WITH BOB ON MY SIDE (1995)

Call it blasphemy if you want, but the first Bob Dylan album I bought was Slow Train Coming. Released in 1979, with Ronald Reagan's hoofbeats on the horizon, the album captured Dylan at the height of his weird, fire-and-brimstone Christian phase; in fact, the guy who led me to Slow Train was the guitar-slinging youth minister at my family's church. Hilarious as it sounds now, I first thought of Bob Dylan not as a tangle-haired, splenetic poet of protest, but as a crusader for conservative Christian values.

Time disabused me of that notion, of course. Bob dropped the Bible shtick; I heeded the critics and crawled back through the canon -- Blonde on Blonde, Bringing It All Back Home, Blood on the Tracks. As a true child of the '80s, I never had any idea what the hell Dylan was singing about, but I fell in love with his seagull squawk and the absurd, reckless rhythm of his words -- especially killer lines like ''the sun's not yellow, it's chicken.'' In the end, I wound up with one rock-solid conclusion: Bob Dyl-an likes to confuse people.

This time around, the confusion comes in a strange package: niceness. At its heart, MTV UNPLUGGED is a far more conservative album than Slow Train Coming ever was. Hoping to tantalize the same youngsters who've rescued Neil Young, Johnny Cash, and Tony Bennett from oblivion, Dylan has stocked the disc with chestnuts from the Robert Zimmerman House of Hits -- ''All Along the Watchtower'' (the song Jimi Hendrix did!), ''Knockin' on Heaven's Door'' (the song Guns N' Roses did!), ''Rainy Day Women #12 & #35'' (the ''get stoned'' song!). Zap it into the disc player next to Unplugged platters by Eric Clapton, Nirvana, and 10,000 Maniacs and you've got a perfect toe-tapping soundtrack for a '90s cocktail party.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Tame as it may be, Unplugged is also Dylan's most listenable record since Oh Mercy, and a fine primer for a generation that doesn't know his music. The band soars, the arrangements percolate with surprises, and best of all, Bob enunciates.

Sure, many of the hoots from the Unplugged audience seem to spring not from revelation but recognition: ''Oh, my God! Bob Dylan's here in front of us, and he's singing 'Like a Rolling Stone'!'' And by shedding the scrappy, screechy elements of his music, Dylan does come off as unbugged -- someone not especially bothered by the state of the world after 1970. But just when you think he's sagging into nostalgia, Bob pulls a fast one. Heaven knows whether he closes Unplugged with a weary ''With God on Our Side'' as a sly commentary on the latest rash of right-wingery. But it's fun to think so. B+

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