This is the greatest punk album ever. "Oh come on, Dave," I can hear you say. "You've really gone too far this time. Bob Dylan isn't a punk. He's classic rock or folk-rock, stuff my parents listen to when their friends come over to get high. How can you call it punk, no less the greatest ever?"

Because I said so, that's why.

We music critics generally consider ourselves to be the arbiters of musical taste for the universe, so our smugness must be taken with the proverbial grains of salt. "But we're all music critics," the Populist says, "and everybody's opinions are valid." "Bullshit," says the Critic while symbolically beating the Populist over the head with a Celine Dion CD, "I must protect you from your own abject ignorance. So how dare you question my judgement!"

This disc is so punk it makes the Sex Pistols look like the hacks they really were. Johnny Rotten, although a pretty fair antagonist himself, has nothing on Dylan here. Here Dylan baits the crowd by giving them what they want, then taunts them, and slays them. Rotten never would have baited them. Instead, he would have either insulted them, or walked offstage in a tantrum.

We must also look at Dylan's attitude in May 1966, when this disc was recorded. After all, isn't punk more about attitude than sonics? It's not? Well, it was once, but that was before Green Day sold a bejillion copies of a bunch of Ramones hand-me-downs. Anyway, the previous year, Dylan toured England reluctantly wearing the King Of Folk crown. That tour, captured in D. A. Pennebaker's fascinating documentary Don't Look Back, showed the former Robert Zimmerman charming audiences and local officials, antagonizing reporters, breaking up with Joan Baez, and staring at electric guitars in the windows of music shops.

He had just released Bringing It All Back Home, which featured his first-released forays with an electric backup band (his initial experiments, three years earlier, were scrapped at the last minute by his record company), and was already starting to face charges of being a sell-out (all great punks must, at some point in their career, be labelled as a "sell-out" any time they move away from their "vision"). But his concerts were still performed solo. Upon returning home, he wrote and recorded "Like A Rolling Stone," which hit #2 on the Billboard charts that summer while breaking virtually every rule governing what a hit single should sound like (all great punks, from Sinatra through Cobain, have rewritten the rulebooks in their own image). The ensuing album, Highway 61 Revisited, confirmed the folk crowd's fear: their savior was now a pop star.

That summer, he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival, the very stage on where two years earlie had seen his coronation. Performing with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the crowd booed him off the stage after just three songs, placating them only by returning with an acoustic guitar and a particularly venomous rendition of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," his parting shot to the folk scene. His concerts then took on a new shape: The first set would be performed solo, followed by an intermission, and concluding with an electric set. He recruited the Hawks, a Toronto-based outfit who had previously backed up rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, to recreate the Highway 61 sound. The Hawks, of course, would later achieve massive success as The Band.

The tour of America was Dylan's most difficult to date. The crowds, often a mix of Dylan's core audience of folkies and pop fans who were familiar with the hits (many of which had been successful for other artists), would sit politely through the acoustic set. When the Hawks took the stage, however, the old guard became livid. Cries of "Play folk music" and "Where's Ringo?" were heard. This eventually became too much for drummer Levon Helm, and he quit the tour.

When the tour ended, Dylan recorded the tracks that would become Blonde on Blonde. On the eve of its release, Dylan set off for Europe for a month of shows in the United Kingdom and France, and it is one of these shows from which this long-awaited 2-CD set is drawn.

Many legendary shows derive their status because of the event surrounding the show. Think of the Beatles at Shea Stadium, Elvis' comeback special in 1968, Woodstock, even Live Aid. This gig, however, was just a typical stop on an atypical tour. But its standing in rock history was guaranteed before its official release due to over thirty years of bootlegging and word of mouth, not to mention the sheer power of the performances. The show took place on May 17 at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester (home of the world's most evil soccer team), right in the middle of the tour.

Dylan, by this time, was consuming massive quantities of drugs, notably speed, to cope and keep up the pace of such a grueling schedule But on this performance he is in complete control. His unique sense of phrasing, drawing out and inflecting syllables to emphasize their meaning, is given a classic display, especially in the acoustic set.

By opening with "She Belongs To Me," a portrait of a deceptive but irresistable woman, he clearly tells the audience that this will not be an evening of protest songs. He follows it with a couple of new songs, "4th Time Around" and "Visions of Johanna." The former, with its "Norwegian Wood" melody and its depiction of the final battle of a difficult relationship, is given delicate treatment, while the latter is a hallucinatory cathartic masterpiece. Changing tempo and metre where necessary, Dylan begins to open up his performance in the third verse, which would carry him through the rest of the night.

After another scathing performance of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" (which is the same version as the one released on his Biograph box set), he moves on to "Desolation Row," the eleven-minute serio-comic parade of fictional and non-fictional characters from Highway 61. By the harmonica solo between the eighth and ninth verse, Dylan's mood has clearly changed from that of detachment to one of commitment, altering his guitar playing by strumming more forcefully and singing more directly than before. Compassionate renditions of "Just Like A Woman" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" round out the set, and he leaves the stage to rapturous applause.

But it is the electric set for which this performance is well-known. After the opener, the previously unreleased "Tell Me, Momma" winds down to little reaction. Dylan, knowing what will be coming, throws in his first taunt. Introducing "I Don't Believe You," the naive acoustic song from Another Side of Bob Dylan, he says "It used to go like that, but now it goes like this!" Robbie Robertson throws in some snaking guitar lines and Garth Hudson plays a staggering organ solo.

Then the first signs of dissent start showing. Before "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" the crowd begins to turn. A bit of yelling, followed by a steady rhythm of slow handclapping from the audience (a British version of booing--the idea being to prevent the action onstage from proceeding), is heard, momentarily interrupting the opening. Dylan refuses to give in and starts over, and Rick Danko's bass drowns out the objectors. This clearly affected Dylan, because he starts the next song, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" at the wrong rhythm, only to have somebody's boot (Robbie's?) count out the beat properly before crashing into the number.

More derision preceeds "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat," the humorous, loping 12-bar blues workout from Blonde. It's a bit louder than before, picking up in steam, and Dylan comes up with an idea he will use in a few minutes. When the clapping begins again, he begins to mumble incoherently into the microphone. This forces the crowd to stop so they can hear him, and when it dies down he says "seaidsencmsoemsfaseia if only you wouldn't clap so hard." The crowd, realizing they have been had, laugh and applaud as such, only to start up again following a devastating "One Too Many Mornings." The next song on the list is "Ballad of A Thin Man," and Dylan couldn't have picked a better song to sing to the dissenters, as Garth Hudson's organ fills swell and Dylan's contempt for the audience rises as he sings "But you KNOW something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" at the end of each verse.

Then, finally, the moment that has made this concert legendary happens. Somebody in the audience yells out "Judas!" and the audience applauds. Dylan stops strumming to acknowledge him. "I don buh-leeeeeve you." More strumming, followed by "You're a LY-ARRRR!" Danko's bass joins in and Dylan turns to his band, saying "Play fuckin' loud." Mickey Jones then hits a cannon shot out from is snare and they crash into the most venomous version possible of "Like A Rolling Stone" you'll ever hear. A snide "Thank you" and the show ends.

So much has been written about Dylan but very little about the performance of the Hawks. Shortly after this tour, they followed Dylan to Woodstock and holed up in the famous Big Pink house. While rehearsing in the cramped basement, they had no choice but to turn the volume down and listen to each other. Their records as The Band, while excellent, often contained too much space, lacking the flash and power on display here. That's not a bad thing, mind you, but flash is important when you have a reputation as the best bar band in the world. Robbie Robertson's solos are particularly hot, using open strings and bluesy bends in the vein of Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf's guitarist. Danko's deceptively melodic bass playing and Garth Hudson's keyboard work are fantastic throughout. Mickey Jones' drumming, while probably not as solid as Levon Helm, is instinctive, often matching Dylan's lyrical evocations with inventive fills.

In 1966 the idea of a person plugging in an electric guitar was still thought of as a dangerous and subversive act, especially within the smug purist folk crowd. What they couldn't see through was that Dylan was still writing folk music, just reinventing it in his own style, just as Woody Guthrie had done years before. In the thirty-two years since this concert, rock has become the new folk music. But in order for rock to take over, it needed a catalyst, someone who could see how this new sound was, and continues to be, an extension of the folk tradition. Live 1966 is a document of the precise moment when the times a-changed.