Music: Dylan: Once Again, It's Alright Ma

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Still, it is quite a triumph for somebody who set out from Minnesota in 1961 on a pilgrimage to the bed of the dying Woody Guthrie, his only ambition to "make it big." The fact that along the way Dylan became an oracle was almost accidental, involuntary. While his musical contemporaries were becoming mirrors of society, Dylan, almost in spite of himself, became its conscience, a reluctant Eumenide. Instead of warbling teen-age love songs, he wrote about bigotry, nuclear destruction, war profiteers and social desolation. Dylan was background for a campus rap session, inspiration for an essay. He was the brooding presence uniting thousands of unsatisfied students, a pioneer who purged the inanities from popular music with surrealistic epigrams and metaphysical subtleties.

"When I first took my music on the road back in '60, it was in search of something else that wasn't being covered," Dylan said last week in a rare interview. "I let it happen by itself, and it grew and matured by itself. Everybody has matured, musicians included. A lot of these people [referring to his followers] and myself have a great deal in common. As for the music ... I just let the rope out."

Nasal Howl. From the moment they shamble onstage to begin their low-key performance, Dylan and the Band are in complete control of the audience. Dylan's early folk-rock numbers, punctuated by Band standards like The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and Up on Cripple Creek, are knocked out with an almost blase professionalism. But if Dylan is short on emotion, he makes up for it in energy. Shouting into the microphone in his haunting nasal howl, he spits out his message like a cobra. Since neither the performers nor the songs need introduction, there is no chatter between numbers. Dylan's acknowledgment of the audience is slight: a simple bow from the waist after each song and a terse announcement of the intermission.

After the break, he walks on, sometimes clad in shining white denim, for a solo set of songs accompanied by his own acoustical guitar and ubiquitous harmonica. It is the most exciting part of the show. Dylan, his halo of curly hair limned by the iridescent hues of the stage lights, is greeted by thunderous cheers. After four or five of his early ballads, he is again joined by the Band for a crescendo of electrified folk-rock songs studded with powerful guitar riffs. From then on, the shouting seldom stops.

For those of us who first grasped for maturity during the decade past, a Dylan concert is a three-hour detour through deja vu. Like images on Plato's cave, Clearasil coeds with Joan Baez hair and men silently hunkered inside thick pea jackets appear and quickly pass— yesterday's graduate students, now headed toward paunch or pregnancy. Dylan concerts draw people who inhabited the fringes of campus teach-ins, rode Mississippi freedom buses and marched down endless University Avenues searching for an end to the draft.