Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" Album Turns 50

[Miles Archer]

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/happy-birthday-highway-61-dylans-weirdest-funniest-album-turns-50-20150827

Happy 50th birthday to Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan's strangest, funniest, most baffling and most perfect album. Released on August 30th, 1965, it arrived just five months after his previous masterpiece, Bringing It All Back Home, but this was a different guy making a different album, a folk rogue embracing the weirdness and spook of electric rock & roll. "The songs on this specific record are not so much songs but rather exercises in tonal breath control," Dylan explains in his wonderfully insane liner notes. "The subject matter — tho meaningless as it is — has something to do with the beautiful strangers." And that's what the nine songs on Highway 61 add up to: a late-night road trip through an America full of beautiful strangers who'll never get back home.

Highway 61 is the middle album in the trilogy of Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde on Blonde—from that moment when Dylan flipped for the Beatles, went electric and banged out these three rock & roll albums in the space of 14 manic months, three albums everybody (including Dylan) has been trying to live up to (or just plain imitate) ever since. All three have different flavors — if Bringing It All Back Home takes off from the Beatles, Highway 61 is the Stones and Blonde on Blonde is Smokey Robinson — but unlike the other two, Highway 61 never lets up. This album has no "On the Road Again" or "Obviously Five Believers" — a moment of pleasant filler where you can catch your breath. Each of the nine songs tells its own immaculately frightful story.

And more than Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 is a band album, rather than a solo album. The songs are juiced with perfect moments of musical interaction — Charlie McCoy's guitar on "Desolation Row," Paul Griffin's piano on "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," Bobby Gregg's drums on "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," Michael Bloomfield's twang in "Tombstone Blues," everybody and everything on "Ballad of a Thin Man." Even the infamously out-of-tune guitar on "Queen Jane Approximately" adds to the spirit.

I first heard "Like a Rolling Stone" on the radio as a little kid in the Seventies, on a short-lived Boston Top 40 AM station called WACQ — the voice so threatening, so disturbing, sneering like the Fonz, except also a cool voice that would make anyone itch to join the wild adventure he was singing about. He did that trademark Dylan move of changing his mind about the lyrics in the middle of a word — "To be haaaa-on your own!" (And to think some people still trust this man's lyric sheets.) How did he get away with that? It was a voice like nothing else I'd ever heard. Then the DJ segued right from "Like a Rolling Stone" to the disco hit "Heaven on the Seventh Floor," about getting stuck in an elevator with a foxy lady. Hard to believe that station went out of business.

[Enthusiast]

1. Historical

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