BOB DYLAN USED TO BE ELUSIVE AND RECLUSIVE, BUT WITH HIS NEW CAREER RENAISSANCE, YOU MIGHT SAY THAT... THINGS HAVE CHANGED.

LANCASTER - When it's late August, and the sign reads: ``Welcome to the Antelope Valley Fair and Alfalfa Festival. Time: 5:34 p.m. Temp: 102 degrees,'' there are a certain set of expectations. You expect the temporary tattoo booth to be empty because most of the fairgoers sport the real deal. You know the corndogs and the pizza will be bad and that Big Bubba's Bad BBQ will be good. And you figure the nighttime entertainment will probably consist of a Bachman Turner Overdrive tribute band that will both open and close its 45-minute set with spirited renditions of ``Takin' Care of Business.''

What you don't expect to see is Bob Dylan, fresh from winning an Oscar, making his only Southern California appearance on this particular leg of what has come to be called his Never-Ending Tour. Staples Center? Sure. In fact, he's playing there Oct. 19 when he hits the road again next month. The El Rey or the Palladium? Why not? Dylan has been at both of these smaller theaters in recent years.

But the Antelope Valley Fair and Alfalfa Festival? That's about as unlikely as Dylan, at age 60, following his acclaimed ``Time Out of Mind'' album with another modern-day masterpiece.

Which is exactly what he has done.

Less than his legend

``Love and Theft,'' Dylan's 43rd album, arrived in stores Tuesday, and the raucous, rootsy collection is as every bit as good as the four-star hosannas it's receiving. (Rolling Stone, for good measure, gave the album five stars, the first time the magazine has been that generous since R.E.M.'s ``Automatic for the People'' in 1992.) Dylan's sustained '60s brilliance has been glimpsed in subsequent decades (``Blood on the Tracks'' in 1975, ``Oh Mercy'' in 1989), but you have to go back to his Voice-of-a-Generation heyday to find a time when he has delivered a one-two punch as strong as this.

Dylan, predictably inscrutable and irascible, says he had to hit bottom before he could reach the top again. In other words, those concerts back in the '80s when he was drinking too much and would perversely sing the same verse of ``Mr. Tambourine Man'' over and over again - he couldn't be bothered to remember the lyrics to many of his songs - actually fueled a creative comeback. Reason: His self-loathing and indifference made the media write him off.

``In the early '90s, the media lost track of me, and that was the best thing that could happen,'' Dylan said in a recent interview with USA Today. ``It was crucial, because you can't achieve greatness under media scrutiny. You're never allowed to be less than your legend.''

``When the media picked up on me again five or six years later, I'd fully developed into the performer I needed to be and was in a position to go any which way I wanted. The media will never catch up again. Once they let you go, they cannot get you back. It's metaphysical. And it's not good enough to retreat. You have to be considered irrelevant.''

Out of the spotlight

And that he was, at one point going seven long, lackluster years in the '90s without releasing an album of original material. Then came the hauntingly spare despair of 1997's brilliant ``Time Out of Mind'' album, followed by that anthem of alienation ``Things Have Changed.'' Suddenly, Dylan became as relevant as ever, singing songs filled with loneliness, anger and an emerging mortality (he battled a life-threatening heart infection in 1996) with a matter-of-fact fatalism that spoke to anyone getting close to receiving that AARP card in the mail.

``Love and Theft'' finds Dylan in a considerably better mood, even if the songs still often dwell on a world - and its women - that has done him wrong. The music surveys more than a century of American song styles, taking in backwoods blues, vaudeville, rockabilly, country, Tin Pan Alley and ragtime shuffles. Its rootsy Americana recalls the music he made with the Band, kind of an amped-up ``John Wesley Harding'' sung (croaked?) by a grizzled survivor.

``You can't repeat the past,'' says a character on the new album's rockabilly rave-up ``Summer Days.'' Dylan's howling answer comes in the next line. ``I say, 'You can't?' What do you mean you can't? Of course you can.''

On the road for the past 13 years, that's just what Dylan has been doing, revisiting and rewriting his own back pages (or his ``prayer book,'' as he once called his catalog of songs).

In Howard Sounes' recent biography, ``Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan'' (Grove Press, $27.50), Carole Childs, a former girlfriend of Dylan's, explained the singer's seemingly never-ending tour.

``He will go as long as he can,'' she said. ``He's practicing his practice. He's doing his job. This is his trade. This is the troubadour in him. This is what troubadours did. This is what vaudevillians did. This is what burlesque people did. This is what you do. You entertain people.''

Friendly room

The Antelope Valley Fair concert was a perfect example of the kind of shows Dylan performs these days - loose-limbed, bluesy and a whole lot of fun.

Performing with the same crack band he used on ``Love and Theft,'' Dylan opened on the concert an acoustic note with ``Hummingbird,'' an obscure Western-swing style number, and then tore into two classics - ``The Times They Are A-Changin'' and ``Desolation Row'' - each performed with a remarkable sense of urgency and passion, considering that Dylan has probably sung them thousands of times.

In fact, what was perverse about the state fair show - and Dylan concerts in general in the post ``Time Out of Mind'' era - is the amount of time Dylan devotes to his warhorse anthems. The encore alone featured ``Like a Rolling Stone,'' ``Knockin' on Heaven's Door,'' ``All Along the Watchtower,'' ``Blowin' in the Wind'' and ``Highway 61 Revisited.'' Nothing from ``Love and Theft'' was played, and he sang only one song (``Love Sick'') from ``Time Out of Mind.''

You'd think a man in the middle of a career renaissance would want to share his new treasures with an appreciative audience. But tell this to the legion of people who follow Dylan from city to city (Deadheads and Phish fans seems to have adopted the singer), and they'll patiently listen, nod their heads and then reply, as if talking to a child, ``Bob is Bob. Don't try to figure him out.''

Let Dylan be Dylan

And that's part of the appeal, says John Williams, 29, of Hollywood, who, with friends, traveled to see Dylan at state fairs in Des Moines, Iowa, and Springfield, Mo., before returning closer to home with the Antelope Valley concert.

``He comes from a time where everything wasn't prepackaged,'' Williams says. ``Dylan's a national treasure. And one of the things that keeps him vital is that you never know what he's going to do next.''

One safe bet: He's going to keep performing. According to a Dylan diehard named Olaf, a Swede who keeps track of these things on his Web site, Dylan has played 1,350 concerts since beginning the fabled Never-Ending Tour in 1988. Just don't tell Dylan that his tour is perpetual; it's sure to end the conversation.

``It annoys me when I hear people talking about the Never-Ending Tour,'' he recently told the Italian publication La Repubblica. ``Obviously everything must finish. That which ties everyone together and which makes everyone equal is our mortality. Everything must come to an end.''

Or, as he puts it in ``Cry Awhile,'' the penultimate song on ``Love and Theft'': ``I'm gonna buy me a barrel of whiskey/I'll die before I turn senile.''

Luckily for listeners, it looks like Dylan won't be purchasing that barrel of whiskey for some time.

BOB DYLAN

Where: Staples Center, 1111 S. Figueroa St., Los Angeles.

When: 8 p.m. Oct. 19.

Tickets: $64.50, $45, $35. Call Ticketmaster, [phone].

CAPTION(S):

5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) DYLAN

He was so much older then, he's younger than that now

Jeff Zelevansky/Associated Press

(2 -- 4) Dylan, above in 1979, coasted on his legend for quite a while, but with the release of his latest CD, ``Love and Theft,'' below, the new Dylan has been reenergized.

(5) no caption (Bob Dylan)