Bob Dylan’s story didn’t end in 1966

You wouldn’t know it if you weren’t paying attention, but over the past two decades, at an age when the rest of us think about retiring to do a whole lot of nothing, Bob Dylan has released nine more records, toured the world from Tokyo to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, sold collections of paintings and trickster collage art and welded-iron gates, wrote another book, and unveiled a line of expensive and quite good whiskeys (I’m partial to the cask-strength Minnesota wheated bourbon called Homesick Blues). His 2020 record, “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” released the year before he turned 80, was welcomed not as a nice late-career curiosity but with honest acclaim. I have played the heck out it.

For those of us who check in on Dylan “news” multiple times a week, and still download bootlegged recordings from the most recent tour (recommendation: get your hands on the April 6 show from Austin), and get spun up over the thinnest of rumors that Dylan has another album of originals on the way—it is sometimes disorienting to remember that for the most part, in the public consciousness, Dylan’s career ends right around the time of his celebrated concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, on May 17, 1966, and its explosive version of “Like a Rolling Stone,” which preceded the mythical motorcycle accident that interrupted his moonshot to legend.

Martin Scorsese’s film No Direction Home tells the rich story of these first five years of Dylan’s career with interviews and archival concert films that had not been widely seen before. (One Dylanologist who had spent decades recording and collecting rare footage told me that he wept when he saw the pristine footage of Dylan’s iconic confrontation—“Judas!” / “Play it ***** loud!”—from the Free Trade Hall.)

It is an irresistible origin story, and one Hollywood will retell shortly with Timothée Chalamet as hurricane-haired Dylan: Bored misfit from an isolated Iron Range town discovers his true self via the transistor radio, makes it in the weirdo Village folk scene, is heralded as Voice of his Generation, rebels, shocks the Pete Seeger set and the tediously proper English folkies with his kick-ass rock band. The rest is history.

But what of the rest? A 60-something Bob Dylan is the unofficial narrator of No Direction Home—he is wonderfully wry and Midwestern; if you know even a little of his story you’ll laugh out loud at times—and in describing the most famous change in a career that has swerved from one change to the next, he says this:

“An artist has gotta be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s at somewhere. You always have to realize that you’re constantly in a state of becoming.”

It is a joy to watch No Direction Home, but Dylan’s genius is found not just in the early 1960s reinvention from folk protest champion to surrealist electric icon. The same story unfolds for decades, the theme building and growing and reinforcing itself, with only Dylan’s presumed mortality promising to end the cycle of tearing down and rebuilding something new.

After the credits roll on the film, there are country songs in Nashville; the quintessential record documenting a relationship coming apart; revival records as fiery as the Second Great Awakening; a white-jumpsuit saxophone world tour; a mash-up era (still ongoing) during which he grabbed hold of blues, country, ancient verse, Confederate poetry, bad Vaudeville jokes, and everything else within reach, and fused it all into something new (and also pretty great). He wrote a memoir that read straight, but was anything but. He won a Nobel for Literature and, hilariously, SparkNoted his way through his acceptance submission.

Since No Direction Home landed in 2005, Dylan has released 10 roomy volumes of official “bootlegs” covering his many eras. If one were truly committed (in both senses of the word), one could spend several weeks, 24/7, listening to officially released Bob Dylan recordings, and most of it would date to after 1966.

It has only been a few months since I saw Dylan, live and in person, on a stage in a hall in upstate New York. Those who only know the Bob Dylan of No Direction Home might find that remarkable; I do too. Sometimes I squint at the stage and try to capture a trace of the 20-something in his face or his ravaged voice. But really I go back to the shows searching not for the Dylan of old, but rather the Dylan of today, the one still obsessively creating, the one mostly singing songs he wrote not long ago, like this one, circa 2020:

“I drive fast cars and I eat fast foods . . . I’m a man of contradictions, a man of many moods . . . I play Beethoven sonatas, Chopin’s preludes . . . I contain multitudes.”