Highway 61 Revisited (song)
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"Highway 61 Revisited" is the title track of Bob Dylan's 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. It was also released as the B-side to the single "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" later the same year.
The song has five stanzas. In each stanza, someone describes an unusual problem that is ultimately resolved on Highway 61. In Verse 1, God tells Abraham to "kill me a son". God wants the killing done on Highway 61. Abraham is also the name of Dylan's own father. Verse 2 describes a poor fellow, Sam, who is beyond the helping of the welfare department. He is told to go down Highway 61.
In the third verse, a "Mack the Finger" has this problem: "I got forty red white and blue shoe strings / And a thousand telephones that don't ring". "Louie the King" solves the problem with Highway 61. Verse 4 is about the "second mother" and the "seventh son", both on Highway 61.
The fifth and last verse is the story of a bored gambler, trying "to create the next world war". His promoter tells him to "put some bleachers out in the sun / And have it on Highway 61". There is an evident political undertone in this absurd tale.
There is a pause in each verse while Dylan waits for some event in the story to finish; in the third verse, for example, the pause occurs while Louie the King attempts to resolve the shoestring-and-telephones problem. This gap in the singing is filled with Al Kooper's imitation police siren sound effect.
The song was covered by Polly Jean Harvey on her 1992 album, Rid of Me. It was also covered by Johnny Winter, who made it a live standard of his, notably performed at the 30th Anniversary Celebration concert, Billy Joel and Johnny Cash (for the soundtrack to the 2003 film The Hunted).
