| Highway 61 Revisited | ||||
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| Studio album by Bob Dylan | ||||
| Released | August 30, 1965 | |||
| Recorded | Columbia Studio A, 799 Seventh Avenue, New York, June 15, 1965 – August 4, 1965 | |||
| Genre | Rock, folk rock, blues rock | |||
| Length | 51:26 | |||
| Label | Columbia | |||
| Producer | Bob Johnston (except "Like a Rolling Stone" – Tom Wilson) | |||
| Bob Dylan chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Highway 61 Revisited | ||||
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Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. It was released in August 1965 by Columbia Records. On his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan devoted Side One of the album to songs accompanied by an electric rock band, and Side Two to solo acoustic numbers. For Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan used rock backing on every track, except for the closing 11-minute acoustic song, "Desolation Row". Critics have written that Dylan's ability to combine driving, complex, blues-based rock music with the power of poetry made Highway 61 Revisited one of the most influential albums ever recorded.
Leading off with his hit single of that summer, "Like a Rolling Stone", the album features many songs that have been acclaimed as classics and that Dylan has continued to perform live over his long career, including "Highway 61 Revisited", "Ballad of a Thin Man", and "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues". Dylan named the album after one of the great North American arteries, which connected his birthplace in Minnesota to southern cities famed for their musical heritage, including St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans.
Highway 61 Revisited peaked at number three in the United States charts and number four in the United Kingdom, while its single, "Like a Rolling Stone", reached number two in the US and number four in the UK. It is often considered by critics as his magnum opus. The album has received multiple accolades. It was ranked number four on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and "Like a Rolling Stone", "Desolation Row", and "Highway 61 Revisited" were listed at number one, number 185 and number 364, respectively, on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.
Contents |
While Dylan was growing up in the 1950s, before the interstate highway system was built, Highway 61 stretched from the Mississippi delta to the Canadian border, running through Duluth, where he was born, and St. Paul. Along the way, the highway passed nearby the birthplaces and homes of Southern music greats such as Muddy Waters, Son House, Elvis Presley, and Charley Patton. The "empress of the blues", Bessie Smith, met her death in an automobile accident on Highway 61, and blues legend Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul to the devil at the highway's crossroads with Highway 49.[1] The highway was also the subject of several blues classics, notably Roosevelt Sykes's "Highway 61 Blues" (1932) and Mississippi Fred McDowell's "61 Highway" (1964).[2]
For most of its nearly 1,700 miles (2,700 km), Highway 61 paralleled the Mississippi River, providing a migratory route in the 1920s through the 1950s for African Americans leaving the Deep South for better economic prospects. With them, they brought their music. As biographer Robert Shelton commented, "Jazz came up the river. Blues came up the river. A lot of great basic American culture came right up that highway and up that river."[3] As a teenager, Dylan hitched rides on Highway 61 to catch live rhythm 'n blues acts around St. Paul.[4] "Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began," Dylan wrote in his autobiography Chronicles. "I always felt like I'd started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere, even down in to the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors.... It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood."[5]
Dylan told Shelton that he had to overcome considerable resistance at Columbia Records, to give his album the title, "I wanted to call that album Highway 61 Revisited. Nobody understood it. I had to go up the fucking ladder until finally the word came down and said: 'Let him call it what he wants to call it'."[6]
Dylan critic Michael Gray has argued that, at the time of its release, the novelty of the songs on Highway 61 Revisited dazzled its listeners. But, for Gray, the very title of the album represents Dylan's insistence that his songs are rooted in the traditions of the blues. "The album title announces we are in for a long revisit. Many bluesmen had been there before [Dylan], all recording versions of a blues called "Highway 61".[7]
In May 1965, Dylan returned from his tour of England feeling tired and dissatisfied with his material. "I was going to quit singing. I was very drained… I was playing a lot of songs I didn't want to play," Dylan told Nat Hentoff in 1966. "It's very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don't dig you."[8]
Out of this dissatisfaction, Dylan wrote an extended piece of verse which Dylan described as a "long piece of vomit".[9] He refined this long poem into a song consisting of four verses and a chorus—"Like a Rolling Stone".[10] Dylan told Hentoff that the process of writing and recording "Like a Rolling Stone" washed away this dissatisfaction, and renewed his enthusiasm for creating music.[8] Speaking of the breakthrough of writing that song, forty years later, Dylan told Robert Hilburn in 2004, "It's like a ghost is writing a song like that… You don't know what it means except the ghost picked me to write the song."[11]
Highway 61 Revisited was recorded in two blocks of recording sessions, which took place in Studio A of Columbia Records in New York City, located at 799 Seventh Avenue, just north of West 52nd Street.[12] The first session, June 15 and June 16, was produced by Tom Wilson and resulted in the single, "Like a Rolling Stone".[13] On July 25, Dylan performed his controversial electric set at the Newport Folk Festival, where some sections of the crowd booed his performance.[14] Four days after Newport, Dylan returned to the recording studio. From July 29 to August 4, Dylan and his band completed recording Highway 61 Revisited, but under the supervision of a new producer, Bob Johnston.[15]
Tom Wilson produced the initial recording sessions for Highway 61 Revisited on June 15–16, 1965. Dylan was backed by Bobby Gregg on drums, Joe Macho, Jr. on bass, Paul Griffin on piano, and Frank Owens on guitar.[16] On lead guitar, Dylan recruited an old acquaintance, Michael Bloomfield, of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.[17] June 15 began with takes of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" and an outtake, "Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence"; versions of these songs recorded on the 15th were released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991.[18] Recording then moved to "Like a Rolling Stone"; on this day, the song was recorded in 3/4 time with Dylan playing piano, and one of these takes was subsequently released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3.[19]
Dylan and his band returned to Studio A the following day, where they devoted virtually the entire session to recording "Like a Rolling Stone". Present on this occasion was Al Kooper, a young musician invited by Wilson to observe, but who wanted to play on the session.[20] Kooper managed to sit in on the session, and he improvised an organ riff which would be a major element of the song.[21] The fourth take was ultimately selected as the master, but Dylan and the band would persist in recording a further eleven takes.[18] After "Like a Rolling Stone" had been completed, Dylan improvised a short song which has remained unreleased.[22] Although the song has been bootlegged under the title "Lunatic Princess Revisited",[23] Dylan researcher Clinton Heylin refers to the track as "Why Do You Have to Be So Frantic?", after its opening line,[22] and Tim Dunn has noted that Dylan copyrighted a song with this title.[24] Heylin calls the song a "weird little one-verse fragment", but claims that the riff is the blueprint of Dylan's 1979 evangelical composition, "Slow Train".[22]
To create the material for his next album, Dylan spent a month writing songs in his new home in the Byrdcliffe artists' colony of Woodstock in upstate New York.[25] Four days after the Newport Folk Festival, on July 29, 1965, Dylan returned to Studio A. Backed by the same musicians from the previous studio session, Dylan no longer employed Tom Wilson as producer.[26] Instead, he was replaced by Columbia producer Bob Johnston, who had lobbied to work with Dylan, although he was not involved in Wilson's dismissal.[a 1]
Their first session together was devoted to three songs. After recording multiple takes of "Tombstone Blues", "It Takes a Lot to Laugh" and "Positively 4th Street", master takes were successfully recorded.[18] "Tombstone Blues" and "It Takes a Lot to Laugh" were included in the final album, but "Positively 4th Street" was issued as a single-only release. At the close of the July 29 session, Dylan attempted to record "Desolation Row", accompanied by Al Kooper on electric guitar and Harvey Brooks on bass. There was no drummer, as the drummer had gone home.[27] This electric version was eventually released in 2005, on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7.[28]
On July 30, Dylan and his band returned to Studio A and recorded three songs. A master take of "From a Buick 6" was successfully recorded and later included on the final album, but most of the session was devoted to "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" Dylan was not satisfied with the results, and set the song aside for a later date; it was eventually re-recorded with the Hawks in October.[29]
During the next two days, Dylan spent much time writing out chord charts for the remaining six songs he had yet to record. Sessions resumed at Studio A on August 2, this time with Sam Lay sitting in on drums early in the session with Gregg replacing him later.[30][31] "Highway 61 Revisited" is thus the only song on the album that Lay played on.[32] "Highway 61 Revisited", "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", "Queen Jane Approximately", and "Ballad of a Thin Man" were all recorded successfully and master takes were selected for the album.[33][34][35]
One final session was held on August 4, again at Studio A. Most of the session was devoted to completing "Desolation Row", which had already been recorded with an electric guitar accompaniment. It was finally recorded with just two acoustic guitars. According to Johnston, respected Nashville musician Charlie McCoy happened to visit New York, and Johnston invited him to attend the Dylan session.[36] According to some sources, seven takes of "Desolation Row" were recorded, and takes six and seven were spliced together for the master recording.[37]
Highway 61 Revisited commences with a song which has been described as revolutionary in its combination of electric guitar licks, organ chords, and Dylan’s voice, at once young and jeeringly cynical.”[38] Dylan critic Michael Gray has described 'Like a Rolling Stone' as "a chaotic amalgam of blues, impressionism, allegory, and an intense directness in the central chorus: 'How does it feel?'"[38] The song was notable for eschewing the traditional themes of popular song, such as love, and instead expressed resentment and a yearning for revenge.[39][40] Author Oliver Trager describes the lyrics as "Dylan's sneer at a woman who has fallen from grace and is reduced to fending for herself in a hostile, unfamiliar world."[40] As well as contemplating the downfall of the central character, 'Miss Lonely', the song has been said to have a wider compass. Dylan biographer Robert Shelton wrote that the song expresses "compassion for those who have dropped out of bourgeois surroundings", and hence describes "the loss of innocence and the harshness of experience".[41]
Edie Sedgwick, a socialite and actress in the Factory scene of pop artist Andy Warhol, has been suggested as the basis of Miss Lonely.[42] Other people who have been seen as possible targets of the song include Joan Baez, Marianne Faithful and Bob Neuwirth.[43][44][45] Biographer Howard Sounes argues that the song is not necessarily about one single person but was aimed generally at those Dylan perceived as being "phony".[46]
This fast-paced blues song, driven by Michael Bloomfield’s lead guitar, assembles a parade of historical characters—outlaw Belle Starr, biblical temptress Delilah, Jack the Ripper (transformed into a successful businessman), John the Baptist (transformed into a torturer), blueswoman Ma Rainey who is in bed with classicist Beethoven—to sketch an absurdist account of contemporary America.[47] The influence of Dylan’s hero, Woody Guthrie, has been heard in the way the chorus of this song, "Mama’s in the factory, she ain’t got no shoes/ Daddy’s in the alley, he’s looking for food/ I’m in the kitchen with the tombstone blues" echoes Guthrie’s "Mama was in the kitchen, preparing to eat/ Sis was in the pantry looking for yeast/ Pa was in the cellar mixing up the hops/ And Brother’s at the window, he’s watching for the cops" in the song "Taking It Easy".[48] But for many critics, the reality hovering behind the song is the then-escalating Vietnam War; the "king of the Philistines" who sends his slaves "out into the jungle" has been heard as a reference to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson may also be present as the Commander In Chief who declares, "The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken".[47]
This song began life under the title "Phantom Engineer", and was first recorded on the same day as "Like a Rolling Stone"—June 16, 1965.[49][50] This earlier version has a faster tempo and slightly different lyrics;[49][50] it was eventually released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3. Dylan performed this formulation of the song as part of his electric set at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965.[51][52]
Dylan and his band returned to the song on July 29, 1965.[50] Tony Glover, who was present at the recording session, has recalled that while the other musicians took a lunch break, Dylan worked on the song at the piano, crucially slowing down the tempo.[53] Egan comments that Dylan transformed "the song from a bobbing, cawing and insufferably smart-alec number into a slow, tender, sensual anthem."[54] The lyrics reveal Dylan’s talent for borrowing from old blues numbers, adapting the lines "Don’t the clouds look lonesome shining across the sea/ Don’t my gal look good when she’s coming after me" from "Solid Road" by Brownie McGhee and Leroy Carr—a song which Dylan had recorded under the title "Rocks and Gravel" and then dropped from his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.[49] Musically, "It Takes a Lot to Laugh" has a lazy tempo driven by session drummer Bobby Gregg, a barrelhouse piano part played by Paul Griffin, a raunchy bass part played by Harvey Brooks, an electric guitar part played by Mike Bloomfield and a harmonica part by Dylan.[51][52]
"From a Buick 6", a "recklessly" played fast-blues song,[55] commences with a snare shot similar to the opening of "Like a Rolling Stone",[56] Partially based on Sleepy John Estes' 1930 song "Milk Cow Blues",[55] the guitar part is patterned after older blues riffs by Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton and Big Joe Williams.[52] Robert Shelton describes the song as "an earthy tribute to another funky earth-mother",[52] while for Heylin it is close to filler material, relying on the band's sound "to convince us he is doing more than just listing the ways in which this 'graveyard woman' is both a life-giver and a death-giver".[57] "From a Buick 6" was released as the B-side of Dylan's "Positively 4th Street" single on September 7, 1965.[58]
Driven by a doomy piano played by Dylan himself, contrasting with a horror movie organ part played by Al Kooper, this track was described by Kooper as "musically more sophisticated than anything else on the album".[59] Mike Marqusee writes that "Ballad of a Thin Man" can be read as "one of the purest songs of protest ever sung", with its scathing take on "the media, its interest in and inability to comprehend [Dylan] and his music." For Marqusee, the song became the anthem of an in-group, "disgusted by the old, excited by the new... elated by their discovery of others who shared their feelings", with its central refrain "Something is happening here/ But you don't know what it is/ Do you, Mr Jones?" epitomizing the hip exclusivity of the burgeoning counterculture.[60] Robert Shelton describes the song's central character, Mr Jones, as "one of Dylan's greatest archetypes", characterizing him as "a Philistine, a person who does not see... superficially educated and well bred but not very smart about the things that count."[52]
There has been speculation whether Mr Jones was based on a specific journalist.[61] In 1975, reporter Jeffrey Jones "outed" himself in a Rolling Stone article, describing how he had attempted to interview Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. When Dylan and his entourage later chanced on the hapless reporter in the hotel dining room, Dylan shouted mockingly, "Mr Jones! Gettin' it all down, Mr Jones?"[62] When Bill Flanagan asked Dylan, in 1990, whether one reporter could claim all the credit for Mr Jones, Dylan replied: "There were a lot of Mister Joneses at that time. Obviously there must have been a tremendous amount of them for me to write that particular song. It was like, 'Oh man, here's the thousandth Mister Jones'."[63]
As in "Like a Rolling Stone", "Queen Jane Approximately" warns the female subject of the song of her imminent fall from grace.[64][65] Polizzotti characterises "Queen Jane" as friendlier and more compassionate than "Rolling Stone", and says the songs makes a "benign" opening to Side Two, after the acidic put-down of "Ballad of a Thin Man".[65] However, Allmusic critic Bill Janovitz describes Dylan's tone as "simultaneously condescending, self-righteous, sneering, contemptuous".[64] "The narrator in the song ... seems to be warning someone of a great fall from grace, an awakening, as if he has either been through it all himself already or is just too smart to fall into such traps": 'Now when all of the flower ladies want back what they have lent you / And the smell of their roses does not remain / And all of your children start to resent you / Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?'."[64] The song is structured as a series of ABAB quatrain verses, with each verse followed by a chorus which is simply a repeat of the last line of each verse: "Won't you come see me Queen Jane?".[66] Gill calls this song "the least interesting track on the album", though he praises the piano ascending the scale during the harmonica break, which "neatly evokes the stifling nature of an upper class existence".[67] "Queen Jane Approximately" was released as the B-side of Dylan's "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" single in early 1966.[68]
Dylan audaciously commences the title song of this album with the words "God said to Abraham 'Kill me a son'/Abe said 'Man, you must be puttin' me on'." As Gill has pointed out, Abraham was the name of Dylan's father, "which effectively makes Bob himself the son whom God wants killed".[69] As befits a song celebrating a highway central to the history of the blues, this is the fastest, most raucous blues boogie on the album, with Mike Bloomfield's "razor slashes of slide guitar" driving the band.[69] The scope of the song broadens to make the highway a road of limitless possibilities, peopled by drifters and chancers, and culminating in a promoter who is trying to stage World War III on Highway 61.[69] The fast moving boogie is punctuated by the sound of a police siren. (On the album cover, Dylan is credited with playing "Police Car".)[70] Drummer Sam Lay (of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band) recalls that he flew in from Chicago and played drums on this one track.[71] Lay has said that he supplied Dylan with a whistle which had a "sound like a police siren with a high pitch to it" known as a "Siren Whistle" [1].[71] Confusingly, Al Kooper also claims that he lent Dylan a siren that he wore around his neck, which supplied the police car punctuation for the recording.[71] "Highway 61 Revisited" was released as the B-side of Dylan's "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" single on November 30, 1965.[72]
"Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" is a song of six verses and no chorus,[73] with lyrics which describe a nightmarish experiences in Juarez, Mexico, where the narrator encounters sickness, despair, whores and saints, corrupt authorities, alcohol and drugs before resoving to return to New York City.[74][75][76] Critics have heard, in this song, literary references to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels.[74][77][78] For Andy Gill, the title may refer to Rimbaud's poem "Ma Bohème: Fantaisie", which contains the lines "My only pair of pants had a big hole in them/ Tom Thumb the dreamer, sowing the roads/ With rhymes".[32] The backing musicians, Bobby Gregg on drums, Mike Bloomfield on electric guitar, and two pianists, Paul Griffin (musician)|Paul Griffin on tack piano and Al Kooper on Hohner Pianet, produce a mood which, for Gill, perfectly complements the enervated tone of the lyrics.[32][33] Heylin notes that Dylan took great care—sixteen takes—to get the effect he was after, with lyrics which subtly "skirt the edge of reason".[79] A live recording of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" was released as the B-side of Dylan's "I Want You" single in June 1966.[80]
Dylan ends Highway 61 Revisited with the sole acoustic exception to his rock album. "Desolation Row" intertwines surreal allusions to a variety of figures in Western culture during this song—described by Andy Gill as "an 11-minute epic of entropy, which takes the form of a Fellini-esque parade of grotesques and oddities featuring a huge cast of iconic characters, some historical (Einstein, Nero), some biblical (Noah, Cain and Abel), some fictional (Ophelia, Romeo, Cinderella), some literary (T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound), and some who fit into none of the above categories, notably Dr. Filth and his dubious nurse."[81]
The song opens with a report that "they're selling postcards of the hanging", and notes "the circus is in town". Polizzotti, and other critics, have connected this song with the lynching of three black men in Duluth. The men were employed by a travelling circus and had been accused of raping a white woman. On the night of June 15, 1920, they were removed from custody and hanged on the corner of First Street and Second Avenue East. Duluth was Bob Dylan’s birthplace; at the time of the lynching, Dylan’s father, then eight years old, was living in Duluth. Photos of the lynching were sold as postcards.[82][a 2]
The south-western flavored acoustic guitar part accompanying Dylan's playing was by Nashville-based session musician Charlie McCoy. The flavor of the backing and eclecticism of the imagery led Polizzotti to describe "Desolation Row" as the "ultimate cowboy song, the 'Home On The Range' of the frightening territory that was mid-sixties America".[83] In the penultimate verse, the passengers on the Titanic are shouting "Which side are you on?". This was one of the most cherished slogans of the Left, and, for Robert Shelton, one of the targets of this song is "simpleminded political commitment. What difference which side you're on if you're sailing on the Titanic?"[84]
A number of outtakes from the Highway 61 Revisited sessions have been released. The first proper non-album release from the sessions was the single "Positively 4th Street",[85] although on an early pressing of the single Columbia used another Highway 61 outtake, "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?", by mistake.[86] "Crawl Out Your Window" was subsequently re-recorded with the Hawks in October, and released as a single in November 1965.[29] Columbia also accidentally released an alternate take of "From a Buick 6" on an early pressing of Highway 61 Revisited, and this version continued to appear on the Japanese release for several years.[57] Other officially released outtakes include alternate takes of "Like a Rolling Stone" and "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry", and a previously unreleased song, "Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence", on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991.[87] Alternate takes of "Desolation Row", "Highway 61 Revisited", "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", "Tombstone Blues" and a still different take of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" were released on The Bootleg Series Volume 7.[28] Excerpts from a number of different takes of "Like a Rolling Stone" appeared on the Highway 61 Interactive CD-ROM,[88] released in February 1995.[89] Several other alternate takes of various songs were recorded during the Highway 61 sessions but remain unreleased,[90] as does the composition "Why Do You Have to Be So Frantic?".[22]
The cover photograph was taken by photographer Daniel Kramer several weeks before the recording sessions. It captures Dylan sitting on the stoop of the apartment of his manager, Albert Grossman, located in Gramercy Park, New York. A website researching the location of Dylan's album cover photos has pinpointed the building at 4, Gramercy Park West.[91] Kramer placed Dylan's friend Bob Neuwirth (carrying a Nikon SP) behind Dylan "to give it extra color". Dylan is wearing a Triumph motorcycle T-shirt under a blue and purple silk shirt, holding his Ray-Ban sunglasses in his right hand.[92] Photographer Kramer commented in 2010 on Dylan's expression, "He's hostile, or it's a hostile moodiness. He's almost challenging me or you or whoever's looking at it: 'What are you gonna do about it, buster?'"[93]
As he had on his previous three albums, Dylan contributed his own writing to the back cover of Highway 61 Revisted, in the shape of freeform, surrealist prose: "On the slow train time does not interfere & at the Arabian crossing waits White Heap, the man from the newspaper & behind him the hundred inevitable made of solid rock & stone." One critic has pointed out the close similarity of these notes to the stream of consciousness, experimental novel, Tarantula, which Dylan was writing during 1965 and 1966.[54]
The album was re-released in 2010 with new liner notes by Greil Marcus.[94]
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | [95] |
| BBC | (Favorable)[96] |
| Entertainment Weekly | (A+)[97] |
| PopMatters | (Favorable)[98] |
| Rolling Stone | [99] |
| Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music | [100] |
| Sputnikmusic | [101] |
Singer-songwriter Phil Ochs told Broadside magazine, immediately after the record’s release, that Dylan had "produced the most important and revolutionary album ever made".[102] Speaking to Anthony Scaduto five years later, Ochs said, "I put on Highway 61 and I laughed and said it's so ridiculous. It's impossibly good, it just can’t be that good. How can a human mind do this?"[102]
The English poet Philip Larkin, reviewing Highway 61 for The Daily Telegraph, wrote that he found himself "well rewarded" by the record: "Dylan’s cawing, derisive voice is probably well suited to his material... and his guitar adapts itself to rock ('Highway 61') and ballad ('Queen Jane'). There is a marathon 'Desolation Row' which has an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words."[103]
The album cemented Dylan's mastery of a new genre—combining verbal sophistication with a hard rock sound. One 1965 reviewer wrote: "Bob Dylan used to sound like a lung cancer victim singing Woody Guthrie. Now he sounds like a Rolling Stone singing Immanuel Kant".[104] The album was a hit, peaking at number 3 on the Billboard 200 chart of top albums.[105] In August 1967, Highway 61 was certificated as a gold record.[106]
Highway 61 Revisited has remained among the most highly acclaimed of Dylan's works. Scaduto, Dylan's first serious biographer, wrote that it may be "one of the most brilliant pop records ever made. As rock, it cuts through to the core of the music—a hard driving beat without frills, without self-consciousness." Commenting on Dylan's imagery, Scaduto wrote: "Not since Rimbaud has a poet used all the language of the street to expose the horrors of the streets, to describe a state of the union that is ugly and absurd."[102] While discussing Highway 61 with Scaduto, Dylan gave the album a strong endorsement: "I'm not gonna to be able to make a record better than that one. Highway 61 is just too good. There's a lot of stuff on there that I would listen to."[102]
Dylan critic Michael Gray called Highway 61 "revolutionary and stunning, not just for its energy and panache but in its vision: fusing radical, electrical music ... with lyrics that were light years ahead of anyone else's; Dylan here unites the force of blues-based rock'n'roll with the power of poetry. Rock culture, in an important sense, the 1960s, started here."[107]
For Clinton Heylin, it was "an album that consolidated everything 'Like A Rolling Stone' (and Bringing It All Back Home) proffered ... an amalgamation of every strand in American popular music from 'Gypsy Davey' to the Philly Sound. The rich, textured sound was folk-rock realized."[53] Tim Riley said it was "the first Dylan record to posit protest as a way of life, a state of mind, something as psychologically bound as it is socially incumbent."[108]
Numerous polls in recent years demonstrate that the album remains a fixture in the rock pantheon. In 1995 Highway 61 Revisited was named the fifth greatest album of all time in a poll conducted by Mojo magazine.[100] In 2001, the TV network VH1 placed it at number 22.[100] In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine, describing Highway 61 as "one of those albums that, quite simply, changed everything", placed it at number four in its list of the greatest albums of all time.[109] The Rolling Stone list of the 500 greatest songs of all time ranked "Highway 61 Revisited", "Desolation Row" and "Like a Rolling Stone" at #364, #185 and #1, respectively.[110]
All songs written by Bob Dylan
| Year | Chart | Position |
|---|---|---|
| 1965 | Billboard 200 | 3[105][111] |
| 1965 | UK Top 75 | 4[111] |
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