Along a Watchtower, Closely Watching the World

By JON PARELES

ob Dylan was a soothsayer and a comedian, a lover and a crank, an archivist and an entertainer when he performed at Madison Square Garden on Monday night. Love and war were on his mind, along with the boundless ironies and regeneration promised by the blues.

His voice has rarely set out to sound pretty, and it has aged like an old tractor, rusty and creaky but right for its terrain. His music has dug into Americana, working its way back through the folk-rock and psychedelic jams of the 1960's toward blues, rockabilly, bluegrass, Tin Pan Alley and Appalachian gospel. Even when the tidings are dire, his music has a spring in its step.

Most of his set came from his 1960's albums and his latest one, "Love and Theft" (Columbia), which is no less ambitious. As he did when he left topical songwriting behind in the 1960's, he is again writing songs that set out to address everything at once. New songs like the loping shuffle of "Lonesome Day Blues" and the stately ballad "Sugar Baby" leaped from prophecy to joke to confession to spite to plain-spoken philosophy: "Some of these memories," he sang, "You can learn to live with, and some of them you can't."

Onstage he said that nearly every song in the set was either written or recorded in New York City, adding "No one has to ask me how I feel about this town." Otherwise he let his lyrics, along with two old country songs probably gleaned from Hank Williams and Ralph Stanley, address the moment. One of the old songs was "Searching for a Soldier's Grave"; he also sang his own "John Brown," about a disfigured soldier coming home, along with "A Hard Rain's A- Gonna Fall" and "Blowin' in the Wind." The finale was a hard-blues, Hendrix-style reworking of "All Along the Watchtower." Mr. Dylan's songs have the Nostradamus knack of wrapping themselves around contemporary events, and the song was thoroughly ominous when he sang "Two riders were approaching/The wind began to howl."

He also sang domestic chronicles. "Tangled Up in Blue" shimmered in his current band's arrangement; "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Just Like a Woman" sounded as if their breakups still rankled. And he and his band romped through songs from "Love and Theft." In "Summer Days," Tony Garnier twirled his bass fiddle while Mr. Dylan, Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell traded guitar leads and David Kemper knocked out the rockabilly two-beat.

Through the set, the band switched off between string-band instruments and electric ones. Mr. Dylan didn't have his harmonica in his usual neck rack; he held it to a microphone like a Chicago blues harpist. Mr. Dylan is no perfectionist; he picked lead guitar lines almost continuously, willing to trip up the other guitarists and shrug off small collisions to keep the music sounding informal and footloose. With his rickety voice, his wayward imagination and his abiding connection to American roots, Mr. Dylan stares down any loss, as if a laugh and a down-home twang are the best survival kit.