Music: Poet's Return: It's What I Do

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Performer Not Prophet. The real source of disappointment lay in a worshiping youthful expectation incapable of fulfillment. The prophet had brought no cataclysm, no revelation. That was hardly Dylan's fault. He has always been a performer who moved uneasily within his aura. He has never really courted audiences. That quality has helped him outgrow the limitations of his early successes. But it has also alienated some of his fans. There were early Dylan fanatics, for instance, who considered him guilty of betrayal when he first gave up the pure strains of folk music and adopted the electrified big beat of rock in 1965.

But, as Dylan has said more than once, it is all music to him. Why should he be impaled forever on the revolutionary edge of his early songs, even if his attacks on the "masters of war" and the "hard rain" of atomic fallout did help make him a myth in the first place? Now 28, happily married and the father of four, he seems to want to relax and write new songs about innocent pleasures and the delights of love.

Dylan himself was pleased by the concert. He came away from the concert feeling strong enough for a full-scale comeback in the U.S. Already he has announced a touring show with The Band, the superb Canadian country-rock group that backed him at Wight. "I want to try it again," he says. "It's what I do. It's my work." But clearly he will do it his way. Not playing up to the applause or offering flowery speeches about "how wonderful it is to be here." It is, in fact, not only Dylan's way but his ultimate message, the adamant and irreducible core that's left after all the protest and preaching, all the politics and poetry are stripped away. As he sings in his own Maggie's Farm: Well, I try my best to be just like I am, But everybody wants you to be just like them.