Finally, essentially giving up, in the early 1990s Dylan recorded two albums of folk songs, "Good as I Been to You" and "World Gone Wrong"; it's a testament to his unpredictability that the first of these is tedious and the second is a signal document, a mesmerizing and sanguinary walk down the blood-soaked history of folk and blues. It also has his best liner notes since the 1960s. ("By the way, don't be bewildered by the Never Ending Tour chatter. There was a Never Ending Tour but it ended.")

In 1997, he released "Time Out of Mind," in which he finally managed to marry a classy studio sound to an appropriately mysterious collection of songs. The record is enormously overrated (it won the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop Poll of the nation's rock critics that year), but boasts a powerful and original lead-off song, the scary "Love Sick," and one or two other "Oh Mercy"-level tracks, like "Not Dark Yet." ("Things Have Changed," the song from the film "Wonder Boys" that won an Oscar last year, sounds like a "Time Out of Mind" tune but was actually recorded two years later.)

Yet Dylan ends the record with a trying, 16-minute-long composition called "Highlands," which sounds and reads like a Dylan parody:

It must be a holiday, there's nobody around
She studies me closely as I sit down
She got a pretty face and long white shiny legs
She says, "What'll it be?"
I say, "I don't know, you got any soft boiled eggs?"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In some ways, Dylan deserves a lot more contempt than he gets. He's everybody's darling these days, but most people who talk about him, or give him Oscars and Grammys, barely bother to plow through the scores of bad songs he has recorded (and released! and sold to an unsuspecting public!) in the past 20 years, or see many of his indifferent shows.

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Yet for all that, he's still underappreciated. A few days listening to his albums fills your head with a cacophony of words. It's the sound of lovers and heroes, charlatans and assholes, the heroic and the downtrodden -- and someone who was once a very young boy with unspeakable ambitions -- fighting for your attention:

"Darkness at the break of noon"
"Ain't it just like the night to play tricks/When you're trying to be so quiet?"
"And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it"
"Spanish boots of Spanish leather"
"And them Caribbean winds still blow/From Nassau to Mexico"
"A million faces at my feet/But all I see are dark eyes"
"I can't help it if I'm lucky"
"Her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls"
"Ma, take this badge off of me"
"'Twas then that I knew what he had on his mind"
"Pistol shots ring out in a barroom night"
"Oh, Mama -- can this really be the end?"
"I got blood in my eyes for you"
"I'm going out of my mind/With a pain that stops and starts"
"And never sat once at the head of the table"
"There's seven people dead in a South Dakota farm"
"Yes, and only if my own true love was waitin'"
"Turn, turn, to the rain and the wind"
"Come in, she said, I'll give you/Shelter from the storm"
"Stayin' up for days at the Chelsea Hotel/Writing 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' for you'"
"How does it feel?"

In this cacophony, songs that seemed impenetrable and inscrutable now and again come into focus. Take "Desolation Row," from "Highway 61 Revisited." Winding through the beat poesy, the litany of famous names, the off-kilter, almost Latin rhythm and the nightmarish scenery is a star in an absurdist theater of fame. The singer places himself firmly on Desolation Row at the song's beginning, and, more than 100 lines later, at the end tells us that we can't expect to criticize him if we don't know what he's going through. ("Don't send me no more letters, no/Not unless you mail them from/Desolation Row.")

Dylan, it's important to note, wrote the song before his vivid electric era. So whirling was his mind at the time that he could effortlessly create prescient passages:

Now you would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row

Funny how you can see Dylan today, point at the stage and think of those words. The Never Ending Tour, beginning in 1988, took him out of his recording doldrums; for years he played with just three backing musicians, led by G.E. Smith, the weird bandleader from "Saturday Night Live." It turned out that Smith was just what Dylan needed -- someone to wrangle a wound-up-tight backing combo that would let Dylan wander into any song on whim. (On one of the opening nights of the tour Smith walked over and actually wrapped his hand around the neck of the guitar of Neil Young, who was sitting in on a couple of songs, when Smith wanted him to stop playing. How many supporting players still alive can claim to have done that?)

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