Electric guitars, a full rock band, and a songwriter who had made his name alone with an acoustic. Bob Dylan's sixth studio album, released by Columbia on August 30, 1965, carries the approach of Bringing It All Back Home to its end point: rock musicians play on every track but one.

That exception closes the record. "Desolation Row" runs eleven minutes and sits apart from everything before it, a long ballad with none of the drive of the blues rock around it. The rest of the album works a seam between blues-based playing and writing dense enough to hold up as poetry, which is the thing critics have circled ever since. Ordinary rock and blues machinery, carrying language that survives on the page.

Dylan aimed all of it at the political and cultural climate of America in 1965, and hit closely enough that the writer Michael Gray later argued the 1960s, in an important sense, started with this album. Anyone tracing the point where folk rock stopped sounding like a compromise between two audiences can begin here, in the first bars.