You toss the music section's remaining Halloween candy in a Dumpster, and we reward you with a Payback Time T-shirt, two recently released major-label CDs, and two tickets to a Live Nation club show taking place in Vancouver within the next four weeks. Here's this week's winning whine.

Dear Payback Time: I just reread Alexander Varty's review of the Bob Dylan concert. Wow, how people can have such radically different views of the same concert! I guess I go to a Dylan concert expecting him to mumble. Hell, it is Dylan, after all. If you want to clearly hear all his vocals, you have to stick to studio recordings. Hell, that's true for most rock 'n' roll music! There was so much I loved about that show. Let's start with the band. They were so tight! I loved the jams and the spontaneity. I know that you were only reviewing the Vancouver concert, but did you know that Dylan's show in Victoria the night before had a completely different set list? Too many live shows these days are rehearsed and choreographed to the point of utter boredom. You see two shows and exactly the same thing happens both nights. It is a huge tribute to Dylan and his band that they mix up the songs this way.

> Mike Stefanelli

Martin Dunphy replies: Dearest Mike—It makes me sadde to inform thee that my liege Alex Varty doth not soil his hands with replies to plaints such as yours. A goode guess as to his inability to discern certain lyrics by Sir Dylan would be that he spends far too much tyme beneath the ocean waves that border his Gabriola Island kingdom. As is his wont, he daily leads his regal retinue and merrye troupe of Morris dancers down to Whalebone Beach, where he straps gem-encrusted driftwood planks to his feet. Using an ornately engraved and hollowed-out walrus tusk as a snorkel, he then proceeds to tour his extensive eelgrass plantations. Oh, it must be a magnificent sight: his lordship drifting above the green bottom, ermine robes fluttering in the current, autumnal purple onions tethered to the royal girdle, good my lord pausing now and again to pluck an offending moon snayle from his crop and imperiously dismiss the occasional insolent spiny lumpsucker. The unkynde waters, though, filleth his ears, and the incessant claw-clacking of his Dungeness crab subjects paying tribute hath rendered him tone-deef to certain frequencyes. So recently he has spent more tyme on drye land, away from such noyse, devising schemes to extract the last remaining wealth from his obsequious subjects. Why, just a little whyle ago he concocted a strategem to take the last of their candye using the ploye of Halloween-celebrating tykes. In his grande, orange-painted carriage, pulled by his trusted steede, Flash, he paraded across his feifdom with a brace of kidnapped moppets begging for treats from unsuspecting peasants. Varty's Varlets, he called them. When done, he dismissed the little beggars without so much as a horehound sweet for their troubles. "Goode enough for the lykes of you," he bellowed magisterially as he cuffed the urchins 'cross their crownes, then strummed a lusty tune on his zither.

Oh, and did I mention the onions?

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