Before him there was only Bobby Vinton. Well, no, not really. But at the time Dylan first arrived in New York City from the Midwest, rock music had lost its leader — Elvis, in a series of movie musicals. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson — all those pioneers Dylan had loved and emulated in high school rock-'n'-roll bands — had been superseded by a series of well-scrubbed teen idols who had as much edge as a corsage.

It was a bland-out all across the bandwidth, a kind of musical hangover from the Eisenhower era. Rock 'n' roll had erupted dead in the heart of Ike's easeful America. In the Kennedy years, when the world started to shake and rattle, the music suddenly turned as thick and sweet as a malted. Jazz had the power, but jazz was for grownups, and its impact was largely instrumental. Anyone who wanted to listen to a song, and take something away from it that would last a little longer than a good-night kiss, turned on to folk.

So Bob Dylan, a rock-'n'-roll American kid who first heard Woody Guthrie while enrolled for a few months at the University of Minnesota, took up folk. Got a ride to New York. Settled in Greenwich Village. Took any gig he could get. Within two years — tops — turned folk inside out. And then abandoned it. Subsumed it, really, inside the raucous, unyielding, cataclysmic rock 'n' roll that he let loose on an audience that didn't like to be reminded how hidebound it was. What had been music of comment and protest became songs of unprecedented personal testament, delivered with a literal and savage electricity.

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