Into the rich past of Dylan and Stewart

Two new sets -- one from rock’s greatest singer-songwriter, another from one of its great songwriter-interpreters -- illustrate two paths that diverged at a fork in the road called fame.

Bob Dylan never took the bait of superstar celebrity, always zigzagging away from its lure, while Rod Stewart bit big time when it was dangled in front of him in the mid-’70s.

A live set from Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue points up how consistently he’s worked to defy expectations, while the collected works Stewart recorded before he became a rock god remind us how far a supremely gifted musical soul went astray in choosing the path of fame.

( The Rolling Thunder Revue was Dylan’s antidote to the tour he’d done the previous year with the Band, his first full-fledged tour since his 1966 motorcycle accident sent him into seclusion for nearly a decade.

With the Band, Dylan delivered incendiary, full-throttle rock performances (captured on the “Before the Flood� live album), but he later said he felt that the scale of the arena-dominated outing was uncomfortably beyond his control.

So he came up with the Rolling Thunder Revue, a caravan for rock ‘n’ roll gypsies that would permit the performers, songs and arrangements to ebb and flow nightly with their moods -- a setup far more in sync with Dylan’s mercurial spirit than the more tightly scripted shows with the Band.

He gathered a cast of musicians, both little-known and famous, from Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn to T-Bone Burnett and Scarlet Rivera, most of whom he’d been working with in the studio on the “Desire� album.

The new double CD “Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue -- The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5� on Columbia includes only Dylan’s performances, so it doesn’t give the full scope of the Rolling Thunder shows. But Dylan himself sounds more relaxed, without sacrificing the power he’d mustered with the Band.

In fact, the album opens with a punchy treatment of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You� that sounds as if he has the Band behind him, except for the heavy steel-guitar presence. His vocal also pushes to the point of strain, something more characteristic of the ’74 performances.

But starting with the next cut, a double-time country-rock arrangement of “It Ain’t Me, Babe,� Dylan turns to the more comfortable, conversational tone that became the hallmark of Rolling Thunder shows.

Dylan has never been content to stick with recorded versions of his songs, a compulsion toward freshness that’s in full bloom here. With 1974’s “Blood on the Tracks� album, Dylan was back at the top of his songwriting game, yet he reinvents the “Blood� songs “Simple Twist of Fate� and “Tangled Up in Blue.�

Dylan’s been known to ignore his latest albums when he hits the road, but here he offers five of the then-new songs from “Desire.� “Hurricane� and “Sara� follow the recorded versions closely, but “Romance in Durango� gets a livelier norteno arrangement that ideally accents the story of a tragic border romance.

The sound quality is far crisper and more full-bodied than the 1976 “Hard Rain� album drawn from the same tour. There’s only one song in common, “Oh, Sister,� and a different performance is included here.

The set includes an entertaining if occasionally self-aggrandizing essay by journalist Larry Ratso Sloman adapted from his recently reissued book “On the Road with Bob Dylan,� about his time covering the Rolling Thunder tour.

There’s also a DVD with the “Tangled Up in Blue� and “Isis� performances from the “Renaldo and Clara� film shot during the tour.

Dylan’s songs have long been a touchstone for Stewart, who included one on most of his early solo albums. The Englishman also looked to material from such great folk and rock writers as Chuck Berry, Tim Hardin, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Sam Cooke.

What’s most striking in “Reason to Believe: The Complete Mercury Studio Recordings,� a three-CD set spanning the years 1969 to 1973, is the unerring vision and relentless striving for heart and soul he exhibited in the selection and delivery of both outside material and his own songs.

At times it seems impossible that the same guy who sang such scrappy, heart-on-sleeve numbers as “Handbags and Glad- rags,� “Gasoline Alley,� “Mandolin Wind,� “You Wear It Well� and “Every Picture Tells a Story� was the same person who later got so caught up in his own celebrity that the most profound question he could muster was “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?�

In the Mercury recordings, the sandpaper grit that seems to coat his vocal cords is the ideal conduit for songs drawn out of a hardscrabble life and imbued with values rooted in basic needs and desire.

It’s the palpable ache of an impossible wish we hear from a prodigal son who swallows his pride and asks (in “Gasoline Alley�) for something or someone to “take me back, carry me back down to Gasoline Alley where I started from.�

That same yearning turns up time and again in his own songs and in the likes of Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is a Long Time� and Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Country Comfort� (Stewart’s version far more raw than Johns’).

Stewart also kept things on a more human scale musically until he left Mercury for Warner Bros. Records in the mid-’70s. His band (usually including future Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood, his frequent songwriting partner) employed mandolin, 12-string acoustic, Dobro or slide guitars and primitive-sounding drums to create a living-room atmosphere that tapped the British troubadour tradition and American folk and blues sources.

On that front, he even beat the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?� revival to the punch by 30 years with his rendition from the “Rod Stewart� album of the bluegrass standard “Man of Constant Sorrow.�

Stewart is back on the charts with his album “It Had to Be You ... The Great American Songbook,� in which he applies that signature raspy voice to songs by Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and the like. The album has received mixed reviews.

But these recordings from three decades ago show there’s never been a question of whether Stewart has the gifts to be a first-rate song stylist -- only whether he was willing to put his heart and not just his famous mug into his music.