Don’t anyone mention the Cavaliers
Tying in to the current discussion I want to take issue with this from the OP.
The rise of rock and roll music did not lead the change in culture. Instead it followed and reflected the ongoing changes in both American and British culture as an ongoing process. To say that ‘cultural changes that came with it’ is to put the cart before the horse.
In truth, anglophone culture was primed for serious change following the 1940s. The hardships of the depression, the war and following - especially the hard times in the UK post-war - combined with new and unprecedented prosperity in the US in the mid and later 1950s created a situation where change was coming. The only real issue was who and what would be the figurehead (not the leader). Like a traditional volkerwanderung, there was no real leader of the changes. But various people and groups were positioned properly - by happenstance, intentional placement and opportunism - to become the focus for various high-profile groups at different times.
Going back not that many years from the Beatles, Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse were in their times the most famous figures on Earth. Literally. Everybody in every country that had access to media knew them and celebrated them. Writers devoted endless inches of prose to their wonderfulness. Philosophers talked about how they had transformed culture.
Their worlds changed out from under them in a historical blink of an eye. The Beatles are luckier. Rock music continues in a way that silent comedies and cartoon shorts did not. It has surprised everyone in its continued relevance but that doesn’t imply it can’t be supplanted.
The Beatles are important because of the continued importance of rock, and the thousands of other figures before and after that rock continues to celebrate. I was watching Ed Sullivan on February 9, 1964, so I saw Beatlemania in America from the instant it started. I was already listening to rock music on the radio, though. The Beatles didn’t invent it or its culture.
The Beatles are supremely important. I’ve said in a million threads that they’re the best. But they are first among equals, and it was that flood of groups and individuals that started in the 1950s for the Beatles to steal so much from and the superflood of groups and individuals later that picked up the banner and ran with it that made rock music the “sound of a generation.” They were the right people to be the face of change - much better than Dylan (he was as big as Chaplin and hated it so much that he destroyed himself). We need to remember though that “the times, they are a-changing” preceded the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written here, except the claim that I “put the cart before the horse”. My intent, at least, was to put them alongside each other (although of course that doesn’t make sense metaphorically). Had I meant that rock music caused the changes in the culture, I would have written “there were old people [in the 1980s] who still hadn’t accepted ‘this newfangled rock and roll’ and the cultural changes that came *from *it”.
IOW, an accurate paraphrase of what I was *trying *to say would be: “there were old people [in the 1980s] who still hadn’t accepted ‘this newfangled rock and roll’ and all the other cultural changes that came along at around the same time”. 
Huh? First of all, I don’t know that he was ever as big as Chaplin (though admittedly I’m biased because my grandmother was briefly engaged to Charlie). But he certainly seemed poised to become the leader of the “New Left” counterculture. Which is what Joan Baez expected, and she has described how bitterly disappointed she was when he so abruptly turned away from that path in the mid-'60s. Is that what you mean by “destroyed himself”? Because many people (including me) would argue that his best album was Blood on the Tracks, released a decade after the other contenders for that title (Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde) when he was threatening to be seen as a nostalgia act. Or do you mean the dissolution of his marriage? Blood on the Tracks, it would appear, was inspired by that very breakup. So I’m just not clear about when, or how, he “destroyed himself”. 