Under a sky of low, cobblestone clouds backlit by a not-quite-full moon, the Walt Whitman of our time illuminated the night.

Bob Dylan brought his fiercely poetic — albeit usually unintelligible — troubadour ramblings to Principal Park in Des Moines on Saturday night, headlining a show also featuring country legend Willie Nelson and western swing band Hot Club of Cowtown.

It was obvious most were there for Dylan.

He took the stage shortly after darkness fell, immediately capturing the crowd of around 5,000 that packed into the ballpark’s outfield and seats to watch the contemporary idol on the centerfield stage.

It was a strange venue for Dylan. He seemed out place — a diminutive poet, pencil-thin and apparently on the slow, shrinking decent into old age, playing on a field built for young, strong athletes. Dylan — a recorded anti-materialist who still spits venom at “Advertising signs that con you into think you’re the one that can do what’s never been done/ That can win what’s never been won …” — stood surrounded by billboard advertisements for soft drinks and department stores.

However, the venue worked for Dylan and Nelson, perhaps because the open-air atmosphere of the park and the pastoral traditionalism of baseball lent themselves to the largely-countrified shows both artists put on.

Dylan came dressed in a trim suit and matching cowboy hat, all black, save for a line of white stars embroidered down the sleeves and outseam. From the outset, one got the impression he was playing a character, a Moulin Rouge cowboy with a long face and drawn-on mustache. Playing that part, he was aloof and seemingly apathetic to the audience.

Through the whole show, he stood at a keyboard on the left side of the stage, facing stage right and never directly acknowledging the screaming, beer-waving masses below him. He crossed center stage only twice, once to introduce his band — which he did facing them, not the audience — and again at the end of his set. In this final address, Dylan, flanked by his band, turned to the crowd but stood motionless and expressionless, as if waiting to be identified in a police lineup. After a few seconds, he walked off without a farewell.

Dylan was joined on stage for one song by Nelson and for another by Elana Fremerman, violinist from Cowtown. The spiraling, 90-minute set did well to showcase the breadth of Dylan’s talent and interest, ranging from the country waltz accompanied by Fremerman to a swing-dance number to loud, thrashing renditions of classics such as “Highway 61 Revisited” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

Dylan played keyboard and harmonica throughout the concert, pounding the keys spasmodically as his band carried the music forward. In most songs, he sang in short bursts, lurching forward to the microphone to howl half a stanza at a time before leaning back again and grooving.

His voice was the sandpapered, mumbled mess it has often been criticized as, and was intelligible only when sang one of his many instantly recognizable songs or slowed his lyrics nearly to the speed of regular speech — as he did on the “Ballad of Hollis Brown.”

That’s not to say he was unlistenable, however. Whether it was Dylan’s mystique as the father of meaningful popular music or just the inherent bond between his voice and his songs, the gravel voice worked, and to great effect.

Dylan’s voice, music and presence were at their height during the encore. After leaving the stage for nearly two minutes following his last song, he returned and before the audience could react, launched immediately into “Like a Rolling Stone.” He reinvented his most famous song — allowing the guitars to rage and tear through the 7-minute song while he broke his stanzas in odd places, throwing off the crowd as they shouted the lyrics back to him.

That crowd — ranging from gray-haired hippies with glowsticks to suburbanites with sweatshirts tied around their waists to college kids raising their beer and cigarettes at to the man old enough to be their grandfather — rose and fell with every phrase, shouting back as Dylan asked rhetorically, “How does it feel?”

To end the concert, Dylan reclaimed a song that he wrote, but that nearly since its creation has been associated with another artist — “All Along the Watchtower.”

And with a raucous, blistering, hang-banging delivery that shook even the most tightly wound of the suburban crowd, he made an undeniable case for whom the song belongs to.