Record: Highway 61 Revisited
Release: August 1965
Songs / length: 9 / 51:26
Dylan's run of albums in 1965-66 (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde) is unmatched in all pop music history for its songwriting, sound and influence. Highway 61, the mythical road that connects Dylan's hometown in the cold north to the musical source in the Deep South, represents the mixture of blues, folk and rock & roll that inspired this album's sound, and it's always been the most consistent, musically accomplished and essential of the three albums for me.
Like A Rolling Stone, and the album, opens with a gunshot snare that sounds now like the starting gun for the sixties revolution. 1965 was the year everything changed in pop music, and it was the ultimate changeling himself, Bob Dylan, that unleashed these forces. Not only did he kill Tin Pan Alley and the hit factories of teenage love songs, but Dylan's longer, more literate songs also put the emphasis on what was being said over how singers said it. The lyrics on Highway 61 Revisited brought a new maturity and experimentalism to pop music that hadn't existed before, with an album clocking in at nearly an hour rather than the standard 30mins. Like A Rolling Stone, released as a single, was twice as long as most hit singles.
The album was recorded in June 1965, right after Dylan's return from England, a tour that has been forever memorialised in D. A. Pennebaker's essential documentary, Don't Look Back. The film shows the start of Dylan's shenanigans with the press; at his first interview in the VIP lounge of London Airport, he held up a large lightbulb in answer to the question about what his "message" was: "Keep a good head and always carry a lightbulb". There's not much live footage in the film, but by his own admission Dylan's live performances had grown a little stale and, on his return to the US, he looked to jettison his purely acoustic sound. Bringing in talented musicians like Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper helped to enhance the atmosphere of this album and make it soar musically. In fact, part of Bloomfield's genius, apart from being a sensational blues guitarist on a par with Eric Clapton, was quickly getting accustomed to Dylan's quirky sense of rhythm and phrasing.
Even more than the music, what makes Highway 61 Revisited so groundbreaking is that it's the first album that allows the unconscious mind to seep fully into its lyrics and sound, and on Like A Rolling Stone, whether he's talking about a girl (possibly Edie Sedgwick), his country or himself, is not as important as the brilliant imagery he summons up and that "thin wild mercury" sound of his mid-60s work. During the studio sessions, Dylan's stalwart producer Tom Wilson was nervous about the more loose studio arrangements for Highway 61 Revisited; whereas previous albums had been recorded quickly – Another Side Of Bob Dylan in one night, Bringing It All Back Home in two days – Highway 61 Revisited took about nine days. On the upside, this provided a treasure trove of alternative studio takes, as we saw in 2016's Cutting Edge bootleg.
Like A Rolling Stone: This song was released as a single in late July 1965, just days before his legendary Newport performance. That summer, Dylan had also finished writing his first novel, Tarantula, using William Burroughs' cut-up method. It wasn't published straight away though; in fact, writing a song such as Like A Rolling Stone made him give up any conventional literary ambitions, as he knew he'd finally found his voice in the pop song format, even though he had to redefine that format to suit his needs. According to Dylan in 1966, this track started out as a "long piece of vomit about 20 pages long", and has a "steady hatred", with Dylan moving from a fairytale opening ("once upon a time...") to Miss Lonely's fall from grace ("When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose"). Christopher Ricks, in Dylan's Visions of Sin, says Like A Rolling Stone is more than an apparent "triumph of gloating" at somebody's demise; instead, there's a sense of jealousy near the song's closing at Miss Lonely's self-reliance. Dylan reveals a deep longing to himself be a "complete unknown" with "no direction home". This narrative arc gives the song an added emotional depth, and as Dylan said in a 1978 interview, "You must be vulnerable to be sensitive to reality".
Tombstone Blues: With its perky Chuck Berry-style guitar riff and surreal lyrics ("the sun's not yellow, it's chicken"), the song combines the Chicago blues (he references the Mother of the Blues, Ma Rainey), Biblical references (John The Baptist, Philistines, Delilah) and a very modern 60s sensibility. I have to confess that I find the lyrics very hard to penetrate, but Dylan has a great knack of making the words align perfectly with the song's rhythm. For me, it summons up an atmosphere of confusion and flux, and the sense that established values of patriarchy ("the city fathers") and religion ("road map for your soul") were being increasingly questioned by this new generation, among which Dylan was one of the "pied pipers".
It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry: A mix of acoustic and electric blues, underpinned by a more languid rhythm (fitting given the narrator's "been up all night"), help to create an entirely new type of love song for Dylan. The lyrics are more straightforward, despite the song's cryptic title, with the standard blues trope of a glum guy ("can't buy a thrill") whose heart is yearning ("wanna be your lover, baby"). After the more visceral sounds and lyrics of the first two songs, it's a welcome relief and feels more joyous and hopeful in its outlook.
From A Buick 6: Another blues number, but this time the car replaces the train and likewise a more raucous sound replaces the languid rhythm of the previous song. Love is again at the heart of the song, which is dedicated to a "soulful mama" who provides comfort ("if I go down dyin', you know she bound to put a blanket on my bed"). As in Tombstone Blues, there's the same obsession with mortality that's been there since Dylan's first record, but it seems to reach a whole new fever pitch on this album, as if Dylan felt that all the assassinations that were plaguing American society in the 60s might mean the Grim Reaper would soon knock at his door too.
Ballad of Thin Man: Side 1 closes with one of Dylan's best and strangest social commentary songs, its dirge-like quality, combined with hipster piano and ghostly organ sounds, communicating disregard for the collapse of the old social order. Ostensibly, the song is about a square (Mr Jones) who finds himself increasingly bewildered ("something's happening here, but you don't know what it is") in an underground world of freaks, geeks, sword-swallowers and one-eyed midgets. Most critics seem to think the song's main target were the bourgeois journalists who kept pestering Dylan around this time.
Queen Jane Approximately: Musically, this song is more ramshackle than most others on the album, but for me this adds to its charm. Dylan is again directing his words to a mysterious woman (Miss Lonely is now Queen Jane), but he's almost pleading with her to get away from all the social madness she's mixed up in and "come see me" in a space where she won't be judged, with Dylan as the refuge ("somebody you don't have to speak to").
Highway 61 Revisited: Side 2 of this record is extraordinary and the title track is one of the highlights for me, with its energetic sound and playful lyrics. As someone whose been reading the Old Testament recently, Dylan's retelling of the Abraham & Isaac sacrificial story doesn't seem all that irreverent, and when you consider Dylan's Jewish heritage and that his father was called Abe, it puts the song in a new light. For Dylan, Highway 61 really was a mythical road that linked his hometown in the north to the southern states of America, and in each of the five verses it's the site and scene of resolution for all the problems presented and also a tribute to Robert Johnson, who as legend has it sold his soul to the devil on that very same highway. For Dylan, it's where the magic happens.
Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues: Dylan sounds weary from cross-country travel on this song, plunged into a surreal nightmare in Juarez, Mexico. The song is written like an odyssey, with the final verse summarising this journey from beginning ("I started out on burgundy") into descent ("but I soon hit the harder stuff") and then abandonment "when the game got rough", before the narrator has a moment of realisation ("I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough"). The song's title is a reference to a character in a Rimbaud poem, and there are literary references throughout, though not as many as found in the album's closing epic.
Desolation Row: On all the albums he'd released up to this point, Dylan was continually pushing at the boundaries of pop music, and with this song he let his imagination run wild. As in other songs on this record, the references to Biblical (Noah, Cain & Abel) and literary (Ophelia, Romeo) characters abound, as if the process of writing was like a dump truck into which Dylan could unload his head. Like Dante's Inferno, this feels like Dylan's descent into the underworld, or Desolation Row, but it's hard to make out if this imaginary place is a waste land dystopia, or whether it's a refuge for artists and scientists, the great visionaries that don't fit into mainstream society. As the only acoustic song on the record, Desolation Row itself feels like an outsider. My efforts to really interpret or understand the song always fall short, but there's something about its majesty that keeps drawing me back in.
Album rating: A++
Release: August 1965
Songs / length: 9 / 51:26
Dylan's run of albums in 1965-66 (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde) is unmatched in all pop music history for its songwriting, sound and influence. Highway 61, the mythical road that connects Dylan's hometown in the cold north to the musical source in the Deep South, represents the mixture of blues, folk and rock & roll that inspired this album's sound, and it's always been the most consistent, musically accomplished and essential of the three albums for me.
Like A Rolling Stone, and the album, opens with a gunshot snare that sounds now like the starting gun for the sixties revolution. 1965 was the year everything changed in pop music, and it was the ultimate changeling himself, Bob Dylan, that unleashed these forces. Not only did he kill Tin Pan Alley and the hit factories of teenage love songs, but Dylan's longer, more literate songs also put the emphasis on what was being said over how singers said it. The lyrics on Highway 61 Revisited brought a new maturity and experimentalism to pop music that hadn't existed before, with an album clocking in at nearly an hour rather than the standard 30mins. Like A Rolling Stone, released as a single, was twice as long as most hit singles.
The album was recorded in June 1965, right after Dylan's return from England, a tour that has been forever memorialised in D. A. Pennebaker's essential documentary, Don't Look Back. The film shows the start of Dylan's shenanigans with the press; at his first interview in the VIP lounge of London Airport, he held up a large lightbulb in answer to the question about what his "message" was: "Keep a good head and always carry a lightbulb". There's not much live footage in the film, but by his own admission Dylan's live performances had grown a little stale and, on his return to the US, he looked to jettison his purely acoustic sound. Bringing in talented musicians like Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper helped to enhance the atmosphere of this album and make it soar musically. In fact, part of Bloomfield's genius, apart from being a sensational blues guitarist on a par with Eric Clapton, was quickly getting accustomed to Dylan's quirky sense of rhythm and phrasing.
Even more than the music, what makes Highway 61 Revisited so groundbreaking is that it's the first album that allows the unconscious mind to seep fully into its lyrics and sound, and on Like A Rolling Stone, whether he's talking about a girl (possibly Edie Sedgwick), his country or himself, is not as important as the brilliant imagery he summons up and that "thin wild mercury" sound of his mid-60s work. During the studio sessions, Dylan's stalwart producer Tom Wilson was nervous about the more loose studio arrangements for Highway 61 Revisited; whereas previous albums had been recorded quickly – Another Side Of Bob Dylan in one night, Bringing It All Back Home in two days – Highway 61 Revisited took about nine days. On the upside, this provided a treasure trove of alternative studio takes, as we saw in 2016's Cutting Edge bootleg.
Here's my track-by-track rundown:
Like A Rolling Stone: This song was released as a single in late July 1965, just days before his legendary Newport performance. That summer, Dylan had also finished writing his first novel, Tarantula, using William Burroughs' cut-up method. It wasn't published straight away though; in fact, writing a song such as Like A Rolling Stone made him give up any conventional literary ambitions, as he knew he'd finally found his voice in the pop song format, even though he had to redefine that format to suit his needs. According to Dylan in 1966, this track started out as a "long piece of vomit about 20 pages long", and has a "steady hatred", with Dylan moving from a fairytale opening ("once upon a time...") to Miss Lonely's fall from grace ("When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose"). Christopher Ricks, in Dylan's Visions of Sin, says Like A Rolling Stone is more than an apparent "triumph of gloating" at somebody's demise; instead, there's a sense of jealousy near the song's closing at Miss Lonely's self-reliance. Dylan reveals a deep longing to himself be a "complete unknown" with "no direction home". This narrative arc gives the song an added emotional depth, and as Dylan said in a 1978 interview, "You must be vulnerable to be sensitive to reality".
Tombstone Blues: With its perky Chuck Berry-style guitar riff and surreal lyrics ("the sun's not yellow, it's chicken"), the song combines the Chicago blues (he references the Mother of the Blues, Ma Rainey), Biblical references (John The Baptist, Philistines, Delilah) and a very modern 60s sensibility. I have to confess that I find the lyrics very hard to penetrate, but Dylan has a great knack of making the words align perfectly with the song's rhythm. For me, it summons up an atmosphere of confusion and flux, and the sense that established values of patriarchy ("the city fathers") and religion ("road map for your soul") were being increasingly questioned by this new generation, among which Dylan was one of the "pied pipers".
It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry: A mix of acoustic and electric blues, underpinned by a more languid rhythm (fitting given the narrator's "been up all night"), help to create an entirely new type of love song for Dylan. The lyrics are more straightforward, despite the song's cryptic title, with the standard blues trope of a glum guy ("can't buy a thrill") whose heart is yearning ("wanna be your lover, baby"). After the more visceral sounds and lyrics of the first two songs, it's a welcome relief and feels more joyous and hopeful in its outlook.
From A Buick 6: Another blues number, but this time the car replaces the train and likewise a more raucous sound replaces the languid rhythm of the previous song. Love is again at the heart of the song, which is dedicated to a "soulful mama" who provides comfort ("if I go down dyin', you know she bound to put a blanket on my bed"). As in Tombstone Blues, there's the same obsession with mortality that's been there since Dylan's first record, but it seems to reach a whole new fever pitch on this album, as if Dylan felt that all the assassinations that were plaguing American society in the 60s might mean the Grim Reaper would soon knock at his door too.
Ballad of Thin Man: Side 1 closes with one of Dylan's best and strangest social commentary songs, its dirge-like quality, combined with hipster piano and ghostly organ sounds, communicating disregard for the collapse of the old social order. Ostensibly, the song is about a square (Mr Jones) who finds himself increasingly bewildered ("something's happening here, but you don't know what it is") in an underground world of freaks, geeks, sword-swallowers and one-eyed midgets. Most critics seem to think the song's main target were the bourgeois journalists who kept pestering Dylan around this time.
Queen Jane Approximately: Musically, this song is more ramshackle than most others on the album, but for me this adds to its charm. Dylan is again directing his words to a mysterious woman (Miss Lonely is now Queen Jane), but he's almost pleading with her to get away from all the social madness she's mixed up in and "come see me" in a space where she won't be judged, with Dylan as the refuge ("somebody you don't have to speak to").
Highway 61 Revisited: Side 2 of this record is extraordinary and the title track is one of the highlights for me, with its energetic sound and playful lyrics. As someone whose been reading the Old Testament recently, Dylan's retelling of the Abraham & Isaac sacrificial story doesn't seem all that irreverent, and when you consider Dylan's Jewish heritage and that his father was called Abe, it puts the song in a new light. For Dylan, Highway 61 really was a mythical road that linked his hometown in the north to the southern states of America, and in each of the five verses it's the site and scene of resolution for all the problems presented and also a tribute to Robert Johnson, who as legend has it sold his soul to the devil on that very same highway. For Dylan, it's where the magic happens.
Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues: Dylan sounds weary from cross-country travel on this song, plunged into a surreal nightmare in Juarez, Mexico. The song is written like an odyssey, with the final verse summarising this journey from beginning ("I started out on burgundy") into descent ("but I soon hit the harder stuff") and then abandonment "when the game got rough", before the narrator has a moment of realisation ("I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough"). The song's title is a reference to a character in a Rimbaud poem, and there are literary references throughout, though not as many as found in the album's closing epic.
Desolation Row: On all the albums he'd released up to this point, Dylan was continually pushing at the boundaries of pop music, and with this song he let his imagination run wild. As in other songs on this record, the references to Biblical (Noah, Cain & Abel) and literary (Ophelia, Romeo) characters abound, as if the process of writing was like a dump truck into which Dylan could unload his head. Like Dante's Inferno, this feels like Dylan's descent into the underworld, or Desolation Row, but it's hard to make out if this imaginary place is a waste land dystopia, or whether it's a refuge for artists and scientists, the great visionaries that don't fit into mainstream society. As the only acoustic song on the record, Desolation Row itself feels like an outsider. My efforts to really interpret or understand the song always fall short, but there's something about its majesty that keeps drawing me back in.
Album rating: A++
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