We are in Toronto the third stop of the Bob Dylan tour. Locked in by snow and still locked out, so far, from the inner circles of Dylan and the Band. I'm reduced to television in my hotel room. I choose Channel 6 and get Channel 79, where a newsy-talk program called The CITY Show named after the station's call letters is on. For some reason, the moderator a sporty-looking fellow, 50 or so, looks familiar but the camera cuts to the program's "youth reporter" whose report this evening is an earnest attack on Dylan, the tour and tour producer Bill Graham. He is asking where all the money is going; he is characterizing Dylan as a "manipulator" of his fans and the press, secreting himself from the public after that convenient little bike spill and, now, exploiting his absence from the scene. He also has heard that Dylan's show is comprised mostly of older songs and this, too, is a pisser for him.

The moderator, the man with those penetrating, close-set eyes I've seen before, comes to Dylan's defense.

"I believe there's a freedom to just sit down if you want to," he tells the kid. "The public doesn't own Dylan; that's why he appealed to you in the first place."

As for Dylan's manipulation of the media, he continues, "You know I don't like to talk about my son too much on the air, but Neil has found that he's not dependent on all this damned media coverage. [Now I recognize the gentleman: Scott Young, Neil's father and a newspaper columnist in Toronto.] Just a line in the papers is enough.

"Dylan is trying," he says, "to reestablish that there still is a Dylan around."

The next night, I met Dylan, bumping into him in the hallway up on his floor, and he agreed to talk — later, in Montreal. Three days later, in Montreal, 33 floors up at the Chateau Champlain, Bob Dylan sat across the table, at ease, in white western shirt and jeans, still sleepy at 3 PM, but willing to talk.

He's always interested in what his audience is thinking, so I told him about the impression his new love songs seemed to be making. Critics — from Chicago through Philadelphia and Canada — were saying he'd mellowed out, "blunted his image," "drained the venom from his voice." He'd moved from urgent, surging metaphorical poetry to clinch-clichŽs, stereotyped images, and an emphatically-stated need for his loved one, a complete turn away from his previous posture of independence, individualism and defiance.

Of course, he's played with such talk before. In "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," he rhymed "moon" and "spoon." In Montreal, just last night, between "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Gates Of Eden," he told the audience, "That was a love song, and this one's another love song."

With a wife and five children, Dylan is being called a family man, or, as Jonathan Takiff, pop critic for the Philadelphia Daily News put it, "a Dutch uncle."

"Yeah," said Dylan. "But those things don't make a person settle down. A family brings the world together. You can see it's all one. It paints a better picture than being with a chick and traveling all over the world. Or hanging out all night.

"But," he maintained, "I still get that spark. I'm still out there. In no way am I not. I don't live on a pedestal.