58. Bob Dylan — Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

Nice jacket, Bob

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1. Ah, here we go. Here’s the revolution we were promised. Where Bringing It All Back Home teases the possibility of the merging of folk and rock, Highway 61 Revisited is the true fruition of the idea. And this is, legitimately, revolutionary. I came of age with “Like A Rolling Stone” as one of my favorite songs
   
   (note 1: thank you Rolling Stone magazine; note 2: very confusing as a teenager without wikipedia not understanding what “rolling stone” meant to see one of the foremost songs, bands, and magazines about music all named for it)
   
   but I did not really appreciate everything happening here until now. To think about how Dylan was recording solo acoustic folk tunes on The Freewheeling Bob Dylan just a few years earlier and was now incorporating electric guitars (and organs!) and such a full sound is fairly remarkable. I’d read about the controversy over Dylan plugging in at the Newport Folk Festival but I didn’t really get it. It’s still stupid, but I better understand it now.
2. To be clear: “Like A Rolling Stone” might legitimately be the greatest song of all time (though it’s probably still “Thunder Road” for me). Listening to it during this age of quarantine is particularly striking; the lyrics resonate a ton with skyrocketing unemployment, business closures, and tent encampments on the mind. The repeated call of the chorus — “How does it feel?!” — is urgent, jarring, utterly unlike the rest of the pop music being released at this time. Dylan’s voice — a joke in his later years — is gritty, aggressive, insistent. The song builds and builds and somehow manages to end on a note of hope, with an asterisk: “When you got nothin’ / you got / nothin’ to lose”. It’s a remarkable 6 minutes.
3. 6 minutes — the average length of a song on this album (admittedly skewed a bit by 11 minute closer “Desolation Row”), which is also remarkable. The last pure folk album I covered was Bert Jansch, with 15 songs, not one over 4 minutes. The Byrds’ Mr Tambourine Man? 13 songs, only two over 3 minutes, and none over 4. Highway 61 Revisited doesn’t give you a break, doesn’t adhere to rules, forces you to strap in and hop along for the ride.
4. The rest of the album is phenomenal as well, of course. “Tombstone Blues” is a rollicking rocker; “Ballad of a Thin Man” is bleak and unsettling; “Highway 61 Revisited” is a killer road trip tune filled with drive by stories. The album is truly the perfection of pushing folk music forward, merging it with rock, and finding something greater on the other side. The lyricists of folk had a new outlet and freedom to experiment; the pop denizens of rock were forced to sing about something other than girls and love.
5. That merging of folk and rock and what it meant for the direction of both makes me think a bit about what happened to indie music in the 2010’s, which Pitchfork summed up quite nicely here. Indie, in this case, would be the folk equivalent; and indeed, both genres fell a bit to the wayside, devoured as they were assimilated by their pop owners. But in both cases, the pop landscape was transformed for the better. I wonder what the next mutation will be.

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