Highway 61 Revisited released: Aug 30, 1965 BUY

Released one month after Dylan’s legendary July 1965 appearance with the at the Newport Folk Festival, and only five months after Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited is universally regarded as one of Dylan’s greatest and most influential records. The voice that Dylan had been growing since Another Side of Bob Dylan was now an instrument of irony, bitterness, gallows humor, mockery, disillusionment, and sarcasm in the service of astonishingly vivid and disturbing images capable of meeting the increasingly strange and livid times head-on. The album title refers to the road that runs from Dylan’s native Minnesota down through Memphis, the Mississippi Delta, and New Orleans, and so it places us in a vein running straight through the middle of an America that seemed to be spiraling out of control. Dylan’s performances of the title song, “Desolation Row,” “Tombstone Blues,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” the venomous “Ballad of A Thin Man,” and his unprecedented 7-minute hit single “Like A Rolling Stone” sat at the center of the 1960s, capturing, and maybe adding to, the accelerating craziness of American culture in that time – the mounting uproar over the nation’s Vietnam involvement, the exhilaration, distortion, and secret humor of drugs, the ballooning sense that what had been called the truth was disguising something sinister. Amazingly, Highway 61 Revisited has lost little of its presence, its power to shake up the listener, in the ensuing decades. A classic – nothing less. Like a Rolling Stone | listen | Tombstone Blues | listen | It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry | listen | From a Buick 6 | listen | Ballad of a Thin Man | listen | Queen Jane Approximately | listen | Highway 61 Revisited | listen | Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues | listen | Desolation Row | listen |