The hype about him in left wing circles was exactly the problem.

Read any good biography of Dylan, and you will see how early he became uncomfortable with being used as the darling of the Left, and why he pretty much abandoned the more topical/protest songs after his 3rd album in 1963 ("The Times They Are A-Changin'")...well before he DID the rock music, which came in '65-66. How then, did the protest songs help him succeed as a "rock star"? They weren't rock music! They were folk music, played simply on a 6-string guitar with harmonica. How does this help one get ahead as a rock star? Dylan clearly repudiated his protest singer stance on his 4rth album ("Another Side Of...") with the song "My Back Pages", and that album was also all acoustic folk...no rock music.

By the time Dylan moved into rock music (a bit on the 5th album "Bringing It All Back Home", heavily on the 6th and 7th albums "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde")...he was not writing topical/protest material. He was writing material that could best be described as very personal and philosophical. The New Left was not too happy with that. Sing Out magazine wrote articles criticizing him bitterly for not writing more folky protest songs like Phil Ochs was doing. Phil Ochs responded by writing to Sing Out and telling them they were completely wrong, and that Dylan was pointing the way to go.

I suspect Bob was being just a tad disingenuous on 60 minutes instead, Frankham.

I mean, how do you succeed as a rock singer by recording a whole bunch of famous acoustic guitar protest songs, none of which can be classified as ROCK???? ;-) You tell me, Frankham. For Dylan, the protest songs ended with the making of the 3rd album in 1963, and that album had nothing on it but an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and a stripped-bare voice. That's not rock music, it's folk music.