Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited

Before the film, A Complete Unknown, was known to this blogger, an interest in revisiting the music of Bob Dylan surfaced last year after close to four decades of not hearing much of his remarkable work.  After acquiring John Wesley Harding, which had not been heard before, a spate of other albums were purchased, including such classics as Blood on the Tracks, Bringing It All Back Home, Blonde on Blonde and, more recently, Before the Flood, the great live album with The Band.

A favorite of the Dylan recordings that have been rediscovered is Highway 61 Revisited, released at the end of August 1965 (when this blogger was a day shy of two months old) and appearing just four months after Bringing It All Back Home.  It's hard to argue that, with Blonde on Blonde being 22 months away, Dylan was at his creative zenith, churning out amazing songs with startling frequency on albums that redefined much of popular music.

Obviously, his move from acoustic folk to electric rock was controversial to the ardent fans of the former —and the fourth volume of the Bootleg Series comprising two discs of the notorious Royal Albert Hall concert in London in May 1966 during which an outraged Luddite yelled "Judas," to which Dylan sardonically replied, "I don't believe you"—is a fantastic document of that move.

Highway 61 Revisited is a staggering record from the opening "Like A Rolling Stone" to the rollicking "Tombstone Blues" to the "Ballad of a Thin Man" and ending with the epic "Desolation Row."  With musicians like Mike Bloomfield and his impressive guitar work and Al Kooper's iconic organ on that first tune and elsewhere, not to mention Bobby Gregg's drums and Charley McCoy's guitar, accompanying Dylan's impressionistic and immersive lyrics, the album is a masterpiece from start to finish.  

Listeners expecting to get some enlightenment from Dylan's liner notes can be amused by the wordplay and seemingly stream of consciousness expressions including his remark that "the songs on this specific record are not so much songs but rather exercises in tonal breath control" while the lyrics about "beautiful strangers, Vivaldi's green jacket & the holy slow train."  Dylan often commented that the content meant various things to different people and it may be better to enjoy his way with language and the performances of the musicians rather than to try and interpret the so-called "voice of his generation."