His career, four decades on, is huge, contradictory and impossible to grasp. Something as trite as "the journey" makes no sense of it at all.

Until you consider this: In the early 1980s, after 20 years of fevered, nearly unrelenting activity and insistent controversy, Dylan slowed down. He barely made American concert appearances during this period, and when he did it was in the form of grinning, easy outings with crutches like the Grateful Dead or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. He also spent too much time recording forgettable albums, such as "Down in the Groove" and "Knocked Out Loaded." It was plain that after a quarter-century career, Dylan was winding down. If not bringing his journey to a complete halt, he did, for a time, switch on cruise control.

But then, in the summer of 1988, he formed a small combo and went out on a real tour. In four or five months he played 71 shows, Dylan's remarkable online chroniclers tell us. In 1989 he kept the groove going: He played 99 shows. And in 1990, he performed 96. He worked at this pace consistently through the 1990s -- in 1999 he played 116 shows.

In 1988, Dylan turned 47. Since then, through the decade of his 50s, he has spent nearly half of his days on the road. No other major star performs anywhere near as often. It's probable that over the past 13 years he has played more concerts than all but a handful of performers in the history of popular music -- 13 years spent traveling from city to city, night after night, on planes and buses, in limos and taxis, across America and the world.

What sort of a trip is this? Where did it start? Where is he going? And where will he be when it ends?

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Some of it was speed- and marijuana-induced dime-store surrealism, of course. There is filler, nonsense, in jokes, blather. Many of his early famous "protest" songs ("Masters of War," for example) are callow; what are supposed to be love songs are mean-spirited; and some of the tracks on the softer albums from the late 1960s are merely passable. The stoner anthem "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" is unforgivable; it ruins what would otherwise be rock's perfect album, "Blonde on Blonde." "Self Portrait," a forgotten release from 1970, is an inexplicably stultifying two-record set of covers and throwaways. (Columbia Records released an even worse collection, "Dylan," a few years later without Dylan's consent.) And his first album, "Bob Dylan," is, well, a first album.

That said, Dylan's work between 1962 and 1977 or so is without parallel. Even the most superficial songs ask to be taken seriously, and the vast part of the work is nonpareil. Many albums' worth of compositions ("The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "Bringing It All Back Home," "Highway 61 Revisited," "Live 1966," "Blonde on Blonde," "The Basement Tapes," "Before the Flood," "Blood on the Tracks" and arguably "Planet Waves" and "Desire") must be addressed in any serious account of the farthest and most compelling ends of rock 'n' roll. Dylan is one of rock's most eloquent, sexy and unpredictable singers. And one of its angriest. He is capable of delightful expressiveness on the harmonica; he's an insistent, possibly underrated melodist. And let's not forget that among other things, while he took no production credit on his recordings from this era, he oversaw, in the course of a consistent 15-year period, the creation of what remain rock's most astonishingly evocative and shudderingly atmospheric acoustic-based albums.

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