On this tour, Oberst has surrounded himself with more than a dozen bandmates, a glockenspiel, hammer dulcimer, bassoon, violin, cello, drums, guitars, banjo. He prefers not to stand stark alone on the stage, so Bright Eyes contains an ever-changing bunch of friends. He shuffles his feet, as if overcome by a fit of modesty. The kids are hip in the studied way of those who take advanced-placement English classes. The club smells like a high-school gym, of teenagers in heat. But for the kids who make up the audience tonight, Dylan is grandpa. festival in New York, he has critics buzzing that he might be the next Bob Dylan. ''I hear the ice start to melt and watch the rooftops weep for the sunlight./And I know what must change.'' With these two literate albums out this year and a knockout performance at the recent C.M.J. ''Onto the stage I was pushed with my sorrow well rehearsed,'' he sings on the band's latest CD. And in Bright Eyes - the band that's clearly closest to Oberst's heart - his writing shows a sudden leap toward maturity. On a recent CD he made with Desaparecidos, one of the bands he leads, he lambasted American consumerism with a level of sophistication you rarely hear in three-minute songs.
Suddenly, Oberst has swerved in an entirely different direction. He has confessed crushes into microphones he has shaken and shivered he has built a following as the bard of teenage angst. Now, at 22, he has played in so many bands and been involved in so many side projects that you need a flow chart to keep track of them. He wrote his first songs at age 12, began soloing in clubs at 13. Oberst, once the child prodigy of the indie scene, has always had to battle his own cuteness. Though he's from Nebraska, he brings to mind some Japanese pop icon - Hello Kitty perhaps - the way he manages to seem both adorable and haunted at the same time. His hair flops around his head in a black bubble, and above the quickly drawn lines of his mouth and nose his soulful eyes stare out. Conor Oberst takes the stage in Eugene, Ore., looking like a cartoon of an indie rocker.
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