“Eight years between Tempest (2012) and Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). This Bob Dylan is a man in his early fifties through this early eighties who revitalized himself and his art with a fresh, brilliant, intensified collage-style of crafting songs, vast, staggering concert tours–over three thousand shows from 1991 through 2024, writing books–Chronicles, Volume One (2004) and The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022); creating a movie, Masked and Anonymous (2003) and inspiring other other movies, I’m Not There (2007), No Direction Home (2005), and A Complete Unknown; hosting a weekly radio program, Theme Time Radio Hour (2005-2009); and exhibiting his paintings and welded sculptures in galleries and museums across America, Europe, and Asia.” (p. xvi)
“Everything was smashed, I had no connection to any kind of inspiration. …My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn’t have the skill to touch their raw nerves, couldn’t penetrate the surfaces. It wasn’t my moment of history anymore… The mirror had swung around and I couldn’t see the future–an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theater of past triumphs. I had written and recorded so many songs, but it wasn’t like I was playing many of them. I think I was only up to the task of about twenty or so. The rest were too cryptic, too darkly driven, and I was no longer capable of doing anything radically creative with them. It was like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat…” (p. 16)
Robert Polito’s AFTER THE FLOOD: INSIDE BOB DYLAN’S MEMORY PALACE (2026) focuses on Bob Dylan’s career and the “higher mysteries” of Dylan’s output, spanning from Good as I Been to You (1992) to Shadow Kingdom (2023). Of course, in order to do an effective analysis, Polito refers frequently to the Bob Dylan of the 1960s and 1970s.
If you’re a Dylan fan, you’ll learn a lot from Robert Polito’s deep dive into Dylan’s career. Where many musicians retired from the music scene, Bob Dylan continued to tour and record new albums for decades.
Bob Dylan sold his songwriting catalog to Universal Music Publishing Group in December 2020 for an estimated $300-$400 million. Later, in January 2022, he sold his entire recorded music catalog (master rights) to Sony Music Entertainment for an estimated $150-$200 million, covering his work from 1962 onward.
Will Bob Dylan and his music stay relevant? I think so. What do you think? Do you have a favorite Bob Dylan song? GRADE: A (for both the book and the CD)
TRACK LIST:
| Blowin’ In The Wind | 2:46 | ||
| Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right | 3:37 | ||
| The Times They Are A-Changin’ | 3:11 | ||
| It Ain’t Me, Babe | 3:32 | ||
| Maggie’s Farm | 3:51 | ||
| It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue | 4:14 | ||
| Mr. Tambourine Man | 5:26 | ||
| Subterranean Homesick Blues | 2:17 | ||
| Like A Rolling Stone | 6:07 | ||
| Positively 4th Street | 3:53 | ||
| Just Like A Woman | 4:50 | ||
| Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35 | 4:34 | ||
| All Along The Watchtower | 2:31 | ||
| Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn) | 2:18 | ||
| I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight | 2:39 | ||
| Lay, Lady, Lay | 3:17 | ||
| If Not For You | 2:40 | ||
| I Shall Be Released | 3:02 | ||
| You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere | 2:44 | ||
| Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door | 2:30 | ||
| Forever Young | 4:56 | ||
| Tangled Up In Blue | 5:41 | ||
| Shelter From The Storm | 5:02 | ||
| Hurricane | 8:33 | ||
| Gotta Serve Somebody | 5:24 | ||
| Jokerman | 6:15 | ||
| Silvio | 3:06 | ||
| Everything Is Broken | 3:13 | ||
| Not Dark Yet | 6:28 | ||
| Things Have Changed | 5:08 |
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Preface: Shadows are falling — xv
A (“Admittedly, lies, fear, muddle, fury, the dead and their ghosts…”) Rough and Ready Ways — 1
B (“Backdrop: One version of my boo’s story goes…”) Overview — 14
C (“Chronology and facts aside…”) By HIs Own Account — 26
D (“Dylan live–or as some of his tour posters….”) Live #1 –40
E (“Everything Dylan put into practice…”) Time Out of Mind –53
F (“False impressions, Figmens, Fragments, Phantoms…”) Bootlegs/His Ghost World — 66
G (“Gatsby…? First take note of the obvious…”) Love and Theft — 77
H (“Hell…first with a small ‘h’…”) Masked and Anonymous — 93
I (“I wish someone had mentioned that to me earlier…”) Chronicles — 111
J (“Just when you thought…”) Live #2 — 130
K (“‘Kiss you, or kill you…'”) Art Noir — 140
L (“Latin at Boston College High School…”) Modern Times — 152
M (“Momento Mori…”) Tributes/Obits — 177
N (“Night…it is always at night…”) Theme Time Radio — 183
O (” ‘Oh! I have suffered/With those I saw suffer…’ “) — 196
P (“Piano. Who’s playing...?”) Live #3 — 220
Q (“Quotations– a too partial…”) Backdrops and Parallels — 230
R (“Rewrite O. It was to be the section…”) Otherworldly Inclinations — 238
S (“Sinatra, and not just once, but three distinct spins…”) Dylan and the Great American Songbook — 250
T (“Trial runs, false starts…”) Early Road Tests — 260
U (“‘Unless, of course, he dies first…'”) The Nobel Prize in Literature — 265
V (“Venice. The Grand Canal. The Palazzo. Chandeliers. Mirrors on mirrors…”) The Body — 275
W (“Where were we? After a nearly two-year suspension…”) Live #4 — 282
X (“X the unknown variable, but X rays, too…”) Hidden in Plain Sight — 292
Y (“You walk into the room…”) His Tulsa Archive — 303
Z (“Zero hours? Zero hour– Bob Dylan’s late albums tend…”) But not where it ends — 312
Acknowledgements — 325
Bibliography/Works Cited — 329
Index — 339
What a shame Mother’s Day has passed…the book would have been a great gift. Ah well, as a Dylan fan girl (even though in concert his voice is totally blown out and he has zero rapport with his audience), this goes on my tbr. And I know it sounds odd when discussing $600 million worth of transactions, but doesn’t that figure seem low for everything he sold? I mean, Stevie Nicks got $300 million for hers. Don’t get me wrong, I love Stevie, but I’d think, just on longevity alone, Bob’s work should be worth more than twice hers.
/End stage capitalism comes for all of us eventually.
Deb, Stevie Nicks wrote more “hit songs” than Dylan did so I imagine that makes the price of her work versus Dylan’s work intelligible. Both Stevie and Dylan wrote an amazing amount of songs!
Early Dylan still knocks my socks off.
Jerry, I listen to Dylans early music every week. The later songs…not so much.
Clearly, even in what you quote, he would agree.
I have the CD. It’s a great one.
Jeff, I’m back from the colonoscopy procedure. As I was dressing to leave the Hospital, the nurse handed me a note from the doctor that read: CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE GRADUATED FROM COLONOSCOPIES! Now, I just have to deal with the Versed (midazolam) Brain Fog…
Modern life/Get me to the procedure on time….still approaching my second Gut Check.
Just Like a Woman is high on my list of favorites!
Bob, “Just Like a Woman” is a classic! You have great taste!
This is ridiculous for me!
His wo best songs imho are missing:
Desolation Row
Highway 61 revisited
What’s thee reason?
Bob did an open air concert in my German hometown Tübingen around 2010 which I couldn’t visit but my friends told me it was a total catastrophe, no good performance and a lot of rain and for security reasons they were not allowed to bring umbrellas …
A bit OT:
I darkly remember Johnny and Edgar Winter in the London Roundhouse in the early 70s when they played Highway 61 –
and then much later (around 40 years …) a total surprise:J
In the spring of 2014Johnny Winter was announced in a small club (maybe 250 people) in Tübingen and we stood less tha 5 m away from him listening to him playing Highway 61
Wolf, I’m guessing the reason “Desolation Row” and “Highway 61” were overlooked was for shorter songs to fit on the CD.
I also love highway 61, the only song of his I remember dancing to in my bar hopping years
Maggie, HIGHWAY 61 was the first album I bought with my lawn mowing money.
I’m thinking mine was a Pickwick Beach Boys anthology, SURFER GIRL (not a Capitol album), as at age 8 going on 9yo I didn’t have access to a real record store, and would buy things with lawn-mowing money at Grant’s and K-Mart. https://www.discogs.com/release/25767601-The-Beach-Boys-Surfer-Girl
If I had to pick a single favorite, “I Shall Be Released” will do. As with Sturgeon/Bradbury (reversed), I like some of the bands deeply inspired by Dylan, such as the Byrds, the Band and Fairport Convention, even more than I do the Dylan band records…but I don’t suffer too much listening to any Dylan (though what I think he thought of as his supper-club concert years in late middle age are not, I think by anyone’s reckoning, his best).
And the Hendrix Experience comes belatedly to mind. “All Along the Watchtower” has had more than anyone’s reasonable expectation of good-to-ecstatic cover versions.
Todd, even Dylan admitted the Hendrix cover of “All Along the Watchtower” was better than his original version…
“Maggie’s Farm” is a good b-side to any favorite.
Todd, I need to listen to more Frairport Convention soon. I have a 4-CD set that’s been waiting for months…
They did get duller, if still pleasant, after the women quit…the reunion bands, including daughters and such, picked up the pace again (not solely because there were women in the band again, though this never hurts).