Return of the song and dance man

Once described as the performing curator of the museum of American music, Bob Dylan is continuing the journey he started over four decades ago, writes Philip King

"Woody Guthrie used to say that you ought to be able to take the newspaper every morning and sit down with it for a couple of hours and write a bunch of songs. Given the amount of newspapers stacked up in corners all over the world, I'd say if someone got up in the morning and sang the papers it might have more of an impact on all of us, especially if it was Bob Dylan"

Tom Waits

from the introduction to The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll for Freedom Highway

A self-styled "musical expeditionary", Bob Dylan set out in the late 1950s and has been travelling hard ever since. His genius was tracked early on. Pete Seeger, the guardian of folk song's eternal flame, asked Bob how he wrote songs: "Do you just spread out the newspaper in the morning until you find the story that really gets you upset?" "I really just take them out of the air," replied Dylan.

My first introduction was in the early sixties, the days before television in Ireland, the days when radio reigned supreme. It was the era of the sponsored programme: the Birds Programme, the Prescott Show, the Imco Show.

I remember my father walking past the gable-end window of our house in Glasheen Park in Cork city with a bulky parcel under his arm. It was a new radio. The year was 1963. The radio was a Pye. We plugged in, clicked on. I remember the smell of the valves as they heated up and the two-toned green light glowing in the top right-hand corner. We tuned to Radio Éireann. The volume was raised. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem filled the room: "Brennan on the moor, Brennan on the moor, bold, brave and undaunted was young Brennan on the moor."

Little did my parents know the moment we turned on and tuned in, I dropped out and began there and then my own musical expedition. Unconsciously I realised, as music theorist Jaques Attali puts it, the world was not just for beholding but for hearing. That day the world had become audible. The radio was my TV, my MP3 and my iPod. It was where I found my music. When I clicked the longwave button I found Europe, Paris, Hilversum, AFN, rock'n'roll and Bob Dylan. Dylan's music has been a constant companion for 40 years and more, the soundtrack to my life.

The witnesses, Dave Von Ronk, Suze Rotolo, Peter Yarrow, Mitch Miller, Joan Baez, Liam Clancy and the archive footage used in Martin Scorsese's film, No Direction Home, give us an insight into the world of Bob Dylan from his early days in Hibbing to his "retirement" in 1966. But it is Jeff Rosen's interview with "Jack Frost" (Dylan's pseudonym) that is at the heart of the picture. This is Hamlet, and like the prince he is enigmatic, present, aloof and idle. Coy, cunning and completely disarming, the timbre of his voice so light and youthful, Dylan chats away.

As with his memoir, Chronicles: Volume 1, he opens up his soul "and binds us to his heart with hoops of steel". With the film there is an extra dimension. We can see his uneasy flickering eyes. We know he's been to the crossroads before he tells us. Jump cut by the director, the interview is never still; the camera allows us to see him thinking, deciding, choosing.

Choosing is part of the game for Dylan. He has always controlled his career. Even the svengali Grossman couldn't own him like he owned his charges Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan always did the choosing. He still does. It is clear from No Direction Home that he has almost an autistic distance from the celebrity he has created. He needs the distance, the clear body of water to allow him to work.

Marking out this distance began very early at a concert in 1964. He said: "Well I hope you're having a good time, its Halloween and I've got my Bob Dylan mask on", 40 years later it's still there. Behind the mask, the shades, the make up of Rolling Thunder and Ronaldo and Clara is the man who makes the work and it's the work alone that matters. The work produced over a career of more than 40 years is an enormous achievement. As the late John Bauldie wrote in 1991, "that he should continue to write, continue to record, continue to perplex and amaze and frustrate and entertain and bewilder and provoke and challenge . . . is quite simply astonishing".

Bob Dylan has always had a huge sense of tradition. He's a real listener. He hears the world, the rattling trains with "iron bodies and steam for blood", and he knows his music inside out and always returns to the source.

In 1992 we got Good As I've Been to You with a version of Arthur McBride learned from Paul Brady and a version of Froggie Went a Courtin'. In 1993 the chilling World Gone Wrong was issued with songs from Tom Paley, Blood in My Eyes from the Mississippi Sheiks, the sublime Delia and Lone Pilgrim from Doc Watson.

DYLAN SAYS "TECHNOLOGY to wipe out truth is now available - not everybody can afford it but it's available. When the costs come down, look out, there won't be songs like these anymore." But there still are and Bob Dylan is writing them. Love Sick, Trying to Get to Heaven, Not Dark Yet and Highlands from Time Out of Mind in 1997 all have that enduring quality.

Love and Theft was issued in 2001, and the package I bought had a bonus disk with a 1962 version of The Times They Are A Changing and I Was Young When I Left Home. The latter song was recorded on December 22nd, 1961, when Dylan recorded 26 songs in a hotel in Minneapolis. He was 20 years old.

For four decades, Dylan's voice has been the same one that learnt young and never forgot. He went as part of his expedition down to the crossroads and had a mighty successful trip. He found what he was looking for: rockabilly, rock'n'roll, Woody Guthrie, Willie McTell, Robert Johnson, the Carter Family, Johnny Cash, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem etc. He was like a sponge, absorbing it all, filling the lumber room with the fuel to sustain him, and it did, and continues to do so. Writing in November 1969, Greil Marcus called Dylan "the performing curator of the museum of American music".

Listening to I Was Young When I Left Home, it's impossible to believe the singer is just 20, it's as if the song is singing him, he inhabits the lyric so completely. "I sort of wrote this on a train," he says, "this must be good for somebody, this sort of song."

"I was young when I left home, and I've been out rambling round, and I never wrote a letter to my home, to my home, Lord, to my home and I never wrote a letter to my home . . . It was just the other day I was bringing home my pay when I met an old friend I used to know, said 'your mother's dead and gone, and your sister's all gone wrong, and your daddy needs you home right away'".

From 1961 to 1966 Dylan was no slow train coming but a comet blazing through the stars. Scary. Love and Theft is like an echo chamber with a direct report to the 1961 recordings. In Summer Days, he says, "the future for me is always in the past", and in Mississippi, "got nothing for you, I got nothing before, don't even have anything for myself anymore".

According to Jaques Attali, music is prophecy, "the herald of the future and even when officially recognised is subversive". His theory would seem to be borne out by High Water (for Charley Patton). Here is Dylan stock still in the tide, summoning up Big Joe Turner, looking east and west, drawing on the stabbing music of Robert Johnson (when he sings he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armour - Chronicles: Volume 1).

He quotes Johnson's "I'm getting up in the morning . . . I believe I'll dust my broom"; the tune echoes Clarence Ashley's banjo-frailing cuckoo and Dylan quotes, "the cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies".

All of these elements are bolted together to form a song as powerful as the great 1983 recording of Blind Willie McTell, where Dylan regrets the lack of a great bluesman to lament the state of the world: "Power and greed and contemptible seed/seem to be all that there is".

HIGH WATER IS in the same tradition, the apocalyptic vision of a true artist compelled to write, sing and perform:

In verse five he says: "They've got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5."

It's as if evolution has stopped, has been arrested. We're running to stand still - but high water is rising - yes it is.

HOW DOES DYLAN, poet, song and dance man, survive, knowing what he knows, seeing what he sees? There must be another fully-formed person somewhere there, watching, controlling, wrestling, forever struggling with the character he has created to deliver the work.

And so he comes to town, this musical expeditionary, bringing it all back home for us. What will we see? What will he see of us? I think that Irish people can access Dylan at a profound level; we know where he's been, we like to think we know where he's going. Like many of us he embraces and rejects tradition at one and the same time. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were living and playing music in the bars and clubs of Greenwich Village at Dylan's dawn. They became, like many others, a source and an influence. As he says in No Direction Home, all he wanted was to journey to the place that that song spirit came from. He did, he is here, to once again lay down his weary tune. He is welcome.

Philip King is a musician and film-maker. His films include Bringing it all Back Home; Daniel Lanois: Rocky World; and The Juliet Letters: Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet. Bob Dylan plays the Point Depot today and tomorrow