O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Real Bob Dylan Stands Up at the Amphitheater : Performance more than atones for his dismal appearance here in 1989. Co-headlining Santana is almost lost in shuffle.

Bob Dylan closed his set at the Pacific Amphitheatre on Friday night with “It Ain’t Me Babe,” a song that bridles against the yoke of overbearing expectations.

As he delivered a totally revamped version of the song with satisfying bite, it reminded one that pop audiences can be a lot like the suffocating, passively controlling lover Dylan has it out with in his 1964-vintage lyric.

You buys your ticket, you wants your expectations fulfilled. You may not demand that the artist in question be “someone who will die for you, and more,” but you imagine that your champion’s performances should be, as the song puts it, “never weak but always strong.”

Dylan’s last appearance at the Pacific in 1989 was a dismal affair that lent credence to another line from “It Ain’t Me Babe”--the one that goes, “I’m not the one you want babe, I will only let you down.”

But on Friday, for 103 glorious minutes, yes, yes, yes, it was him , babe. Shaking off whatever it is--cobwebs? fatigue? boredom?--that has made him a less than reliable prospect in concert in his recent years of steady barnstorming and, since 1990, nonexistent new-song output, the 52-year-old Dylan made an unforgettable stand as he turned in what may well prove to be the concert of the year.

Opening an evening that was finished by the co-headlining (and, as it turned out, decidedly anticlimactic) Santana, Dylan and his four-man band created a fresh, newly heightened set of expectations for what a Bob Dylan performance can be.

Dylan eased into it with “You’re Gonna Quit Me,” an acoustic country-blues song from “Good As I Been to You,” his 1992 collection of traditional covers (Dylan’s next album, “World Gone Wrong,” will offer more of the same when it arrives later this month).

It wasn’t an especially promising start. Dylan tootled brightly on his harmonica, but his voice remained the burry, wizened, gargly, impossibly nasal and muffled singsong his fans have had to get used to.

But as the band plugged in with “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” vital signs began to register.

Dylan was still sounding mush-mouthed on the rapid-flying verses, but he weighed in with force and conviction on the choruses. In the songs to follow, he would muster assured spontaneity and complete emotional alertness with virtually every line.

The band was primed to fly. It was powered by Winston Watson, an impressive young drummer in a tie-dyed shirt. It featured a magic, swirling interplay of guitars--lanky, bespectacled John Jackson at Dylan’s right, and over to the left side, leather-jacketed, cowboy-hatted Buckey Baxter whistling or braying on lap and pedal steel guitars as the moment required.

And there, in the thick of that sonic thicket, was Dylan himself, playing an eminent part with meaty guitar riffs and confident lead fills.

It was almost a revelation.

In the 28 years since he “went electric” at that infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance that the folk purists booed, Dylan had always hired somebody else to do that stuff for him (his succession of electric guitar sidekicks included some pretty fair somebodies, including Mike Bloomfield, Robbie Robertson, Mick Taylor, Mark Knopfler and G.E. Smith, not to mention Dylan’s late-1980s enlistment of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the Grateful Dead as touring backup).

“Memphis Blues Again,” and the next song, a howling version of “All Along the Watchtower” that trumped even Neil Young’s gale-force reading on his recent tour with Booker T. and the MGs, set a pattern of lengthy intros, middle-section breaks and chorus upon concluding chorus in which Dylan and band played instrumental rock that explored, intensified and simply savored the splendid riffs and ever-fresh melodies that inform so much of what he has written. It served as a reminder that the man who gave rock permission to be literate would have qualified as a great songwriter even if he never had written a word of his own to support his melodies.

The 13-song program contained far too many striking moments to enumerate them all. A few, to give the flavor and range of the show:

* Dylan’s guitar solo in the middle of “Tangled Up in Blue,” so well-etched and strongly constructed that you had to look at all the players’ hands to make sure it was really him playing it. After bogging the song down briefly with a slow and shapeless harmonica interlude (about his only misstep of the evening), Dylan finished it off with more sharp guitar work, as if to assure the disbelieving that it really was him.

* A version of “Just Like a Woman” in which Dylan sang with an ache as tangible as a writ of divorce. Yet, toying with the melody as is his wont, he also achieved moments of such high-arching, bittersweet beauty that it reminded you why we allow ourselves to be put through love’s wringer. Dylan’s method of coping with all this pain was to work it out at the song’s end with muscular instrumental rock.

* A three-song, mid-show acoustic set in which the band, though it contained no ace acoustic pickers, put rolling, coursing energy into the trad-folk “Blackjack Davey,” the trad-based “Boots of Spanish Leather,” and an epochal version of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” In the latter, Dylan’s voice cracked and sobbed with sadness during the death scene in this (true) tale of a black maid who is murdered by a wealthy white drunk whose race and position buys him a minuscule sentence for his crime. It rose with a prophet’s anger on the refrain, “now ain’t the time for your tears,” challenging impotent onlookers not to rationalize away such deeds as part of the scheme of things.

As a clincher, Dylan slowed what had been a rapid, inexorable pace, and capped “Hattie Carroll” with a lovely valedictory waltz--as if to affirm that this world is built on a foundation of beauty and justice that even such horrors as the song recounts cannot blot out.

As for the rest, nothing much happened, if you overlook a stormy, ultra-powerful “I And I” (the semi-obscure wild card in a set made up primarily of hits), a “Ballad of a Thin Man” that sounded as if the band was cutting it out with razors instead of playing it with guitars and amps, and a “Maggie’s Farm,” whose clipped chording and charging force called to mind the Rolling Stones hammering away at “Brown Sugar” on one of the best nights of their lives.

How did Dylan comport himself?

Well, he wore a broadly pin-striped suit jacket, and pants with metal studs and a thick fabric stripe on the sides, the sort of thing a gaucho might wear into town on Sunday. He hunched his shoulders the whole time, and with his chin tilted downward toward his chest, he resembled a frizzy-headed Ed Sullivan. He didn’t allow himself to be illuminated by a spotlight.

And, of course, he didn’t speak, except near the end when he shouted out a quick greeting (“Everybody have a good time tonight?”) and the players’ names while the band kept on pummeling through “Maggie’s Farm.”

But Dylan struck a true rocker’s stance, accentuating his playing with a body-English of knee-bends and standing-on-one-leg boot-lifts. He wore a grimace of concentration and effort that sometimes might even have turned into a grin. When it was over, after he had bowed to acknowledge a well-earned ovation and reached out to touch the extended hand of one front-row fan, his look was fixed, his mouth was clenched tight, and he nodded slightly, the way some victorious prizefighters do when they’ve ended their night’s work with a knockout.

(Fans who have been turned off by word of slack Dylan shows in recent years might consider a trip Tuesday evening to the Glen Helen Blockbuster Pavilion in San Bernardino County, where Dylan and Santana close out a series of area dates that also included a Hollywood Bowl concert on Saturday).

*

After that eruption, Carlos Santana would have had to do remarkable things to pull a Dylan fan out of the afterglow and into the present (Santana’s own fans were well-primed, however).

Instead, he delivered a nearly two-hour set that contained some dull padding (pointless, show-boating drum and bass solos and a long, meandering encore that never found a focus as it ran through snippets of “Jingo” and “Soul Sacrifice”). But he also delivered enough of the real goods to remind you what has sustained him near the top of the guitar-hero heap since that career-launching day at Woodstock.

When Santana (the band) cooked with its signature sound, a churning, salsa-blues-rock hybrid, it was satisfying--never more so than on the fiery “Gypsy Queen” section of “Black Magic Woman.”

When Santana (the man) played gorgeous lyrical ballads on his ever-fluent guitar, it pointed you toward the spiritual realm that it is his stated goal to evoke in music. In a nice touch consonant with that theme, Santana used means ranging from the T-shirt he was wearing to musical quotation to spoken reminiscing by way of paying his respects to Bill Graham, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Arthur Ashe.

Too often, though, Santana departed from his strengths and tried to stretch out with styles that proved less involving. The set included some serviceable but not spectacular contemporary pop-R&B;, in which the two singers, veteran band member Alex Ligertwood and a newcomer introduced as Maurice something, twined voices gracefully and managed to make something of platitudinous lyrics about aspirations for advancement toward social justice and personal happiness.

Detours into reggae and rap were fruitless, and the antics of timbale player Karl Perazzo, the band’s designated live-wire, grew tiresome.

Since the early days when he teamed with future Journey-man Neal Schon, Santana has kept his band primarily a one-guitar affair. This time, he had his brother, Jorge Santana (formerly of the band Malo) on second guitar. They have plans for an album together, and one assumes it will contain more twin-guitar interaction and excitement than the vestigial traces audible at the Pacific. Most of Jorge’s rhythm playing was swallowed in the mix.

This would have been a so-so night for Santana, even if it hadn’t gotten tangled up in Dylan.