Bob Dylan and his band turn in a sterling Boston performance of mostly newer material

After my last Bob Dylan concert in 2006, I figured that was it. After all, he was in his mid-60s even then, and his voice wasn’t getting any better. But recordings of his current tour are making the rounds, and I was impressed with how good he and his band sounded. Not only was he killing it on electric piano, but his singing had somehow improved.

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So on Thursday, my son, Tim, and I headed to the Leader Bank Pavilion for what turned out to be an outstanding performance. Dylan, now 85, is if anything even quirkier than he used to be. He’s been wearing a raincoat with a hood on stage lately, he had the stage video monitors turned off, and he said not one word, simply segueing from one song to another without a break for an hour and 20 minutes.

His set was identical to the one he delivered on June 29 in Austin with one exception — he closed with “I Shall Be Released” instead of “Every Grain of Sand,” a favorite of mine and one of the best songs from his Christian albums in the late 1970s and early ’80s. I had listened to a recording of the Austin concert several times, so I knew what to expect. It’s hard to pick out highlights, but the opening three songs were particularly strong: “Watching the River Flow,” “The Man in the Long Black Coat” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” his only nod to the 1960s.

The band was tight and impressive. Dylan has been cycling through guitarists recently; the Austin show featured just one. In Boston, there were two, Joel Paterson and Julian Lage. As James Sullivan noted in his Boston Globe review (sub. req.), Paterson and Lage’s playing is jazz-inflected, and it lent a different feel to the proceedings. Tony Garnier was on bass as always — he’s been with Dylan since 1989, and he serves double duty as Dylan’s musical director. I’ve always thought Garnier had a lot to do with Dylan’s late-career revival. Anton Fig, a respected studio musician, was on drums. (Peter Chianca has a nonpaywalled review at Boston.com.)

I enjoyed hearing how much a part of the band Dylan himself was. He abandoned the guitar for keyboards years ago, and he wasn’t just occasionally stabbing at a few chords — he was an integral part of the sound. The downside was that though his voice was clear, you could only pick out a few phrases here and there. Fortunately, I knew most of the songs.

Five of the 16 songs Dylan performed were from his 2020 album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” and in general he leaned heavily on the latter parts of his astonishingly long career. For someone to be able to grow and change at his age is remarkable. Of course, it also meant that half the audience, not knowing what to expect, lost interest when they realized he wasn’t going to strap on a guitar and harmonica to perform “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” A woman sitting next to me spent most of the concert on her phone, texting, and then left early with her companion. Good Lord.

Dylan also performed covers by Bo Diddley, Bobby “Blue” Bland and Jerry Lee Lewis, perfectly interspersed throughout the set to break up the heavier content of his own songs. I got a kick out of listening to him sing his own “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” given that Jimmie Vaughan, one of the opening acts, played guitar behind his head. Dylan sang: “You won’t amount to much, the people all said / ’Cause I didn’t play guitar behind my head / Never pandered, never acted proud / Never took off my shoes, throw ’em in the crowd.” Take that, Jimmie!

Despite his reputation for rearranging his songs beyond recognition, I thought most of what we heard was pretty straightforward. The major exception was “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” done up, as Chianca writes, as “a quirky jazz-noir style that would have felt at home in a club populated by gangsters and hooligans in some 1940s detective movie.”

The most poignant line of the night: “Lot of people gone, lot of people I knew,” from “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” No one knows what the inscrutable Dylan is thinking, but mortality and those who’ve gone on before him must be forever on his mind. Yet he’s still blessedly with us.

Dylan actually had two openers, with Brittney Spencer performing before Vaughan. Unfortunately, we missed her set as we were scrounging for edible food with mixed success. Pro tip: If you go to the Leader Bank Pavilion, eat before you go inside. I will concede that Tim tried to tell me.