A glaring, defiant Bob Dylan stares at the listener from the front cover, daring those who booed him at Newport for going electric. He doesn’t care; you take his music his way or you go listen to something else.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Highway 61 Revisited <\/i>is a marked break from the folk past; Dylan has come into his own now, no longer a Woody Guthrie disciple, and a truly original artist. It is perhaps his best single album statement, topped only by Blood on the Tracks <\/i>a decade later. <\/p>\n
Here, he pursues a different vibe. Very little music at the time sounded like “Like A Rolling Stone,” the loose kiss-off anthem driven by Al Kooper’s organ work. It swirls by in a cool haze, and it’s not even the best song here; that honor goes to the garage rock stomp of “Tombstone Blues,” Dylan’s words barely keeping pace with the rapid guitar. It’s the fastest six minutes on any of his records.<\/p>\n
As usual, the words are fairly incomprehensible; if anyone can figure out a meaning from a Dylan song, it’s because they really wanted to, not because he had a meaning. The liner notes even say as much: “…the songs on this specific record are not so much songs but rather exercises in tonal breath control. The subject matter — though meaningless as it is — has something to do with the beautiful strangers, Vivaldi’s green jacket and the holy slow train.” So there.<\/p>\n
The piano-led “Ballad of a Thin Man” is a sneering put-down of a journalist, a square and\/or a parent; it’s where the famous “Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is \/ Do you, Mr. Jones?” The descending piano riff carries the song to the depths; it’s an appropriate way to close the first side of the record.<\/p>\n
The fun stomp of the title track is a highlight, and not just for the Biblical allusions, while “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is a dry run for the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, <\/i>though Dylan’s attitude is far more laid back and sinister. “Queen Jane Approximately” and “From a Buick 6” are solid, if derivative of better Dylan. <\/p>\n
<\/i> “Desolation Row” ties all the previous threads together in an 11-minute closer that is just this side of hypnotic; with only an acoustic guitar and his voice, for the most part, Dylan manages to create imagery like the best poets before him (even name-dropping Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, fighting in a castle).<\/p>\n
There is little in the way of commercial appeal here, which is part of the charm; many of the songs don’t have a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure, but rather one phrase that is repeated several times with different lyrics.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
To truly understand Dylan beyond the handful of radio staples, this is where to start. Highway 61 Revisited <\/i>ends up being one of the most rewarding and necessary discs of Dylan’s career.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":29155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5866],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-40686","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-bob-dylan","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40686"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}