Saint Bob?

Bob Dylan is playing in town this Wednesday, at the USF Sun Dome, one of the area's worst large venues for acoustic reproduction. And if I hadn't caught Dylan's entire set at Jazzfest in new Orleans (see post below), I'd give serious consideration to seeing him on a double bill with Merle Haggard.

Dylan lately is giving Elvis Presley a run in the omnipresence department. The latest round of exposure is by way of Richard Goldstein's insightful, well-written cover story, "Satellite Dylan," for the May 15 issue of longtime liberal standard bearer The Nation.

We thought we knew Dylan, the hero of the '60s counterculture, Goldstein writes.

"Now it's trickier. There's Dylan the artist in cap and gown, and Dylan the brand, hyping the new line at Victoria's Secret; Dylan the Nobel Prize nominee, and Dylan the franchise whose product is being diversified into a tribute musical by Twyla Tharp. And now there's DJ Dylan coming to the XM pay-radio network."

Goldstein's point, or one of them, is to rail against the Baby Boomers who are convinced that every move Dylan makes, and every move he will make, is pure, unalloyed genius.

"To his most fervent admirers he's not just another artist, certainly not a song-and-dance man, as he's often called himself. He's the emblem of his generation's splendor. Beatified in his youth, he's cruising toward sainthood today."

Goldstein then goes on to catalog the Dylanania pouring out -- his recent bio, the Scorsese doc, a forthcoming film from Todd Haynes, with four actors playing Saint Bob -- and rail a little more.

"This failure to distinguish between awesome and awful Dylan is evidence that his reputation rests less on his recent music than on his enduring status as a fetish."

He concludes with a salute to Bob's young fans, and a suggested approach to appreciating all things Bob.

"Now a new generation has discovered Dylan, but not for his late style. They flock to his concerts to hear the early songs, those still-gripping sagas of alienation and outrage written when Dylan was lost in the wilderness, and they come to hear how Dylan will sing those songs today, since he always performs them differently. They know Dylan as he should be known--as a striving, fallible artist, not a saint."

I was too young to appreciate the full flowering of Original Bob, but I've appreciated him, off and on, as an insightful singer and an always at least interesting interpreter of his own work. And more often than not he brings along a killer band -- rootsy, swaggering, marked by plenty of six-string bluster and earthy rhythmic drive.

What do you think? Has anyone out there heard Dylan's XM show?