Bob Dylan

Are you ready to Dyl out with Bob Dylan - on disc or tonight at the Mann Music Center? If you're in the mood, so's he, but keep in mind, its gotta be on his terms. There's a new Bob Dylan album in the stores, "Down In the Groove. " A sticker on the cover promises an all-star affair with the Grateful Dead, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler and Full Force (among others) sitting in. In fact, most are buried in the rubble of poor mixes and slapdash arrangements. But as on the 32 previous albums that Dylan has issued since the early 1960s, there is some brain food worth chewing on here.

WANT TO warm your Valentine's heart today? Do it with an album of classic romantic music, newly reinvigorated. Or with fresh-baked originals offering curious takes on love. MACCA MAGIC: Can't say I was enthralled with his last, symphonic effort. But Paul McCartney 's entry in the American songbook, "Kisses From the Bottom" (Hear/Concord, A) is the total charmer. Surrounded by a top team of tasteful jazz/pop talents - producer Tommy LiPuma, keyboardist/arranger Diana Krall, guitarist John Pizzarelli, engineer Al Schmitt - Macca brings multiple voices, oft surprisingly frail but effective, and childhood memories as he celebrates songs largely introduced to him by his dad and which surely influenced his own compositional nature.

On July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan stepped onstage at the Newport Folk Festival, plugged in an electric guitar, and changed the course of pop music history. The performance caused a furious reaction. The crowd booed loudly, and folk icon Pete Seeger tried to stop the show. Dylan and his band retreated after three songs, coming back to play an acoustic set. Still, Dylan's provocative move has long been pointed to as a key moment when electric rock music eclipsed folk as the sound of the '60s generation.

Levon Helm, 71, the Arkansas-born drummer and singer for The Band, the four-fifths Canadian ensemble whose music in the 1960s and '70s, some of it with Bob Dylan, endures as a high-water mark of quintessential American rock-and-roll, died Thursday of complications from cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. "Levon Helm passed peacefully," according to an announcement on his website. "He was surrounded by family, friends and band mates and will be remembered by all he touched as a brilliant musician and a beautiful soul.

It was a sight to behold. Toward the end of Bob Dylan's concert at the Tower Theater on Thursday night, the famously misanthropic bard allowed his flock to approach the altar. With the venue's officious security force powerless to stop them, many in the reserved-seat crowd of rowdy graybeards, grungy teens and twentysomethings rushed to fill the aisles. After a storming "Maggie's Farm" that raged like a nor'easter (and included that rarest of Dylan moments: a brief, cryptic smile)

"Chillin' Wit . . . " is a regular feature of the Daily News spotlighting a name in the news away from the job. TOM KLINE sits at his glossy dining-room table inside his Center City apartment and sips orange juice - that he just squeezed - out of a tall, flute-like glass. The table, set against a dizzying view of the city and adorned with a silver candelabra and glass vase filled with fresh white roses and pink tiger lilies, is heaped with books about Bob Dylan. This is Tom Kline unmiked.

Bob Dylan is a doomsayer, spreading the word that trouble is on the way. He's a crusty romantic "studying the art of love," still hopeful, at 65, that "it'll fit me like a glove. " And he's a devilishly cheery troubadour with a Snidely Whiplash mustache who playfully couples "I got the pork chop, she got the pie" with "She ain't no angel, and neither am I. " Modern Times (Columbia . ?), Dylan's 44th album and his first in five years, contains multitudes. No surprise there.

For Todd Haynes, there was never going to be only one Bob Dylan. "There was a question of whether there should be six, or seven, or 20," says the director about I'm Not There, his perfectly titled movie about the most elusive of musical icons, in which Dylan is played by Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, and 11- year-old African American actor Marcus Carl Franklin. "But the idea of multiples as a way of getting to something true about him was almost plain as day," says the Far From Heaven director of the experimental biopic he conceived during a cross-country drive with a slew of Dylan tapes for company.

Last week's announcement that Bob Dylan would play the Theater of Living Arts was accompanied by an explanation: Dylan, now touring stadiums with the Grateful Dead, was restless. He had days off, and wanted to play. But few in the TLA's capacity crowds Wednesday and Thursday could have been prepared for what they encountered: Dylan was being literal. Not content to stroll through his house blend of hits and back-page obscurities, he wanted to play. As in, play guitar. As in, play guitar solos.

As the ultimate singer/songwriter of the contemporary folk and progressive rock eras, Bob Dylan has always had his pick of great and worshipful sidemen (and women), from Joan Baez to the Band, Al Kooper & Mike Bloomfield to the Rolling Thunder brigade and Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler. None has ever put Dylan's gritty visions into as sweet and commercial a context, though, as his latest recruits, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who joined Dylan for two very satisfying shows at the Spectrum, Saturday and last evening.