Not Dark Yet - by Henry Begler - A Good Hard Stare

A Good Hard Stare

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Not Dark Yet<br>Bob Dylan's second act

Henry Begler<br>Jul 01, 2026

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20<br>30

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from Shadow Kingdom (2021)<br>I.

They say it was bat shit that almost did him in, something he might have breathed in while riding his motorcycle on a gusty spring day, or maybe at a rest stop before a show in Memphis, or maybe while he was taking a walk in the woods. The fungus is called histoplasma capsulatum, and it grows on bird and bat droppings in the Mississippi and Ohio River Valley, when the air is thick with pollen and the rivers are stagnant with muck. If it gets into your lungs, it can swell the sac around your heart, make it hard to breathe, give you a stabbing pain in your chest, and eventually, if left untreated, stop your heart entirely. That’s what almost happened to Bob Dylan in May of 1997.<br>He had wandered in the wilderness since his temporary conversion to evangelical Christianity in 1978 and the trilogy of gospel albums that followed. Despite the musical strengths of those records, and the fiery live performances that accompanied them, the press, as well as many Dylan fans, didn’t take kindly to being proselytized to and looked upon his conversion as a betrayal. He abandoned the fire-and-brimstone tone after a few years, but the odd critically acclaimed album—Infidels in 1983, Oh Mercy in 1989—was always followed by a disappointing sequel, like 1985’s Empire Burlesque or 1990’s Under the Red Sky. On tour he was erratic, sometimes brilliant but often sloppy, maybe drunk. In 1991 he was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, performed a nearly-unrecognizable version of “Masters of War,” took the stage sweating and fidgeting next to a grinning Jack Nicholson, and gave a strange oration:<br>Well, my daddy he didn’t leave me too much, you know, he was a very simple man, and he didn’t leave me a lot, but what he did tell me was this—he said so many things, you know. He did say, “Son, you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you. And if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your own ways.” Thank you…

He had never been one for straightforward speeches, but it was a distressing sight. Around the same time, he was performing “Desolation Row” in Australia when his eyes flooded with tears, and he had to retreat to the back of the stage to compose himself. He had been attempting to sing the lines “You would not think to look at him / But he was famous long ago.”<br>The early nineties also brought two records of traditional folk and blues covers: Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong. Both were well-received, but to outside observers they seemed to signal a retreat to the source, a surrender, an exhaustion. The icon of the counterculture, the mercury kid whose songs spilled out of him faster than he could write them down, who burst out of the coffeehouse folk scene with protest anthems and love ballads of startling power and originality, who left all that behind for sunglasses and amphetamines and blaring electric guitar, who wrote and released Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde in a matter of months, who made his own myths wherever he went: Newport, “Judas!,” the motorcycle crash, Woodstock, The Basement Tapes, Blood on the Tracks, the Rolling Thunder Revue…that guy… that guy was out of ideas. We would never see his like again.<br>So most people thought, anyway. In reality, he was on the road, purifying and refining himself, searching for new spaces in the old sound. His revitalization had begun in 1987, on tour with Tom Petty, out of inspiration and considering retirement. His last two albums had been critically savaged and he found he could hardly write anymore, relying on partners like Sam Shepard and the Grateful Dead’s Robert Hunter to whip his songs into shape. On stage, he often wore a hoodie and dark glasses, barely looking at the audience. He felt as if his own songs had become strangers to him, like (he wrote in his memoir Chronicles) “an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theater of past triumphs.” One last tour and he would call it quits, retreat to his compound in Malibu or his farm in Minnesota, maybe spend the rest of his days playing the old spirituals and murder ballads he loved, maybe play nothing at all.<br>Something happened to him on stage in Locarno, Switzerland. In Chronicles, he is almost comically vague about the nature of this revelation, but a 1997 Newsweek interview offers slightly more clarity. He was standing on stage when everything seemed to suddenly drop out.<br>It’s almost like I heard it as a voice. It wasn’t like it was even me thinking it. “I’m determined to stand, whether God will deliver me or not.” And all of a sudden everything just exploded. It exploded every which way. [...] After that is when I sort of knew: I’ve got to go out and play these songs. That’s just...