Day 242: Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited
For a music fan, I’ve listened to a pitiful amount of Bob Dylan, I honestly think the first time I’ve ever sat down to listen to a full Bob Dylan album was when I listened to Nashville Skyline on day 150. I though I’d have to listen to one more of his before the year is over just to round up the project, so today I thought I’d listen to Highway 61 Revisited.
Album cover courtesy of Columbia
Highway 61 Revisited was released in 1965 as Bob Dylan’s sixth studio album. It came to when Dylan returned from touring in England, exhausted, disillusioned and ready to quit making music. He eventually sat down to write what he described as a “long piece of vomit, 20 pages long” and compiled the song “Like a Rolling Stone” out of the word vomit. It was different to anything else he’d ever written, and it reinstated his spark to write more music.
His previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, was the first one where he’d switched from doing acoustic folk into having a backing band consisting of various session musicians, and Highway 61 Revisited also featured rock musicians backing him, and it’s been described as the first rock album that Dylan made. It was a critical success when it came out, and it’s built a reputation since as one of Dylan’s finest, as well as being featured on many lists of the greatest albums of all time.
I came to find that Highway 61 Revisited is an album that you have to listen to closely to appreciate it fully, as if you zone out for even a second, you’ll have no idea what the hell he’s talking about – for a few songs where I was listening a bit less intently, I kept just hearing snippets of nonsense word salad, until you focus and start finding the narrative. But that’s the good part of it: his lyrics are sometimes like a surrealist puzzle that you want to solve; it’s the sort of music where you have to sit with the words and wonder what they mean to get the full experience.
But I’m sure every person reading this will know that Dylan is a good songwriter. I just wonder who will become the voice of the generation from this time because I’ll be honest, it kind of feels like slim pickings in comparison. The writing is beautiful, and it’s a great album for feeling lost and confused. There’s a reason why Bob Dylan is considered on of the all-time greats in songwriting – he says he’s a poet first and a musician second, and that’s probably what makes him so good.
It’s a mystery to me why I never listen to Bob Dylan, it’s not like I’ve never heard anyone tell me he’s good. But once again, better late than never – I probably wouldn’t have kindled this love without this project, so I’m counting that as a huge win. I’m giving Highway 61 Revisited a 9/10 now, but I’ll return to it with a bit more time in the future.
The video below is from a performance that’s so controversial that it has its own Wikipedia entry: a few days after he released “Like a Rolling Stone”, he went on stage at the Newport Folk Festival and did his first ever live show with electric instruments. Some of the audience booed him.