It didn't have to come to this. He could have died in that motorcycle crash or been shot by a crazed fan or sky-walked out a 10th-story window during a bad trip. But Bob Dylan--the great American artist of the past 50 years, I believe--survived, which is perhaps the only prosaic thing he's done in his life. A half-decade older than the oldest baby boomers, 68 on May 24, he has predicted their maturation--marriage, divorce, finding and losing religion, midlife crisis and regeneration, a second wind, a third.
And now, with the release of his 46th album, Together Through Life, Dylan...