Ken Tucker

Another day, they don't add another ship.

I know how it happened.

I saw it begin.

I opened my heart to the world and the world became me.

It's been a long time since I've read a book about a major artist that is as much fun, that communicates as much excitement as the author feels for his subject, as Robert Pulido's After the Flood, subtitled Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace.

Its provocative argument is that the past 30 years of Bob Dylan's career are every bit as creative and essential as the first 30, those early years of Dylan's arrival as a folk revolutionary and a pop star.

For Pulido, the albums beginning with 1997's Time Out of Mind, on through 2001's Love and Theft, and Rough and Rowdy Ways in 2020, as well as his thousands of performances on the so-called NeverEnding Tour, are as thrilling and innovative as anything Dylan was doing as a young man.

And if you don't think so, it's just because you haven't been listening.

I'm sitting on my terrace, lost in the stars Listening to the sounds of the sand guitars

Been thinking it all over and I thought it all through.

I've made up my mind to give myself to you.

Polito's book accepts the common idea that Dylan lost his way in the 1980s, putting out mediocre music, giving listless live performances.

I'd certainly noticed that something was up when Dylan seemed re-engaged starting in the late 90s, but I was struck by the way Polito cast this as a near-total reinvention.

Key to this, he thinks, and I agree, was Dylan letting go of mere careerism in favor of the pursuit of art, making paintings and sculptures, his book writing such as 2004's Chronicles Volume 1, the hundred episodes of his Theme Time Radio Hour, and a tighter approach to his live shows, which in turn revitalized his studio recordings.

I crossed the Rubicon on the 14th day

Of the most dangerous month of the year At the worst time at the worst place That's all I seem to hear I got up early So I could greet the goddess of the dawn I painted my wagon abandon all hope

The result of all this activity, argues Pulido in After the Flood, is a new method of Bob Dylan music making.

Instead of social commentary or first-person pseudo-confessions, he crafts songs in what Pulido repeatedly refers to as collage, songs with melodies rooted in the blues and early rock and roll, containing lines and images borrowed, changed, or rewritten from a wide variety of literary sources and visual artists.

Pulido points out examples of Dylan giving the game away, as in his year 2000 song, My Own Version of You, in which the speaker operates as a Dr. Frankenstein, creating his own beautiful monster of romanticism.

All through the summers into January I've been visiting morgues and monasteries Looking for the necessary body parts