Eschewing any pretense of commercial appeal, Bob Dylan appeared at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 with an electric guitar.
The fans booed, even though the electric portion of the set was short. No longer a folkie like Woody Guthrie, but too weird and original to be classified as pop, the moment marked the point where Dylan entered into his own genre -- and where, one could argue, the music of the 60s began to change.
Bear in mind Dylan had a profound effect on the Beatles in 1965, and shades of him are all over Rubber Soul. Where the Beatles were still writing short pop songs, though, Dylan was pursuing a longer, looser, weirder vibe, where the drugs and the poetry and the revelations of life mixed in an intoxicating haze. You either got it or you didn't.
More than 40 years after the fact, Highway 61 Revisited remains as fascinating and confusing at it was upon first listen. Three of the first five songs are each six minutes long; none of them have any sort of traditional structure, but rather repetitious phrases -- verse, chorus, verse, chorus, etc. until Dylan gives up and fades out. As he writes in the incomprehensible liner notes, "...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."
It doesn't make sense. It's not supposed to. Dylan's words and meaning come across with such force that the power and originality trump any supposed meaning. He was not nominally a folk artist anymore -- "Like A Rolling Stone," the album's leadoff song, makes this clear. Think James Dean crossed with Walt Whitman; Dylan didn't care what he sounded like, and he could give a fuck if anyone else cared.
Highway 61 Revisited marches forward with the spirit of Dean, Guthrie, Whitman and the everyday poet yearning to clamber out of the earthly shell. "Like A Rolling Stone" is the embodiment of this, of course, a six-minute tirade against a former lover featuring smoking keyboard and guitar work from Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield, respectively. "Tombstone Blues" thrusts itself forward again and again, with Dylan's words barely keeping pace with the rapidly-strummed guitar. It's the fastest six minutes on any of his records.
"It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry" injects the blues spirit for a few minutes, while "From A Buick 6" is solid, if derivative of what comes before it; even Whitman had an off day. "Ballad Of A Thin Man" is an epic, though its layers take time to unfold. The song that birthed the famous "Mr. Jones" character, it's a slow, piano-led descent into madness or suicide. Yet it also begs the question on everyone's mind; "Something is happening here and you don't know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?"
"Queen Jane Approximately" is a less successful follow-up to the other six-minute pieces, though the fun stomp of the title track is worth hearing, and not just for the Biblical allusions. "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" sounds like an early run-through of the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed disc, though Dylan's attitude is far more sinister and laid-back than Jagger's in your face. While Mick would attack you from the front in an obvious manner, Dylan would shred you from behind with just a piercing glare and the right words. "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).
The spirit of Highway 61 Revisited became fully realized in the double album that followed it, Blonde On Blonde, and in some ways this platter is a primer for that one -- the way Revolver was a primer for Sgt. Pepper's. There is very little in the way of commercial appeal here, either for rockers or folkies; embracing something that doesn't feel like it was supposed to be public is an uneasy proposition.
Yet in spite of its lack of cohesion, its meaningless lyrics and its desire to be different, Highway 61 Revisited ends up being one of the most rewarding and necessary discs of Dylan's career. To truly understand him -- to get him -- this and Blonde On Blonde are where to turn after the hits collections.
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