I dunno how many people here know this, but for what it's worth, if you go back to the very earliest Dylan recordings, made back in Hibbing when he was in his teens, there are some that sound uncannily like his Nashville Skyline voice. It's eerie.
If not for the motorcycle accident, I think he would have probably spent the next ten years trying to make another 'Blonde on Blonde.'
The evidence is kinda mixed. The hotel-room recordings he made on the '66 tour suggest that he was considering turning toward a more straightforwardly confessional love song (and if he'd gone on to record and release "Does She Need Me?" he might have had to fight a lawsuit like George Harrison's for stealing the melody of Bobby Bland's "Share Your Love with Me.") On the other hand, in Scorsese's "No Direction Home" doc, there's a scene where he spontaneously riffs off some advertising signs to produce a word salad that foreshadows the wilder verbal surrealism of "The Basement Tapes."
Oh, uh, we were talking about the best/worst moments from last night's show?
Well, I laughed the hardest when Tom just could not find the words ("stomach-churning" was one he tried) to describe the sheer depravity of AP Mike's question for Uncle Luke--
when he himself said at the beginning of the show that that's what he wanted to ask him.