Giles Harvey on Saint Bob in the NYRB

As the Sixties wore on, however, Dylan grew increasingly frustrated with what he came to regard as the pious sloganeering and doctrinaire leftist politics of the folk milieu. (Such politicized folk music, Dylan said in one of the notorious semicoherent interviews he gave mid-decade, “is a bunch of fat people.”) As a result, his songs became stranger, more complex, less overtly concerned with the political happenings of the day. They no longer partitioned the country into moral factions, with arms dealers, corrupt politicians, Southern racists, and conventional bourgeois society on one side and the young, the poor, the downtrodden, and the guitar-and- harmonica-wielding troubadours on the other. They no longer asked—as Florence Reece’s pro-union protest song of the 1930s had done—”Which Side Are You On?” Instead, Dylan began writing a kind of visionary nonsense verse, in which the rough, ribald, lawless America of the country’s traditional folk music collided with a surreal ensemble of characters from history, literature, legend, the Bible, and many other places besides.....

.....Dylan has certainly made some astonishing records since then (1966), most notably The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, and Blood on the Tracks (1975); but for years at a stretch—from 1971 to 1975, from 1978 to 1989—he went into creative tailspin, releasing album after album of generally insipid material......as the years went by, Dylan found himself trapped inside the aspic of his own legend.