Bob Dylan - At B CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

again conspire to make his voice so perfectly representative, so widely heard. His talent has changed, evolving into something more supple, less stubborn, more musical, finally leading toward an odd and private synthesis of the visionary and the mundane. Considered fairly, removed from the shadow of his past achievements, Dylan's new songs are often as lovely as the old ones. Bob Dylan at Budokan comes as a shock, a sacrilege and an unexpectedly playful bonanza. The illumination it offers is long overdue.

Bob Dylan at Budokan is also a marked departure from the live LPs that have preceded it (and the very volume of this material -- three albums, five records in all, in as many years -- betrays a regrettable nervousness about breaking new ground). Before the Flood was caught up in keeping the legend intact, in proving that the old lion was alive and ready to roar. Virtually every arrangement there strained to sound fierce, to beef up the old songs without really changing anything. The mood was emphatic at all costs, and sometimes -- with Dylan and the Band chanting "How does it feel?" over and over in "Like a Rolling Stone" -- genuinely triumphant. Later, after Before the Flood's corrective surgery removed that great big chip from his shoulder, Dylan's approach to his old songs began to sound more random, almost petulantly so. Hard Rain, the soundtrack LP from his TV special, seemed to come at a time when the Rolling Thunder Revue, so joyful and electrifying in its first performances, had just plain run out of steam.

But this time the old songs have been recast sweetly, without that self-defeating aggression, in what sounds suspiciously like a spirit of fun. The sanctimonious, Las Vegas-style bastardization of "Blowin' in the Wind" and the wise-guy tenor of the liner notes (he thanks "that sweet girl in the geisha house -- I wonder does she remember me?") echo Dylan's old evasiveness, even though what used to pass for mystery in him has the look of cowardice now. But most of this two-album set is forthright, astonishingly so. Can it really be that Bob Dylan had to go all the way to Budokan, to Japan, to find an audience with a short memory, a crowd that didn't think he had anything to prove? In any ca