By JON PARELES, Special to The New York Times

SAUGERTIES, N.Y., Aug. 14--Bob Dylan played Woodstock '94 tonight, 25 years after he avoided the first Woodstock festival. Except for only two recent songs, Mr. Dylan and his four-man band played a set they could have performed at the original festival: one masterpiece after another from the 1960's. It wasn't 25 years too late.

"All Along the Watchtower" -- a song about claustrophobia, commercialism and unknown portents -- mutated to fit the last day of the gigantic festival. Others, like a blistering "Highway 61," sounded like greetings and dour warnings from one generation to the next.

Mr. Dylan is leading one of the best bands of his career, a group that switches from bluesy American rock to a drumless string-band lineup. And his singing has grown heartfelt again. As always, he toyed with melodies, never repeating a phrase. But he sang so clearly, and with such mercurial emotion, that long-familiar words took on new shades of tenderness and rancor, accusation and wiliness.

Common Ground?

He juxtaposed oracular songs, like "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," with personal ones, like "It Ain't Me, Babe" and "Don't Think Twice." He didn't indulge the huge audience, which moshed while he sang, until he chose "Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 and 35," with the chorus "Everybody must get stoned," as an encore.

For much of its third day, Woodstock '94 seemed to suggest common ground between generations, where tastes overlap in danceable grooves and utopian hopes. But Green Day, a Bay Area rock band, seized the festival's punk moment this afternoon. Playing for an eager crowd, Green Day was a blast of punk-pop: fast, exuberant, catchy songs of suburban discontent that ask, "Do you have the time to listen to me whine?"

Its guitarist, Billie Joe, and bassist, Tre Cool, taunted the dirt-spattered crowd, which started hurling mud and straw at the stage. While the rhythm section played on, Billie Joe exposed himself, smashed a microphone on the stage (the audience clapped along in rhythm), then tossed divots back into the audience. He told the audience that if it chanted instructions to shut up, Green Day would. He cued them with a "1,2,3"; when they responded, the band quit.

Both band and audience seemed to treat the fracas as a matter of boyish high spirits, approving its entertainment value. The audience shouted for an encore. It was one more Woodstock '94 episode that showed the distance from 1969. So did the set by Porno for Pyros, the band led by Perry Farrell, founder of the Lollapalooza Festival. The songs took up taboo impulses -- murderous feelings, polymorphous sex -- in music that kept shifting style. For spectacle, Mr. Farrell presented a sexualized rock-and-roll circus, complete with acrobatics on a rope, topless simulated lesbian coupling and a twirler with a flaming baton.

Saturday's late-night lineup had emphasized the anger and alienation of current rock. Nine Inch Nails snarled its bitterness, followed by Metallica's hard-riffing songs -- some grinding, some jet-propelled -- about death, dismemberment and other apocalyptic fears. Metallica was both streamlined and weighty, an efficient machine that generated sing-alongs and waving hands in the audience as far as the eye could see.

A Song Without a War

Aerosmith, which followed, seemed supercharged by competition. Its songs are part blues-rock, part arena-rock, poised between the Rolling Stones and later heavy metal. In a set that stretched two hours, to about 3:30 A.M., Aerosmith's blues roots and cartoonish humor were amply displayed.

Today, much of the music was similarly kindly. The morning opened with Country Joe MacDonald reprising, from the 1969 festival, his "Fish" cheer and "Feel-Like-I'm-Fixing-to-Die Rag," which seemed marooned without the Vietnam War it protested. Mavis Staples, Phoebe Snow, Thelma Houston, Cece Peniston and Lois Walden then sang classic gospel songs with fervent virtuosity. Arrested Development's songs were determinedly positive, urging unity, tolerance and respect for history, but on stage its bass riffs and catchy melody phrases overwhelm any didacticism.

The Neville Brothers, whose experience dates back through three decades of New Orleans rock, could have been Arrested Development's elder relatives, generating all their rhythms from live instruments and meshing in buoyant New Orleans and island-hopping rhythms. Santana, which appeared at the 1969 festival, brought its own galaxy of Latin rhythms and searing guitar solos, while Jimmy Cliff used reggae songs to urge one-world love.

Both baby boomers and younger fans of so-called "classic rock" savored brand names like Traffic and the Allman Brothers Band. Paul Rodgers, formerly the lead singer with Free and Bad Company, sang chest-heaving arena-rock versions of old and new songs; Slash, the guitarist from Guns 'n' Roses, sat in.

The Spin Doctors offered a tepid version of grooves learned from the Allmans and the Grateful Dead; not wasting time, they have already recorded a new version of Joni Mitchell's " Woodstock. "

There were also bands from Africa presented by Peter Gabriel's World of Music, Arts and Dance: Xalem, with Senegalese drumming; the Justin Trio, playing glimmering music from Madagascar; Geoffrey Oryema, from Uganda, and Hassan Hakmoun, from Morocco, with his band Zahar. To pacify a crowd impatient for Green Day, Mr. Gabriel joined Zahar for a song.

Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company