According to an Associated Press review of the opening night, Bob Dylan "drove a packed-house audience of 7200 into shrieks of ecstasy. The thirty-seven-year-old folk-rock singer mixed old songs and new. His audience in the Augusta Civic Center was a mixture of people who first knew Dylan as an angry young poet in the early Sixties and high-school students more accustomed to punk rock. Dylan satisfied both, although his veteran fans seemed the happiest."

After a highly successful series of concerts in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and western Europe earlier this year, it might seem peculiar to think of Dylan's latest American tout as a kind of comeback. But, at least in this country, Dylan recently has been the recipient of some especially negative reviews, both for his film, Renaldo and Clara (which, incidentally, was warmly greeted at this year's Cannes Film Festival), and his latest album, Street-Legal. This billingsgate, moreover, has come from a number of Dylan's "veteran fans." In the Village Voice, seven reviewers - a kind of firing squad - administered justice to the film with a fusillade of abuse. And Rolling Stone, in its two August issues, featured a column and review that pilloried the album.

Yet Street-Legal seems to me one of Dylan's most passionate, questing and questioning records. It presents two songs of ironic and bittersweet explanations and resolutions ("True Love Tends to Forget" and "We Better Talk This Over"), a song of waiting and searching ("Senor"), a song of black magic ("New Pony"), a song of need ("Is Your Love in Vain?"), a song of pleading ("Baby Stop Crying"); a song of the stripping bare of personality ("No Time To Think"), a song of loss and encounters ("Where Are You Tonight?"); and a song that combines medieval romance, Tarot dreams and a Palace of Mirrors in which each image is seen as if on a different floor ("Changing of the Guards"). Street-Legal reflects the night and day sides of Dylan's art and personality - the last three songs mentioned being among the singer's most complex lunar-landscapes (illumined with imagination, intuition and magic), the first two radiating with the solar attributes of intellection and objectivity-white the other songs hover around like mysterious satellites.

Dylan recorded this album in a week, and as much as I like its rough, deglamorized sound, the LP hardly gives an idea of the brilliance, dexterity and inventiveness of his new band — which he has taken on all his recent tours and which includes lead guitarist Billy Cross; rhythm guitarist Steve Soles; bassist Jerry Scheff; keyboardist Alan Pasqua; drummer Ian Wallace; David Mansfield on steel guitar, violin and mandolin; Bobbye Hall on percussion; Steve Douglas on woodwinds; and backup singers Carolyn Dennis, Jo Ann Harris and Helena Springs.

I caught up with Dylan and his group at their second concert, on September 16th at the Portland Civic Center. It began with the band — dressed in black and white velvet and satin — performing a lilting, gossamer-like instrumental version of "My Back Pages." As that concluded, Dylan — wearing white sneakers, black jeans decorated with diamond stars, a black leather jacket and a purple scarf — appeared and led the band in a sultry reworking of Muddy Waters' "I'm Ready," which featured the lines, "I'm ready as I can be/I'm ready for you/I hope you're ready for me" (Quite a different opening from "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine," which introduced his 1974 tour with the Band.)

Next came an eerily high-pitched and intense rendition of "Is Your Love in Vain?" that combined the vocal inflections of James Brown and Little Anthony with the Dylan voice of Highway 61 Revisited. He furnished "Shelter from the Storm" with a new, romantic, rootless-sounding melodic line, full of unresolved cadences and sang it in a kind of incantatory style reminiscent of Kurt Weill.

After a calypso-flavored version of "Love Minus Zero" — which featured his first harmonica solo of the evening — Dylan gave a soulful, torch-ballad rendition of "Tangled Up in Blue," singing it to the accompaniment of tenor sax and Yamaha synthesizer as if he were on the stage of a Parisian music hall. "Ballad in Plain D," "Maggie's Farm" and "I Don't Believe You" followed — the first delivered in an ironically showbiz manner, the second featuring a driving Stax-Volt riff, and the third insinuating itself in a sly, feline way. In "Like a Rolling Stone," Dylan gave an entranced recitation of the words against a pulsating wall of sound, after which he switched gears and sang "I Shall Be Released" with the vocal timbre he once used on Nashville Skyline. He ended the first half of the set with an occasionally newly worded version of "Going, Going, Gone."