The tour's first concerts were frantic and articulate and fun; as time went on, and as the years went on, Dylan became stranger and stranger. You could easily see him once, twice, three times a year if you wanted to. You could see good shows, bad shows, indifferent shows. Shows in which he whined his way through a tune -- a famous song, a classic song -- for minutes before a half-heard snatch of lyric allowed the audience to figure out what it was listening to. Those who follow his touring closely say that calendar years could go by without him saying a single word to the audience.

But the interesting thing was that you could see Dylan. As time went on it became a defining issue. That's what Bob Dylan did: He played live -- year in and year out, in good health and bad. (Even a severe infection near his heart that hospitalized him in 1997 did not slow him down.) In New York and Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Berlin, sure, but also, night after night, in the middle of nowhere: in Davenport, Iowa; Rochester, Minn., and Bristol, Tenn., to pick three random dates from 1994; in 13 cities in Spain and Portugal, to pick a small leg of his 1999 tour. This year, he has already played 13 shows in Japan, nine in Australia, 15 in the South and Midwest of the U.S. -- with several dozen concerts scheduled in Scandinavia and western Europe from June onward.

It seems obvious, in retrospect, that in 1988, when Dylan began his endless tour, he felt subterranean still, and homesick yet again. That's why the journeys in "Hard Rain" and "Tangled Up in Blue" have such resonance, and why, 35 years later, the words that hang in the air when you hear "Like a Rolling Stone" are "no direction home."

Dylan today is the last moving target of the dream that was '60s rock. Mick Jagger shills for Budweiser and Tommy Hilfiger, while respected new stars like Moby sell entire albums' worth of songs to corporations that grimly purvey youth culture to itself. Dylan makes great money (particularly overseas); he takes home $5 million to $10 million a year for his five or six months of work annually. But he could earn that in a few weeks on a quick stadium tour with Neil Young or the Stones; or he could take a page from David Bowie's or Pete Townshend's book and do a farewell or "Greatest Hits Live!" tour every two or three years. He could feed the attendant hype and walk away with five times what he does now, while investing a fraction of the time.

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Is the Never Ending Tour a journey away from that, or toward something else? It's easy to be the sort of pop star who grins for the public, and tells it what it wants to hear. You certainly wouldn't have anyone around urging you to do it differently. It's much harder -- and it takes a greater psychic toll -- to be true to a voice inside and spend your life trying to communicate it faithfully, whether people listen or not, whether people like it or not.

That's what Dylan is doing. Those other stars are in effect moving farther and farther away from themselves, while Dylan's headed in the opposite direction. Elvis died at Graceland, true, but no star ever came to an end further from his real home. Bob Dylan, at the close of the Never Ending Tour -- at the end of this unforgettable, undeniable, incredible career, and a journey no star like him has even contemplated -- will be somewhere else: a point quite close to the uncompromising, limitless, clangorous place he started.

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