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When I saw him perform again at the Albert Hall in 1966, the atmosphere had changed from a church service into a battlefield. This time the veneration lasted only as long as Dylan performed without accompaniment. When he came back after the intermission with what would become the Band, reverence was replaced by something just short of bloodshed. Audience members screamed, shouted, walked out—even threw things at the stage.

The subliminal message may have caused the larger subterranean turmoil. Dylan’s simultaneous abandonment of the simple style and a straight­forward political message added up to an eerie early warning that an already intricate decade was about to unravel into the unimagined intensity of 1968. But no one articulated such a notion at the time. This was Dylan's typically labyrinthine response to the question that plagued him wherever he went in 1966—“Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock­and-roll route?”

“Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a thirteen-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a 'before' in a Charles Atlas 'before and after' ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this thirteen­year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy—he ain't so mild: he gives her the knife and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until the delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?”

Twenty years later, I asked if that was “still the answer.”

“Well,” he said, “that's part of it.”

The truth was much simpler: He was in a fierce struggle to make the most influential music of his era, and it was beginning to look as if the Beatles might beat him to the punch. As early as the fall of 1964, he saw the limits of writing “for people” and being a “spokesman.” Specificity was narrowing his audience unnecessarily. “From now on I want to write from inside me, and to do that I'm going to have to get back to writing like I used to when I was ten.”