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Highway 61 revisited revisited

AJITPAUL MANGAT VOLUNTEER STAFF

In Martin Scorcese’s documentary No Direction Home, Bob Dylan (b. Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) describes himself, at the time he left home (Hibbing, Minn.) for the University of Minnesota, as a “musical expeditionary.” Dylan knew that he wanted to be a musician of significance but felt he had not found an identity or a voice. In fact, Dylan did not even have a name yet. Taking Bob from local rock 'n' roll artist Bobby Vee and Dylan from poet Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan was born. The amalgamation of these dissonant musical styles, rock and roll and poetry, would re-emerge as an important theme in Dylan’s career. Soon thereafter, Dylan would also begin to find his voice.

During his time at the University of Minnesota, Dylan became acquainted with the music of folk singer Woody Guthrie. Dylan viewed Guthrie music as extraordinary and radical because, as Dylan says in No Direction Home, Guthrie “said something” in his songs which was “highly unusual to my ears.” He identified with Guthrie and immersed himself in the folk singer’s music and writings. Upon hearing the news that his idol was dying, Dylan left Minnesota for New York City. Dylan arrived in New York in January of 1961 where he began regularly visiting and performing for Guthrie in the mental home where the ailing singer was staying. During this time Dylan also began playing in coffeehouses around Greenwich Village where he made a significant impression on the growing folk community.

Based on the strength of a positive review in the New York Times, Dylan was signed to Columbia Records in the fall of 1961. Though he had by now stopped visiting Guthrie, he did however feel he owed a great deal to his idol, so he wrote “Song To Woody,” a goodbye letter of sorts and one of Dylan’s first original works. In the coming years Dylan would surpass his idol by both revolutionizing folk music and exposing it to the masses.

During the time period between Bringing It All Back Home (1963) and Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), Dylan quickly emerged as the preeminent folk singer in popular music. Commercially his songs became ubiquitous, with hundreds of artists covering them. Artistically Dylan was rapidly advancing beyond his peers. Due largely to the influence of Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg, his narratives were the most dense and erudite in popular music. Dylan musically complemented his lyrics with melodic and diverse sounds rarely heard in folk music, causing his songs to become accessible and extremely affecting. These advancements were most evident in the immense effect Dylan’s music was having on the civil and social rights movements. Songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and “Chimes of Freedom” became anthems in the folk-protest canon. Although many musicians were writing similarly minded songs, Dylan’s became the most prominent and soon the media and parts of the folk community began pigeonholing Dylan as a topical songwriter, labelling him with the unwanted and unfair tag of “Voice of a Generation.”

Too talented to remain stagnant and hoping to prevent himself from becoming type-cast, Dylan made his most ambitious musical statement todate with the imaginative Bringing It All Back Home (1965). The A (rock 'n' roll) side of the record was a revelation, as Dylan transformed his music with electrified guitars, galloping drums, and a more frenzied harmonica. The tracks were strikingly memorable as Dylan’s typically varied lyrics, ranging in subject matter from capitalism (“Money doesn’t talk, it swears”) to love (“She knows there’s no success like failure/And that failure’s no success at all”), were backed by even more varied and unexpected music.

The B (folk) side of the record, although more akin to Dylan’s previous works, displayed important, primarily lyrical, changes. From the symbolist-influenced “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” to the dream-like “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Dylan’s writing was progressing from topical subject matter to more personal, poetic lyrics. The album was ultimately most remarkable because it broke down previous boundaries of what folk and rock music should be, in the process pioneering what would become known as folk-rock.

Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Dylan’s next album, was a zenith for the songwriter as he improved the rock 'n' roll aspects of Bringing It All Back, creating a more diverse, refined sound. With the music of the album Dylan literally seemed to be revisiting the infamous Highway 61 on which the album was titled. The 61, stretching from Dylan’s hometown through Memphis to New Orleans, passes through the birthplaces of rock & roll, blues, and jazz. Incorporating those styles into his already sundry folk-rock repertoire and backed by a full rock band for the first time in his career, featuring most notably bluesman Mike Bloomfield, who Dylan described as the “best guitar player I’d ever heard,” the songwriter takes the listener on an exhilarating musical journey.

Bruce Springsteen has described the beginning of the album as “that snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind.” Grander, meaner and more ambitious, “Like A Rolling Stone” did, in fact, open the minds of the entire recording industry, completely reinventing what a pop song could and should be. Backed by the maniacal guitar play of Bloomfield and Al Kooper’s unforgettable organ riff, Dylan spews the most acerbic poetry of his career” “you’d better lift your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe/You used to be so amused/At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used/Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse/When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose/You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.” The rest of the album finds Dylan adopting his trademark panoply of personas, allowing for a staggering variety of lyrical styles, ranging from surreal (“Highway 61 Revisited”) and bellicose (“Ballad of a Thin Man”) to funny (“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”) and amorous (“Queen Jane Approximately”).

Dylan leaves his finest lyrical performance for the end of the album; “Desolation Row,” an epic poem filled with evocative imagery and myriad characters tells the story of a town, full of losers and rejects, in which the narrator finds himself. Backed by a wistful acoustic track, Dylan beautifully depicts one of the outcasts’ dire circumstance: “Now Ophelia, she’s ’neath the window/For her I feel so afraid/On her twenty-second birthday/She already is an old maid/ To her, death is quite romantic/She wears an iron vest/Her profession’s her religion/Her sin is her lifelessness/And though her eyes are fixed upon/Noah’s great rainbow/She spends her time peeking/Into Desolation Row.”

Dylan would go on to release many more acclaimed and significant albums, but none would be as pivotal to his career as Highway 61 Revisited. With that album Dylan proved he was no longer a musical expeditionary but rather, by consolidating the ghosts of his past, a truly distinctive and influential voice that needed to be heard.