With his gaunt face, pencil mustache, and long black coat, Bob Dylan these days looks more like Vincent Price than the punk laureate of yore. He shuffled onstage last Sunday with a stripped-down band consisting of two guitars, one bass, one drums. Dylan did not once pick up a guitar during the set, did not take center stage save for a brief moment or two, but sat at the far left with a small electric keyboard and vocal mike. Apart from the song lyrics, the only phrase that came out of his mouth was a single thank you about halfway through, a brief introduction of the musicians at the end. Though Dylan has never exactly been a chatterbox onstage, his concerts have usually contained a few moments of offhand monologue, solipsistic though they may be. But on Sunday, virtually no remarks to the capacity crowd. No famously telling hecklers that they were liars--there were no hecklers. Dylan seemed completely disengaged from the audience. And from where I sat, much of the audience seemed fairly disengaged from him.

Not that he played a bad show. In many respects, he played a great show. From the start, the band rocked hard with a tight, fast version of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” a concert standby, but tonight cooking hotter than the similarly arranged but artier version with Robbie Robertson and Co. His backing musicians played off each other like a proverbial machine, though they lacked the distinctive personality of The Band or of the classic, era-defining sessions with Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield. As song followed hard upon song, Dylan barked his lyrics into the mike with impeccable timing. And if he delivered certain lines with what some fans call his “wolfie” voice, a horror-movie gnarliness that goes all too well with the current physiognomy, it still had personality to spare. How many times before have we heard him change his voice? The man has presented another side of himself with almost every album. We’ll get used to this one.

But the crowd at Campanelli wasn’t there to get used to much of anything. I’m not sure that most of them were there for Dylan at all, but rather for his co-headliner Willie Nelson, who played for over an hour before Dylan came on. Willie is an old pro at flattering his audience, and he gave at least some of them what they came for: from his down-home folksiness when he introduced the players (most of whom seemed to be family members), to tossing several hats to the people near the stage (and donning one fan’s Red Sox cap for a while, to predictable cheers), to the benignly pugnacious patriotism of songs like “Living in the Promised Land” or the Texas flag that unfurled behind him at the start of “Whiskey River.” (Dylan, in cryptic response, played his set backed by a flag of a stylized eye.) Nelson’s set was squarely aimed at the too-much-red-meat faction, like the middle-aged guy in work boots who stomped throughout the set, and it worked. When he finished his last encore, a number of his fans left the stadium without waiting for the rest. Even before the show, the chatter we heard was not about acts you might normally associate with Dylan, like rock's other great survivors the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton, also touring this summer. These people wore straw cowboy hats and dropped names like George Straight and Clint Black. These were not rock fans. This was a country crowd, through and through.