Bob Dylan is absolutely cooking on the road right now

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SANTA BARBARA — Sixty-one years and a day after he laid down the epochal “Like a Rolling Stone” in a recording studio on Seventh Avenue in New York City, Bob Dylan shuffled onstage on the other side of the country dressed so fine in a dark jacket with the hood pulled over his head.The hood, which Dylan has been wearing even for shows without the cool coastal breeze that blew through the Santa Barbara Bowl on Wednesday night, has lately become an object of online fascination; one guy on X last year wrote that he was obsessed with the rock legend’s “new dripped out look,” and I have to agree: Though there are great hooded-Dylan photos going back decades, his current wardrobe — as seen nightly against a velvety curtain lit from below — is a vibe through and through.(His Bobness forbade photographers from shooting Wednesday’s show, which means you’ll have to consult social media for a glimpse.)Dylan’s drip isn’t the only thing putting him into the viral bloodstream of the internet.

In March, he launched a Patreon, where he’s posting short stories and apparently AI-assisted installments in an audio series called “Lectures from the Grave”; this week, he contributed his thoughts on aging to a widely shared New York Times op-ed pegged to President Trump’s 80th birthday.In my social feeds, at least, quotes from Dylan’s piece — “You’re an old king from some vanished country,” he wrote — kept turning up next to clips of Timothée Chalamet celebrating the New York Knicks’ NBA Finals win — an oddly poetic interleaving given their history.All this stuff is cool; I admire veteran culture-shapers who figure out how to adapt to a new information environment.

Yet one of the reasons it’s fun to encounter Dylan on Instagram is because you can still encounter him in the flesh.And at 85, he’s absolutely cooking on the road right now.

Music Veteran...