Dylan remains a great performer and his material will always have the ability to strike to the heart. But the rock-solid layer of absolute conviction underlying his best work, from the earnest, now legendary ballads of the early years to the bemused pain of recent songs like “Not Dark Yet,” never quite made it onstage. He might be having fun with the tunes, he might venture out for a weird jiggy-dance during one of the solos, but the old urgency, the daring was hard to find. Dylan may continue to reinvent himself as he has done so many times before. He may climb back onto the charts after being left for dead, as he did in 1997 with Time Out of Mind, an album devoted precisely to the loss of love and youth. He might win Oscars and accolades. But never again, I suspect, will he capture the pulse, and the ear, of a generation the way he did with “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” and so many others in the space of so few years. Never again will he take the stage, as he did at the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, and just by his presence eclipse all of the suddenly minor deities—Harrison and Clapton included—who had been standing there.

Just hear what has happened to “Rainy Day Women,” no matter how good it sounded on Sunday night. What a liberating piece of chutzpah that was when he first recorded it, what an incredible fuck-you to everyone who thought they had him figured out. Who but Dylan would have started off an album in 1966 with an oom-pah band, especially on the heels of “Rolling Stone”? Who else would have reinvented the song a few years later into danceable blues rock, again keeping it one step ahead of the packagers and pundits? But these days, Dylan seems to accept that what was once a revolutionary musical statement has evolved into a frat-boy joke, a party tune, an amiable toe-tapper to get the audience warmed up.

We might say this is a shame. Just as we might call it a travesty that our own personal Rimbaud is all growed up and hawking lingerie. The eclipse of our shared generation, its ideals and illusions, is coming more surely than any Altamont could presage. However sweet the sound, the word being handed down from the makeshift stage at Campanelli field is that nothing, no matter how heady, is forever. Not fame, not genius, not love, not adoration, not records, not audiences, not dreams. But in the meantime, Dylan is still Dylan, and the sneering brass descent that opens Blonde on Blonde still echoes pretty loudly. This is what time has brought us to, and as sad as it might be in some respects, it is what it is and the best we can do is go along for the ride. It is a ride on which Dylan accompanies us, as he always has, making the changes, weathering the storms, giving us a voice—a magnificent wreck of a voice by now, but a voice nonetheless, and still his, and still ours. And as we go down in the flood, he will continue to rock and roll until he, and we, can’t anymore. And after that the songs will remain, for as long as someone is around to remember them. It might not be dark yet, he is telling us, though it sure as hell is getting there. But don’t think twice, it’s all right.