Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited

Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 30, 1965 by Columbia Records. Having until then recorded mostly acoustic music, Dylan used rock musicians as his backing band on every track of the album, except for the closing 11-minute ballad, "Desolation Row". Critics have focused on the innovative way in which Dylan combined driving, blues-based music with the subtlety of poetry to create songs that captured the political and cultural chaos of contemporary America. Author Michael Gray has argued that in an important sense the 1960s "started" with this album.
Leading with the hit single "Like a Rolling Stone", the album features songs that Dylan has continued to perform live over his long career, including "Ballad of a Thin Man" and "Highway 61 Revisited". He named the album after the major American highway which connected his birthplace, Duluth, Minnesota, to southern cities famed for their musical heritage, including St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, and the Delta blues area of Mississippi.

Highway 61 Revisited peaked at No. 3 in the United States charts and No. 4 in the United Kingdom. The album was ranked No. 4 on Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". "Like a Rolling Stone" was a top-10 hit in several countries, and was listed at No. 1 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. Two other songs, "Desolation Row" and "Highway 61 Revisited", were listed at No. 187 and No. 373 respectively.

In his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan described the kinship he felt with the route that supplied the title of his sixth album: "Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began. 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."
When he was growing up in the 1950s, Highway 61 stretched from the Canada–US border through Duluth, where Dylan was born, and St. Paul all the way down to New Orleans. Along the way, the route passed near the birthplaces and homes of influential musicians such as Muddy Waters, Son House, Elvis Presley and Charley Patton. The "empress of the blues", Bessie Smith, died after sustaining serious injuries in an automobile accident on Highway 61. Critic Mark Polizzotti points out that blues legend Robert Johnson is alleged to have sold his soul to the devil at the highway's crossroads with Route 49. The highway had also been the subject of several blues recordings, notably Roosevelt Sykes' "Highway 61 Blues" (1932) and Mississippi Fred McDowell's "61 Highway" (1964).
Dylan has stated that he had to overcome considerable resistance at Columbia Records to give the album its title. He told biographer Robert Shelton: "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'." Michael Gray has suggested that the very title of the album represents Dylan's insistence that his songs are rooted in the traditions of the blues: "Indeed the album title Highway 61 Revisited announces that we are in for a long revisit, since it is such a long, blues-travelled highway. Many bluesmen had been there before [Dylan], all recording versions of a blues called 'Highway 61'.
In May 1965, Dylan returned from his tour of England feeling exhausted and dissatisfied with his material. He told journalist Nat Hentoff: "I was going to quit singing. I was very drained." The singer added, "It's very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don't dig you."
As a consequence of his dissatisfaction, Dylan wrote 20 pages of verse he later described as a "long piece of vomit". He reduced this to a song with four verses and a chorus—"Like a Rolling Stone". He told Hentoff that writing and recording the song washed away his dissatisfaction, and restored his enthusiasm for creating music. Describing the experience to Robert Hilburn in 2004, nearly 40 years later, Dylan said: "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."
Highway 61 Revisited was recorded in two blocks of recording sessions that took place in Studio A of Columbia Records, located in Midtown Manhattan. The first block, June 15 and June 16, was produced by Tom Wilson and resulted in the single "Like a Rolling Stone". On July 25, Dylan performed his controversial electric set at the Newport Folk Festival, where some of the crowd booed his performance. Four days after Newport, Dylan returned to the recording studio. From July 29 to August 4, he and his band completed recording Highway 61 Revisited, but under the supervision of a new producer, Bob Johnston.

Track Listing

1. Like A Rolling Stone
2. Tombstone Blues
3. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry
4. From A Buick 6
5. Ballad Of A Thin Man
6. Queen Jane Approximately
7. Highway 61 Revisited
8. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
9. Desolation Row

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Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited