In the meantime, he recorded and released the album Highway 61 Revisited, which contained the monumental single "Like a Rolling Stone." Clocking in at more than six minutes, it was the longest, angriest song ever released on a 45, and it reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart. By this time, Dylan was routinely being hailed as the most important voice of his generation, but he was reaching a breaking point; he was, after all, only twenty-five years old. "The pressures were unbelievable," he would later tell biographer Anthony Scaduto. "They were just something you can't imagine unless you go through them yourself. Man, they hurt so much." A near-fatal motorcycle accident on July 29, 1966, proved a blessing in disguise, allowing Dylan to retreat to the solitude of his home in Woodstock, New York, with Sara and their newborn son Jesse to reevaluate his career and priorities. (The Dylans would ultimately have four children, with Bob adopting Sara's daughter from a previous marriage; Jakob, the youngest, is now the leader of the popular band the Wallflowers.)
At this point, it had been seven years since Dylan's motorcycle accident, and he had not mounted a full-scale tour since. In the summer and fall of 1973, he and the Band started rehearsing the Dylan songbook for a comeback tour, and in early November they took a few days off to record the album Planet Waves. It was a hasty, underwritten effort, but that didn't stop it from shooting to the top of the charts after Dylan and the Band hit the road for a nationwide tour in January of 1974. (Planet Waves was, in fact, Dylan's first No. 1 album ever.) The concerts were the stuff of legend, and promoter Bill Graham said that there were mail-order requests for more than twelve million tickets, though only 658,000 seats were available for the forty shows. An acclaimed two-record live set, Before the Flood, came out within a few months of the tour, and made it to No. 3 on the charts. While the tour seemed to reinvigorate Dylan's creative spirit, his personal life was in a shambles. He and Sara had separated, and Dylan's confusion, pain, and anger over their split infused the songs he was writing with a rare passion. The result was Blood on the Tracks, perhaps the most mature, moving, and profound examination of love and loss ever committed to record. Stunning songs like "Tangled Up in Blue," "Idiot Wind," and "Shelter From the Storm" were not strictly autobiographical, but their emotional turbulence clearly reflected Dylan's anguished state of mind. But the songs did not win her back: Dylan and Sara divorced the following year. Dylan's first post-divorce album, Street Legal, did not bode well for the future.