The man before me in the queue at the ticket sales kiosk outside the Point collected two envelopes each containing two tickets. A third envelope would be collected shortly by a friend, he said, giving his friend's name and describing him as tall and balding, writes Colm Keena.
"That will be a help," said the ticket saleswoman and the line of grey or balding men joined her in some good-humoured laughter. Bob Dylan was in town and a lot of his old fans had come straight from the office.
In fact the basis for our laughter was mistaken. Once inside the Point it was evident that although many of the fans gathered for the gig had been listening to Bob Dylan records since the 1960s, they were by no means the majority. A good section of the crowd were obviously "busy being born" around the time Dylan was discovering God (1979), or releasing Infidels (1983).
A burst of taped orchestral music announced Dylan's imminent arrival on stage and a voice on the PA system began an introduction that was surely tongue in cheek. It was hard to hear above the roaring and clapping and whistling, but it went something like this: "He was the main figure of the counter-culture movement in the 1960s, he disappeared for a bit in the seventies but then brought out the fantastic Blood on the Tracks (1975) and Desire (1976). He discovered God in the 1980s, brought out some great spiritual albums then disappeared for a bit again but in the past 10 years has brought out some of the greatest albums of his career. Ladies and Gentlemen, Bob Dylan!"
When the lights went up we saw Dylan standing at the side of the stage, bent over an electric piano, wearing a black suit with a high collar, white pocket flaps on the jacket and white lines down the outside seams of the trousers. When the music started up and he started to sing, it took a few moments to recognise Maggie's Farm (1965).
During occasional guitar breaks Dylan wandered away from his piano and performed a graceless stumble, his bent arms down by his sides, his two forefingers pointing forward. It wasn't clear whether he was dancing or just wandering. He's only 62 but he seemed very doddery. Maybe that's just the way he dances.
It is hard to describe his voice: Raspy, raw, ragged. Some of the time you could hear the lyrics, some of the time you couldn't. At times he seemed to be struggling to get enough puff to get the words out. (The following night's concert in Cork was cancelled because of laryngitis.) It was hard to forget that you were listening to Bob Dylan, that he was up there, on the faraway stage, singing those songs you'd known for years. That said, his performance amounted to far more than going through the motions, faithfully recycling old numbers.
There were a lot of young working-class men standing near me, many of them small and thin with pinched faces, shorn heads and cheap clothes, men you could imagine knowing how to intimidate a Limerick murder trial jury. There were "No Smoking" signs everywhere but most people around me were chain-smoking marijuana. When Dylan started singing The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (1964) the group of tough-looking, drug-smoking, working-class youngsters beside me cheered and punched the air and I realised I knew nothing at all about today's youth culture.
The song, about the killing of a black, 52-year-old Maryland barmaid and mother of 11 by a rich young tobacco farm-owner was one of the high points of the night. William Zantzinger killed Hattie Carroll with a blow of his cane in a Baltimore hotel in 1963 because she was slow in pouring his bourbon. The trial judge, speaking through his cloak "most deep and distinguished", sentenced him to six months in jail.
Dylan spoke as much as sang the ballad and it was all the more effective for that. His ruined old vocal cords seemed to fill the sad lyrics with a great regret that the world is as it is. When it ended the hall erupted with applause for a great performance of a great song by a great singer.
Politics, particularly the politics of outrage, has always been one of Dylan's main topics. He has a great eye for absurdity and a keen interest in the prospect - or otherwise - of salvation. But desire is his greatest theme. Sometimes he fuses desire and God, a conjunction that goes back at least as far as Plato. The British Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, has said Dylan's Visions of Johanna is the best lyric ever written.
As Dylan gets older the subject matter remains much the same but the perspective changes. Time Out of Mind (1997) was a brilliant collection of songs about ageing. In one song he talks of walking past a public park, seeing young men and women together and feeling he would change places with any of them if he could. "I've got new eyes/ Everything looks far away."
Hearing him struggle with his torn vocal cords to sing songs he had written while he was young was truly moving. He did a rare performance of his love song about one of his earliest loves, Girl of the North Country (1963). The voice was like a death rattle. "See for me if her hair hangs long/ That's the way I remember it best," he croaked. What was once a young man's song about having moved on from a young love was transformed into a song about youthful love and the passage of a whole life.
Yet it is quite possible that his best work has yet to be written.