"Like a Rolling Stone" was Dylan's commercial breakthrough, a #2 hit that blazed twice as long as anything else on the radio. The rest of his sixth album is wall-to-wall classics, too, with jet-propelled Bob rampaging through the history of the blues, declaring the entire territory his own, and populating it with grotesques: John the Baptist, Ma Rainey and Cecil B. DeMille all turn up in "Tombstone Blues" alone. Nearly every song here is still in his repertoire, and the title track — which starts with an argument between God and Abraham, and spirals outward from there — returns at almost every Dylan performance.

Dylan spends a lot of the album making it clear what he's not: "Ballad of a Thin Man" eviscerates a hapless square with a thousand verbal slashes, "Queen Jane Approximately" cuts a girl who thinks she's too good for Bob down to size, and "Desolation Row" is a fantastic panorama that becomes a vicious kiss-off. Even at their cruelest, though, these songs are driven by kaleidoscopic, all-encompassing compassion. ("Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" maps out a particular shade of gradual psychological self-destruction, sliding between first and second person: the ambitious fool Dylan's mocking might just as well… read more »