by Chris Nichol

Following hard on the success of 'Love and Theft', his latest album, Bob Dylan has been touring the world once more. But, as Chris Nichol discovered when Dylan blitzed New Zealand in February, in the hands of the right guide the same road can offer a different view.

By the time Dylan's guitarist had crashed through the opening chords to 'All Along the Watchtower', the night's second encore, the master minstrel had led us all on a new path through familiar territory.

He'd given us new eyes to see sights that were always there. We'd just been too blind to recognise them. For the packed and ecstatic house at Wellington's Queens Wharf Events Centre Dylan's performance was little short of a revelation.

The journey had begun two hours earlier as Bob had launched a reinterpretation of a familiar enough biblical narrative, the sacrifice of Isaac. But Dylan's take on the Genesis story in 'Highway 61 Revisited' moves the centre from Abraham's obedience to the place where the sacrifice is to be made. For Dylan that place is, as always, on the road.

The road has been Dylan's home for most of his 60 odd years. It's where he engages with life. And it's on the road where the stories that sustain and express his vision are told, re-told and re-interpreted.

Over the course of his show, Dylan drew together songs from four decades of diverse material to create something new. We weren't being subjected to 'Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. 42'. A complex assortment of 60s folk, Nashville country, aggressive guitar driven blues and Texas swing sat alongside each other and constituted a new melody, a narrative of their own.

Dylan's lightness of touch was masterful. He seemed to resist treating his own words and music as scripture. Certainly he was self-referential, but the old songs were consistently given new treatments. Seventies self-importance was replaced by a sense of self-knowledge, perhaps even self-parody as he sang "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now".

As that younger man now he reworked all his older songs. Minimalist melodies and oblique phrasing cast the lyrics of yesterday onto a new canvas and into a new light. 'It's Alright Ma (I'm only dyin')'s' crack at Richard Nixon ('Even the President of the United States must some day stand naked') was an overt reference to George W Bush. "Don't Think Twice (It's Alright)" had ridden through bitterness and cynicism to evidence now a slight world weariness and acceptance.

Dylan's shocking confidence in stripping away the lyrics' melodies was secured by the strength of the musical structures in which the tunes were once grounded. Never mind that the sweet and syrupy baritone that had characterised seventies anthem 'Lay Lady Lay' was gone and replaced by a sometimes barking squark. The cadences of acoustic and steel guitar locked an ecstatic audience into the song and Bob's new vocal freed us to discover new depths of hope and nostalgia in equal measure.

As the show progressed even the band was re-invented. The original guitar outfit morphed into a country band (complete with fiddle and double bass). By the encore the band was back to its electric best. 'Like a Rolling Stone' charged out of the speakers and set the audience aflame, only to be upstaged by a version of the once acoustic 'All Along the Watchtower' that would have gladdened Hendrix's heart.

If you didn't like Dylan, this concert wouldn't have changed your mind. If you thought he can't sing and his songs are senseless and shallow and secular you'd have had your opinion confirmed. But we were true believers, and couldn't have cared less.

This frail man, who stood almost bemused as he received the rapturous applause, had taken pieces of our past and from a tradition of almost 40 years of prophetic poetry had fashioned for us a complex and sustaining, if at times contradictory, vision. For two hours we'd shared an audience and a voyage of discovery, with the muse.