The Albums of Winter : **** Great Balls of Fire *** Good Vibrations ** Maybe Baby * Running on Empty

BOB DYLAN AND THE GRATEFUL DEAD “Dylan and the Dead.” Columbia

** 1/2

This live record of Dylan’s 1987 stadium tour with the Grateful Dead comes off as a mini-drama about wheezing old rockers giving it one last haggard shot--a Tennyson’s “Ulysses” on vinyl, but without the affirmative ending.

In a creaky first half, Dylan offers brittle reworkings of a couple of old gems, “I Want You” and “Queen Jane Approximately.” The harsh, bardic sing-song he favors through much of the album doesn’t do either song justice. (The approach makes more sense, but is no more appealing, on the rock sermonettes “Slow Train Coming” and “Gotta Serve Somebody.”)

Jerry Garcia injects some lyricism with his guitar solos on the ballads and whips up a fair flurry at the end of “All Along the Watchtower.” Otherwise, the Dead keep a respectful distance and play the part of rustic yeomen while Dylan barks along like a baleful, graybeard prophet.

Dylan’s strange, incantational singing finds its proper setting on Side 2, where it brings an elegiac, deeply-felt grace to “Joey” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Both songs are about doomed outlaws, and Dylan and the Dead sound caught up and transported by their sad myth-telling. By the finish, when “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” fades and ends as if from sheer exhaustion, Dylan and cohorts sound thoroughly played out, and absolutely authentic: You’d think this really was the end of the line.

It’s puzzling, but perhaps for the best, that the Dylan-and-Dead tour chronicle appears a year and a half after the fact. Given Dylan’s spunky ’88 campaign as an energetic live rocker, a wry Wilbury and a folk-vision sharer, this downcast but sometimes affecting album can be taken as a chapter, not an epitaph.