A dream bill of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and more are currently appearing at the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts – albeit in photographic form, in the Jorgensen Gallery.

“Eight Days a Week: An Illustrated Record of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” which opened in September and will run through December 13, is the product of years of research, archiving, and fandom by Ken Best – journalist, WHUS disk jockey, and recently retired University Communications specialist.

“I wanted to show the music industry as well as the music,” Best says. “Because, as an industry, you don’t just have musicians, you have artists doing graphic design, you have photographers, you have posters, you have authors and journalists producing books, and I’ve got a ton of that stuff that I’ve collected, starting with my time in high school.”

Best, a Woodstock attendee who interviewed numerous rock legends during his time as a journalist, assembled the impressively diverse collection in the Jorgensen Gallery from his own archives and from the work of Connecticut photographer Joe Sia, whose iconic photo of Jimi Hendrix in New Haven – known as “The Shadow” – adorned the cover of his and Best’s book “Eight Days a Week: An Illustrated Record of Rock and Roll,” which gives the exhibit its title.

“Joe’s photos from the book had never been seen all together before, other than in the book, so that was something I wanted to focus on,” says Best. Sia, who died in 2003, was a renowned photographer whose first published photo graced the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine in 1969.

Visitors to the exhibit can now see 53 striking photographs of performers from the period when rock ‘n’ roll went from being dismissed as a teen fad to being a serious popular art form.

But the exhibit also includes historic vinyl LPs; posters; promotional materials; books; magazines; and other ephemera that together tell the story of an American form of popular music that went on to conquer the world.

“The roots of rock ‘n’ roll are in jazz, the blues, gospel music, and country,” Best says. “I hope that people come away from the exhibit with an understanding of how those influences came together to make rock ‘n’ roll, and how rock ‘n’ roll then developed in lots of different directions.”

At first glimpse, there may not seem to be much in common between rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Chuck Barry and heavy metal thunderers like Led Zeppelin, but Best says a straight line can be drawn between them, and further on into the present.

“You start with country blues, and that becomes electric blues and r&b, and that becomes an open door for English guitarists like Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, or Jimmy Page to take things to new levels of baroque extravagance, as Sam Charters said in his book ‘Walking a Blues Road,’ the anthology of his  pioneering writings about the blues that are part of his blues archives here at the Dodd Center,” Best says.

Best says the experience of putting the exhibit together was gratifying, and that he’d like to take it on the road – ideally to somewhere in Fairfield County, where Sia lived.

For now, though, the exhibit has a few more weeks at the Jorgensen Gallery and Best, who spins records every Wednesday at 3 p.m. on WHUS, still has his ears open for good music.

“I hope people come away from this with an appreciation not just of where music is now, but how it got there,” he says.