I missed the continuity between Dylan’s early blues and his later rock excursions because, like almost everyone in the 1960s, I became aware of him through other performers: as the composer of Peter, Paul and Mary’s lilting protest anthems, the Guthriesque ballads Pete Seeger performed at Carnegie Hall, and the Byrds’ mellow take on “Mr. Tambourine Man.” By the time I discovered his own, rawer versions of the songs, I associated him with those performers and continued to see him through that prism: as a brilliant, difficult artist whose work was a gritty cousin to the pretty pop-folk style.
In terms of broad cultural impact, it makes sense to see Dylan primarily as a groundbreaking lyricist, a modern bard who has inspired generations of singer-songwriters. That is the Dylan who just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and whose influence permeates every strain of popular music. But the focus on Dylan’s writing makes it easy to forget that he was signed by Columbia Records and hailed by early reviewers as a compelling musician and singer, and as a rough blues artist rather than a sensitive balladeer. When he went electric it was a return to form, and the title of his breakthrough hit, “Like a Rolling Stone,” neatly signaled his kinship with those other young blues fans who were tearing up the charts that year—not coincidentally with a series of Dylan pastiches: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” followed by “Get Off of My Cloud” and “19th Nervous Breakdown.” (The British r&b scene had embraced Dylan as a blues artist from the start, the Animals copping “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” and “House of the Rising Sun” off his first LP.)
By 1963, it made sense to market Dylan as a folk poet. But before adopting that strategy Columbia actually tried the electric route: Dylan’s first single, released on the cusp of that year, was “Mixed-Up Confusion,” a rockabilly raver recorded alongside a hot take of Big Boy Crudup’s “That’s All Right” (with Bruce Langhorne playing the same guitar riff he later used on “Maggie’s Farm”) and a souped-up rewrite of an old section-gang song, “Rocks and Gravel.” The single went nowhere, but it is easy to see why Columbia gave it a shot: Dylan didn’t sound like a smooth-voiced pop-folky, and proudly affirmed his roots in rock & roll. His rambling hobo stories included claims of backing Gene Vincent and Bobby Vee, and the references to Presley, Perkins, and the Everlys on his first album were backed up by the “Wake Up, Little Susie” riff he tacked on to Tommy McClennan’s “New Highway No. 51.”