This is Bob Dylan and The Hawks as they were then known (they became The Band latter) playing "Like a Rolling Stone" live in 1966 in England. It's a raw and angry version. The sound quality is quite good though the filming is below average. The song is part of one of the most famous and legendary performances in the history of rock music--known as The "Royal Albert Hall" concert---and it was often bootlegged before the official release.

The first part of the concert at The Free Trade Hall was Dylan doing a solo acoustic set that featured songs he had written over the past 16 months to a reverent audience. The second part of the concert was an electric set to a hostile audience.

I personally don't much like the folk set of this concert. It feels kinda lifeless to me, even if Dylan does play with his audience's expectations of Dylan as folk singer. But this electric track is good--nay, classic--rock and roll.

A report on a Dylan conference in 2005 at the University of Caen (Normandy, France) by Christopher Rollason. I find that most of these type of academic conferences that present work in the form of Dylan criticism over-emphasis the lyrics rather than music. The literary culture certainly values Dylan highly---and rightly so; but Dylan is musician as well as a poet who records albums in a studio and he performs the work onstage in front of an audience as Dylan the superstar.

This video clip is about the performance.