Bob Dylan, One Step from the Great Beyond

How do rock stars grow old? Probably the best-known answer is that they don’t; as some twenty-one-year-olds sang in 1965, “Hope I die before I get old.” Or in Neil Young’s bitter, ironic words, better to burn out than to fade away — as was the reality of many icons of the Boomer generation.

But many others did survive, including not only half of the Who but members of the three most important acts of the Sixties: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, who is now 85 years of age. How they are growing old varies. At one extreme is Mick Jagger, who has opted for a kind of perpetual youth, and who has said in interviews recently that there is nothing good about growing old. The Stones’ new album, the excellent Foreign Tongues, is the kind of music the Stones made fifty-five years ago, in their heyday; it is perfectly symbolized by the video for “In the Stars”, which features digitally de-aged versions of the band hanging out in a cool Brooklyn-esque loft with other cool twenty-somethings. I don’t mean to denigrate this move. Jagger is raging against the dying of the light, and he sounds great doing it. Foreign Tongues is the Stones’ best music in thirty years.

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At the other extreme is Dylan, who has leaned into growing old – his voice raspy, his lyrics filled with symbolism of aging and mortality. (Paul McCartney is somewhere in between: his new album, Boys of Dungeon Lane, is unapologetically nostalgic and wistful, and he allows his 84-year-old voice to be as shaky as it is. But in live appearances, he’s still rousing the crowd with Beatlemania.) In a way, this is true to form. Three years before Pete Townshend wrote “Hope I Die Before I Get Old,” Dylan covered Bukka White’s 1940 Delta Blues song “Fixin’ to Die.” Dylan’s version, on his debut album, is unconvincing — a cherub-faced twenty-one-year-old white kid trying mightily to persuade us that he’s an old blues man on death’s door. He would really find his voice on his next album.

Now of course, Dylan may indeed be fixin’ to die, and has spent most of the last thirty years figuring out how to talk about it, largely by turning to older musical forms including blues, folk, and even the standards of Frank Sinatra. These older forms are themselves parts of long oral traditions (the film Sinners beautifully and tragically illustrates the collision of white and Black American musical forms) and, as such, speak in languages of myth and archetype. I doubt many of us have ever gone down to a crossroads and fell down on our knees, but Robert Johnson’s metaphor speaks to existential conditions: being at a place of transition, liminality, and homelessness, and not knowing what to do. These traditions, white and Black alike, speak to human suffering in a mythic language that communicates in ways literality cannot.

Much of the last three decades of Dylan’s work continues in this idiom. Starting with 1997’s Time Out of Mind and running through 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, he has instead worked through a range of metaphors. One of the best songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways, “Black Rider,” gestures at death — or something akin to it — without ever naming it. The title character may be Satan, or Death, or a nameless villain, or may be Dylan himself:

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Black rider, black rider, you’ve seen it all
You’ve seen the great world and you’ve seen the small
You fell into the fire and you’re eating the flame
Better seal up your lips if you wanna stay in the game
Be reasonable, mister, be honest, be fair
Let all of your earthly thoughts be a prayer

But also:

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Black rider, black rider, tell me when, tell me how
If there ever was a time, then let it be now
Let me go through, open the door
My soul is distressed, my mind is at war

Dylan played this song last night, in Forest Hills, Queens, and the audience was rapt. It was a sublime moment, among the most resonant musical experiences I’ve ever had. I had heard the song performed live before; just after Covid, in Port Chester, New York, it felt like Dylan was inventing a new musical and lyrical language, somehow, yet again, after all these years. But this was something else. He seemed to be evoking the ineffable, in elliptical lyrics that refused to say the unsayable directly.

I’ve seen Dylan a dozen or so times. Some shows have been transcendent — New Haven in 1994, for example, when, fresh off his tours with the Grateful Dead, Dylan inhabited the musicality of his songs in a way he never had before (and hasn’t since). Other shows have been lacking — like when I’d seen him last, in Newark in 2024, with Dylan basically phoning it in, back to his old habit of Sprechgesang, speak-singing, and seeming at least to me, totally uninvested in his own lyrics. So, I said to myself after that show, I’m done. I’ve seen him enough; let’s let the good memories resonate, unsullied by more bad ones.

But this year, I’d watched a few videos of his more recent concert appearances, and he seemed to be “back.” Singing again, emotionally invested, articulate, on point. So I took a gamble and bought good seats for the Queens show, performed in the shadow of a tornado watch and looming thunderclouds.

I was rewarded. “Black Rider” and another songs that evoke mortality — “Crossing the Rubicon”, “I Shall Be Released” — seemed newly urgent in Dylan’s improved vocal presentation: they were confrontations with the reality of being eighty-five while insisting on the integrity of truthful, artistic expression, whatever the cost.

That cost is sometimes significant. Dylan’s albums and live performances have spawned a cottage industry of hermeneutical speculation, perhaps because, on the surface, they really are inscrutable. On the 2026 tour, Dylan has played none of his best-known songs: definitely nothing from his first era as a ‘protest singer’, but also no “Like a Rolling Stone,” no “Tangled Up in Blue,” no “Forever Young” – pretty much nothing that a casual listener would recognize, the only contenders being “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” from 1966, and “I Shall Be Released,” from the early seventies, and even those were so transformed as to be barely identifiable.

The Internet being what it is, there are now plenty of TikTok videos with newer fans — some drawn in, presumably, by the recent biopic starring Timothée Chalamet — complaining about all this: that Dylan refuses to play his hits, that he never talks to the audience, that even the familiar songs are unrecognizable — and now, in an effort to deter video recording, that he wears a hooded white jacket that makes his face hard to see. It is an ornery set of choices, to be sure. But longtime Dylan fans like me have known about this for decades. As he said in 1966, after ‘going electric’ and launching into a new version of a once-acoustic song, “It used to sound like that... now, it sounds like this.” This is how Dylan has performed for fifty years.

Contrast that approach with, well, almost anyone else, including McCartney or the Stones, who by and large faithfully execute their greatest hits, sometimes note for note. There’s obviously room for both approaches here, and having seen the Stones once and McCartney three times, they put on great shows. And arguably there’s something a little selfish about Dylan’s insistence on personal artistic integrity over pleasing the tens of thousands of people who’ve paid to be in the room.

But, as Dylan sang in 1965, “ said, “She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back,” a phrase immortalized in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary of that title. He doesn’t look back; the songs used to sound like that, but now they sound like this. They were folk, acoustic, electric, Americana, country, confessional, cocaine-Rock, Christian. Probably Dylan’s weakest period, as he’s said himself, was the exception to the rule: the Eighties, in which he tried to sound young and relevant, goosing his songs up with eighties-style production that now sounds badly dated, if not desperate. Dylan wrote in his memoir Chronicles that he knew he was washed up during that period, and that he had to rediscover what made music essential to him. He got back to basics, releasing two albums of folk covers, rediscovering or reinventing himself again. “I would have to become a different person to sing those songs,” he wrote. And so he did – a different person, an older person who could embody the timeless metaphors of blues and folk singers, translating the horrors of Jim Crow or the pain of poverty into a vernacular that made their songs not didactic but somehow prophetic.

And so, last night, we heard straight-up love songs (including his recent “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”) and dark, brooding menace — and not much in between. There were no political songs, no “Idiot Wind,” no “Gotta Serve Somebody.” Only love and death, eros and Thanatos, the darkness and the raging against it. Dylan was committed to both: “I’ve Made up My Mind” had a pleading to it that reminded me of Blood on the Tracks — an emotional striving for a faithfulness that eludes the flawed persona of the singer. But for me, the songs of old age were the most poignant. Here’s a bit of “Crossing the Rubicon,” also from the 2020 album:

Well, the Rubicon is a red river
Goin’ gently as she flows
Redder than your ruby lips
And the blood that flows from the rose
Three miles north of purgatory
One step from the great beyond
I prayed to the cross, I kissed the girls
And I crossed the Rubicon

What are these dark days I see?
In this world so badly bent
I cannot redeem the time
The time so idly spent
How much longer can it last?
How long can it go on?
I embrace my love, put down my hair
And I crossed the Rubicon

Three miles north of purgatory, one step from the great beyond — I have no idea whether Dylan lifted these lines from an obscure folk or blues song, but Jesus that is good writing. And something that a younger artist would have difficulty selling. Dylan has earned this mythic language — the Rubicon, the river Caesar crossed, irrevocably committing himself to war, here standing in perhaps for death itself, or resignation to its imminence. There is so much truth in this song: the regret, the wondering “how long can it go on?” (something many of us fans have wondered for years), and that one step from the great beyond, there is God and there is love (the cross, the girls) and everything else falls away.

Hearing Dylan sing these with a commitment I hadn’t heard from him in years, at eighty-five, it seemed as though he’d unlocked some secret treasure, or perhaps an occult technology, that lets him dispel the angel of death by naming him, singing him into oblivion.

The invitation Dylan offers is not to relive the glory days of the Sixties or Seventies, as Jagger and McCartney do, but to hear an eighty-five-year-old man who, unlike some of his peers, confronts the demons directly. He’s got everything he needs; he’s an artist; he doesn’t look back. I can certainly appreciate more casual fans being mystified, or angered, by what’s on offer – again, it is an ornery choice. But this is the old magic — the magic the Black bluesmen of the early twentieth century knew, and the white folk musicians of Appalachia also knew — the magic that keeps the devil at bay, one more night at a time.

Summer days, summer nights are gone, Dylan sang twenty years ago, “but I know a place where there’s still something going on.” Music is that place — the barn rave-up in Sinners, the old lounge in Shadow Kingdom. There’s a place where there’s still something going on, where piano, two guitars, bass, and drums convey a poetry that even a Nobel laureate struggles to articulate. Somehow, in the last two years, Dylan has re-found this magic. His piano playing is sharper than it has been in years; his vocal technique isn’t back to its early prime, but it’s certainly back to something like its 1990s-era power and emotion. And yet all of it stays elliptical enough — there is nothing didactic in these songs. They mine the old ways, ways Dylan learned and borrowed stole as a young man but has grown into in these last decades.

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When Dylan sang “I Shall Be Released” back in 1967, the ‘release’ in question is constructively ambiguous. The speaker seems to be a wrongly condemned prisoner – is he about to be released from bondage, or maybe executed and released from life itself?

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They say every man needs protection
They say that every man must fall
Yet I swear I see my reflection
Somewhere so high above this wall
I see my light come shinin’
From the west down to the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released.

The song lacks a single, stable meaning; the way Dylan sings it in the original, there’s a yearning for freedom, for justice. There’s even, some have written, a kind of hopefulness, a religious faith in redemption.

Last night, though, as he closed the set with the song, it felt like a different kind of release: the letting go of life itself. Any day now, any day now, the ultimate release may come. And none too soon. The world of Dylan’s lyrics is a hard, unforgiving one, where mercy walks the plank and dignity is hard to find. Yet through all his spiritual peregrinations, Dylan’s eyes have always been turned toward the light coming from the west down to the east, toward the possibility of some transcendent source of justice that will judge the many when the game is through. The final yearning, one step from the great beyond, is for something there to yearn for.

Thanks for reading. If you’re new here, please consider becoming a subscriber — and if you’re like the 90% of my subscribers who are free subscribers, I get it! I free-subscribe a lot too. But this project depends on the financial support of people who want to see it in the world.

Meanwhile, here’s some stuff I’ve been reading:

• Perhaps my least favorite opinion is that daylight savings time is fine just the way it is, balancing sunlight in the summer and the needs of working people to have light at 8am in the winter. Thankfully Josh Barro has written a quintessentially Barro-esque grump about this subject, in which he completely agrees with me.

• Jules Evans has written an excellent introduction to the concept of ‘spiritual emergency’ and its many complexities.

• Having written a fair amount on Trump’s efforts to sabotage the 2026 midterm elections, I admit I feel out of steam on this issue. People are just not paying enough attention to it. Robert Reich wrote a great take on it recently that is worth a read.

• Johnny Harris did a great 45-minute video on oligarchy in America, but I think the 20-minute version is even better. Send this to your conservative relatives.

• Finally, I wrote a review of a documentary about a pioneering charismatic rabbi who, it turns out, was a serial molester of teenage girls. TW: everything.

See you next week.

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