I dug this:

”“…an immediately-forgettable late-60s avant-garde novelty-collage hyphenated-word waste of a half hour…”

Am I misremembering that Zappa retouched that album in the ’80s along with the rest of the Mothers-era discography? I basically agree. It’s nice as an artistic statement but I’d be pissed if I had paid good money for this.

I heard the Dylan debut in high school and I remember liking it a lot. It’s actually a lot like the David Bowie or Donovan debuts in that it’s just damned refreshing. It’s not a light-before-the-sun-and-stars kind of thing, just a mild unpretentious slab of objectively good music.

Speaking of humble beginnings:

I’m actually more familiar with Dylan’s “In My Time of Dyin”” than Zeppelin’s. That was on Physical Graffiti, wasn’t it? I’m not really familiar with them post-Houses.