Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisted by: Tom Bradbury Sun:11-Mar-07 Label: Columbia Year: 1965 WB rating 92 out of 100

“Well I started off on burgundy, but I soon hit the harder stuff”, Dylan  informs us on ‘Just Like Tom Thumb Blues’. This sentiment rings true throughout Highway 61 Revisited, released in August 1965, which builds on the momentum from Bringing It All Back Home, released earlier that year. Like Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 is an electric album, but unlike that recording, where the instrumentation was raw and minimalist, on Highway 61 Dylan and producer Tom Wilson employ a much fuller sound – particularly through Al Kooper’s organ. Likewise Dylan expands on the thematic dynamics which made Bringing It All Back Home such a riveting album. Dylan’s anger is more focused, his scorn better harnessed, with critiques cutting like a knife through the hubris of middle America -  especially in tracks such as ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, and ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’.

‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is the pinnacle of Dylan’s early career – the man admitted as much himself, although he has never been one to worry about self-aggrandisement. There are certainly few album openers in history that are so confronting both musically and lyrically. Kooper provides one of pop music’s most memorable organ lines, which only exists because he was able to sneak his way into the recording room when Tom Wilson wasn’t looking. “How does it feel, to be on your own?” Dylan asks the object of his derision, but it is also a question that he could have asked himself, given the tumultuous nature of the year he had just had, having been rebuked by his folk audience for abandoning a clear political message in his music. No longer the darling of the folk scene, Dylan had the new challenge of winning over the rock audience, demonstrating that it was possible to groove and be poetic at the same time.  Nowhere is this done better than on the highly overlooked, ‘Tombstone Blues’, which sounds like it could have been a Rolling Stones B-side from the same era. The drum beat is steady as a freight train, with a sped-up blues chord progression. Hey, you can dance to this! But then there’s the lyrics – “The ghost of Belle Starr she hands down her wits/To Jezebel the nun she violently knits/A bald wig for Jack the Ripper who sits/At the head of the chamber of commerce”.

In ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, Dylan demonstrates that he can do what few other artists are capable of – make lyrics musical, not just through the sound of the words but their content as well. Every inflection has meaning and emotional resonance, in a perfect marriage of sound and intent. Any review of a Dylan album must focus on the lyrics, because words are for Dylan what the guitar is to Hendrix. Each phrase is carefully considered, sounding both like spoken word and melodic singing simultaneously. Just listen to the title track, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’: “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’/Abe said ‘Man you must be putting me o’/God said ‘no’, Abe said ‘what?’/God said ‘you can do what you want Abe but the next time you see me coming you better run’. This was not the typical matter of rock songs – many have tried to replicate it since, but none have done it better.

Dylan’s genius is such that he makes his arrogance seem like virtue and his smugness compelling. In the spiteful ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’, Dylan growls “You know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is…Do you, Mr Jones”. Dylan clearly thought that he knew what was happening, and his self-belief comes out with every obnoxious inflection. On Highway 61 Revisited he is at the top of his game and he knows it, sure enough of himself to scorn the folk scene in which he first found fame and follow his own path – Dylan refused to be owned by anybody. As a result, Highway 61 Revisited finds Dylan in an instrumentally adventurous mood. Throughout his career Dylan has been a consumer of musical styles, swallowing them up and disposing of them at his own leisure, all the while keeping artistic unity by the use of his distinctive voice and unmistakable lyrics. Highway 61 Revisited is the sound of Dylan revelling in his musical freedom, breaking free of the shackles of the instrumentally-sparse folk scene of the early ‘60’s – a middle finger that reverberated throughout the world.

Dylan’s experimentation with style means that one or two songs are more musical vignettes than lyrically powerful songs. ‘It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry’, is rather monotonous and musically uninspired, and is an early indication of one of the problems that would plague Dylan later on in his career: trigger-happiness with instrumentation at the expense of melody and songwriting, resulting in horrible datedness. Highway 61 Revisited is not an album without weak tracks, yet it is an album that contains peaks that only a select number of others equal. One of these is the poignant ‘Desolation Row’, which lasts for over eleven minutes but never tires. The accompanying guitarist assists Dylan in creating the epic aesthetic of the song – spiralling cadences saturated with reverb that beautifully augment Dylan’s apocalyptic lyrics – “The fortune-telling lady has even taken all her things inside”.

‘Queen Jane approximately’ is rumoured to be about Joan Baez, yet Dylan could just as easily be thinking of himself when he sings: “you're tired of yourself and all of your creations… And you're sick of all this repetition”. His stubborn refusal to be held captive to his songbook is well-documented, both by Dylanologists and the remarks of the Bard himself. Dylan’s creativity and originality result in a new direction on Highway 61 Revisited, which is part of what makes it a great album – its not flawless but it is Dylan, and that word alone speaks more than any adjective in the English language. Creativity and iconoclasm in the possession of a genius always makes for timelessness, and that’s why young songwriters are as enamoured with Dylan now as much as they were forty years ago.