The lights went up on six guys in dark suits and black hats, looking like a high school production of a western saloon scene. The short one standing in front of the keyboards was the singer. His suit had a tuxedo stripe of midnight blue glitter and the brim of his hat was ringed with silver medallions. As they roared into their first number, his voice came on abrasive and overpowering like the forgotten smell of aftershave on my father's rough cheeks.

But like the memory it inspired, his voice only lasted a minute or two before losing force. He stood in front of the keyboard as stiffly as if it were a walker, every now and then attempting a few rockabilly kicks and slides in his smooth-soled shoes, flourishes which might easily have been taken for spasms. His band gathered round him in a tight circle, watching closely for clues as to what he might do next, like football players huddled around a quarterback who only called plays in minimalist pantomime, or not at all.

After each song the lights went out for five or six seconds, when I believe he was discreetly turning the page of a crib sheet lying flat in front of him. He either messed up on the first verse of “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine” or he was messing with the lyrics, I can’t be sure which.

True to form, Dylan changed up his old songs a little. The addition of a steel lap guitar and new picking patterns gave a celebratory aspect to his most pessimistic songs, and he broke up the vocal phrasing in new and interesting ways. The band did their best to liven things up with volume surges on the choruses, a rockist trick which mostly worked.

The arena was designed for watching sporting events with the lights on so there was no illumination for the row numbers. It had been pretty hard to find our seats in the dark; we had to count heads. It didn’t help matters that one section was 314 and the one next to it was 314A. When the lights came on after the opener, a quarter of those who had finally found their place got up again and went for beer and snacks. The instant the lights went out again I smelled the reek of pot come crashing over the seats from somewhere behind me, and a few songs later spotted an old dude three rows down toking up in cupped orange hands.

In the middle of most songs one's mind drifted to the near-miss playoff pennants dangling from the rafters or the few drunken dancing fools at the foot of the stage. There was a middle-aged woman who had rushed up to the railing at the front of the audience, and who bopped her way through every single song regardless of tone or tempo, casting a long pointing arm out in the moments of her greatest exuberance as if inviting the players to come down from the stage and bop with her. Behind her was her companion, a much older man with long gray hair on the sides of his head and nothing on top, bouncing along sympathetically at about half her speed. They had found each other.

The audience for live music is always stupid, regardless of the performer. People shout Freebird at Richard Thompson shows. Tonight people were pumping their fists and howling as if “Desolation Row” were “Born to Run,” and during “Nettie Moore” they cheered at the mention of whiskey and scripture and more inexplicably at the song’s sad refrain, The world has gone black before my eyes. Some of them danced so jerkily they looked like they were being beaten senseless by invisible forces, which I wished they were.

For a moment I felt myself looking down on Dylan himself with a hint of pity and feeling as if I were somewhere so high above it all before realizing with a little shock that my thoughts were echoing a phrase from one of his lyrics.

Sixty-five himself now, Dylan played four songs off of his album from 1965, almost as many as from his latest record. There's a wide gulf between his old songs and his new ones. The old ones are more musical, lyrically more acid-etched. Critics have started to speak of a late trilogy, comprised of Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft” and now Modern Times. It makes some sense, but I personally dislike the grouping because Time Out of Mind is so much better than the other two.

The feeling one inevitably gets while listening to Modern Times is that Grandpa slipped away at the county fair and next thing you knew he was up on stage honking-tonking over the p.a. system like in cherished days of yore. Musically a lot of it is the generic stuff you might expect a guy in a music store to play if he was demoing a guitar for you. The sleepy softshoe of “Spirit On The Water” is so old-timey I half expected him to start doing the old Tim Conway gag about sweeping up the spotlight.

The profuse lyrics of the new songs seem stapled on top of their chords, like the ninety-five theses Martin Luther once nailed to a wooden church door. Dylan has never been above throwing in a junk line to set up the rhyme for a good one and some of his filler has been so inspired that people have puzzled over it as if it too were poetry. Lyrically he limps along, one marble leg and one wood, alternately oracle and hack. Modern Times isn't bad after a few listens when you know what to expect from it, a modest mood piece from another era, solidly built with a few bonus shards of modernism thrown in and undeniable but brief flashes of genius.

There were a few attractive girls there, sleek as otters and hanging half out of their ass-pants, and their incongruity seemed a kind of reference point for the night’s distance from the idea of rock. At a real rock concert, they would have been dancing up on the stage instead of here and there in the stands. They were the kind of free spirits Dylan got tangled up with and then wrote about burned and bitter forty years ago.

One of these Ruby Tuesdays said to me, I love your lollipop, I’m totally obsessed with lollipops. A natural entertainer, she danced facing the crowd instead of the stage.

Another girl across the aisle from me was alternately talking on her cell phone and photographing herself and her friend with it. When I looked over darkly half-intending to chastise, she gave me a look of beaming pride and satisfaction, happy to have another chance to show her beauty.

My first Dylan buddy in high school told me that Visions of Johanna was secretly about the Hebrew gehenna and that the vision was of the end of the world. My college Dylan buddy told me that Dark Eyes was about the darkness of apocalypse. I believed those guys because they were in so much deeper than I was. Recently I listened to Judy Collins singing Dark Eyes and realized that both of them had been dead wrong.

Dylan's songs are mostly about what they seem to be about, being in love. It can feel like the end of the world sometimes but it's not. Not everything has to be the end of the world to matter. The things that matter most may matter only to oneself, like one's own happiness.

It's not prurience to want to know who Dylan is writing these love songs for. In fact it speaks to a lack of context and artistic detail in the songs themselves. They are vague and foggy, drifting off theme, programmatically abstract and dissociated, a kind of idiomatically naturalized crypto-modernism like that of Arthur Miller’s plays.

When Billy Bragg sings “The Saturday Boy,” I don't want to know the name of the classmate he had a schoolboy crush on or see a picture of her because the song has withheld nothing that I do need to know. But when Dylan sings the twelve ascending verses of Nettie Moore over a slow cardiac thump, one has no definite sense of the poetic situation. Is he remembering an old love or celebrating a new one? Does the woman he loves love him back?

Even the sharpest line is unclear: “Don't know why my baby never looked so good before.” He means she never looked this good to him, but when you listen the line is undercut by the possibility that she actually does look better for some other reason like a new haircut, or even that he's complaining a little ruefully about her less presentable past. You can quickly rule out those possibilities but doing so involves a detour that took you out of the song.

When Dylan tells a love story, the woman often mysteriously vanishes, and the story is told in such a mysterious way that it is uncertain if the woman has even really vanished or not. Even a gripping story like Tangled Up In Blue is completely tangled and unclear on reflection. In verse two he meets a married woman, “soon to be divorced”, they drive out West and then split up on the docks that night—no, on a dark sad night—and she says they will meet again. In verse four he meets a waitress in a topless bar and ends up moving in with her and her boyfriend in a basement flat in Brooklyn. So is it the same woman? All the people I used to know are illusions to me now, Dylan laments. It seems like they always were, if the ghostly characters he makes out of them are any indication.

There's a hidden puzzle in this song, as in “Simple Twist of Fate” with its quiet shift from third to first person and Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, a puzzle buried so deep you could listen to the song a thousand times and not even realize it was there, a puzzle which once found still does not admit of resolution.

Can one straighten out the plot with effort? Big Jim surprises his mistress Lily with the Jack of Hearts in her dressing room. His cold revolver—or is it Colt revolver?—clicks. And does it click because he has drawn back the hammer to fire or could it be that it is empty because his disloyal wife Rosemary has taken out the bullets? Rosemary winds up stabbing Big Jim to death in the back and then hangs for it. Her former rival Lily is there to watch the hanging but the Jack of Hearts himself is missing from the scene, dead or alive we don’t know. He is another of Dylan’s evanescent phantoms, allegories of the unreality or unreliability of love.

The boomers were calling for their encore with the blue firefly lights of their unlimited-calling-plan cell phones instead of stomps and cheers and butane. That’s showbiz for you, I guess. I was very happy several years back when Dylan shifted his stance from prophet to humble entertainer; it seemed a gesture toward recovering his sanity. I still find it strange that he is willing to pretend to be a cowboy, a Christian, a movie star, a motorcyclist, or a deejay, but never simply what he is, a poet.

For the encore, they lowered the backdrop of Dylan's odd mystic-eye symbol. When Dylan brought out “Like A Rolling Stone” you felt like there ought to be a law against it, he's so far from that now. Andy and Edie and all the people he dissed are dead and it's like a curse turned back on him that he has to keep putting them down while they sleep peacefully in the graves he is spitting on. Dylan's first joy was the joy of nastiness unleashed, the positivity of at least calling a Fourth Street friend of yours an enemy when that's what they really were. His songs will live as long as our language does, but in a world which they say might or might not be worth living in.

I don't mind the old songs being brightened up. The real story isn't in the song, it's the fate of the song and its singer in the world. The story is survival, a story of winning unprecedented fame and turning your back on it, of being held and shaken hard by more inspiration than all but a few human frames have ever endured, of his own inescapably dark vision of humanity, of the agonizing witness of beauty and of a well-sifted handful of love disasters. But it's hard to celebrate the survival of a song that seems to adapt by having its meaning lost in pseudo-celebration.

Dylan's singing voice is ruined but he always sung kind of ugly on purpose, slipping in and out of a nasty, leering cackle which has transmogrified into a mocking horror-show croak, as if he were risen from the grave. It's not from the stadium setting or bad equipment, though it’s possible his desire to express is so vehement while singing that he just craps out the mikes. Sometimes his butchering was so bloody I had to sing the song to myself the right way to get through it. I got home around midnight and strummed my way through three or four of his songs looking for answers before giving up and going to bed.

He never spoke to the audience, except to introduce the band towards the end. Still, I would guess he continues touring as a way of clinging to life and trying to warm his wintery soul off the crowd's applause, which can't mean nothing, can it?

He closed the show with All Along The Watchtower, repeating, None of them along the line know what any of it is worth, stretching out the last word in one of the only moments of the night that felt like he was singing again. He may have been including the audience in that condemnation or he may have been expanding it even wider as a way of saying, Man proposes, God disposes.

The song starts, as most people know, with a dialogue between joker and thief. The joker complains to the thief that he is being robbed by businessmen. The thief responds by telling the joker that many people feel that life is a joke. This kind of reversal is known in rhetoric as chiasmus: the joker speaks of a theft while the thief talks about a joke. Though they propose to speak truly from then on, we do not hear the rest of their conversation. Meanwhile the fortress is on alert. Two riders approach, probably bearing ominous news of an enemy on the way. Rather than providing closure, the song ends with a loose feeling of opening up to chaos and darkness, kind of like a Pynchon novel, or those of Kafka which actually were unfinished.

As I drove out of the parking lot, a white-haired gentleman stopped and stood in the path of my car for a minute, not seeing me. Finally I honked and he roused himself and slowly began to move off. Seemingly stoned, he made some derogatory remark I didn’t catch. That was the image that stayed with me most from the whole night: seventeen thousand souls checking out of reality by looking at a stage and imagining themselves the person on it, losing themselves so deeply that some were lucky to make it back in one piece.