Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan (1965)
I’m soft-launching into my love of Bob Dylan’s catalog with a week of Dylan posts
A few months earlier in 1965, the world got Dylan’s fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home. That record was split in half. The first side was the musical evolution of noisy, ramshackle rock n roll, while the second side was closer to his previous acoustic sound but was dedicated to Dylan’s emerging lyrical penchant for deeply literate surrealist epics.
Highway 61 is a more complete interpolation of these two big changes to Dylan’s music.
The title track was recorded in a separate section, shortly before his world famous “Dylan plugs in” turn at the Newport Folk Festival in July of 1965. It grew out of a long piece he wrote examining how dissatisfied he’d become with playing other peoples’ games.
The rest of the tracks were cut a month later with a new producer but substantially the same band.
Dylan had been filling his head not just with a hundred strains of American song tradition, but also with seemingly every book he could get his hands on. He had become a particular fan of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and the hallmarks of surrealist art movement are evident all over this record in the form of “the grotesque,” confounding expectations with physical deformity, absurd situations, and incongruous language. It’s a sort of poetic body horror that Dylan has used to great effect ever since.
There are plenty of side trips back into raucous countrified blues rock with less serious lyrics. From A Buick 6 and It Takes A Lot To Laugh… are great counterweights that keep the whole thing from collapsing under the sheer density of Ballad Of A Thin Man and Desolation Row.
This all makes for a dense and exhilarating collection of tunes, full of depth and adventure and harrowing fun.
