The Masked Man

As the small private plane flew over Providence en route to Boston, the pilot turned on his FM radio and heard the announcement for an upcoming concert. Wow! He immediately landed the plane, took a taxi downtown and bought a pair of tickets. Then he resumed his flight. Standing in line at a supermarket in Plymouth, Mass., a young couple was given a handbill bearing similar news. Wow! They left their cart where it was and dashed downtown to buy tickets. And so it went as the word spread. "Is he really coming?" asked a teen-age girl at the ticket window.

Bob Dylan was really coming. As elusive and provocative as ever, the onetime prophet of protest has launched his first road tour in almost two years. It is not a complete surprise: like most rock stars on the concert circuit, Dylan happens to have a new single, Hurricane, just out and an album on the way. But his tour is different. It began, of all places, in Plymouth, where the Pilgrims settled, and it quickly became an oddly timeless journey: a rambling, almost casual camper and bus tour of college towns and blue-collar community halls. Ticket sales for such places as Waterbury, Conn., Durham, N.H., and Niagara Falls were announced five days before the event and then only by handbills. "The idea," says Dylan's boyhood friend Louis Kemp, 33, who is managing the tour, "is to go from town to town, do whatever the group wants, whenever they want, wherever they want."

The "group" is a comfortable array of friends, mostly old with a few new --Folksinger Joan Baez, ex-Byrd Roger McGuinn, Nashville Star Ronee Blakley and even Poet Allen Ginsberg. "We were all very close," Dylan told TIME Correspondent James Willwerth. "We had this fire going ten years ago, and now we've got it burning again."

Yes indeed. In Plymouth, after a half-hour warmup by the folksy, dungareed, unnamed back-up band, a figure became distinguishable at stage rear. It was a masked man in a gray cowboy hat and black leather jacket, looking slender and spindly, picking his way cautiously forward through the microphones and cables. He gave his guitar a few licks and then, from behind the mask, started singing. The applause began to grow. After a pulsating rendition of an old favorite, It Ain 't Me, Babe, he pulled back the mask to reveal the familiar ironic smile and hawk's eyes of the single most influential poet of the entire rock era. The crowd went wild.

Free and Loose. It became apparent that Dylan, now 34, has not been this free and loose since the days when he was putting folk rock on the map, way back in 1965. He seemed most carefree when he and Baez joined to sing such old Dylan classics as Blowin' in the Wind and I Shall Be Released. And why not? As they put their heads together in front of the mike, Joan would put her arm around Bob, mop his brow, kiss his cheek. Most important were several new songs that indicate that the creative fires may be burning brighter than in years. Sarah is the latest in a series of plaints about women. This one is especially poignant since it is addressed to Dylan's wife of ten years. The Dylans, who have five children, are said to have a rocky marriage. Dylan's lament is deep and haunting:

Sarah, Sarah

What made you change your mind

Sarah, Sarah

So easy to look at

So hard to define

Hurricane is the story of the former middleweight contender Rubin ("Hurricane") Carter, who many feel was unjustly convicted and imprisoned 8 1/2 years ago for a triple killing in New Jersey. The song has punch and the kind' of outrage that characterized Dylan's 1971 ballad George Jackson.

Dylan's last tour in January and February 1974 with The Band had its hysteria, excitement and genuine high musicality, but Dylan apparently tired quickly of the hoopla of big-city auditorium life. "They divide your time too much," he says. "They shuffle you around, wind you up, put you on stage and turn you on." This is a more intimate occasion, although Dylan has security men around him and keeps his whereabouts in off-hours a secret. Arriving for concerts, he moves under guard past the awed gawkers. Still, the mood at the Dylan "camp" is easygoing and spontaneous. He even wants to scout local talent as he goes along. "Maybe there's another Bob Dylan out there," he smiles, pushing back his cowboy hat. Not likely.

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