Just as I read that Bob Dylan had released a new CD, “Modern Times,” I happened to catch the last 40 minutes on cable of Martin Scorcese’s “The Last Waltz,” a 1978 documentary about The Band’s final performance, with guest appearances by (among others) Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison and of course Dylan himself. Though I’ll probably end up buying it, Martin Edlund’s review of “Modern Times” in the New York Sun didn’t exactly propel me out of my chair and down to the nearest music store. I read some of the lines quoted, such as (to take the lamest example) “blues is falling down like hail,” and thought, “You mean, ‘cliches is falling down like hail,’ surely.”

But this is 2006 and “The Last Waltz” is now a 28 year-old relic. Amazing how well it holds up, though. The Band was not only a fabulous group in its own right, it had a chameleonic ability to provide the perfect backing for just about anyone. I would never have thought of placing Joni Mitchell in front of them, but the version she and the group cooked up of her song, “Coyote” was pitch-perfect, and neither the music nor the lyrics have aged even a fraction.

Like everyone else in the show, Mitchell gave the occasion her all. As did Neil Young and especially Van Morrison, whose version of “Caravan” is a stunner, as if he’d gone on stage thinking it was the last time he was ever going to be able to sing in front of an audience in his life.

But Dylan? Perhaps out of ego — he knew he was the star, bringing the show to a close — but more likely out of some fundamental split between his performing and actual self, or selves, treated his role in the The Band’s final concert in an almost offhand, perfunctory way. He played two songs, “Forever Young” and “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” and then everyone who’d taken part in the concert came on stage to join him in “I Shall Be Released,” an appropriate choice not only because that was the point, after all — The Band was quitting — but because Dylan and The Band had originally recorded the song together on “The Basement Tapes.”

The difference between Dylan and everyone else in “The Last Waltz” is not only that the others give it everything they have, but that they also seem intent on being exactly who they are. Mitchell has her delivery and complex lyrics down cold. She’s being Joni Mitchell — cool, sophisticated, bordering on frosty but for the hint of a blush that even her rouge can’t hide. Morrison is simply a man possessed — by music, by rhythm, by poetry, by Van Morrison. But Dylan only seems to be playing at being Bob Dylan. This doesn’t harm his performance. On the contrary, it bring to it an added mystique and a playful, distancing power. After delivering the opening verse of “Forever Young” (”May God’s blessing keep you always / May your wishes all come true / May you always do for others / And let others do for you”), he leans back from the microphone, catches the eye of someone off-camera to his left, makes a face and then shrugs, as if to say — “Anyone could do that.” Or: “I’m doing it, but it’s not me.”

Five years ago, when he released his last album, “Love and Theft,” there was a bit of embarrassment (presumably) in the Dylan camp when someone noticed that a remarkable number of lines in two or three songs bore an uncanny resemblance, even a word-for-word resemblance, to some sentences in Junichi Saga’s, “Confessions of a Yakuza: Life in the Japanese Underworld,” a biography of a Japanese gangster that had been translated into English. It seems that Dylan read the book, took some lines from it and just dumped them into songs about rustic life in the southern United States as if it were the most natural thing in the world. You couldn’t call it plagiarism, exactly, because it was so bizarrely random. Anyway, as Eliot said, minor poets borrow, major ones steal. Presumably the same applies to rock ‘n’ rollers. If Dylan sings Yakuza, it’s still Dylan.

But reading Martin Edlund’s description of the new album (”The blues are [Dylan’s] means of escaping the present. He borrows willy nilly from them — a line here, a scene there”) reminds me that I’ve occasionally thought that one day someone with too much time on his hands will prove that every line Dylan has ever written was actually written by someone else. (Jacques Levy, who shared the writing credits on most of the 1975 album, “Desire” — the only time Dylan has collaborated on lyrics — claimed in an interview that he wrote most of the words and Dylan just tweaked them.) But if this were true, I suppose in the age of Google we’d already have found out.

What it all boils down to, I suppose, is a slight but persistent puzzlement that this man ould have written such a wealth of unforgettable songs. Particularly when I hear him being interviewed, I can’t help feeling that he doesn’t quite seem up to it. (A friend of mine once made W.H. Auden sit down at his apartment on Saint Mark’s Place and listen to a few Dylan tracks, probably from “Highway 61 Revisited” or “Blonde on Blonde.” Auden’s judgement was that Dylan was a fraud.)

But then I think of the expression Scorcese caught on Dylan’s face as he sings “Forever Young,” and that extraordinary little shrug, and I see something else: the nonchalance of a supreme artist. So I guess sooner or later I’ll head on down to my local CD purveyor and put down a $20 bill for “Modern Times.”

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