Bob Dylan often surprises audiences with unusual performances

Bob Dylan's legend can't be questioned.

But his live shows? They almost always are.

The voice of a generation is a concert name that belongs on the bucket list of anyone who was alive in the 1960s. And that's been a fairly easy wish to fulfill.

Dylan, who turned 70 in May, has been a Las Vegas regular throughout his AARP years, having played Las Vegas (or Primm) at least eight times since his Strip debut at Bally's in May of 1992.

But once can be enough. Some people didn't get the memo 10 or 20 years ago that Dylan continues to be a confounding, enigmatic performer. These people walk away surprised that:

■ He never chats up the audience.

■ He sometimes doesn't even face the crowd head on, playing in profile at a keyboard. (Depending on the misfortune of their seat assignment, some concertgoers have looked at his back for the whole set.)

■ And why can't he just sit on a stool, strum that guitar, blow that harmonica and articulate those magic words? Why does a loud band drown out the poetry we've all come to hear?

And why do the songs always sound so different than the way we grew up hearing them?

Dylan continues to frustrate the uninitiated, so we reached out to the initiated to explain why they still pack the joint -- or, on Saturday, The Pearl at the Palms.

"I gave up defending Bob Dylan in seventh grade," says Paula Francis, evening news anchor for KLAS-TV, Channel 8. That said, she's happy to defend him some more:

"When people give me the old 'I hate his voice' line, I just shake my head. I feel sorry for these people. I just hope, for their sake, that they have a musician whose work thrills them like Dylan's does me. I feel lucky to be alive in his era."

Francis even likes the band. "Phenomenal," she says. "What I love about Dylan's concerts in this decade is seeing so many young people in the audience."

Indeed, those guess-what-song arrangements now conform to a musical niche that was coined well into Dylan's career: jam bands. If it seems too Phishy to be a coincidence that the legend is here the same weekend as Widespread Panic, remember the tie-dye crowd has embraced him at least since he toured with the Grateful Dead in the 1980s.

"Bob Dylan doesn't do any nostalgia," says his most high-profile local fan, Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller. "He isn't doing a show about what he was doing 50 years ago, he really is doing what he was doing 50 years ago. He's making music. He's making music from the heart. He's standing naked onstage. He's making the best music of his life."

Jillette caught the recent Paul McCartney concert at the MGM Grand, which was more of what a legend in concert has become in the corporate-run concert industry: a wish-fulfillment delivery system for a familiar product.

"Everyone had a good time, and McCartney kept repeating what a good time we were having. The music was being used to take us back to childhood, and that's fine. It's OK to have a good time," Jillette says.

Dylan could "make more money with a fancy nostalgia show, and many people would love it, but it wouldn't be Dylan," Jillette says. "Not everyone who plays Vegas condescends to us. Bob Dylan plays an honest show of the music and the ideas he's feeling and thinking about right now."

Nick Lewin, a comedy magician who covers during Mac King's vacations at Harrah's Las Vegas, shares Jillette's enthusiasm for Dylan as a continued role model for men of a certain age.

"The fact that some of the very strongest of his work has blossomed after the age of 60 is not only unusual, but highly inspirational," Lewin says.

Francis and Lewin both point to Dylan's three strong albums of the 2000s as a sign of his continued vitality. (Oddly, they did not count "Christmas in the Heart.")

Dylan overcame the hurdle of youthful enthusiasm's giving way to self-consciousness for a performer. What Dylan fans call the Never Ending Tour showed Lewin the way out of a trap.

"He made the decision to continue performing on a nonstop basis, but to never sing any song the same way he had sung it before," Lewin notes. "Sometimes the variations on his classic songs work and sometimes they don't. But what is important to Dylan is the feeling of walking on a tightrope night after night without a safety net."

Which leaves us only with the voice. And there's only so much a fan can defend.

Francis recalls walking out of the Hard Rock's new Joint with her husband saying, "The acoustics were incredible. You could understand everything he sang."

To which her husband replied, "No, you could understand every word. Because you knew them all."

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.