Dylan returns -- and again hits the right chords

Bob Dylan is that rare and lucky artist who connects on a deep and mystical level with a mass audience while following his own obscure and convoluted path to redemption. After 40 years in show business, he is at the top of his game.

MUSIC REVIEW

BOB DYLAN

WHEN: Saturday night

WHERE: KeyArena

Contrary to the commandment against pouring new wine into old bottles, this 60-year-old song-and-dance man is successfully rewriting the lexicon of popular American music. When he last appeared at KeyArena (then the Coliseum) in 1974, the audience found new relevance in a song penned a decade earlier.

Amid the Watergate scandal, Dylan sang "even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked," and the crowd roared in assent. At Saturday night's concert, "Masters of War," his 1962 missive against munitions manufacturers, found a similarly new context.

Line for line, the song mirrored President Bush's recent ultimatum to terrorists. It also encompassed the fear brought on by such an ultimatum.

Dylan followed a lovely reading of "One Too Many Mornings" with another chilling song from 1962, the Cuban-missile-crisis-inspired "A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall." The panorama of preapocalyptic images piled higher and higher until, by the final verse, he was delivering the lines like a man on his way to Calvary Hill.

Like Chopin, who would often destroy the mood created by a beautiful nocturne by capping it with a nasty glissando, Dylan likes to clear the rarefied air of his most inspired moments with crude romps through slight material. The junky "Country Pie" followed "Hard Rain," and a loud, trite arrangement of "The Wicked Messenger" decimated the sullen beauty of "Sugar Baby," one of four songs he performed from the new album, "Love and Theft."

Dylan opened his two-hour concert with "Wait for the Sun to Shine," an old-timey gospel song that he had never before performed live. The choruses were enlivened by guitarists Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell's excellent vocal harmonies. By doubling on fiddle, mandolin, and pedal steel, Campbell was a key to the band's versatility.

Sexton shared lead guitar duties with Dylan who, while technically awkward, occasionally managed to pull off a well-placed lick. After four acoustic songs, the band switched to electric instruments for a letter-perfect version of "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum."

In the past, it has taken months for new songs to be successfully worked into the repertoire. Saturday was the second show of this tour, and the "Love and Theft" material was already well-seasoned. Dylan even met the melodic challenges of "Moonlight," a love ballad in the Johnny Mercer tradition, with vocal acumen.

Dylan's voice is one of the treasures of American music. As distinctive as John Coltrane's saxophone, Miles Davis' trumpet or Jimi Hendrix's guitar, it resonates with our cultural history. Combining the diction of old English balladry with the grit of delta blues, the voice is both singular and universal.

It has taken Dylan a lifetime to develop a style that encompasses not only Woody Guthrie and Billie Holiday, but the pain and passion of the land itself. A highlight of the five-song encore was the gentle benediction of "Forever Young" that followed a chastising "Like a Rolling Stone."

The concert ended with a stunningly sad "Blowin' in the Wind" that questioned the relentless march of human stupidity as the voices of reason are once again being drowned.

Although uncomfortable in any role other than musician/entertainer, Dylan is often looked to for insight into philosophical and political issues. If there was a message in Saturday night's performance, it might be extracted from his new ballad, "Sugar Baby," which ends in the exhortation to "Look up, look up/Seek your Maker/ 'Fore Gabriel blows his horn."

In a world in which all human efforts seem to have failed, it's not bad advice.

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