His debut album showed his raw talent and brash singing, with covers like "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" and "You're No Good" reflecting his apprenticeship in the Bleecker Street folk scene.  

 Dylan pulled ahead of everybody else on Freewheelin', a virtuosic burst of original songs that combined bitter political protest, poetic dread, introspection, and romance. 

 Another Side showcased his tormented love/hate ballads, suggesting that Dylan was starting to outgrow acoustic simplicity. 

 Still armed with just his acoustic guitar, harmonica, and ragged voice, Dylan became the king of the freewheelin' folk rogues, even as his punk rage and blues rhythms suggested the rock moves to come. 

 Dylan mixed up the medicine to invent a whole new breed of rock & roll on Bringing It All Back Home. On the electric first side, Dylan sneered his absurdist, word-drunk rambles over lean, jittery garage rock, brimming over with wild humor. 

 Highway 61 Revisited perfected the sound that Dylan dubbed "thin wild mercury music," with a jagged guitar groove, swirling organ, fluid piano, and Dylan's madcap snarl up top, all doomy menace and hallucinatory wit. 

 Rolling faster than anyone could follow, Dylan moved on to the double-vinyl Blonde on Blonde. Dylan freaks still love to argue over whether Bringing It, Highway 61, or Blonde is the absolute pinnacle of Zimmerdom. 

 Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 is an ideal introduction–much more fun than the lightweight 1967 Greatest Hits–with superbly chosen album tracks and rarities. 

 Dylan shocked everyone with the stark simplicity of John Wesley Harding; in the era of flower power, he suddenly went all Jewish-cowboy prophet on everybody's ass. It's one of his best albums, 12 ancient-sounding country-rock tunes. 

 Dylan dipped deeper into country for Nashville Skyline; he even temporarily quit smoking to sweeten his voice. It has a seductively light touch, especially in "I Threw It All Away" and "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You." 

 New Morning is a lighter, stronger Nashville Skyline. 

 Self Portrait was a disaster that nobody has really ever explained: a double album of deliberately bad throwaways, most of them grumpy covers. Dylan took a while to fully recover–his voice grew phlegmy and his songwriting absentminded. 

 Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 is an ideal introduction–much more fun than the lightweight 1967 Greatest Hits–with superbly chosen album tracks and rarities. 

 Dylan's soundtrack for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid has the hit "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." 

 The 1974 Before the Flood is crude, rough fun with The Band. 

 Planet Waves is a modest reunion with the Band.  

 It took marriage troubles to shake Dylan up, and he found his rugged new adult voice in the acoustic heartbreak of Blood on the Tracks. It was such a stunning comeback that for years afterward, anything half decent he did would be compared to it. 

 The frenetic pace came to a halt in July 1966: The official (and possibly fictional) excuse was a motorcycle crash. Dylan retreated to Woodstock, NY, to detox, recover, and plan his next move. While there, he gathered with his friends in The Band. 

  is a nap, one of the least distinguished of Dylan's many live albums. 

 Back in the ring, Dylan knocked off Desire in one night, with first-take arrangements full of floppy drums, lazy violin, plenty of tequila, and Emmylou Harris' harmonies. He mourned his broken marriage through "Isis" and "Sara." 

 Bob Dylan at Budokan is immaculately recorded but short on surprises. 

 Having thus reconstituted the shattered fragments of American poetry, Dylan moved on to religion. He started out on Genesis, but soon hit the harder stuff, with a fundamentalist conversion that remains one of the oddest episodes of his career. 

 By Slow Train Coming, Dylan was a Bible-thumping, born-again Christian who was hearing from the Almighty on a regular basis. Slow Train benefited from Mark Knopfler's guitar and "I Believe in You." 

 Continuing with the Christian overtones, Saved had the underrated "Solid Rock." 

 The last of his heavily spiritual records, Shot of Love has the overrated "Every Grain of Sand." 

 Dylan briefly returned to form with 1983's Infidels, an altogether more worldly batch of songs ("Jokerman," "Sweetheart Like You") lifted high by the Sly & Robbie rhythm section and guitarist/producer Knopfler. Dylan's best work of the 80s. 

 A lone highlight was hidden on side two of the mostly terrible, completely ignored 1984 concert album Real Live: a new version of "Tangled Up in Blue," with just Dylan and his guitar, playing around with the chord changes and lyrics. 

 Biograph was the 1985 box set, spiking the hits with choice rarities from 1963's "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" to 1981's "Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar." The prize is the Blood on the Tracks outtake "Up to Me." 

 On Empire Burlesque, he sounded lucky just to be employed, though "Tight Connection to My Heart" went into the all-time canon of great Dylan songs on lousy Dylan albums.  

 Knocked Out Loaded, the absolute bottom of the Dylan barrel, has the Carol Burnett ShowÐstyle production number "Brownsville Girl," with one classic Dylan line: "I didn't know whether to duck or run, so I ran."  

 Down in the Groove has a sing-along goof, "Ugliest Girl in the World," though it's not as funny as the genius self-parody of "Tweeter and the Monkey Man," buried that same year on the Traveling Wilburys' Volume One. 

 Oh Mercy and Under the Red Sky were studio-slick mush. 

 Dylan and the Dead made one Deadhead friend lament, "I never thought I'd see the day when Jerry Garcia would have to bail someone out vocally."  

 Oh Mercy and Under the Red Sky were studio-slick mush. 

 The three-disc Bootleg Series collects unreleased treasures like "She's Your Lover Now," "Let Me Die in My Footsteps," "Call Letter Blues," and "Blind Willie McTell," as well as the unheralded baseball classic "Catfish." 

 He hit the road for his Never Ending Tour, and recorded a couple of overlooked oddities, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, which comprise solo acoustic renditions of old blues and folk songs. 

 He hit the road for his Never Ending Tour, and recorded a couple of overlooked oddities, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, which comprise solo acoustic renditions of old blues and folk songs. 

 The 1995 Greatest Hits, Vol. 3 reaches all the way back to the early 70s, which is just crazy.  

 Another nostalgia-soaked live album fails to bring the rebirth the "Unplugged" brand lent some others. 

 It was now official: Dylan had finally blown out his voice. But that turned out to be good news, because after those last creaky floorboards gave way, the man had to come up with a whole new songwriting style for the sinister rasp he was left with. 

 You can see the pace taking its toll in the Dylan documentaries Don't Look Back, where he's a fidgety coquette sucking in his cheeks for the camera, and Something Is Happening, where he's the vanishing American hidden behind steely shade 

 The two-CD, 30-song Essential is a handy sampler, despite some dubious picks ("Rainy Day Women," that means you).  

 He hit even harder with Love and Theft, a full-blown tour of the American songbook in all its burlesque splendor, veering into country blues, ragtime, vaudeville, cocktail-lounge corn, the minstrel show, and rockabilly. 

 Live 1975 has windbag performances from the Rolling Thunder Review tour. 

 Live 1964 is the famous October '64 solo acoustic show at Carnegie Hall, long bootlegged as Halloween Masque, and prized as his definitive pre-electric live set. "Don't let that scare ya. It's just Halloween," Dylan tells the crowd. 

 The No Direction Home soundtrack has a great "Visions of Johanna" with the Band.  

 Modern Times was his third straight masterpiece, as well as his first Number One hit since Desire. It kicks off with a salty old Chuck Berry riff, stretched out into a six-minute lust letter to Alicia Keys. 

 Tell Tale Signs is a lavish collection of late outtakes.  

 By now Dylan was 68, as old as Maggie's ma, but he showed no signs of slowing down–his just-plain-ridiculous Christmas album had a version of "Must Be Santa" that rocked as hard as "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down."  

 Together Through Life is a laid-back melange of Chess Records blues and Tex-Mex border-cafe accordion, mostly co-written with the Grateful Dead's Robert Hunter, peaking with the riotous Howlin' Wolf rip "It's All Good."