Oooh, that's definitely a good one. I might be inclined to do him and the Beatles as they're contemporaries, and I feel like I'm leaning on punk a bit much in these lectures. And with Dylan, it wasn't just the sin of electrification, he also confounded by recording in Nashville and made a lot of public statements that pissed off folkies. Yeah, that might be the better twinning even if punk fans are generally more intolerant of diversity. John Doe's book on the early L.A. punk scene really illustrates well how diverse it originally was and how, as it grew, fans, not bands, established an orthodoxy of sound, behaviour, and dress, and basically chased out a lot of strange groups.
Actually, now that I think about it, comparing folk fans and punk fans is the even better one because, as many have argued (and I mostly agree), punk and folk are ideologically quite compatible, apart from aesthetics. They share the loathing of commercialism, the mass, and celebrity, and privilege songs about honesty and from experience, along with breaking down the barrier between performer and audience. And, in practice, fans tend to think of themselves as the real keepers of the music (hence the outrage by unacceptable change).
Yeah, he's in that Fall camp, I think, where the core fans don't get pissed off with the stylistic changes. Some stick around, some go, but people don't get offended. All that ends up being a completely different topic of why are some artists allowed to change their sound without their fans clutching at pearls and dropping monocles.