Dylan lets his songs do most of the talking

Bob Dylan has rarely been accused of being a chatterbox in concert. But he dispensed with virtually all performer-audience pleasantries at his tour stop Wednesday at UC Irvine’s Bren Events Center. Maybe he felt nothing more needed to be said now that he’s gone public about his life for the first time with “Chronicles: Volume One,” the recently published first part of his three-volume autobiography.

Without so much as a “Good evening” when he walked on stage or “Thank you” after a single song, the 63-year-old singer-songwriter simply carried out his task of rooting through his extraordinary catalog.

As usual, he drastically recast such touchstone numbers as “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” and “All Along the Watchtower,” mixed in some left-field choices (“To Be Alone With You” from “Nashville Skyline”) and several songs from his latest work (2001’s “Love and Theft”).

Each received uniformly fresh interpretations from Dylan and his monster four-man band, which purred like a Ferrari for nearly two hours, tightly hugging every curve and roaring down every straightaway their boss laid in front of them.

Dylan frequently delivered lines or entire verses on a single note, a reductionist tactic that forces listeners to focus their attention on songs’ meanings instead of letting them lapse into nostalgic singalongs.

Planted behind a keyboard and leaving the acoustic guitar at his right on its stand all evening, Dylan gave “To Be Alone With You” a pumping-piano groove that sounded like what Jerry Lee Lewis might have done with it. The recent “Summer Days” got a swinging ‘30s jazz arrangement a la Django Reinhardt. Both treatments continued the exploration of roots-music settings that characterize the musical side of “Love and Theft.”

It was only during the encore that the voice of his generation finally broke his nonsinging silence to introduce his band. He noted that the quartet’s newest member, former Face to Face and Peter Wolf guitarist Stu Kimball, is from Boston. Alluding to the Red Sox beating the New York Yankees earlier in the evening, he smiled and added, “It just goes to show the impossible still can happen.”

After a performance as impossibly vital as he gave, what more needs to be said?