spring and summer of 1984, he embarked on a European tour as a bona fide rock dinosaur: big arenas, a band of veterans (Mick Taylor, already on guitar for Infidels, brought in former Small Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan, drummer Colin Allen and bassist Greg Sutton), the inevitable greatest hits setlist, old glories on the bill (Carlos Santana sharing the stage, plus a string of occasional guests including Joan Baez, once again sidelined by Dylan).

For the tour's first two nights, it finally fell to Italy to welcome Dylan on stage. By the time he appeared in front of the terraces at the Arena di Verona, the band had barely had time to rehearse, and the result was sloppy to say the least. But for those who were there, those May days in 1984 remain impossible to forget. Paolo Vites recalls it like this: “When I saw the little figure dressed in a black leather jacket, a straw hat, a nice red bandana around his neck, black jeans and motorcycle boots, I thought—and I kept thinking it all evening—so Bob Dylan really exists. He's not a mythological figure I invented from listening to certain records, he's not a dream, a projection, a fabrication. He exists, and he's here, just a few metres away from me. It might not sound like much, but it was everything”⁹.

Show by show, things improved, though without ever shining too brightly in terms of invention. Real Live is a faithful portrait of these concerts: a slightly too tame mannerism (“Highway 61 Revisited” done oldies-style, “Tombstone Blues” with Santana on guitar) is offset by a few solid updates to the canon (the electric venom of “Masters Of War”, the vehemence of “Ballad Of A Thin Man”). It's the acoustic set, though, that holds the best moments, with a deeply rewritten “Tangled Up In Blue” that holds its own against the original version.

From the end of the tour through to March of the following year, Dylan drifted in and out of the recording studio for a series of disorganised sessions with no clear direction, featuring a parade of high-profile guests (from Ron Wood to the Heartbreakers) who came and went without ever truly clicking with the American songwriter's new material.

The album that hit shelves in May 1985, Empire Burlesque, represents Dylan's somewhat overambitious attempt to show he's keeping pace with the times, and it duly turns out to be a flop. The Infidels leftovers, like "Tight Connection To My Heart" (an R&B rinse of "Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart") and "Clean Cut Kid" (missing the Chuck Berry-style playfulness of Mark Knopfler's riffs), are polished up with a crisp, catchy sound, but they lose their soul along the way. The new ballads ("I'll Remember You" and "Emotionally Yours") drown in a flood of sentimentality. Dylan finds himself with a mighty, apocalyptic-toned rock stomper on his hands in "When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky", recorded with Steve Van Zandt and Roy Bittan of the E Street Band: maybe he feels it's too Springsteen-esque, maybe he thinks of making it his own "Dancing In The Dark"... in any case, he decides to shelve the early versions (they'll only resurface later on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3 and Springtime In New York) and hands production duties to Arthur Baker (already behind the console with New Order), who turns it into a bacchanal of synthesizers and plasticky rhythms. The contrast stands out even more against the totally acoustic closer "Dark Eyes", a true hidden gem of the album and, ultimately, a paradoxical declaration of detachment from that present to which Empire Burlesque seems so desperate to belong: "Vivo in un altro mondo, dove c'è la memoria della vita e della morte/ Dove la terra è inanellata delle perle degli amanti e tutto quello che vedo sono occhi scuri".

Dylan's time increasingly seems to lie in the past, so much so that a far deeper mark than his new album is left by the massive Biograph retrospective, which for the first time opens a crack into the treasure chest of his archives.

Also in 1985, Dylan takes part, somewhat reluctantly, in the cast of "We Are The World", the most famous charity anthem in history, meant to raise funds for the famine that has struck Ethiopia. His bewildered expression in the video for the song is a sort of meme ante litteram: "I wasn't too convinced by the message, to be honest I don't think people can save themselves," he comments. Things go even worse, however, with the subsequent Live Aid, the mega-concert organized once again in aid of the Ethiopian population by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure. Dylan performs on the Philadelphia stage with Keith Richards and Ron Wood: after a triumphant introduction by Jack Nicholson, a drenched-in-sweat Dylan tries somehow to hold together a ramshackle trio of old songs ("Ballad Of Hollis Brown", "When The Ship Comes In" and "Blowin' In The Wind"). "It was an unspeakable mess," he admits bluntly. "We didn't even have monitors on stage. We couldn't even hear our own voices." As if that weren't enough, instead of talking about Africa, Dylan launches into a somewhat nationalist appeal about the conditions of American farmers...

His such an out-of-step move, though, gives Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and Neil Young the idea of organizing another charity concert that September, this time in support of America's family farmers. And at Farm Aid, Dylan fully redeems himself, delivering a relaxed, good-humored set alongside Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, which culminates in a joyful closing rendition of "Maggie's Farm".

It's the launchpad for a proper tour alongside the Gainesville rocker and his crew, which turns out to be one of the most successful live ventures of the decade for Dylan. With Petty the chemistry is perfect, and the band lends a raw, luminous rock sheen to Dylan's catalogue, whether reinterpreting the classics or revitalizing more recent material. The Queens Of Rhythm's backing vocals revive the gospel spirit of his Christian period, and the group has fun playing with covers of old songs, from Beasley Smith's "That Lucky Old Sun" to Ry Cooder's "Across The Borderline". The "True Confessions Tour", after crossing New Zealand, Australia and Japan, is captured in the TV special "Hard To Handle", which captures the whole outgoing spirit of those nights: from the powerful opening attack of "In The Garden" to the dazzling rebirth of "Like A Rolling Stone" through to the closing happening of the Dylan/Petty duet on "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" — the Heartbreakers manage to become as close to a utopian Dylanesque E Street Band as one could possibly imagine.

Before the tour heads to the U.S., though, two significant developments come into play. The first would be kept carefully secret for years: on June 4, 1986, Dylan marries Carolyn Dennis, one of his longtime African-American backing singers. In January the two had had a daughter, Desiree Gabrielle. Following his divorce from Sara Lownds, Dylan hadn't lacked for romantic relationships: besides Mary Alice Artes, the most talked-about had been with two other backing singers, Helena Springs and Clydie King, and with record executive Carole Childs. With Carolyn Dennis, however, Dylan wants to give his daughter the chance of a family life away from the spotlight: "Bob was a great and active father to Desiree," the songwriter's second wife would later state.

In the same period, after even lending himself to a clumsy rap verse on a Kurtis Blow song, "Street Rock", Dylan returns to the studio without much inspiration and, drawing partly on new recordings and partly on material stockpiled over previous years, puts together a patchy, limping album, rushed out to coincide with the summer dates of the "True Confessions Tour". Knocked Out Loaded lines up an extremely long list of collaborators, yet never finds a personality of its own: while "Got My Mind Made Up" spins its wheels despite the presence of the Heartbreakers (their partnership works far better on "Band Of The Hand", recorded for the soundtrack of the film of the same name), "They Killed Him" shamelessly goes so far as to bring in a children's choir...

Amid faded Caribbean postcards ("Precious Memories") and half-heartedly rearranged leftovers ("Maybe Someday"), even on an album like this Dylan still manages to slip in a landmark track: it's "Brownsville Girl", an eleven-plus-minute deconstructed western co-written with Sam Shepard, which, amid choirs and horns, seems to unfold like the cinematic translation of a dream. Dylan got the idea from a Lou Reed song, "Doin' The Things That We Want To", based on an account of a stage play Reed had seen. Dylan imagines himself sitting in front of a cinema screen watching an old Gregory Peck film, "The Gunfighter". But, at a certain point, he finds himself in the Texas desert, in a beat-up Ford with a woman by his side; perhaps he's looking for a certain Henry Porter, but the only sure thing is that Henry Porter isn't really his name. "Eppure c'è qualcosa a proposito di quel film che proprio non riesco a togliermi dalla testa/ ma non riesco a ricordarmi perché ci fossi anch'io o che parte dovessi recitare". Sadly left off Empire Burlesque (back then it was called "New Danville Girl", after the title of a traditional folk ballad, and the drier atmosphere of that first version — released in 2021 on Springtime In New York — was probably even superior), "Brownsville Girl" is a hall-of-mirrors game with a Lynchian flavor that wouldn't have been out of place even among the tracks of Blood On The Tracks: ironic to find it on an album as short on inspiration as Knocked Out Loaded.

And the walls came down, all the way to hell

Bob has left the building. He has no intention whatsoever of turning back. Down the street, away from the rehearsal room, under the pouring rain.

It's 1987, and Dylan is rehearsing with the Grateful Dead. In July a short run of shows awaits him, six dates together. But everything feels wrong, out of place. Something had already broken the previous summer, in the final stretch of the tour with the Heartbreakers: "Tom was giving his best and I was giving my worst," he would admit himself in "Chronicles". "My own songs had become strangers to me. I had no ability to touch their raw nerve, I couldn't get below their surface."¹

And so, that day, Dylan decides to drop everything. To stop pretending and walk away for good. At a certain point, though, he hears the sound of a jazz band coming from a club. "I opened the door of a small bar, looked inside and saw the musicians playing on the other side of the room," he recalls. "It felt like the last stop of a train headed nowhere." The way that old singer delivers his repertoire of standards is a genuine epiphany: "suddenly, without warning, it was as if he himself had opened a window onto my soul for me. It was as if he was telling me: 'This is how you're supposed to do it.'"¹

Dylan takes up the challenge. When he goes back into the studio, with great effort, something inside him comes loose. The tour with the Grateful Dead is anything but memorable, and so is the album that comes out of it, Dylan & The Dead: a handful of rather anonymous reinterpretations, among which a nervy "Slow Train" and a torrential "Joey" stand out. But Dylan has started learning again. And in the middle of the new dates with Mr. Petty's Heartbreakers (the "Temples In Flames Tour", which takes him first to Israel and then to Europe in the fall of 1987, with Roger McGuinn of the Byrds opening the shows), he has another revelation. It happens in Locarno, Switzerland: the wind furiously sweeps the stage on Piazza Grande, and not a sound comes out of his mouth. "It was like a panic attack. You're in front of thirty thousand people staring at you and nothing comes out." Perhaps it's sheer desperation that makes him put everything on the line in that very instant. "It was like a thoroughbred had charged through the gates at a full gallop. Everything came back, and in more than one dimension." Once again, it took an unexpected event. "In more than thirty years of touring, this was a place I had never seen and had never been to before. If it hadn't existed, someone would have had to invent it for me."¹

"Wherever great rock is made, the shadow of Bob Dylan is there," proclaims Bruce Springsteen, celebrating the Duluth songwriter's induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in early 1988. But Dylan, now, is more interested in the future. A new beginning looms on his horizon: he wants to schedule as many shows as possible in 1988. He wants to test himself again, he wants to win over a new audience. Fate, however, seems to have other plans: an accident in his backyard, and suddenly Dylan finds himself with a hand crushed to the bone. "Having been on the threshold of something bold, innovative and adventurous, I was now on the threshold of nothing at all."¹ It's precisely the risk of never being able to play again that sharpens his desire to start over even further. And, slowly, recovery begins.

Meanwhile, Dylan cobbles together a ramshackle covers album from some sessions from the previous year, Down In The Groove: embarrassing both when it dabbles in pallid rock'n'roll ("Let's Stick Together") and when it ventures into soul ("Sally Sue Brown") and crooner tones ("When Did You Leave Heaven?"). At the last minute, John Hiatt's "The Usual", used in the soundtrack of "Hearts Of Fire", is replaced with a self-penned track left in the drawer since the days of Infidels, "Death Is Not The End". But it would take Nick Cave and his "Murder Ballads" to restore the song's dignity. The lively "Silvio", written with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, is the one saving grace: and even that is slight stuff compared to Dylan's previous releases.

In April, though, the phone rings at Dylan's villa in Malibu: George Harrison needs to record a b-side for his latest single, "This Is Love", and he needs Dylan's home studio. Producing the track is Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra, and old friend Roy Orbison decides to join them. Harrison stops by Tom Petty's house to pick up his guitar, and naturally he too gets pulled into the crew. In Dylan's garage they all end up playing together, among boxes marked "handle with care": and "Handle With Care" ends up being the title of the song. The problem is that it turns out too good to be relegated to a b-side... The melody glides with irresistible ease, the vocal harmonies interlock perfectly, the guitars sparkle: how could they not try to give it a follow-up? Besides, Harrison had already been mulling over the idea of putting together a kind of supergroup for a while. In fact, he even already had a name ready to go: Wilburys (a pun on the best way to hide recording mistakes: "We'll bury 'em in the mix"...). Traveling Wilburys.

In the newborn family of wandering minstrels, everyone is a writer, performer and producer in equal measure. And each one gets a new stage name: Lucky Wilbury, in Dylan's case. The five of them meet up at the house of Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, and, sitting in a circle, they churn out one song after another: in the space of a month they put together an album of surprising freshness, titled with optimistic understatement Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1. Old-school rock'n'roll, genuine and spontaneous, without too much second-guessing or overdubbing. Dylan's imprint is felt above all in the light-and-shade of "Tweeter And The Monkey Man" and "Congratulations", but every participant's contribution is essential to the success of each track.

Buoyed by the days spent with the Wilburys (the album wouldn't come out until October) and having fully recovered the use of his hand, Dylan is finally ready to set out on his new live adventure. No one knows it yet, but June 7, 1988 marks the beginning of a new era for him: the era of the "Never Ending Tour", the endless tour that will keep him on stage practically non-stop for over thirty years (with a forced stop due to the 2020 pandemic). Dylan ditches the rockstar look (earrings, bared biceps and leather jackets), ditches the big venues, ditches the big-name collaborators, and starts over with the most bare-bones of lineups (guitar/bass/drums). He wants to put into practice a method he says he learned from guitar virtuoso Lonnie Johnson in the early Sixties, a sort of alchemical formula based on principles of musical geometry: "by combining certain elements of technique that caught fire off each other when placed side by side, I was now able to work on certain levels of perception, certain time structures and certain rhythm systems that would give my songs a more brilliant shape, calling them back from the grave, stretching out their bodily stiffness, and finally setting them back on their feet."¹

From the jagged chords of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" that open the concert at the Concord Pavilion that day in June, it's clear that Dylan is no longer afraid to roam freely through his vast songbook, to dig up more or less obscure folk songs, to reinvent himself and his repertoire every single night. "A lot of people would have said the songs had been altered, others that this was how they should have been performed from the start. Everyone was free to choose whichever they preferred."¹ As for him, he'd already be back on the road, on his way to the next show.

Into the valley of dry bone dreams

New Orleans is a city of ghosts. "Ghosts of men and women who have sinned and died and now dwell in the tombs," as Dylan writes in "Chronicles". In the sticky Louisiana air, the past seems unwilling to stop haunting the present. "The ghosts race to the light, you can almost hear them breathing, spirits that have hit it big, that have struck it rich"¹.

Dylan too is looking for a destination, among the tombs of New Orleans. After the accident to his hand, he had started writing songs again. Lyrics still without melodies, for now; verses that could only have been born out of that forced stillness. One day, Bob showed them to Bono of U2, with whom he had written the intense "Love Rescue Me" (later included on "Rattle And Hum"). And Bono told him that the right person to work on those songs was Daniel Lanois, the Canadian producer responsible, along with Brian Eno, for the sound of "The Joshua Tree". What strikes Dylan most of all is the work Lanois is doing in that same period with the Neville Brothers on their album "Yellow Moon". So, in the spring of 1989, Dylan rents a house in New Orleans to get to work at Lanois's recording studio.

The relationship between the two is anything but idyllic. Lanois doesn't do half measures: "He wasn't satisfied just floating on the surface," Dylan recalls. "Even swimming wasn't enough for him. He wanted to dive down and hit bottom. He wanted to marry a mermaid"¹. Dylan, for his part, has no clear idea of which direction to take; he only knows he's not willing to be defined by the personality of a producer with such a strong imprint. At the height of his frustration, Lanois even smashes a dobro to the floor in dead silence... But a clash like that was necessary, to break the spiral Dylan had fallen into. His new songs are the best since Infidels, and Lanois knows how to make them sound ancestral and contemporary at once. From the clash, the two emerge with the mutual respect owed to the fiercest of rivals, and with an unforgettable record in hand: Oh Mercy.

Guitars chase each other like blades, the pulsing rhythm drives a menacing crescendo: the intro of "Political World" immediately reveals the shadowy face of Oh Mercy. A collection of songs with nocturnal atmospheres, a dark gait, wrapped in a haze of reverb through which Dylan's voice emerges deeper and more vulnerable than ever. In the video for the song, directed by none other than John Mellencamp, Dylan plays in a room lit only by candlelight, where politicians, military men and businessmen feast greedily in the company of femmes fatales. The world is corrupt, as we know. Love has no citizenship, wisdom is persecuted. "Infidels" already said as much: pity, compassion, that mercy invoked in the album's title, is thrown to the fish. Everything falls apart, Dylan proclaims, dancing amid the percussion and nimble guitars of "Everything Is Broken". Everything breaks, especially the thing closest to your heart, and there's no way to fix it.

But for Dylan, it's no longer time to hurl curses. It's time to look within and discover his own fragility. Oh Mercy is one of his most introspective records ever, suspended between two question marks: the one in "What Good Am I?" (why do we turn our backs on others?) and the one in "What Was It You Wanted?" (why do we reduce others to our own advantage?). At the bottom of the mirror lies the drama of discovering ourselves as strangers. The disease of conceit, Dylan calls it on the gospel-tinged piano of "Disease Of Conceit", that inflated projection of oneself that ends up making the other person unreachable.

"Every man's conscience is vile and depraved," proclaims the preacher of "Man In The Long Black Coat" from the pulpit. Over the chirping of crickets, the harmonica seems to gather the echo of the wind. The dark, fateful voice tells of a lover returned from the underworld to claim his woman, as in the old English ballads that arrived on the ships of the Pilgrim Fathers. “Lui la guardò negli occhi/ quando lei lo fermò per chiedergli/ se voleva ballare/ aveva il volto come una maschera/ Qualcuno disse che citava la Bibbia/ C’era polvere sull’uomo dal lungo cappotto nero”. Perhaps it's nothing but the shadow of our own will to possess the other, that man in black risen from Hades. But the townsfolk don't care; all they know is that she's gone and she's not coming back. "People don't live or die, people just float."

Only those who truly live and die, only those willing to look pain in the face, can manage to escape the demon. The rarefied notes of "What Good Am I?" remind us of this, barely grazed by dobro and keyboards: “Che cos’ho di buono se dico sciocchezze/ e rido in faccia a ciò che il dolore porta con sé/ e volto le spalle mentre tu muori in silenzio/ che cos’ho di buono?”. Because pain, as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han would say, is the tear through which the other breaks in. The opening through which compassion can be reborn.

Sometimes we almost manage to fool ourselves into thinking we've forgotten the wound we carry inside: "I don't even notice she's gone / most of the time," Dylan murmurs in "Most Of The Time". And it almost feels like being back among the pages of Blood On The Tracks, given the bitterness of its self-deprecating irony (hear the guitar-acoustic-and-harmonica version included on Tell Tale Signs to believe it). But the bells that "Ring Them Bells" sings of toll a reminder that time flees, and while we float through life our innocence is lost forever. The piano echoes with a liturgical solemnity, as in the days of "When He Returns". The last word, on Oh Mercy, carries the taste of hope: "Tomorrow will be another day," announces the romantic glide of "Shooting Star". We still have a chance to hear the Sermon on the Mount, we still have a chance to hear that last radio playing.

When Oh Mercy hit stores in September 1989, critics hailed it as a miracle: Dylan, at last, was Dylan again. "A record of rare sincerity," was how Riccardo Bertoncelli described it at the time in his review, "as close to the Dylanesque heart as any has ever been"¹⁰. And yet, even this time, at least two stunning songs were left off the album's final tracklist. The first, "Series Of Dreams", later unveiled on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3, is a dreamlike journey of over six minutes, marked by the majestic march of the drums. The second, "Dignity", to use Alessandro Carrera's words, is "a song about a society that has criteria for everything except recognizing the value of a human being"². Dylan claims he was never able to record it the way he wanted: aside from the first version released in 1994 on Greatest Hits, Vol. 3, weighed down by Brendan O'Brien's posthumous overdubs, all the other versions of "Dignity" that have surfaced over the years are actually equally memorable (including the ones recovered on Tell Tale Signs, which range from the bare bones of a piano demo to an unexpected rockabilly swing).

But the curse of the Eighties is broken now, and that's what matters. It took the voice of an old jazz singer, the wind of the Alps, torn flesh, the voodoo of Louisiana. But the spell worked. Not to turn back the clock — that would have been impossible. "To do that, you need to have power and dominion over the spirits," Dylan admits. "I once had that, and once was enough"¹. It's rather a matter of letting yourself be transfigured. Because "it's the transfiguration that allows you to come out of chaos and rise above it," as he would cryptically state to Rolling Stone in 2012. "You can try to learn more about transfiguration from the Catholic Church, you can try to learn more about it from some old mystical book, but it's a real concept. It's always happened, in every era. That's how I'm still able to do what I do, to write the songs I sing, to keep going." The only way to keep on being himself. Transfigured, always.

PART FOUR: THE NINETIES

And the river went dry

That hat. The longer you watch the scene, the more you can't take your eyes off that hat. First Dylan pulls it down over his head, then lifts the brim with a quick gesture. He takes it off, holds it in his hands. Puts it back on, keeps fidgeting with it. In the end, he simply decides to keep a hand on top of it, as if some nonexistent wind might whisk it away at any moment.

There's something surreal about the whole dance. Bob Dylan as the Hatter, Jack Nicholson as the King of Hearts. The old songwriter would probably rather be on a page of Lewis Carroll than on the Grammy stage. It's 1991, and he's there to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the reverent hands of Nicholson. Earlier, he sang a halting electric version of "Masters Of War": a far from easy choice, with the Gulf War still underway. But his raspy, half-hearted voice seems to toss the lyrics aside, forcing the band to chase desperately after him. Maybe he really did have a fever, as he'd say years later. The only certain thing is that, once he's received the award, he just stands there in front of the microphone, staring at the plaque. "Well, my daddy didn't leave me too much," he begins to mumble. "You know, he was a very simple man... But he told me this, he said: 'Son...'". Silence. Eyes still on the plaque, amid general embarrassment. "He told me many things, you know...". Nervous laughter from the audience. "He said: 'You know, it's possible to become so defiled in this world that even your own father and mother will abandon you... if that happens, God will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways.'" Dylan doesn't say so, but those are actually the words of a 19th-century rabbi, Samson Raphael Hirsch. He doesn't say so because, in that moment, those words are truly his own, his oblique way of looking at himself in the mirror and searching for meaning in thirty years of career. Combining play and wisdom once again. Just as on Under The Red Sky.

It's a strange record, the one Dylan released a few months before that Grammy performance, in September 1990. It arrives almost as a surprise, barely a year after Oh Mercy. Everyone expects the second chapter of a rebirth, and instead Dylan steps sideways. He goes back to piecing together material recorded in different sessions, back to surrounding himself with big-name guests (all dutifully left in the background): Slash of Guns'n'Roses, George Harrison, Al Kooper, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Stevie Ray Vaughan, even Elton John... In the end, Don Was's production (fresh off the success of Bonnie Raitt's "Nick Of Time") manages to give the record's sound some cohesion. Concise rock, with no great pretensions. But the ten tracks on Under The Red Sky never quite fully convince: "Too many people around, too many artists, too many personalities," Dylan recalls, "self-centered musicians who only wanted to play what they felt like playing."

There's a dedication on the album: "For Gabby Goo Goo". It's easy to guess that the nickname refers to his (then secret) daughter Desiree Gabrielle, who was four years old at the time. Far from a casual reference, since Under The Red Sky is in fact a collection of nursery rhymes, a tribute to the great tradition of nursery rhymes: "Like the Bible for the songs of his Christian period, or lines from classic Hollywood films on the records made in the mid-Eighties," observes Alessandro Carrera, "Under The Red Sky also draws on a grid of homogeneous references, supplied in this case by the folkloric heritage of children's nursery rhymes"².

From the insistent drumbeat of “Wiggle Wiggle” (named by Time among the 10 worst songs in the Dylan catalogue…), the old minstrel plays with rhyming couplets, vivid imagery, a taste for the absurd. There's an apocalyptic glint, though, in the red sky that gives the album its title, and the fairy-tale verses of the title track could easily belong to some remote esoteric text.

“There's no doubt that for Dylan even the nonsense of nursery rhymes, which are after all a subspecies of traditional song, is sacred”, reflects Renato Giovannoli in his analysis of biblical influences in Dylan's songbook. “Nursery rhymes belong to the same family as biblical riddles, and in other respects their “absurdity” is nothing but the effect of the decay of ancient symbolism no longer understood”¹¹.

Between the run-of-the-mill rock-blues of “Unbelievable” and the (not particularly incisive) sermon against the television age of “T.V. Talkin' Song”, the album's weakest moments are the ones that indulge in the sappier tones, from “Under The Red Sky” to a “Born In Time” that's clearly inferior to the earlier versions (later included on Tell Tale Signs).

The best is saved for the finale: “God Knows”, an outtake from Oh Mercy over which the shadow of the end of days once again looms; “Handy Dandy”, a variation on the chords of “Like A Rolling Stone” that adds a new trickster figure to the genealogy of Dylan's characters; and finally “Cat's In The Well”, a boogie-paced lullaby that bids farewell with an enigmatic sense of transience: “Il gatto è nel pozzo, le foglie stanno cominciando a cadere/ Buonanotte, amore mio, che Dio abbia pietà di tutti noi”.

More than the cover (an old photo from the Infidels era), it's the image on the back of the album that most emblematically captures the Dylan of Under The Red Sky: a blurry black-and-white snapshot of him slumped on the steps of a house, in a sweatshirt and basketball sneakers. During the making of the record he's said to have been perpetually unapproachable, hood pulled down over his forehead. The truth is that Dylan is in crisis. Even onstage he seems distracted, prickly. A couple of times, during the 1992 Australian shows, he has to step away from the microphone during “Desolation Row” to keep from bursting into tears. His second marriage is falling apart: according to Howard Sounes's biography, in August 1990 Carolyn Dennis files for separation. The actual divorce wouldn't come until 1992, and for that whole stretch Dylan is as if trapped in a tunnel.

Not even his return alongside the Traveling Wilburys manages to lift his spirits. Roy Orbison is gone, taken by a heart attack at the end of 1988. The four survivors shuffle their names around (Dylan is now Boo) and try to pick up where they left off. But the new album, ironically titled Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3, no longer has the magic and freshness of the first chapter. While the single “Inside Out” bears the supergroup's trademark sound more than ever, on most of the tracks (starting with the other song chosen to launch the album, “She's My Baby”) the sound thickens and loses some of its playfulness. Dylan, for his part, scatters country scents over “If You Belonged To Me” and ventures into the 1950s with “7 Deadly Sins” and “Where Were You Last Night?”.

On the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, however, the greatest gift for fans is the 1991 release of The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3, an extraordinary triple collection of unreleased material pulled from the archives. From that point on, the “Bootleg Series” would become a regular fixture for exploring every hidden corner of the Dylan saga.

Hard times, come again no more

 

“The world doesn't need any new songs”, Dylan proclaims in the spring of 1991, interviewed by Paul Zollo. “In fact, if nobody wrote another song from today onward, the world wouldn't suffer for it”. And indeed, after the lukewarm reception of Under The Red Sky, it would take seven years before hearing a collection of his new original compositions. Dylan needs to go back home. His home of old: the kingdom of folk song. “A mythical kingdom made more of archetypes than of individuals”, as he would describe it in “Chronicles”. “Once you were summoned into its presence you could end up sucked in and disappear”¹. In that ancestral well, Dylan really does seem to vanish. Carried off into another dimension. But behind him he leaves breadcrumbs so he can be followed.

The otherworldly journey begins along the route of the Never Ending Tour, when songs from far away start creeping into the acoustic sets. Songs like “The Girl On The Greenbriar Shore”, captured during a 1992 concert and recovered among the rarities on Tell Tale Signs: the protagonist's mother warns him not to run off with that dark-curled girl, but he doesn't listen; and when he eventually finds himself alone, all he can do is think back on that warning.

Then, in early June 1992, Dylan goes into a studio in Chicago. With him is David Bromberg, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and great lover of Americana, with whom Bob had already collaborated back in the 1970s, around the time of Self Portrait. Together with him, Dylan records a string of old folk songs. There's enough to fill an entire album, or even more. But that album will never see the light of day. The “Bromberg sessions” remain one of the great Dylan mysteries: so far only two official fragments have surfaced, both on Tell Tale Signs, and both are excellent. Jimmie Rodgers's “Miss The Mississippi” settles into the romantic tremor of the mandolin and the shimmer of the horns, while the murder ballad “Duncan And Brady” takes on a more energetic swagger.

We don't know why Dylan decided to keep those tapes in a drawer. We only know that a few months later, in the summer of 1992, he tries again. This time, though, it's in his home studio, and he's in complete solitude.

To find a fully acoustic Dylan record you have to go all the way back to 1964, with Another Side Of Bob Dylan. When Good As I Been To You saw the light of day in November 1992, everyone was once again thrown off balance. To tell the truth, though, Dylan had dropped a hint a few weeks earlier. At New York's Madison Square Garden, an extraordinary cast of artists had gathered to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his recording debut (from Lou Reed to Eddie Vedder, from Neil Young to Tom Petty, to name just the protagonists of some of the most memorable moments). Media attention, in truth, had focused above all on Sinead O'Connor, who had left the stage after being booed by the audience over the incident that had recently made her the center of attention on Saturday Night Live, when she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II in front of the cameras. But the key moment had come when, in the glare of the spotlight, the slight figure of the man being honored appeared, armed only with an acoustic guitar and harmonica: “Song To Woody”, “It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)” and “Girl From The North Country” more bare than ever, stripped down by that rasping voice. He had recently turned fifty, yet he seemed like the last surviving troubadour from before the war. It was, in a way, the preview of his new journey.

With cover songs, up to that point, Dylan had managed to produce some of his worst studio work (Self Portrait, Dylan, Down In The Groove). But Good As I Been To You is a completely different affair. Everything here is steeped in minimalism (starting with artwork that would look shabby even in a PowerPoint presentation…). There's room only for Dylan's rough, clean-cut fingerpicking on guitar, for the breath of the harmonica, and for a voice that by now sounds ageless, capable of bending into a croak of impossible tenderness or roughening up like sandpaper.

The thirteen songs on the album come mostly from Anglo-Saxon folk tradition, with Dylan pilfering arrangements and ideas from all over the place. “Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book”, he states flatly. “My whole philosophy is down there”. Perhaps that's why he treats them as if they were his own, without bothering to credit any of those who came before him in folklore's family tree: “A folk song has a thousand faces and you have to meet them all if you want to play it”.

There are more accessible sides to Good As I Been To You, like the smoothed-out blues of "You're Gonna Quit Me" or the intimate melody of "Tomorrow Night". And there are darker sides, like the brooding gait of "Blackjack Davey" or the jaggedness of "Little Maggie". Dylan slips into Mississippi John Hurt's shoes on "Frankie & Albert", conjuring the shadows of the Mississippi Sheiks on "Sittin' On Top Of The World". He invokes better seasons over the notes of "Hard Times", murmurs a fairy tale on "Froggie Went A Courtin'". But every syllable seems to come from some unknown dimension, perhaps by now incomprehensible to a humanity that has unlearned its familiarity with mystery and with the sense of destiny. This is precisely the appeal of letting these songs take you by the hand: the appeal of being introduced to a lost language that, in all its stories, speaks of us.

This deeply personal kind of "Anthology Of American Folk Music" as reimagined by Dylan has no trouble winning over the critics: "We hear the old songs merging into a single story," comments Greil Marcus. "Variations on the theme of innocents setting out on a long journey into the unknown, and the betrayals they encounter once they reach their destination."

Good As I Been To You comes out on the day of the election that crowns Bill Clinton President, and on January 20, 1993, Inauguration Day, Dylan delivers a jubilant "Chimes Of Freedom" in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Clinton smiles and gives a thumbs-up, but the minstrel in scarf and cowboy hat increasingly feels like a retiree: "I really thought I was done with records. I preferred playing on the road. The whole recording process had become a crazy thing." First, though, there's still need for those old songs.

Strange things have happened

The pattern is more or less the same as the previous year: in May, Dylan again shuts himself away in the recording studio at his Malibu villa, and by October the second chapter of his solitary pilgrimage is ready. It's called World Gone Wrong, and it would be hard to imagine a more fitting title to sum up how Dylan views his era. "Strange things have happened, like never before," he announces, once again drawing on the records of the Mississippi Sheiks. The acclaim earned by Good As I Been To You seems to have emboldened him, and his new tribute to tradition turns out even better than its predecessor. You can tell right away from the care put into the packaging, the respect shown for the authorship of the songs, and the presence of an actual set of liner notes written by Mr. Zimmerman himself. "The technology to wipe out the truth is now available," he reflects, with a gaze more prophetic than ever, commenting on the gentle closing epitaph of "Lone Pilgrim". "Not everybody can afford it but it's available. When the cost comes down, watch out! There won't be any more songs like this. There aren't any now."

This time the scales tip toward rural American folk-blues. And the tones grow even more raw, more shadowy, more ascetic. Voice and guitar scrape the songs down verse after verse, riding the rails alongside Blind Willie McTell on "Broke Down Engine", singing of crime and punishment in the murder ballad "Stack A Lee", surveying the battlefield with a lump in the throat on "Two Soldiers". Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics directs an evocative black-and-white video for "Blood In My Eyes", in which Dylan wanders the streets of Camden Town in top hat, leather gloves and umbrella, signing autographs, stopping to chat with passersby and even trying his hand at juggling... Sealing the deal on these modern Dylan-style basement tapes, World Gone Wrong also earns a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album.

But the time machine Dylan reactivated in those sessions held other treasures in store too: in 1994, the soundtrack to Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" features the romantic "You Belong To Me", while Tell Tale Signs later unearths his readings of Robert Johnson's "32-20 Blues" and the traditional "Mary And The Soldier". It's the start of a growing presence of unreleased Dylan recordings on soundtracks and tribute albums, which becomes ever more frequent in the latter half of the Nineties, from the sparkling "Boogie Woogie Country Girl" by Doc Pomus to the seductive "My Blue-Eyed Jane" by Jimmie Rodgers, not to mention a successful revival of Johnny Cash's classic "Ring Of Fire" for the romantic comedy "Due mariti per un matrimonio".

The fact is, the more Bob looks toward retirement, the more alive he feels — especially on stage. From the second half of 1992, the Never Ending Tour enters one of its creative peaks, fully able to rival the most brilliant moments of Dylan's live career. The backbone of the band is now bassist Tony Garnier, destined to become the American songwriter's longest-serving collaborator (and the true master of ceremonies at his concerts). Under his guidance, John Jackson's snappy guitar, Bucky Baxter's pedal steel, and Winston Watson's forceful drumming help stretch the songs into long, propulsive jam sessions. Dylan reclaims center stage, not only with a vigorous, engaged vocal presence but also with a surprising turn as lead guitarist. As Paolo Vites recalls, "the kindest comment you'll hear from more than a few onlookers will be: 'Does he think he's Eric Clapton?'" No, Dylan knows his limits as a guitarist all too well... But "with his lead playing he's not trying to do anything more than pick up the song's rhythm, push it forward, stretch its tension, load up its expressive power, and then let the band's real soloists run wild, continuing to back them up with his two notes"9.

The result, during the summer 1993 tour, yields some of his finest Italian concerts ever, dominated by a majestic rendition of "I And I". A few months later, in mid-November, New York's Supper Club hosts four memorable acoustic shows that showcase a bold, adventurous spirit: the only officially released excerpt is the enveloping "Ring Them Bells" included on Tell Tale Signs, but the setlists are full of unexpected choices (from "Tight Connection To My Heart" to "One More Cup Of Coffee"), as well as tributes to folk tradition with an almost mystical aura ("Weeping Willow" above all). The day after those performances, Dylan appears on the "Late Show With David Letterman" with an intense "Forever Young" (the same song sung to close out the Supper Club shows).

This moment of grace for Dylan and his band is captured on film in 1994 on two extraordinary occasions: the first is the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Woodstock festival, which lets Dylan make up for his infamous absence from the original event. In a black suit and with a piercing gaze, he opens straight away with one of the most magnetic live renditions of "Jokerman" ever given. The jagged phrasing of his guitar leads the band through a set full of epic-flavored surges, driven by the drums' overwhelming energy.

The second occasion comes at the end of the year, when Dylan, after months of relentless stage presence, gives in to what in the early Nineties is the musical fad of the moment: MTV's "Unplugged" series. In November, at Sony Music Studios in New York, he records his Mtv Unplugged, which will be released in May 1995.

Disguised as his own 1966 self (dark glasses, polka-dot shirt, black jacket) and with the far-from-secondary addition of Brendan O'Brien's hammond organ, Dylan proves more indulgent than usual in following the songs' original melodies, tackling both the classics (the opening "Tombstone Blues" above all) and more recent material (from a melancholy "Shooting Star" to a spirited revival of "Dignity"). But what's most surprising about Mtv Unplugged is above all Dylan's vocal performance: the confusion of just a few years earlier (for some, not unrelated to a certain familiarity with alcohol...) is swept away by crisp, cutting diction. As Greil Marcus writes about the record, Dylan takes the approach of "a detective investigating his own songs, treating them as clues, following their trail until he reaches the real mystery, the real crime"8.

And so, resurfacing from the depths of the Sixties, comes the antimilitarist parable of "John Brown", a forgotten protest song reshaped as an Appalachian ballad; and above all, here is a "Desolation Row" rich with nuance, where every verse seems to tell a new story. Not to mention the notable omissions from the final setlist, including a rare revival of "Hazel", which would have made the record even more precious. The question keeps becoming more insistent: does Dylan really have no intention of writing songs anymore?

The end of time has just begun

Who's that guy in white standing next to Bob Dylan?

It's September 27, 1997, and three hundred thousand people gathered on the grounds of the Centro Agroalimentare in Bologna are awaiting an impossible encounter: the wandering Jew Zimmerman and the Pope who will become a saint right away. The press has been having a field day for days: "The Woodstock of the spirit", "Pope Wojtyla's rock night", "The first great religious concert in history"... The mere fact that Dylan agreed to perform live on TV during the vigil-concert of the National Eucharistic Congress (with a lineup ranging from Adriano Celentano to Andrea Bocelli...) is the kind of news bound to stir up the most entrenched clichés: what ever happened to the minstrel of the counterculture? What do rock and faith have to do with each other? Where are we headed?!

This time, though, there's one more reason to draw attention to the event: the simple fact of seeing Dylan on a stage again. To use his own words, at the end of May Dylan nearly went to meet Elvis: a cardiac inflammation caused by a serious infection, histoplasmosis, forced him into the hospital and a long convalescence. Only in August was he able to painfully return to the stage, after having canceled all the dates scheduled for the preceding months.

"And now... Bob Dylan!" announces an incredulous Milly Carlucci. He, Dylan, appears in a sober country-singer suit with a pale Stetson pulled down over his head. He only has time for three classics: "Knockin' On Heaven's Door", "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and "Forever Young" (diplomatically leaving out "With God On Our Side", even though it had been run through at the previous day's soundcheck). With the formidable Jackson/Watson pairing replaced by Larry Campbell on guitar and David Kemper on drums, the band sounds stiffer and less incisive. Before wrapping up, Dylan climbs the steps, stumbles, takes off his hat and finally finds himself in front of John Paul II. The words they exchanged remain a mystery. What is not a mystery, however, is that for the first time a Pope decided to directly comment on Dylan's lyrics: "You said that the answer to the questions of your life 'is blowin' in the wind'", Wojtyla observes, referring to "Blowin' In The Wind". "It's true! But not in the wind that scatters everything into the vortexes of nothingness, but in the wind that is the breath and voice of the Spirit". And further: "You asked me: how many roads must a man walk down before he can call himself a man? I answer you: one!". "The road of truth", he adds, "the way of life". Who knows whether, in that moment, Dylan thought back to the words he himself had used, almost twenty years earlier, in one of his notorious sermons: "I told you the answer was blowin' in the wind, and so it was. There's only one way to believe, only one - the truth and the life"...

Three days later, a new record signed Bob Dylan hits the shelves. It's called Time Out Of Mind, and it's his first collection of original songs since Under The Red Sky. The album that many feared would never arrive.

In 1996, while his son Jakob's Wallflowers were climbing the charts with "Bringing Down The Horse", someone had even gone so far as to invent a phantom album, just to keep hope alive. It was supposedly going to be called "Stormy Season", and a full tracklist had even circulated online, with titles like "Abraham's Altar" and "Apollo's Love"... Prophecy or coincidence, it's roughly around that same period that Dylan actually goes back to writing. Under a blanket of snow, on his farm in Minnesota, the words pour out in a slow stream of consciousness, starting from fragments jotted down between one show and the next. And when the pages start piling up, he lets himself be talked into picking up where he'd left off, before things had stalled: with Daniel Lanois.

In a New York hotel room, Dylan has Lanois read the new lyrics. Just words, no music. "I was blown away by the power of those lines", the Canadian producer recalls in his memoir, "Soul Mining". The two arrange to meet in Oxnard, California, at the studio Lanois had set up inside an old Mexican theatre. There the new songs begin to take shape, as shown by the excerpts released in 2023 on Fragments. But Dylan wants somewhere further from home, with fewer distractions. So, in January 1997, the sessions move down to Miami: Dylan has in mind a long list of musicians to bring in (first and foremost, blues pianist Bruce Dickinson), people who he believes can help him find the attitude he's looking for. The studio starts to get overcrowded: alongside Dylan's recruits there are the members of his touring band and, of course, Lanois and his collaborators. Just like in the days of Oh Mercy, the tension starts to become palpable. "I felt a darkness spreading through the air", Lanois recalls. "Everything I had fought against was seeping out of the walls like blood in a horror movie". The parking lot outside the studio becomes the personal war room of Dylan and Lanois. But once again, their tug-of-war gives birth to a bleeding, memorable record.

The sounds seem to emerge like shadows out of the fog: at first they're just indistinct echoes, then the organ and Dylan's voice push through, filtered through an old amplifier. "I'm walking through streets that are dead", announces the opening line of "Love Sick", and its rarefied fatalism reverberates with an archaic, spectral tone. No one has ever managed to make Dylan's songs sound as contemporary and, at the same time, as ancient as Lanois does on Time Out Of Mind. That guitar slicing through the air on "Til I Fell In Love With You" could have come from Slim Harpo's "Strange Love"; the hypnotic riff that runs through "Highlands" could belong to some Charley Patton record. Lanois gathers up all the suggestions Dylan offers him, but carries them off into a dusty elsewhere, where every instrument appears and vanishes into the background: "A dirt floor with loose ends and frayed edges", is how Greil Marcus describes it. "Songs that seem at once unfinished and definitive. More than created, the music seems to have been found"⁸.

With his increasingly dry, mesmeric growl, Dylan invents a new language, one that will stay with him through the decades to come. "I was writing couplets, and then I'd put them together later", he says of how the lyrics of Time Out Of Mind came about. The structure of the songs thus grows out of the juxtaposition of short epigrams, each with a life of its own: a technique typical of oral culture, from the bluesmen of the rural South all the way back to the formulaic style of epic bards. "A jukebox of intertextual references", to use Alessandro Carrera's words, "a giant cut-up performed on the songbook of American folklore"².

The album's title sounds like a reference to exactly that dimension: "Bob Dylan's time out of mind, the time of the wise and the graceful whose disappearance he cannot resign himself to, is the oral culture of the storytellers, the blues and country singers who passed their knowledge down to one another before phonograph recordings could claim to fix it in a fixed history"². And time is the record's true obsession, from the menacing ticking of the clock in "Love Sick" to the swinging pendulum of "Tryin' To Get To Heaven". Time slipping away, the hands that never turn back. "Yesterday everything was going too fast/ Today it's moving too slow", Dylan sings as the organ of "Standing In The Doorway" seems to chase the ghost of "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands".

But Time Out Of Mind is also the story of an unending journey. Footsteps unwinding along the lost roads of "Dirt Road Blues", with its saturated sound reminiscent of some old pre-war record. Routes crossing through Missouri and New Orleans, London and Paris, Chicago and Boston. And yet, in the twilight hour of "Not Dark Yet", the journey seems to lead nowhere: "I know it looks like I'm moving, but I'm standing still". The pace is mournful and majestic, a funeral march for a world of lies, for a wasteland from which not even the murmur of a prayer rises anymore. Then a pitch-black bassline introduces "Cold Irons Bound", immediately gripped by wooden percussion and lashing metallic guitar: the destination is only twenty miles away, but the pull of a chain keeps him from going on.

On one hand, a sense of imprisonment; on the other, the desire to reach the end of the road before it's too late. Time Out Of Mind, at bottom, is nothing but a long chiaroscuro rumination on this conflict. The harmonica of "Tryin' To Get To Heaven" opens a crack in the stillness of the sky, borrowing its words from an old spiritual about Noah and his ark: despite everything, the door isn't shut yet. Despite everything, the heart belongs to a distant place, but one that isn't therefore unreachable: "My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I roam/ That's where I'll be when I get called home," Dylan whispers in the closing lines of "Highlands." "There's a way to get there and I'll figure it out somehow/ But why must I explain, don't think I will." In the nineteenth century, the Scottish poet Robert Burns sang of his homeland's highlands in much the same way. But for Dylan they're nothing more than the symbol of an edenic land, a sort of heavenly Jerusalem. The song's more than sixteen minutes unfurl like the telling of a dream: a neighbour who can't stand Neil Young's music, a waitress who's desperate to have her portrait painted, the feeling of having taken the wrong turn somewhere along the way. Not in at least twenty years had the surreal irony of the Duluth songwriter dug so deep.

And yet, Dylan is unsatisfied, frustrated by the gap between his original idea and the final result. Lanois too had to give in to compromise: he dreamed of turning the sludgy groove of "Can't Wait" into a chart-topping hit, but at some point it slipped through his fingers. "It was hard trying to steer that ship," Dylan recalls of the Miami sessions. But this time, fortunately, he's wrong. The reception of Time Out Of Mind is nothing short of triumphant: Elvis Costello, writing in Mojo, goes as far as to hyperbolically call it the best Dylan record ever made. In 1998, the album sweeps up no fewer than three Grammys: Album of the Year, Best Contemporary Folk Album, and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for "Cold Irons Bound." At the award ceremony, while Dylan delivers a scorching rendition of "Love Sick", self-styled artist and performer Michael Portnoy bursts onto the stage bare-chested with the words "Soy bomb" scrawled across his torso. Dylan grants him no more than a glance and carries on with the song unfazed. It would fall to Eels, about a decade later, to turn the incident into a nostalgic metaphor on their track "Whatever Happened To Soy Bomb."

Among the eleven tracks on Time Out Of Mind, the only weak spot is the sentimentality of "To Make You Feel My Love" (which would nonetheless go on to be turned into a hit soul ballad by Adele). But once again, the final tracklist is missing at least one gem: "Red River Shore," an elegy of old-fashioned charm later recovered on Tell Tale Signs and Fragments, which builds as the instruments gradually enter. The waters of the river are the same ones once sung about by the Kingston Trio, but the story they tell here is different: the girl's silhouette outlined against the light on the riverbank seems as impalpable as a ghost's, an unreachable memory of Eurydice, almost a female counterpart to the dark lover of "Man In The Long Black Coat." Is it possible to experience mystery on this earth? "I heard of a guy who lived a long time ago," Dylan murmurs, “Un uomo pieno di tristezza e di contrasti/ Se qualcuno intorno a lui moriva/ Lui sapeva come riportarlo alla vita/ Non so che tipo di linguaggio usasse/ O se accadono ancora cose di questo tipo/ A volte penso che nessuno mi abbia mai visto/ Eccetto la ragazza della riva del Red River”.

PART FIVE: FROM 2000 TO THE PRESENT

My heart is not weary

Bob Dylan has grown a moustache. It's on full display in the camera's close-up: a neat, dapper little moustache fit for a country squire. He's also written a new song: it's mocking, it's disillusioned, it's more Dylanesque than ever. It's called “Things Have Changed”. As if to say, if once the times were a-changing, now they really have changed. But not in the way people thought back then: “La gente è pazza e i tempi sono strani/ Sono rinchiuso, sono tagliato fuori/ Una volta mi interessava, ma le cose sono cambiate”. He wrote it for the soundtrack of Curtis Hanson's film “Wonder Boys”, and it earned him a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Best Original Song. And it's during the 2001 Oscar night that he performs it live on TV, broadcast via satellite from his Australian tour. His gaze is icy, the music cutting. It will become one of his most-performed live tracks, one of the songs that best represents the Dylan of the new millennium. “A song that doesn't dance around the issue and doesn't turn a blind eye to human nature”, to use the words of his acceptance speech. On stage, atop an amp, he will carry that golden statuette around the world for a long time to come.

Bob Dylan has grown a moustache, and it's not just a trivial detail. Because the new album he releases in 2001 is, at heart, a record with a moustache too. A record that seems to come from a past made up of dapper crooners, vintage microphones, string ties worn by Wild West gamblers. From before the invention of rock 'n' roll. Love And Theft is the first chapter of a journey backwards whose seed had already been planted five years earlier, on the occasion of the most improbable of investitures. At the party for Frank Sinatra's eightieth birthday, Dylan had been the guest of honor, the only one to perform an original song (a dreamy “Restless Farewell”, requested, it seems, by The Voice himself). “You and I, my friend, have blue eyes”, Sinatra had told him. “We come from up there, not like all these others”, he'd added, pointing to the star-filled night sky. “I remember thinking that maybe he was right”, Dylan remarks. And along the path traced by that voice, through the melodies whispered in the dead of night by the radio he listened to as a boy, begins his umpteenth search for lost time.

On the cover of Love And Theft, next to a black-and-white portrait of a visibly moustachioed Dylan, the album title is written in quotation marks. That's because the title is already a quotation, a nod to historian Eric Lott's book on the America of minstrel shows: "Love & Theft. Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class". The notorious blackface performers, white actors with their faces painted black, staged a kind of caricatured appropriation of African-American culture. A shameless dialectic of love and theft, indeed — not unlike Dylan's own relationship with his roots. Or perhaps a perfect synthesis, since for him love and theft are exactly the same thing.

The first thing that strikes you, after the gloom of Time Out Of Mind, is the sense that the shadows have suddenly lifted: the interplay of percussion and guitars on "Tweedly Dee & Tweedly Dum" sets up a brisk wordplay built around the characters of "Alice in Wonderland" and nursery rhymes, just like in the days of Under The Red Sky. The sound is crisp and stripped-down, in none-too-subtle contrast to the atmospheres favored by Daniel Lanois. This time Dylan wants no intrusions, taking on the role of producer himself under the alias Jack Frost ("I don't think anybody really understands how I should sound except me"), aiming to recreate the dynamism of his live band. And he pulls it off brilliantly when he invites everyone to put on their dancing shoes for the full-throttle rockabilly of "Summer Days", driven along by Charlie Sexton's guitar.

And yet, looking just beneath the surface, Love And Theft is anything but a sunny record (partly due to the sense of loss stemming from his mother's recent death). Just listen to "Summer Days": past summers never come back, no matter what Jay Gatsby claims to the contrary. Anyone who's read Fitzgerald knows the story doesn't end well. "Your days are numbered, and so are mine," Dylan muses in "Mississippi," the track that stands as the album's centerpiece. "Time is piling up, we struggle and we scrape/ We're all boxed in, nowhere left to escape." He'd written it for Time Out Of Mind, but hadn't managed to give it the shape he was after. He'd lent it to Sheryl Crow, but the breezy version on "The Globe Sessions" only partly captured its spirit. Now it takes on a measured, light step, a tone that caresses and wounds at once. "The emptiness is endless, cold as clay/ You can always go back, but you can't go back all the way."

Love And Theft essentially sets the template for Dylan's discography in the years that follow: while the songwriting carries on down the road paved by Time Out Of Mind, musically the album splits into three distinct strands. On one side are the electric blues numbers built on the most classic twelve-bar structure, from "Lonesome Day Blues" to "Cry A While". On the other, intimate songs delivered with a small d'antan orchestra, like "Floater (Too Much To Ask)" and "Po' Boy". In between sit the true folk ballads, which often still hold the album's most precious gems. Such is the case with "High Water (For Charley Patton)", with its Appalachian-flavored banjo sinews, where floodwaters serve as a warning of looming apocalypse. The album, incidentally, came out on a day destined to make its prophecies of the end times feel tragically timely: September 11, 2001.

Dylan's songs increasingly become a kind of hypertext woven with quotations and allusions, to the point of requiring an actual set of annotations to interpret them. In the case of Love And Theft, it takes months before anyone discovers that quite a few lines actually draw on a novel by Japanese writer Junichi Saga, "Confessions of a Yakuza," dating back to 1989. Naturally, there's no shortage of people immediately crying plagiarism, proving they haven't understood much about Dylan's particular blend of love and theft... The same thing will happen a few years later, when it emerges that Modern Times makes use of a series of quotations from the nineteenth-century American poet Henry Timrod. Dylan doesn't take it too well: he bluntly calls his accusers "wussies and pussies"... "In folk and jazz, quotation is a rich tradition," he snaps in a Rolling Stone interview. "That goes for everyone except me. I mean, everybody else can do it, but not me. There are different rules for me."

As Erik Davis noted in his writings on modern esoterica, "folk music has never been pure; its creative mutations, cannibalizations and cross-cultural thefts constitute its living continuity"¹². Dylan takes quotations from forgotten authors and inserts them into a completely different context, giving them a new perspective: an intellectual game with a postmodern flavour, taking the place of the beat poet's mystical inspiration. But always lived out with the spirit of an old folksinger.

Love And Theft lacks the leaden allure of Time Out Of Mind's atmospheres, lacks the search for a contemporary angle on an ancestral legacy. It sounds more straightforward, but also more backward-looking. And yet the album is met with equal enthusiasm: it wins a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 2002 and enters Billboard's top five. In stark contrast to the oblivion of the Eighties, Dylan now enters a phase of near-unanimous critical acclaim, one that will faithfully accompany every new release of his in the new millennium.

Bob confirms he's in fine form even when tackling other people's material, whether it's the country of Hank Williams ("I Can't Get You Off My Mind," from the tribute album "Timeless") or the Sun Records jukebox sound ("Red Cadillac And A Black Moustache," from the record accompanying the documentary "Good Rockin' Tonight"). In "Return To Me," included in the soundtrack of the TV series "The Sopranos", you can even hear him singing in painfully broken Italian ("solo tiuuu, solo tiuu, mio cu-roreee"...).

On stage, after a 1999 tour alongside Paul Simon (sadly not up to the expectations raised by such a pairing of sacred monsters…), between 2000 and 2001 Dylan returns to his best form, backed by a band set alight by Charlie Sexton's guitar and its interplay with the band's other guitarist, Larry Campbell. In October 2002, however, audiences in Seattle get a bitter surprise: for the first time, the American songwriter takes the stage playing keyboards rather than guitar for much of the evening. From then on, seeing him pick up a guitar becomes increasingly rare. Arthritis is to blame, so the rumor goes. Dylan claims it as an artistic choice, but there's no getting around it: it's the end of an era.

Even though, to this day, there still isn't (yet) a proper live album of the "Never Ending Tour" after MTV Unplugged, official recordings have nonetheless been scattered here and there over the years (from b-sides to bonus discs, up to the Japan-only compilation Live 1961-2000 and the already-mentioned Tell Tale Signs and Fragments). On stage, Dylan once again unearths the hidden treasures of folklore ("Cocaine Blues", "Roving Gambler", "Somebody Touched Me"), but above all he rewrites his repertoire anew every night in an eternal present, chasing that unforeseen nuance capable of shifting the perspective, even if only in the inflection of a single line. Just listen to the hypnotic mandolin interplay with which "Highlands" makes its live debut in 2000, or the earthy rebirth of "Country Pie" that same year, or the sulfurous electricity of "High Water (For Charley Patton)" in 2003: throughout the entire span of the never-ending tour, Dylan's songs have never stopped presenting themselves as a script in constant transformation.

Slowly but surely, though, a sense of gradual erosion begins to creep into his performances, especially from the mid-2000s onward. The flashes of brilliance don't disappear, but they become increasingly sporadic, within setlists that are by now less and less open to the unexpected: as Paolo Vites recounts, "over the years, people started going to a Bob Dylan concert hoping that at some point in the evening he'd play at least one song worthy of note, that is, up to his usual standard. If you were lucky, at least one song that night was pure magic. Then people started going to Bob Dylan concerts hoping that, at some point in the evening, during at least one song, he'd deliver a verse, a few lines, in a memorable way"9. So then, why? "Why do you keep playing?" journalist Ed Bradley asks him during the interview he gave to CBS in 2000 for "60 Minutes". "Ah, here we go back to the question of destiny," Dylan replies. "I made a deal a long time ago, and I'm still holding up my end of it." "Should I perhaps ask who you made it with?" the interviewer presses, slyly. "Well, with the chief commander... on this earth and in the world we can't see."

Reality has always had too many heads

Floods, guerrilla warfare, poverty. "God has turned his back on his nation," thunders a preacher's voice. In the background, the notes of a song in Japanese that sounds strangely familiar. Yes, it really is: Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages", but in an unlikely Japanese rendition...

So begins "Masked And Anonymous", yet another Dylan cinematic failure. Actually, the best of his failures. Unlike "Renaldo And Clara", Dylan doesn't attempt to play director. Unlike "Hearts Of Fire", he doesn't simply act as a performer. But his fingerprints are everywhere, and it's not always a happy imprint.

To appear in Dylan's new project, which would premiere at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, Hollywood's biggest names line up: from John Goodman to Jeff Bridges, from Penélope Cruz to Val Kilmer, from Mickey Rourke to Jessica Lange. The star-studded cast, however, isn't enough. Nor is Larry Charles's direction enough (he would find success a few years later with "Borat", starring Sacha Baron Cohen). The weak point is the screenplay, co-written by Charles and Dylan himself (under the pseudonym Sergei Petrov).

Dylan, for a change, plays an old, washed-up rock star, Jack Fate. Who is also the son of the President, the leader of a South American-style dictatorial regime that seems to have supplanted American democracy in a near (dystopian) future. The plot revolves around Fate's release from prison so he can take part in a benefit concert, while the President lies on his deathbed. Beyond this bare-bones synopsis, though, the plot actually unfolds in anything but linear fashion, essentially serving as mere glue for a series of encounters and exchanges that are unfailingly cryptic. Aphorisms that might sound evocative in a song lyric end up coming across on screen as merely contrived and sibylline: partly to blame is Dylan's clumsy acting, but even far more celebrated actors seem to suffer a certain awkwardness (with the exception of the scene-stealing John Goodman, in the role of the impresario Uncle Sweetheart).

In a dizzying scenario of corrupt revolutionaries and secret lovers (which even includes a Sorrentino-esque circus featuring lookalikes of Pope John Paul II, Gandhi and Lincoln mixed in with illusionists, wrestlers and ventriloquists), there's quite a bit of wasted potential: there's an ironic hall-of-mirrors game with the Dylan icon (as when the concert organizers demand that Jack Fate's songs be "recognizable"), and there are flashes of political satire and existential fatalism that deserved far better development ("Human beings, alone with their secrets, masked and anonymous: nobody really knows them"). In a parallel universe, "Masked And Anonymous" could have been a masterpiece.

For the soundtrack, the choice falls on a collection of decidedly unorthodox Dylan covers: alongside "My Back Pages" by Japan's Magokoro Brothers, there's also the (dreadful) spaghetti-rap rendition of "Like A Rolling Stone" courtesy of Articolo 31 ("Come una pietra scalciata"), and the version of "If You See Her, Say Hello" translated by Francesco De Gregori for "La valigia dell'attore" ("Non dirle che non è così"). The musical heart of the project, however, is offered by Dylan himself: a handful of superlative performances alongside the "Never Ending Tour" band (in the film's fiction, the Simple Twist Of Fate, Jack Fate's cover band), captured on the stage of an old theatre. Four tracks are also included on the soundtrack album: a sharp, biting "Down In The Flood", a molten "Cold Irons Bound", and a pair of tributes to tradition ("Diamond Joe" and a solemn rendition of the Southern anthem "Dixie"). In the film, though, there are even more songs, from an "I'll Remember You" of incomparable tenderness to a vibrant "Drifter's Escape". In the end, the music is the best reason to remember "Masked And Anonymous", right up to the splendid live version of "Blowin' In The Wind" (recorded in Santa Cruz in 2000) that plays over the closing credits. Jack Fate climbs in handcuffs into the van taking him back to prison, a disenchanted smile on his lips: "I stopped trying to figure things out a long time ago," says the voiceover. Maybe that's the only way to arrive at true understanding.

Dylan's involvement with film in the 2000s didn't end with "Masked And Anonymous": he lent the big screen a series of particularly successful unreleased tracks, starting with the long ballad "'Cross The Green Mountain", also included in 2003 on the soundtrack of "Gods And Generals". In keeping with the film's theme, devoted to Civil War-era America, the song tells of the blood of the fallen and the vanity of glory, accompanied by a sepia-toned video in which Dylan crosses the battlefield in full period costume, complete with beard and long hair (in the sense of an outlandish wig...).

Aside from the lackluster waltz "Waitin' For You" (from 2002's "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood"), Dylan's subsequent film contributions also settle at a level just below that of "'Cross The Green Mountain": both the swagger of "Tell Ol' Bill" and the more delicate "Huck's Tune" (included on the soundtracks of "North Country" and "Lucky You" respectively) prove to be substantial songs, which could easily have found a place on the tracklist of a proper album.

Martin Scorsese, meanwhile, dedicated his 2005 documentary "No Direction Home" to the Dylan of the electric turn, crafting a passionate journey through images, music and testimonies into the genesis of the myth, able to paint a fascinating picture of America's political, social and artistic context in the first half of the Sixties.

Meanwhile, in the autumn of 2004, the hugely anticipated first volume (and, to this day, still the only one) of Dylan's autobiography, "Chronicles", hit bookshops. Naturally, Dylan doesn't content himself with a chronological narrative, but weaves together different timeframes in a story that seems to proceed above all by thematic affinity. The theme of the first volume, from this perspective, could then be said to be that of beginnings, or rather of the continuous new beginning that life carries with it (almost paraphrasing Cesare Pavese's insight: "The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to live because living is beginning, always, at every instant"). The beginning of his musical career, among the legendary streets of Greenwich Village; the new beginning after stepping out of the spotlight following the electric turn, at the dawn of the Seventies; and yet another new beginning after the disorientation of the Eighties, with the start of the "Never Ending Tour" and the recording of Oh Mercy. Dylan offers a fictionalized version of his own adventure, yet one that is unexpectedly sincere.

The book is a critical and commercial success, staying on the "New York Times" best-seller list for 19 weeks. Because these Dylan chronicles, as Riccardo Bertoncelli writes, are not "stories fixed in formalin on the page of memoir, but adventures that still quiver in some timeless corner of the mind"¹⁰.

Through the world mysterious and vague

"The New Dark Ages": that's how Dylan had described modern times back in the era of World Gone Wrong. Times in which man seems condemned to remain incomprehensible even to himself. Times to which Dylan knows full well he doesn't belong.

Five years on from Love And Theft, for his comeback album Dylan picks up right from there, from those illusory, indecipherable modern times. Modern Times carries the bittersweet smile of Chaplin's Little Tramp, in the way it confronts the soulless machinery of the new millennium. The parallel with Charlie Chaplin, after all, is a constant in Dylan's iconography: as far back as his debut, John Hammond had described the fresh-faced Minnesota folksinger as "a musical Chaplin tramp". With Modern Times, then, the circle truly seems to close: Dylan's is a ceaseless search for lost time, an impossible attempt to hold onto even just a fragment of those instants fleeing into the night, as in the famous Ted Croner photograph used for the album cover.

Recorded over a couple of weeks in New York, after two months of rehearsals in early 2006 at the Poughkeepsie Opera Theatre, Modern Times conjures the grainy images of a past woven from memories. As had already happened with Love And Theft, Dylan personally directs every detail, handling the album's production entirely on his own. His voice, roughened by the furrow of works and days, embraces crooning tones darker and deeper than ever before. "Sometimes I feel like I'm inhabited by the echo of Louis Armstrong's voice," he says. "I don't know if my way of singing is inspired more by his gravelly voice or by his trumpet when it seems to whisper a secret in your ear."

The curtain on Dylan's modern times rises on the proto-boogie of "Thunder On The Mountain", which chases, with its driving melodic line, the echo of "Johnny B. Goode"'s rock 'n' roll swagger, gladly giving way to the elegant guitar solos of Stu Kimball and Denny Freeman. Dylan presents himself as an aging Casanova, busy studying Ovid's "Ars Amatoria" and casting mischievous glances in the direction of Alicia Keys.

With consummate skill, Modern Times alternates lively blues numbers with soft ballads, from the sugary caresses of "Spirit On The Water" and "Beyond The Horizon" to the hushed waltz of "When The Deal Goes Down", which in the video starring Scarlett Johansson conjures the grainy images of a past woven from memories. On the blues front, the interweaving of love and theft continues with the usual labyrinth of citations: it's not hard to trace the line connecting "The Levee's Gonna Break" to the almost identically titled song by Memphis Minnie, also covered by Led Zeppelin on their legendary fourth album, whose images of flooding seem to take on fresh relevance in an America wounded by Hurricane Katrina.

But Modern Times, thankfully, isn't just an apocryphal collection of blues and swing standards. Proof of that comes with the nostalgic piano that grazes the edges of "Workingman's Blues #2", inspired by a song by Merle Haggard. In just a few lines, Dylan sketches his own personal economic analysis of Western society: "The buying power of the proletariat's gone down/ Money's getting shallow and weak," he sings bitterly, "they say low wages are a reality/ if we want to compete abroad." Then the inexorably dense tread of "Nettie Moore", heightened by Donnie Herron's violin, is cloaked in regret and longing. Once again, the roots run deep, back to a 19th-century folk ballad by Marshall S. Pike dedicated to the painful memory of a woman taken into slavery and forever separated from her love.

Before the credits roll, Dylan still has in store the most gripping moment of his script: introduced by a dark violin lament, the conclusion of Modern Times is entrusted to the spectral tread of "Ain't Talkin'", which over more than eight minutes leads into an apocalyptic meditation worthy of the visions with which "Highlands" sealed the stream of consciousness of Time Out Of Mind.

It's a pilgrimage in which the steps matter far more than the words, that of "Ain't Talkin'": "I'm not talking, I'm just walking," Dylan murmurs, “attraverso il mondo misterioso e sfuggente/ Il cuore sta bruciando, si sta ancora struggendo/ Mentre cammino tra le città della pestilenza”. The "mystic garden" through which his journey unfolds recalls the thorns of Gethsemane more than the fruits of Eden. There are no altars along the lonely road, and yet the path is guided by "a faith that's long been abandoned" and by a plea full of begging: "They say prayer has the power to heal/ So pray for me, mother."

On the threshold of the end of the world, there seems to be no trace of the gardener in the deserted garden. Has God abandoned man, as T.S. Eliot might ask, or has man abandoned God? Dylan answers by silently resuming his journey through the mysterious Sabbath of time in which human existence is fulfilled. This is what pilgrims have always done.

Like its predecessors, Modern Times also received a virtual standing ovation: at the 2007 Grammys it took home the award for Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance (for "Someday Baby"), and for the first time since Desire it topped the Billboard chart.

Meanwhile, though, Dylan had plenty of other activities keeping him busy. First of all, between 2006 and 2009 he hosted the radio show "Theme Time Radio Hour," showing off all his talent as a musical storyteller to present a series of richly themed playlists drawn liberally from the music he grew up listening to.

Then, in 2007, he opened his first exhibition of paintings to the public: Dylan's passion for painting was certainly nothing new (just think of his artwork used for the covers of Self Portrait and Planet Waves, as well as "Music From Big Pink" by the Band), but with the exhibition "The Drawn Blank Series" it rose for the first time to a standing of its own as art. Over the years, Dylan-the-painter (though also a sculptor of wrought-iron gates...) would make increasingly frequent appearances, as would the inevitable accusations: his paintings, in fact, often draw directly on more or less well-known photographs, which, as usual, Mr. Zimmerman appropriates without too many scruples. But the point remains the same: it is precisely in this process, after all, that his originality lies.

To the further outrage of his most hardline fans, Dylan gave in to the lure of several TV commercials: for Victoria's Secret he lent the notes of "Love Sick," wandering the halls of a Venetian palazzo in the company of Adriana Lima, while for Chrysler (to name two of the most notable examples) he delivered a declaration of pure American rhetoric in a billiard hall: "You can search the world over for something as beautiful as the open road, but you won't find it." A few years later, he would even launch his own line of whiskey: it would be called "Heaven's Door," with bottles featuring motifs from his wrought-iron work.

In 2007, director Todd Haynes (who had already explored the world of rock in "Velvet Goldmine") dedicated the film "I'm Not There" to Dylan's persona, one of the most successful pieces of iconography built around the Dylan mask: six different characters, each played by a different actor (from Christian Bale to Cate Blanchett, from Richard Gere to Heath Ledger), stage, in a visionary and evocative way, as many different phases of the Duluth songwriter's career. Accompanying the images is a soundtrack of reinterpretations of the old bard's songbook entrusted to a truly remarkable alternative cast (Sonic Youth, Mark Lanegan, Cat Power, Sufjan Stevens, Stephen Malkmus, just to name a few). It's a pairing that reaches its peak when, in the imaginary town of Enigma, Jim James and Calexico take the stage of a gazebo, turning "Goin' To Acapulco" into a surreal and haunting funeral song.

Crowning this renewed popularity, in 2008 Dylan was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize "for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." It was the first time such an honor went to an artist outside the bounds of classical or jazz music. But it was merely a preview of the poetic laurels still to come.

I’ve got the blood of the land in my voice

A face carved by time, an intense and piercing gaze; fingers brushing the keys of a trumpet, hands gripping an accordion. Is the group of gypsy musicians appearing in the black-and-white image on the back of Together Through Life just that, or is it merely the latest reincarnation of Bob Dylan? Judging by the border dust blowing through the tracks of his new record, released in April 2009, one might almost say the spirits of that wandering band had been summoned to take part in an impossible meeting between Howlin' Wolf and Calexico at America's crossroads.

No one expected a new Dylan album barely a couple of years after the previous one. Probably not even Dylan himself. Yet something new happens on Together Through Life: there are the zydeco scents of David Hidalgo of Los Lobos's accordion sketching sun-baked landscapes; there's Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers's guitar weaving between sudden flashes of horns and violin. And the retro elegance of Modern Times gives way to rougher shades.

Not since Under The Red Sky had Dylan made a record so spontaneously, riding the inspiration of the moment: this time the spark came from French director Olivier Dahan, who asked him to contribute to the soundtrack of his new film, "My Own Love Song." Dylan wrote him a languid parlor ballad embroidered with mandolin, "Life Is Hard," and his muse suddenly stirred back to life.

Going even further back in time, not since his partnership with Jacques Levy on Desire had Dylan written most of an album's songs in collaboration with another writer: in this case it was Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, with whom Mr. Zimmerman had already worked on a couple of songs on the infamous Down In The Groove. It's no coincidence, though, that the most convincing lyrics are those of the one song credited to Dylan alone, "This Dream Of You": the songwriting born from the partnership with Hunter sounds all too straightforward.

Amid the swirling accordion and violin of "This Dream Of You" – somewhere along the road connecting Desire and Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid – a tex-mex dance emerges in the melancholy glow of sunset: "There's a moment when all old things become new again/ But that moment might have come and gone," Dylan reflects bitterly.

Shadowed by the dark tones of Campbell's guitar, the figure of the door – always a key element in Dylan's poetics – returns within the folds of "Forgetful Heart," in a somber tone over which the presence of Daniel Lanois seems to hover: "The door has closed forevermore/ If indeed there ever was a door."

Dylan's rasping, world-weary voice spares nothing, neither himself nor the world around him: over the driving boogie of "It's All Good," the Duluth songwriter proclaims that everything is fine with the sarcastic gaze of Voltaire's "Candide," while around him buildings collapse and the weeping of widows mingles with the blood of orphans.

And yet, "I Feel A Change Comin' On" casts a faint glimmer of spring onto the horizon, following the steady tread of faithful Tony Garnier's bass: "I feel a change comin' on/ And the fourth part of the day's already gone." Even in the face of the inexorable passing of time, the barest, almost imperceptible tremor of change is enough to open an unexpected crack even in the desert of a withered heart. "Some people say/ I got the blood of the land in my voice."

As was already the case on Love And Theft and Modern Times, the weakest side of the album is found in the Chess Records-style blues numbers barked out at a brisk clip by Dylan ("Shake Shake Mama" and "Jolene"). Things improve when the tempo slows down, as on the sulphurous blues of "My Wife's Home Town", where Dylan borrows from Willie Dixon's "I Just Want To Make Love To You" to play with the archetype of the hellish bride, even allowing himself a diabolical smirk at the close: a borrowing acknowledged outright, for once, given that Dixon is even credited as co-author of the song.

Just a few months after Together Through Life, however, Dylan surprises everyone again, reappearing in the unlikely guise of Santa Claus to try his hand at the most classic of holiday repertoires on Christmas In The Heart. It's a record that chooses to place itself within a very specific tradition, one deeply rooted in American culture; a Christmas tradition made up not only of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, but also of Johnny Cash and Gene Autry, and one that belongs squarely to the country-folk universe of the United States.

On one hand there's the slightly rough-edged restraint of tracks like "The Christmas Blues" and "Do You Hear What I Hear?", which steer clear of the saccharine orchestration typical of the genre, relying instead on the hands of the regular cohorts who back Dylan onstage (with the addition, as on Together Through Life, of David Hidalgo of Los Lobos). On the other, there's the mawkish backdrop of Andrews Sisters-style choruses framing "Hark The Herald Angels Sing" or "The First Noel". The secular "Christmas Island" sits alongside the sacred "Adeste Fideles", with Dylan intoning the verses in a wobbly, drunken-sounding Latin that ends up producing an unintentionally comic effect.

And yet, from his Santa hat Dylan can still pull out a surprise like "Must Be Santa", which (taking its cue from a version by the little-known Texan outfit Brave Combo) turns a classic Christmas rhyme into a breakneck polka, with Hidalgo's accordion lending it an irresistible small-town-fair flavour. Had the rest of the record carried the same spirit, it might have sounded like the Grinch gleefully devouring Christmas sheet music... But evidently that wasn't what interested Dylan.

In the end, the problem with Christmas In The Heart is precisely its lack of personality: Dylan wants to recreate the Christmas atmosphere of his youth, but he does so by slavishly following tradition (with King Elvis clearly in mind), putting almost nothing of himself under the tree. Riding a wave of nostalgia, Dylan simply lends his unmistakable voice to a string of standards reproduced with as much fidelity as possible, from "Little Drummer Boy" to "Silver Bells", right up to the closing "Amen" of "O Little Town Of Bethlehem". The charitable intentions behind it (all proceeds from the record go to the World Food Programme) aren't enough, however, to redeem the musical results of Christmas In The Heart.

Then, in 2011, Dylan oversees a project dedicated to one of his greatest mentors, Hank Williams. Approached by music executive Mary Martin, he's offered the chance to set to music the lost verses of the "Hillbilly Shakespeare", jotted down in his old notebooks. Around him gathers a group of about a dozen artists ready to join him in the endeavour, starting with Lucinda Williams and Sheryl Crow.

Faced with "The Lost Notebooks Of Hank Williams", the comparison that inevitably comes to mind is the work done by Billy Bragg and Wilco on Woody Guthrie's lyrics on "Mermaid Avenue". But where "Mermaid Avenue" was driven by the courage of reappropriation, "The Lost Notebooks Of Hank Williams" feels altogether more static and traditionalist. It's a faithful tribute to the Hank Williams canon rather than a new take on it. Dylan, tackling "The Love That Faded", delivers a waltz embroidered with Donnie Herron's steel guitar and violin, very much in the spirit of the most classicist moments of his recent work.

So much for these long and wasted years

There's a city, at the foot of a hill. Its streets bear names that no human tongue has ever spoken. It's the Scarlet Town, the land of the seven wonders of the world. "That's the place I was born", Dylan sings in his voice worn hollow by time. Because if Duluth gave birth to Robert Allen Zimmerman, his double belongs to another place: Bob Dylan's homeland is the same as Henry Lee's and Omie Wise's, the homeland of the shadows of the "Anthology Of American Folk Music". "Evil and good living side by side, every human form seems glorified", he murmurs over the ancient fiddle of "Scarlet Town". Once he yearned to reach the place where beauty took shape, seeking shelter from the storm. Now that the storm has arrived, it's there that beauty has made its home. A scarlet beauty, as suggested by the cover of Tempest, the record that in 2012 makes us forget the uncertainties of the previous efforts.

In truth, Tempest (recorded at Jackson Browne's studio in Santa Monica, California) sits in closer continuity with Modern Times and Love And Theft than one might have expected. The success of his 2011 Grammy performance, when he'd unleashed a triumphant "Maggie's Farm" alongside two of the most prominent acts of the new indie-folk scene, Mumford & Sons and the Avett Brothers, had raised hopes of some change of direction. Instead, Dylan makes Tempest once again with the band that accompanies him on his tireless world tour, with the production reins firmly in his own hands, albeit with a touch more sparseness than usual.

The soft shuffle with which "Duquesne Whistle" opens the record seems to come straight out of the old dance hall of Love And Theft. It's the whistle of an abandoned factory, like the ones that were once the pride of the city of Duquesne. It's the whistle of a ghost train's locomotive, calling together everyone it passes. "Listen to that Duquesne whistle blowing/ Blowing like it's gonna sweep my world away". And the world it leads to is a cruel, soulless one, as in the video directed by Nash Edgerton for the song: where even the naive rush of falling in love ends up trampled by violence, with Dylan's cynical sneer leading a street gang through the slums.

"This is a hard country to stay alive in/ Blades are everywhere and they're breaking my skin", "Narrow Way" proclaims right from the start. Greed, corruption, betrayal: the world of Tempest closely recalls the decadent scenario Dylan imagined in "Masked And Anonymous". The pace is that of the tireless blues of Modern Times, which on "Early Roman Kings" turns into something close to a direct cast of Muddy Waters' famous "Mannish Boy", with David Hidalgo's accordion alongside it. They could be the arrogant rulers of antiquity, or they could be the Bronx gang that borrowed their name: Dylan's "Early Roman Kings" are equally treacherous and lecherous, equally capable of devouring souls and cities alike.

Between the Hank Williams-style country languor of "Soon After Midnight" and the sense of regret in "Long And Wasted Years", you have to wait for the pop-rock accents of "Pay In Blood" to find less predictable tones, somewhere between the Stones and Warren Zevon, whose vengeful growl would have suited the late-Seventies Dylan perfectly. But the real novelty of Tempest lies elsewhere: it's Dylan's return to narrative, to storytelling in its most classic sense. A taste for vivid, torrential storytelling that Dylan hadn't indulged in for years, and which he seems ready to rediscover in the closing stretch of the album.

On "Tin Angel" he lends his most Mephistophelian tone to a bloody, obsessive murder ballad built entirely around a grotesque dialogue. On "Roll On John" he pays a belated funeral elegy to John Lennon, almost echoing the one he wrote for Lenny Bruce some thirty years earlier. But it's above all the account of the sinking of the Titanic, across the more than forty verses of "Tempest", that claims a place of honour in Dylan's songbook.

Dancing to a waltz with Celtic echoes, the songwriter draws on the Carter Family's "The Titanic" to build a gallery of characters with a cinematic sweep, among whom it's certainly no accident to find a Leo who points none too subtly to James Cameron's blockbuster. "People will say I'm not very truthful", Mr. Zimmerman admits. "But a songwriter isn't concerned with what's truthful. What he's concerned with is what should have happened, what could have happened. That's his own kind of truth".

Once, faced with a storm, Dylan's concern would have been to find someone to blame. Even then, perhaps, he was telling his own kind of truth. Today, instead, his Titanic goes down with a sense of fatality, while the lookout dreams of the ship swallowed by the waves. Brother rises against brother with the blind fury of survival. Lovers say goodbye to one another, officers weep over the pages of the Book of Revelation. But someone leaves his cabin to reach out a hand to those who are drowning. And to lift his gaze toward the sky.

This is what Dylan is interested in describing: how, in the moment of crisis, a man's true mettle can be revealed. Or, to put it in Camus's words, how in the face of misfortune man is forced to "rediscover or assume the greatest virtue: that of All or Nothing." The storm, paradoxically, is the great opportunity. The opportunity to be oneself, even when beauty is as scarlet as blood.

Tempest climbs the Billboard chart all the way to number three, but also in 2012 Dylan earns an even more significant honor, one of the most prestigious accolades an American citizen can aspire to: the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It's the President of the United States himself, Barack Obama, who presents it to him, stating that "there is no greater giant in the history of American music." Bob shows up in a tuxedo and dark glasses, with his usual seemingly aloof gait, and gives Obama an awkward pat on the shoulder after the President hangs the medal's ribbon around his neck. Already in 2010, Dylan had accepted Obama's invitation to the evening celebrating the music of the civil rights movement, performing a stripped-down version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'" at the White House. An unusual concession from Mr. Zimmerman to his prophetic image, evidently prompted by the honor of institutional recognition.

It's to Martin Scorsese, instead, that Dylan pays tribute on the occasion of the 2012 Critics Choice Movie Awards: for the director of "No Direction Home," Bob transforms "Blind Willie McTell" into a kind of timeless jazz-blues, in which the American songwriter takes center stage armed with nothing but a microphone and harmonica, as he has begun doing in the most intense moments of his performances. Even Hollywood's stars give him a standing ovation.

Meanwhile, the press reports that Dylan has married – once again in secret – Darlene Springs (according to some, none other than the sister of his longtime backing vocalist Helena); the marriage, however, allegedly collapsed due to his wife's out-of-control spending... In the absence of any official confirmation, it can only be considered yet another example of the "stories in the press" that have haunted Dylan since the days of "Idiot Wind."

When autumn leaves start to fall

They call it the Great American Songbook: that repertoire of standards that made the fortune of the music publishers of Tin Pan Alley between the 1920s and the 1960s. Until Bob Dylan came along. "Tin Pan Alley is gone. I put an end to it": he said as much himself, in plain words, talking to Cameron Crowe back in the days of Biograph. Could it really be up to Dylan to seal the immortality of the Great American Songbook?

In 2015, what once would have seemed unthinkable instead sounds almost natural: on Shadows In The Night, Dylan tackles a compendium of more or less famous classics from American pop's bygone era. In a sense, it's not a different operation from the one that in the Nineties had led to the birth of Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong: there, the recovery was of folk and blues roots, here the gaze shifts toward that tradition straddling jazz and pop which, at least since the days of Love And Theft, has by now become fully part of Dylan's music. But the approach is the same: stripping the songs down to their essence, in search of their most hidden face.

From the title itself, the point of reference is inevitably Frank Sinatra. "He's the mountain," Dylan states firmly. "He's the mountain to climb, even if you might not manage to reach the summit." It's no coincidence, then, that all ten tracks on the album were performed by The Voice at some point in his career. After all, Dylan had already written as much in the pages of his autobiography: "In his voice I heard everything, death, God, and the universe, everything."

His, then, is first and foremost an act of love. Or rather, an act of justice. "I love these songs and I have no intention of disrespecting them," he explains. "Ruining these songs would be a sacrilege. We've all heard them get ruined and we've gotten used to it. In a way, it's about righting the wrong done to them."

With the declared intent of setting things right, Dylan thus relies on his unshakeable live band and an old-fashioned recording, done live in the studio with no additions or overdubs. Putting the melodies at the center and leaving everything else aside, starting with the flood of orchestration that usually accompanies this kind of song. A choice that's more understated even compared to his previous foray into Sinatra's repertoire, on the Christmas collection Christmas In The Heart: this time center stage is reserved for Donny Herron's pedal steel, with a horn trio barely grazing the edges of a few tracks ("I'm A Fool To Want You," "The Night We Called It A Day," and the closing "That Lucky Old Sun," already performed live by Dylan several times in the past).

Thus, even the most languid torch songs end up sounding like apocryphal Hank Williams numbers. It doesn't matter whether it's Prévert's lyrics ("Autumn Leaves") or Rachmaninoff's score ("Full Moon And Empty Arms"): the songs bleed into one another in a single, long ode to lost time and the nostalgia of love. Not with the bitterness of regret, but letting oneself be lulled by the torpor of memory. Dylan's crooning combines rust and tenderness as expected, but despite everything, the role of confidential balladeer doesn't suit him as well as that of the bluesman. And the devotion with which he approaches the songs on Shadows In The Night leaves the impression of a tribute that's almost too indulgent toward the shadows of the past.

It's telling, in this sense, that the only interview Dylan grants to promote the album is to the AARP magazine, the American retirees' association: "Don't try to act young. You could hurt yourself," he quips sardonically. After all, that's been his motto ever since the Nineties. These are songs Dylan could never have sung at twenty: as he himself admits, they would have overwhelmed him. Only the passing of time revealed to him the truth hidden behind the feeling. "It's something that has to do with human emotions. There's nothing artificial about these songs. There isn't a single false word in them. They're eternal."

Universal songs because the human heart is universal: the passion that burns away like autumn leaves, the waiting that lingers like a reflection of the moon. The cold, the weariness, the sense of sin. But above all, the need for someone to reach out to. To fully understand it, perhaps, one must have earned the same wrinkles he has.

It's hard to imagine any commercial motive behind Dylan's decision to release, the following year (the year of his seventy-fifth birthday), a new volume of reinterpreted American pop standards, Fallen Angels: how many people really felt the need to find him once again grappling with Frank Sinatra's repertoire? But the old minstrel only cares about the songs. And for the Dylan of the 2010s, these are the truest songs of all.

In fact, he's even bothered by the term "cover": "It's a kind of derogatory term, a word that has crept into music jargon. In the Fifties or Sixties nobody would have understood it. Doing a cover means hiding something." His purpose, instead, is the exact opposite: not to cover, but to reveal. Not to superimpose his own personality onto the songs, but to let their essence emerge, to resurface after decades of musical layering.

"If you don't believe what a song says, if you haven't lived it, there's not much point in interpreting it," Dylan states firmly. "An actor pretends to be someone else, a singer doesn't. He doesn't hide behind anything. That's the difference." The key to it all lies in this kind of identification, in the need to reclaim the truth of the simplest words.

The formula of Fallen Angels, in short, is the same as Shadows In The Night: elegant, austere arrangements, vintage microphones ready to capture the warmth of every breath, a band with perfectly oiled mechanisms. And Dylan, playing the crooner in his own inimitable way, making up in conviction for the limits of a voice that was certainly never built for this kind of songbook.

Fallen Angels navigates yesterday's shadows and ghosts with a touch slightly lighter than its predecessor. It's a matter of nuance, from the swinging gait of "That Old Black Magic" to the exotic scents of "On A Little Street In Singapore," shades of feeling that make the album's atmospheres seem, this time, a little less nocturnal. And yet, the track around which the melodic yearning wraps itself most tightly is precisely the one whose title alone ("Melancholy Mood") spells out the veil of melancholy in plain words.

Scattered strings and horns gently caress the contours of "Maybe You'll Be There" and "Skylark," while the sentimental vein of old torch songs like "All The Way" (queen of the 1957 Oscar night) and "It Had To Be You" (remember "When Harry Met Sally"?) takes on an even more pensive quality in step with the brushed drums.

Donnie Herron's pedal steel and Charlie Sexton's guitar continue to hold centre stage, intertwining like silver threads in the moonlight of "Polka Dots And Moonbeams." Brushing against each other while dancing at a country ball and staying bound together forever: this sense of destiny is, in the end, the real protagonist of Fallen Angels. The "simple twist of fate" that ties life's encounters together in a mysterious web, as the playing cards on the cover seem to suggest. When the tangle unravels, time no longer looks like an enemy, as Dylan suggests by turning Sinatra's old hit "Young At Heart" into a country apocryphal.

Songs unlike anything anybody ever heard

"Prior commitments." The classic excuse, the one we've all used at some point to dodge an annoying invitation. Only Dylan, though, could use it to skip picking up a Nobel Prize... It's October 13, 2016, when Sara Danius announces, on behalf of the Swedish Academy, that the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Bob Dylan, "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." Everyone scrambles to get his first reaction, but the Academy reports it hasn't been able to reach him. That evening, in Las Vegas, he launches into "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" as if nothing had happened. Of the Nobel, needless to say, not a word.

Only a couple of weeks later, as journalists begin to openly brand him arrogant, he mutters something: "It's hard to believe. It's extraordinary, incredible. Who could dream of such a thing?" Still, he doesn't show up at the award ceremony. Prior commitments, indeed. In Stockholm it's Patti Smith who performs his "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", but emotion gets the better of her and she stumbles over the verses of the newly crowned poet.

It falls instead to the US ambassador to read out a short speech prepared by Dylan: "I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me a few minutes to properly process it. I began thinking about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. (...) I'm also going to make an educated guess that Shakespeare was not thinking as he was writing his plays, 'is this literature?'"¹³.

In short, Dylan claims kinship with the line of bards, rhapsodes, troubadours. His is the dimension of oral tradition: the poetry of the voice, even before that of the written word. An art Dylan learned from folk music, where the song is built from formulas, archetypes, repetitions: the typical ingredients of orality.

To quote the words of Tom Waits, "before poems and epic tales were written down they migrated on the winds of the human voice, and no voice is greater than Dylan's." A voice that precedes the word, a voice made of dust and soot, of shadows carrying within them the memory of an entire mythic universe. Does anyone really care whether it's worth more or less than literature?

His poetic laurel, in any case, Dylan does eventually go and collect. After all, there's a fair dose of vanity and a sense of vindication in receiving the academic world's seal of approval: things the Dylanian ego has always had a soft spot for. Which doesn't necessarily mean the prizes really matter to him. Not as much as the music does.

And so, in April 2017, the Swedish Academy organized a private ceremony for Dylan, during which he was finally handed the Nobel gold medal. As required by the rules, Dylan also prepared his own lecture, which he recorded in June of that year in Los Angeles, with Alan Pasqua's piano providing background accompaniment. In his speech, Dylan talks about "Moby Dick," "All Quiet on the Western Front," the "Odyssey." And once again controversy flares up: are his references lifted from a summary website? Or, once again, is someone completely missing the point?

Certainly, Dylan has no intention of playing literary critic. He wants to go back to talking about the relationship between song and literature, obviously in his own way. "It's possible that this could be a little long winded," he warns right away. And indeed he seems to lose himself in a thousand digressions, from Buddy Holly to Leadbelly, from Captain Ahab to the Muses. But there's a thin thread guiding his thought, and it's the vital essence of the sung word. He speaks of it through the image of Ulysses, who in the underworld meets the shade of Achilles: "if he could he would rather go back and be the lowest-paid slave laborer on Earth than be what he is – a king in the land of the dead – that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place"¹³. Here's the point: "That's also what songs are like in some sense. Our songs are alive in the land of the living." They can't be treated as dead pages. They must vibrate with breath, intonation, rhythm, physicality. All components that are inseparable – every bit as much as the music – from that very particular art called song.

Meanwhile, Dylan has released a new album. A triple album, no less. Once again built on the old standards of the Great American Songbook. It seems paradoxical: the Nobel Prize winner for literature fully immersing himself in the seemingly rather precious immediacy of lyrics penned by the Tin Pan Alley songwriters. But paradoxes, as we know, are Dylan's weapon of choice. And yet it would be too easy to dismiss Triplicate as just another of his tricks for toying with expectations, or worse still as the product of some kind of late-life whim. What do these songs really mean to Dylan?

A first clue comes from the very structure of the new album: the way the songs are split across the three discs of Triplicate is anything but random, following instead a rigorous thematic order. Three distinct chapters, each with its own title (“’Til The Sun Goes Down,” “Devil Dolls” and “Comin’ Home Late”), coming together to form a single concept piece. Which is to say that Dylan’s aim here isn’t merely to pay homage to the past, but to communicate something of himself. “There's so much of myself in these songs that it allows me to just concentrate on the melody and the arrangements,” he confesses to Bill Flanagan while introducing Triplicate.

The second clue comes from writer Tom Piazza, in the opening lines of the album's liner notes: “It often takes a lifetime to learn the most important things, and they usually turn out to be the simplest ones. Maybe so simple that they can't be translated into words.”

The key to understanding the album starts to come into focus: the point is precisely simplicity. Or rather, sincerity. Because it's through the simplicity of other people's words that Dylan no longer seems to need to hide. Someone had to write these songs in his place, to let him show himself for once without disguise, with that humble, profound awareness of the human condition that only life's own lessons can teach.

There are no revolutions here compared to Shadows In The Night and Fallen Angels: same collaborators, same instruments, same vintage approach to recording. And it's precisely this uniformity that makes tackling the thirty tracks of Triplicate more demanding than ever. It's a long twilight by the fireside, a marathon of old black-and-white films (directly evoked by the famous “As Time Goes By” from “Casablanca”). But getting through it all in one sitting is definitely not a feat for everyone.

Starting with the melancholy gaze of “September Of My Years,” it's the inexorable passing of time that dominates the first disc of Triplicate. What's left, looking back, in the autumn of life? The memory of a girl with moonlight in her eyes, as in the dreamy “Once Upon A Time,” the racing heartbeat framed by the placid horns of “That Old Feeling.” But above all, the sense of a promise almost held between one's fingers in “This Nearly Was Mine,” that attempt to grasp paradise in which, ultimately, an entire life is summed up: “This promise of paradise, this nearly was mine.”

Lost loves take the leading role in the album's second chapter, amid the swing atmospheres of “The Best Is Yet To Come” and the brushed-drum tremor of “But Beautiful.” And the beauty of a woman's face slowly fades into Beauty with a capital B: “Where is the one/ Who'll end my search for love?” Dylan asks over the notes of “Where Is The One.” “That's a song I could never have written,” he admits. “It's got too many exposed nerves. It leaves you too defenseless. I'd rather not venture into that kind of territory, especially when I have to write a song.”

The final leg of Dylan's sentimental journey is the road home. Charlie Sexton embellishes “Stardust” with his guitar textures, while Tony Garnier on bass leads the dance as always. “You start out wondering why you bought blue pajamas,” Dylan muses, quoting the lyrics of the collection's opening track, “I Guess I'll Have To Change My Plan,” “and you end up wondering why you were born.” “Why Was I Born,” indeed, is the title of the song that closes Triplicate: a question already echoed by the voices of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, which Dylan digs into with all the rough delicacy he's capable of.

Voice and melody: that's the whole heart of Dylan's interpretations. A voice that stretches out as never before across its shades and nuances, in search of what he himself calls a “more circumspect and inward intonation.” In 2018 he adds one last appendix to his collection of covers, contributing “He's Funny That Way” (a male-perspective take on the popular 1929 torch song) to the compilation “Universal Love.” The world celebrates him as a writer, but he insists he wants to be, first and foremost, a singer. If he could trade his Nobel for a crooning prize, he probably wouldn't think twice.

Black rider, you’ve seen it all

A drone of strings, piano notes scattering like tiles of a black-and-white mosaic. The cymbals are the rustling of wind, the percussion distant echoes of a storm. Eight years after Tempest, Dylan's first new song to hit the airwaves is a long, nearly seventeen-minute rumination titled “Murder Most Foul.” The bard recites the funeral dirge of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It's the end of March 2020, and the world is grappling with the harshest phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. As people suddenly rediscover their own fragility, that day in November 1963 feels so distant.

But once again he's right: “It's not some kind of glorification of the past or some kind of a lament for lost times. It speaks to me in the moment.” And the moment is George Floyd's America, the moment is an America forced once again to reckon with the original sin of its own history. “Freedom, oh freedom, freedom over me/ I hate to tell you, mister, but only the dead are free,” Dylan murmurs: the old slave song rings out like a cruel joke in the land of the free.

JFK's death is the loss of America's innocence, they say. At first, “Murder Most Foul” seems like just a page torn from the news, a diaphanous, floating topical song. Then something different starts to happen: the words of history books and those of old songs begin to intertwine, until it becomes impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. The radio becomes a litany, an endless playlist for Judgment Day. Wolfman Jack, the legendary DJ from “American Graffiti,” is the last prophet left in the age of the Antichrist. And the last song to play on his radio is called “Murder Most Foul.”

This isn't a one-off, spur-of-the-moment release: it's the advance single from an actual new album, Rough And Rowdy Ways. Nine songs plus one (“Murder Most Foul,” precisely, which gets a disc all to itself), where American history is everywhere. Not history viewed through a museum case, but history rewritten through a hidden time portal out back, in the manner of Stephen King.

The invocation of “Mother Of Muses” is the album's true proem: the mother of the Muses, Mnemosyne, Memory herself. Sing to me, o goddess, of the mountains and the oceans, the heroes of the Civil War and those of World War II, the deeds of Elvis and those of Martin Luther King.

The lesson of Tin Pan Alley is felt above all in the minimal grace of the arrangements. Alongside the usual live band, it's hard to pick out the contributions of guest stars like Fiona Apple, Blake Mills and Benmont Tench of the Heartbreakers. But it's precisely this rarefied aura, this essentiality, that makes Rough And Rowdy Ways the most precious chapter of Dylan's last twenty years.

The melodic caress of “I Contain Multitudes” could come from some old standard, but the arpeggios that accompany it have the nocturnal sobriety of the ballads on Oh Mercy. Dylan quotes Whitman to play with the myth of his own enigma: “I contain multitudes”. Who else could compare themselves, with impunity, to Anne Frank, Indiana Jones and the Rolling Stones within the space of a single couplet?

His references are, as ever, a labyrinth of hypertexts. Haven't we already heard the riff of “False Prophet” in “If Lovin' Is Believing” by Billy “The Kid” Emerson? Doesn't the album's title recall that of an old Jimmie Rodgers song? Not to mention Master Shakespeare, who looms in the background of a multitude of verses, starting with the Hamlet-esque title of “Murder Most Foul”.

And then, of course, there's the “old time religion” of the blues, to which the harmonica on “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” pays homage with the dry, square-cut gait of an apocryphal track from Highway 61 Revisited. This time Dylan doesn't need to overload the contours or snarl with all his emphasis: in the fatalism of “Crossing The Rubicon”, in that “oh Lord” that slips from his lips at one point, there's an entire genealogy of twelve-bar troubadours.

The atmospheres turn toward more noir tones when the pedal steel follows the veiled, menacing gait of “My Own Version Of You”: “I'll take the Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando/ Mix 'em up in a tank and get a robot commando”. Maybe it's Dr. Frankenstein in his laboratory, maybe it's Rabbi Loew with his golem. The temptation is always the same: to stitch the world back together in one's own image and likeness. But reality doesn't let itself be dominated so easily.

Reality is an unexpected visitor, a rider dressed in black casting his fatal shadow: “Black Rider” is a bleak, skeletal ballad, clinging to a mandolin that gives it a Cohen-esque air. “Let all your earthly thoughts be a prayer”, Dylan implores, and his words seem to echo through the deserted streets of cities in lockdown: “I think of the death of mankind. The long, strange journey of the naked ape. Everyone's life is so fleeting”.

But there are places, in the Dylanian cosmology, where the secret of things suddenly seems to become transparent. They are the “Highlands” of Time Out Of Mind, they are the “Scarlet Town” of Tempest. On Rough And Rowdy Ways, his imaginary map leads to the tropical paradise of Key West, an old buccaneers' haunt and buen retiro of Hemingway and Truman: a Platonic republic of pirate philosophers, a radio station at the edge of the earth.

On the scent of the accordion in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”, Dylan seems to want to rewrite “Caribbean Wind” as if it were a slowed-down “Most Of The Time”. A hushed chorus accompanies the album's only refrain: “Key West is the place to be/ If you're looking for immortality”. In the elysian fields of hibiscus and bougainvillea, the poets of the beat generation live forever in the company of Buddy Holly and the other blessed souls of rock 'n' roll. They dance until morning around the jukebox, like the couples on the cover of the album, taken from an old London club. The desire for eternity, the one great antagonist of the dark rider. “Key West is the gateway key/ To innocence and purity”. We can still recover the innocence lost in the fall. You just have to follow the route to Key West.

In the summer of 2021, with the “Never Ending Tour” forced into a hiatus by the Covid-19 pandemic, Dylan adapts to the livestreaming trend in his own way. But his “Shadow Kingdom”, far from being a mere virtual concert, turns out to be a kind of dreamlike staging, as if lifted from the reel of an old black-and-white film: the setting of a timeless club, a cast of extras immersed in half-light, an atmosphere with unreal contours. And, above all, the best reinterpretations of his legendary songbook in many years.

Two years later, Shadow Kingdom finally becomes an album. But mystery continues to hover around that cinematic performance (and the record, entirely devoid of liner notes, does nothing to dispel it). Apparently, the tracks were recorded in early 2021 at The Village studios in Los Angeles, while their on-screen counterpart was filmed in the following months in Santa Monica, also in California. The musicians who appear in the video are said to have merely played extras: Dylan's real backing musicians were others, including such storied names as T-Bone Burnett and Don Was. But the uncertainty of the details is an integral part of the whole operation's slightly Lynchian allure.

What matters most, in any case, are the album's fourteen tracks. No drums or percussion, an accordion with a nostalgic flavor, the skeleton of the upright bass dressed in guitar embroidery. The storyteller's voice at the center of the stage, together with his faithful harmonica. Opening the dance in the smoky air of the club (the “Bon Bon Club” in Marseille, in the imaginal dimension of the Dylanian multiverse) are the wandering notes of “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. And there couldn't be a better overture, because it's precisely to the art of repainting one's own masterpiece on stage that Shadow Kingdom pays homage: with no obligation to replay the classics for the umpteenth time, Dylan makes a wonderfully arbitrary—and equally inspired—selection of songs (a bit like he would have wanted to do back in the days of his Unplugged, had he had the freedom).

A good part of the setlist comes from the electric climate of the mid-Sixties, but what it undergoes is an elegiac transfiguration: “Tombstone Blues” becomes the floating declamation of a dream, “Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues” a serenade along the border's edge, “Pledging My Time” a cheek-to-cheek dance. Conversely, the country languor of “I'll Be Your Baby Tonight” takes on a nervous, vibrant tone, while “To Be Alone With You” is even rewritten as if it were a vision just conceived in a feverish night.

Rumor has it that what was released is only part of the tracks recorded for Shadow Kingdom (and a clue comes from the fact that T-Bone Burnett, in 2022, auctioned off a version of “Blowin' In The Wind” that seems to belong to those very same recording sessions). In any case, it's an experience that helps unexpectedly renew Dylan's performances. The long tour that begins in 2021 (and which also stops in Italy for a series of dates in the summer of 2023) shows a Dylan back in a state of grace: his voice is firm and penetrating, the band backs him with the spirit of a jazz ensemble, highlighting the guitars of Bob Britt and Doug Lancio. Above all, there's no slavish devotion to the nostalgia effect: the songs holding court are from Rough And Rowdy Ways, performed almost in its entirety (with the sole exception of “Murder Most Foul”), yet constantly transformed through new alchemies. Dylan always stays behind the piano, standing up every now and then without venturing further toward center stage. And yet, despite his advancing age, the impression is of a man more lively and engaged than ever, capable of surprising with a series of particularly inspired covers.

Meanwhile, in 2022, Dylan returns to publishing a book. It isn't, however, the long-awaited second volume of “Chronicles”: it's titled “The Philosophy of Modern Song”, and it isn't even a musicology treatise (as the title might suggest). It's simply a playlist, in the manner of those Dylan used to present on the radio. Or like the one he reeled off in the final part of “Murder Most Foul”. Sixty-six songs spanning rock, blues, folk and soul, drawing mostly from the repertoire of the Fifties (though not shying away from the occasional foray into the less distant past as well). An illustrated collection of vintage memorabilia, given that a large part of the book's over 300 pages are filled with an abundant array of old photos, ads, posters, paintings, film stills. A collection whose only connecting thread is Dylan's free association of ideas. The best parts, however, are those in which Dylan, amid so much bric-a-brac, digressions and bizarre tangents, simply sets about telling stories that reveal all his love, his passion, his devotion to music.

“I am hanging in the balance/ Of a perfectly balanced plan”, whispers the old storyteller, closing every concert of the Rough And Rowdy Ways tour with one of his most intense meditations, “Every Grain Of Sand”. Dylan approaches it with solemnity, leading it by hand through the notes of the piano and sealing the farewell with the breath of the harmonica. The lyrics are those of the song's first draft, not the version included on “Shot Of Love”. At over eighty years old, it sounds like the distillate of his entire journey: the fragility of existence and its mysterious completeness.

 

Notes:

¹ Bob Dylan, “Chronicles Volume 1”, translated by A. Carrera, Feltrinelli, 2005.

² Alessandro Carrera, “La voce di Bob Dylan. Un racconto dell’America”, Feltrinelli, 2021.

³ Greil Marcus, “Like A Rolling Stone. Bob Dylan, una canzone, l’America”, translated by A. Mecacci, Donzelli, 2005.

⁴ The version of “Maggie’s Farm” performed at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was officially released in 2005 on “No Direction Home”.

⁵ Greil Marcus, “Bob Dylan. La repubblica invisibile”, translated by M. Lizzardi, Arcana, 1997.

⁶ Bob Dylan, “Joan Baez In Concert, Part 2”, 1964.

⁷ Amanda Petrusich, “Fire In My Bones”, in Trouble No More.

⁸ Greil Marcus, “Bob Dylan. Scritti 1968-2010”, translated by B. Sonego, Odoya, 2011.

⁹ Paolo Vites, “Un sentiero verso le stelle. Sulla strada con Bob Dylan”, Pacini, 2011.

¹⁰ Riccardo Bertoncelli, “Una vita con Bob Dylan”, Giunti, 2016.

¹¹ Renato Giovannoli, “La Bibbia di Bob Dylan”, Ancora, 2018

¹² Erik Davies, “Codici nomadi. Avventure nell’esoteria moderna”, translated by M. Spiga, Ipermedium, 2014.

¹³ Bob Dylan, “The Nobel Lecture”, translated by A. Carrera, Feltrinelli, 2017.

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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