Thankyou. When I say about it being garage rock Im talking more about the sound and aethetic of it than the musicianship. Mike Bloomfield was a far more advanced guitar player than any of the guys in the garage bands but I think between that banging drum sound and his bluesy raw guitar sound that the album has its quite similar to the Rolling Stones garage rock songs ("19th Nervous Breakdown", "The Last Time" etc). What you have to remember about garage rock is that it was basically untrained American kids trying to copy Stones and Yardbirds records, like "19th Nervous Breakdown" and "I'm A Man."
I feel that punk rock is an American invention and that it started in the mid '60s with bands like the Count Five and the Sonics. I wouldnt say "you can trace it back to the Yardbirds via influence" cause I think that the Yardbirds and the Stones wrote the British Invasion chapter of the history of rock. There influence is so apparent on some of the American bands of the time that its easy to lump them all in together but I don't think its accurate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB0rEkC6PtM
Heres a great clip from
Don't Look Back that encapsulates what I mean. They used a bit of it in
No Direction Home. I can certainly understand why a lot of people saw this and thought that Dylan was an ******* (even to this day some people still feel this way) but as I say Dylan was as punk as they come back then and, with that, I feel comes a certain degree of being confrontational.