Bob Dylan: at the North Shore Events Centre

By GRAHAM REID

It's hard to know what to expect of Bob Dylan concerts these days: 40-something albums which range from the indispensable to the indifferent, wildly erratic shows which can include ancient folk-blues or covers of contemporary artists (he has recently included Warren Zevon songs), and that mighty catalogue of original music which now spans four decades.

For a Dylan show, we have learned, you "pays your money and takes your chance". On Friday an almost capacity crowd took its chance and was rewarded and bemused.

For decades Dylan has been introduced simply as "Columbia recording artist" but this time he was announced with a haiku-like career synopsis: the protest singer, the man who turned folk into rock, something about critical indifference and his recent terrific albums ... Bob for Beginners?

But beginners would have been mystified by the mystique of this dapper, frock-coated 61-year-old who powerfully propelled his distinctive croak through his back pages, most songs so reconfigured many recognised them only when a distinctive phrase such as "I'll be your baby tonight" emerged.

With an exceptionally disciplined and inventive band which kept the momentum and depth going, Dylan favoured many old classics and included only a few recent songs - rocking out from behind the keyboards with Tweedle Dee, like Bing Crosby gargling sandpaper on the gorgeous ballad Bye and Bye, and closing the encore with a ripping All Along the Watchtower.

The unsmiling Dylan looked assured if distant at the end, scanning the crowd as if searching for a missing relative.

But he dug deep into big-beat country, Texas swing, r'n'b and rock. There was a blistering Drifter's Escape, and some breathtakingly inventive Spanish-style acoustic playing on It's All Over Now Baby Blue. And a cheery Happy Birthday for guitarist Larry Campbell briefly cracked his mask.

Timely though Masters of War (delivered as throbbing Muddy Waters blues) was, it also raised questions. Dylan has long denied he is a political songwriter (what if he'd included his old pro-Israel Neighbourhood Bully?) and while the the song was welcomed, you might have wondered whether the audience brought more to it than the artist. Early on, when he pulled out his harmonica for Just Like a Woman, it was greeted as an iconic moment.

This was an audience prepared to enjoy its collective, if refracted, history, and even if there was an occasional sameness about the Texas r'n'b framework of some songs it was the legend as much as the music people had come for.

So it was a night of r'n'b rock'n'roll with touches of tough country and Spanish guitar, delivered by one of popular culture's most enduring and enigmatic figures.

As expected, old songs were warped and morphed, it was always interesting, sometimes amusing, occasionally disappointing and, often enough, revelatory and exciting.

Yes, it was hard to know what to expect from one song to the next. This was Bob after all.