Bob Dylan’s relationship to rock ‘n’ roll was once the most hotly disputed subject in twentieth-century popular music. By January 20, 1988, however, those disputes must have seemed like a distant memory to the celebrities jamming on the stage of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel. It was the third annual induction ceremony of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and Bob Dylan had just taken his place in the pantheon. “Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body,” Bruce Springsteen declared in a speech that framed Dylan as a musical trailblazer: “He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve.”1 In his own speech, Dylan thanked both the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and Little Richard: folk and rock ‘n’ roll were once conceived as mortal enemies, but things had changed. Despite the blandly celebratory mood, few could deny that this was, paradoxically enough, a low point in Dylan’s career. As Springsteen implied – “If there was a young guy out there writing ‘Sweetheart Like You,’ writing ‘Every Grain of Sand,’ they’d be calling him the next Bob Dylan” – the assembled rock royalty were not there to celebrate this Bob Dylan, the Dylan of Infidels and Empire Burlesque.2 This Dylan – the 46-year-old man in the long black coat – was almost incidental to the proceedings. As Mick Jagger, George Harrison, Neil Young, Jeff Beck, Tina Turner, Elton John, and others belted out a billowy “Like a Rolling Stone,” the event could not help but recall that earlier, more contentious era, when Dylan’s first forays into rock had been greeted (by some) as form of apostasy.3