Here's What's Happening, Mr. Jones

By JAY COCKS

No question. Surrounded by superstars, many of whom have eclipsed him in popularity and record sales, Bob Dylan looks as if he has been dealt out.

In the TV documentary that chronicles the creation of We Are the World, there is a general air of union and celebration, with Dylan hanging back from all the good-fellowship. Everyone is used to seeing Dylan as the selfexiled iconoclast, the hipster assassin, lurking darkly and waiting to wound. But here he seems different, like an expatriate who is not sure whether to travel on his own passport or sneak back into the country. He frets openly about performing his short solo. He needs coaching; he needs confidence. And when he brings it off, finally -- and beautifully -- he gets a hug from Producer Quincy Jones. Dylan's face breaks into a wide smile, grateful, relieved and unguarded. That session could not have been easy for him; neither, one suspects, were these last years, looking for some moorings, trying to reconnect with an audience.

Now there is a new album, his 23rd of original material, which will be available in stores this week. Empire Burlesque is full of turmoil and anger and mystery, an oblique diary of all this time just past. It is also a record of survival and a tentative kind of triumph. Maybe Bob Dylan got a little lost, but he never left the field. This album is hard evidence that he is ready to take the point again.

On Empire Burlesque, Dylan is in fine dramatic form: wrenching on ballads like I'll Remember You, furious on Seeing the Real You at Last and spooky on When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky, one of those pacesetter Dylan songs in which romantic anguish kaleidoscopes into a sneak preview of Armageddon. The writing in the album is near peak. Tight Connection to My Heart is a playful bit of lovelorn apocrypha, a mood, once established, that turns sinister toward the end of the record, with the ominous Something's Burning, Baby. The last song, Dark Eyes, is like one of those midnight Poe love poems, filled with grace notes that sound like cries for help ("I live in another world where life and death are memorized./ Where the earth is strung with lovers' pearls and all I see are dark eyes"), and images of fleeting beauty that turn into signs of prophecy ("Hunger pays a heavy price to the falling gods of speed and steel").

Nothing has calmed or settled, but the album's ten songs, produced for the first time by Dylan himself and remixed by Arthur Baker, all have a tempered edge. Baker, who made himself a heavy reputation doing 12-in. dance remixes of songs by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Cyndi Lauper, would seem at first glance to be Dylan's way of catching up with what is supposed to be going down. Baker works the board in a recording studio like a virtuoso instrumentalist. He brings up the sound of some instruments, reduces others, sometimes adding electronic effects; he can make a song sound big without ever getting grandiose. On Empire Burlesque, he gives subtle toning to Dylan's new muscle. It is not a matter of bringing Dylan up to the minute, but giving him the room to make his own time.

There is a lot of first-string instrumental talent on Empire Burlesque: Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones present and Mick Taylor of the Stones past; Drummer Jim Keltner; and most especially the drum and bass team of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, who give the record a funky, rumpled-up, island-inflected, rhythmic drive. With all this professional sheen, Empire Burlesque is still startling, an unexpected flash-forward. Like a sudden cut in a film, this record is disorienting at first -- Where did this come from? What's going on? -- but so well judged and timed that after a moment, it seems the only natural course.

Dylan has had a lot of practice at such radical departures. He not only shaped current American popular music, he changed it irrevocably. Baffled editorial writers and swamped reporters, trying to sort sense from the maelstrom of the late '60s and early '70s, would fall back on a famous refrain from Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man. Now don't all sing at once: "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

Dylan would complain about his songs getting picked over, like berry patches, for a few ripe quotes, but back then he seemed to be not only the guy who knew better than anyone else what was going on, but the guy who was making it happen. He was imitated by everyone, including the best: the Beatles, the Stones. Then he lay low, losing himself in uncertainty and mysticism. His last great album, Blood on the Tracks, was released in 1975, and since then he has been looking for his way: a route out and a road back. There were wonderful songs after 1975 even on his most equivocal albums (like Every Grain of Sand on Shot of Love), but Dylan appeared to have given himself over to political conservatism and the rigors of religious conversion. First he adopted fundamentalist Christianity, then an Orthodox Judaism that made him sound on some recent records like a half-delirious cabala student looking for a guest shot on Soul Train.

Such excursions, meaningful as they may have been to Dylan personally or artistically, took their toll on his audience. Never a multiplatinum artist -- his most popular record, Desire, has sold only 1.5 million copies to date -- Dylan could no longer fine-tune the zeitgeist all by himself, and his records were perceived as too personal or, worse, increasingly marginal. "What are they playing that guy for?" sneered a Manhattan saleswoman recently when a Dylan medley came on the radio. One playing of Empire Burlesque and all such questions become academic. Listen up. You too, Mr. Jones.