The opening note of Bob Dylan’s majestic “Like a Rolling Stone,” was, unquestionably “a drumbeat like a pistol shot,” as Greil Marcus asserts in the prologue to his most recent book about the most influential rock ‘n’ roll icon of the past half-century. While Mr. Marcus’s “Like a Rolling Stone” (PublicAffairs, 283 pages, $25) is riddled with hyperbole, revisionist left-wing musings, and attention to single words of the 1965 Top 40 radio hit – Mr. Dylan’s first – the book is worth the time of anyone reader fascinated, as I am, by popular culture.

Strictly speaking, Mr. Dylan was more than just a rock ‘n’ roller, and the author is certainly correct that when his obituary is written lazy reporters will focus on his brief phase as a “protest singer” in the early 1960s and cite “Blowin’ in the Wind” in the first paragraph. Mr. Dylan – in the tradition of Woody Guthrie – transformed the folk music genre at the beginning of the 1960s, spawning hundreds of imitators who followed his lead by writing their own topical lyrics. But it was his headlong, amphetamine-fueled switch to loud, sneering, electric rock ‘n’ roll mid-decade that turned the pop music world upside down.

When the six-minute single “Like a Rolling Stone” was first heard on AM radio stations – FM wasn’t yet the province of rock music – it really was a jolt to the system. Chart-toppers by the likes of Herman’s Hermits, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and even the Beatles instantly seemed like songs from a vanished era.

“It’s a great thing, when a song defines a summer,” Mr. Marcus writes, and though that’s no longer true today – the notion of a Top 40 is as dated as “The Pepsi Generation” – in 1965 Mr. Dylan owned the airwaves. I was 10 when the song was released, and I immediately bought the single at the local record store (where I would soon buy “Highway 61 Revisited,” the album on which it appears). I have listened to it several thousand times over the past 40 years.

Mr. Marcus dissects “Like a Rolling Stone” poring over each line with the same reverence one might accord Homer. But though he attaches nearly global significance to its sound and lyrics, he is accurate in saying: “Whenever you hear the song you are not quite hearing a song you have heard before – it cannot carry nostalgia.” I no longer play “Like a Rolling Stone” five times consecutively, as I did when I was young. But the song is still exhilarating, a “wall of sound” fraught with lyrical anger, confusion, and mystery that can’t be matched even by legendary producers like Phil Spector.

Certainly a devotee of Mr. Dylan can take something new and fresh away from the pop masterpiece today. But the relevance Mr. Marcus sees to today’s turbulent political climate eludes me. Mr. Marcus’s rich detail on the making of one classic song at times makes for engaging reading, but you can’t help feel that the author is often writing about himself, and part of his generation, rather than Mr. Dylan.

It’s worth noting, before examining Mr. Marcus’s many exuberant excesses, that Mr. Dylan (unlike Bruce Springsteen, the only “new Dylan” marketed by Columbia records who surpassed his mentor’s record sales) has never dabbled in presidential politics, preferring to remain above the fray. In fact, it’s impossible to decipher what, if any, political views Mr. Dylan holds. Maybe he’s a pro-life, small-government adherent, or a millionaire who believes in socialism. It’s a measure of the celebrity’s elusive nature, and quest for privacy, that he doesn’t broadcast nonmusical views.

Undoubtedly, Mr. Marcus has no illusions that “Like a Rolling Stone” will make even a dent in the volatile – left versus right – best-seller lists, and that’s to his credit. Almost as old as his subject, Mr. Marcus, a longtime Berkeley resident, is content with his prolific, if not lucrative, writing about popular music in the 20th century, a body of work that often includes Mr. Dylan but also Elvis Presley, traditional folk songs, and the Sex Pistols.

Yet, in his enthusiasm, the author overreaches continuously. Mr. Marcus writes about a country singer, Rodney Crowell, who said in 2004 that when he plays “Like a Rolling Stone” at concerts, “from six-year-olds to seventy year-olds, they all know the chorus to the song.” That’s hard to swallow. Similarly, Mr. Marcus attaches meaning to the song that only someone in a cocoon could actually believe. He writes: “Like a preacher, Dylan sang doom through the song; while no one missed the threat, the freedom of the song [was] defined as specifically as the Declaration of Independence, with nearly as strong an ear for cadence.”

I’m probably in the top 1% of Mr. Dylan’s legion of enthusiasts – at least for his work between 1961 and 1975 – but it’s absurd to compare the gifted songwriter with Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Marcus claims that “Like a Rolling Stone” was somehow emblematic of the 1965 Watts riots, LBJ’s escalation in Vietnam, and political assassinations. I’d say the vast majority of listeners missed the “threat” of the song and instead reveled in the joy of the rapid evolution of a still burgeoning art form.

Even more ludicrously, Mr. Marcus quotes Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner, today a multimillionaire, as saying Mr. Dylan’s song spoke to the “disaster of commercial society.” Perhaps, but that “disaster” hasn’t exactly left Mr. Wenner or Mr. Dylan in an impoverished state.

Finally, in describing the songwriter’s creative comeback in 1975 with the album “Blood on the Tracks,” Mr. Marcus once again falls into inexcusable solipsism. With the obligatory mention of Watergate, the failure of Vietnam, and a faltering economy, he says “As the country went about its business in a haze of meaningless,” Mr. Dylan was starting anew, “someone who had been from one end of the land to the other and returned to tell the tale.”

Maybe Mr. Marcus was in a “haze,” but most Americans, whatever their musical tastes, were not immobilized, but rather going to school, starting careers, and raising families – some, apparently unlike the author, quite cheerfully.

Mr. Smith last wrote in these pages on Lou Gehrig.