6) Cover: George Harrison's "Something," 1969 (MSG, Nov. 13, available on bobdylan.com)

A final encore, done very straight. Musicians love this song; they admire the ability to craft anything that's at once generic, anonymous and likely to generate income for a hundred years.

7) "Summer Days" (MSG, Nov. 11)

In a perfect world, this would be the turnaround cut on a live album called "Having a Rave-Up With Bob Dylan!"

8) "Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread" (MSG, Nov. 11, available on bobdylan.com)

Dylan's first performance of the song since he recorded it with the Hawks in a basement of a big pink house in upstate New York 35 years ago. Two of the five who were there then are dead. The house was recently on the market as a prime Dylan collectible. The tune still blew the air of pure American fedupness: "Pack up the meat, sweet, we're headin' out."

9) "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" (MSG, Nov. 11)

From 1965. The audience always waits to cheer for "Sometimes even the president of the United States must have to stand naked." By now the song has outlasted almost as many presidents as Fidel Castro: Lyndon Johnson (no problem, for a man who liked to receive guests while sitting on the toilet), Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton (who as president was stripped naked, and who you can imagine singing the line to himself) and now George W. Bush. The line took nothing away from the last man on the list; he lives in the armor of his own entitlement.

10) "All Along the Watchtower" (MSG, Nov. 11)

The second of two encores, it began very strangely, with guitarist Charlie Sexton rolling a few spare notes that seemed to call up a distant western -- Jim Jarmusch's "Dead Man," maybe, with Neil Young's improvised and timeless guitar soundtrack. It was in fact the opening of Ferrante & Teicher's 1961 twin-piano hit "Theme From 'Exodus,'" from the movie based on Leon Uris' 1958 novel about the creation of the state of Israel. Whether you caught the reference or not, it took the song about to emerge from its own history -- one of Dylan's most world-ending, from 1968, a year that over and over again felt like the end of the world -- out of itself. Now the song was going to speak with a new voice: That was the promise that little introduction made.

It was impossible to imagine that Dylan ever played the song with more vehemence, or that, this night, six days after the midterm congressional elections, the performance was not utterly political, as much a protest song as "Masters of War." Not when, after Dylan, Sexton and guitarist Larry Campbell led an overwhelming instrumental climb through the tune's themes following the closing verse, Dylan came back to the mike to sing the opening verse again in a wild voice, throwing the last lines across the seats and out of the hall like a curse: "Businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth/ None of them, along the line, know what -- any -- any of it -- any of it is -- worth."

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