The Anniversary

The anniversary

Today marks sixty years since the release of “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965), the sixth album by Bob Dylan and the second chapter of his “electric trilogy,” which began with “Bringing It All Back Home” and closed with “Blonde on Blonde”. The title evokes Highway 61, the road that stands as a symbol of the blues, running across America from Minnesota to Mississippi, and ideally represents the musical and cultural journey undertaken by the bard of Duluth. The album marked Dylan's definitive shift from acoustic folk to rock, following the famous Newport concert, forever changing the course of contemporary music.

Among its tracks is one of the Duluth man's immortal classics, “Like A Rolling Stone,” inspired by a piece he was writing for the book “Tarantula.” With a personal, innovative language, the song fused modernity with American roots, drawing on the blues to create a new and revolutionary sound. This is how Dylan described the song in 1966: “I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit, twenty pages long, and out of it I took 'Like A Rolling Stone' and made it as a single... After writing it, I wasn't interested in writing a book, or a play”.

Recorded in six days at Columbia's Studio A in New York, “Highway 61 Revisited” brought together musicians such as Michael Bloomfield on guitar and Al Kooper on organ, whose riff on “Like A Rolling Stone” became iconic. The sessions were intense and experimental: the sprawling eleven-minute closer “Desolation Row” remained entirely acoustic, while tracks like “Tombstone Blues,” “From A Buick 6” and “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” were nailed down in later sessions. The album alternates between electric and acoustic moments, complex and ironic lyrics, and a musical approach that blends rock, blues and folk.

Among the most celebrated songs is also “Ballad Of A Thin Man,” addressed to the mysterious “Mr. Jones,” a symbol of the obtuse bourgeoisie frightened by the new. Dylan uses irony and satire to paint a world struggling to grasp change. Although Dylan has never explicitly admitted that the song's “Mr. Jones” was a real person, several individuals have been identified as the subject of the song or as a possible inspiration for it. The most frequently cited is a certain Jeffrey Jones, a journalist for The Village Voice, who tried to interview Dylan at the 1965 Newport festival.

“Highway 61 Revisited” is universally regarded as a milestone of rock: Rolling Stone ranks it 4th among the 500 greatest albums of all time, with “Like A Rolling Stone” at number 1 among the greatest songs, while “Desolation Row” and the title track sit at 185 and 364 respectively. The album has influenced generations of musicians, confirming Dylan's crucial importance as an innovator and narrator of American culture. (OndaRock Staff)

The review

A shot rings out.

A house collapsing into the void.

A kick that flings open the door of the mind.

From Greil Marcus to Bruce Springsteen, the first listen to “Like A Rolling Stone” is an experience that can never be erased from memory. That dry snare shot that flings open the road to a majestic, fearless sound seems to mark the watershed of an entire universe.

This is how the journey down Highway 61 begins, archetype of the blues road: that ribbon of asphalt running from the Canadian border all the way to New Orleans embodies the legacy of an entire tradition, one that grew up between the Mississippi Delta and Chicago and was sung about in at least a dozen songs starting in the 1930s. On Highway 61, past and future are just two sides of the same coin: there, everything has already happened, and everything can still happen. It's the perfect metaphor for a music whose roots stir and transform in the wind of the present, until they become a prophetic hallucination.

As summer 1965 approaches, Bob Dylan has decided to stop singing. The role he keeps playing on English stages during the tour begun in May, immortalized in Don Pennebaker's famous documentary “Don't Look Back”, has long since stopped meaning anything to him: he wants nothing more to do with the image of the committed folksinger that was sewn onto him after his first albums.

So, on the flight back to the United States, Dylan begins sketching out a chaotic outpouring in which to pour all the rage seething inside him. “I was playing songs I didn't want to play, singing words I didn't want to sing,” he recalls. “Then I found myself writing this long piece of vomit, twenty pages long, and out of it I took 'Like A Rolling Stone'. It couldn't be described as anything except a very rhythmic thing, with my hatred directed at some point that was honest. I had never thought of it as a song, until one day, when I was at the piano, the page in front of me sang 'How does it feel?' to me in a slow motion, like I was swimming through lava. After that I was no longer interested in writing novels or plays.”

It's a feverish surge that drives Dylan to shut himself away in his house in Woodstock, filling page after page with that vivid delirium of verses. Bob tries to translate it at the piano to a waltz tempo, as can be heard on “The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3”, but what he's after is something else entirely. “I don't want it to sound like that B.B. King shit, and I don't want that goddamn blues either,” he bluntly tells Michael Bloomfield, the formidable guitarist then playing in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whom Dylan has recruited as his new partner in crime.

Fresh off the failed sessions improvised with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers at the end of the British tour, Dylan is searching for a sound denser and more powerful than the electrified folk of the first side of “Bringing It All Back Home”, something able to surpass even the crystalline vibrations of the Byrds' version of “Mr. Tambourine Man”, which at that very moment is climbing the American charts.

So, in mid-June, Dylan enters a New York studio to record “Like A Rolling Stone” with producer Tom Wilson at the console, who would shortly afterwards come up with the electric overdub for “The Sound Of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel. Guitarist Al Kooper also shows up at the session but, unable to compete with Bloomfield in any way, takes advantage of a moment when Wilson isn't looking to sit down at the organ instead: by the time the producer notices, it's already too late, and Kooper is ready to give life to the sound whose intense brushstrokes would indelibly define “Highway 61 Revisited”.

A rock 'n' roll liturgy built on the chords of Ritchie Valens' “La Bamba”, “Like A Rolling Stone” is an invective in which every syllable presses hard on the next with an ever more brazen, sardonic sneer, while the pounding guitar and piano chase an epic climax that soars on the wings of the organ.

The “rolling stone” is a trope well known to the old bluesmen, the image of the homeless wanderer sung about in songs like Muddy Waters' “Rolling Stone” and Leon Payne's “Lost Highway”. It's from that same well that Mick Jagger and co. (who in the summer of 1965 had just released “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction”) drew the name of their own band. And it's from there that Dylan sets off on his own journey, determined to transfigure the language of the forefathers into something completely different.

“Like A Rolling Stone” is not simply a vindictive, mocking sneer aimed at the haughty “Miss Lonely” who has fallen from grace, the song's declared protagonist. It's a far more radical question that Dylan's cutting voice wants to insinuate with its provocative sneer: is there anyone willing to abandon everything to truly live up to their own desires? Being fully honest with your own heart means being ready to give up every false certainty: “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” “That was the kind of drama that 'Like A Rolling Stone' unleashed in Bob Dylan's music,” observes American critic Greil Marcus, who devoted an entire book to the song, “you arrive at that moment where everything is at risk.” Freedom, then, is the fabric “Like A Rolling Stone” is made of: the razor's edge of that constant risk on which existence itself is staked.

Stringing together a saraband of Siamese cats, jugglers, chrome horses and emperors in rags, Dylan's unstoppable ride reaches six minutes in length: unthinkable for the record industry to release as a single. “Like A Rolling Stone” is therefore cut in half and pressed on the two sides of a 45. But the public outcry is such that it forces the label to backtrack, reissuing the song in its entirety.

On July 25, 1965, just five days after the single's release, Dylan confronts the folk purists with his historic electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival. It's the point of no return: from that moment on, it's open war for Dylan.

While the Beatles, about to release the album “Help!” and still more tied to the 45 rpm single format than to the LP, would only begin their psychedelic adventure a few months later, what Dylan has in mind is an uncompromising challenge, one capable of combining the instinctive energy of rock 'n' roll with the timeless memory of folk.

“Rock 'n' roll wasn't enough for me,” Dylan observes. “It didn't reflect the reality of life. When I got into folk music, I knew it was more serious. The songs are filled with despair, sadness, triumph, faith in the supernatural, deeper feelings... There was more real life in one single line than in all the themes of rock 'n' roll put together. Life is a complicated business, and rock 'n' roll just didn't reflect that. If I've managed to do anything important, it's bringing those two genres together.”

With the deafening echo of the Newport boos still ringing in his mind, between the end of July and the beginning of August Dylan returns to the studio to complete the trajectory of the stone cast by “Like A Rolling Stone,” which in those very days is climbing the charts in America and Britain.

Dylan decides to push Tom Wilson aside for reasons never fully explained, replacing him with a far less intrusive producer, Bob Johnston, after even considering approaching Phil Spector. The recording sessions, which take up less than a week in total, are dominated by typical Dylanesque chaos: “Nobody seemed to understand anything, everything seemed to be happening haphazardly, like some kind of jam session,” Bloomfield recalls. Kooper echoes him at once: “It was like groping around in a dark room looking for the light switch.”

At the end of August, “Highway 61 Revisited” hits record store shelves, announced on the cover by a Dylan in a flashy floral shirt and biker t-shirt, casting his defiant gaze into Daniel Kramer's lens.

Riding the wake of “Like A Rolling Stone,” Dylan unleashes a series of amphetamine-fuelled rock-blues blasts, starting with the hammering drums and acid phrasing of “Tombstone Blues,” which Mr. Zimmerman claims was inspired by a conversation between policemen he overheard by chance in a New York café, all the way to the title track's demented sprint, turned into an irreverent sneer by a whistle thrown in almost by accident during the sessions.

Then the pace slows for a moment, and Paul Griffin's piano takes on a saloon-like air for the lazy shuffle of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry,” branded by Dylan's blazing harmonica. But it's only a brief pause, because Dylan soon plunges back into the whip-cracking, adrenaline-charged riff of “From A Buick 6.”

Over the fateful tolling of a piano that seems to announce the final judgment, “Ballad Of A Thin Man” enters the scene, punctuated by Dylan's voice like an unappealable sentence of condemnation, while Kooper's organ swirls in wisps of acrid smoke. Wondering about the identity of the “Mr. Jones” targeted by Dylan's mocking indictment is a fairly pointless exercise: suffice to say the most widely accepted theory identifies him with one of the many journalists Bob delighted in humiliating. But what Dylan aims to skewer with the Kafkaesque theatre of the absurd in “Ballad Of A Thin Man” is certainly not just a reporter: his real target is the smugness of those unwilling to look beyond the illusory comfort of their own limitations, ending up oblivious to what's actually happening around them.

The second side of “Highway 61 Revisited” opens with the liquid guitar of the album's most seductive ballad, “Queen Jane Approximately,” gliding over a carpet of organ dotted with piano, in the dream of an embrace capable of dissolving every torment.

The road then pushes on toward the sun-scorched Mexican coastline with “Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues,” amid doctors ready to prescribe less-than-orthodox substances and women capable of stealing your voice and soul, while a piano in a romantic mood accompanies the guitar's border-town scent.

The epilogue unfolds with the solemn descent through the Dantean circles of “Desolation Row,” a procession of hungry souls peering out from every window in search of hope to feed on. The electric arrangement initially tried out in the studio fails to capture the song's essence, so Johnston brings in guitarist Charlie McCoy from Nashville, who weaves a poignant acoustic counter-melody around Dylan's raspy voice.

Across the more than ten minutes of “Desolation Row,” Dylan pushes his poetic technique of lifting historical and literary figures out of context to its furthest extreme, turning them into emblematic images of the human comedy. From Romeo to Cinderella, from Cain and Abel to the Hunchback of Notre Dame, from Einstein to Casanova, the characters of “Desolation Row” seem suspended between loneliness and waiting, as in an Edward Hopper painting, struggling to fulfil their own destiny against a world that seems to deny their true face. Dylan belongs to them, the prisoners of Desolation Row: as for everyone else, those content to stifle their own cry, new names and new faces must be invented, because their old ones no longer mean anything.

The definitive stone of scandal, "Highway 61 Revisited" is the shattered mirror marking the crucial rupture between Dylan and his own mask: for the hardline folk revival faithful, Dylan has sold out to the charts, while for the world of pop the visionary impact of his lysergic blues is an unprecedented provocation. Dylan puts on his dark shades, indifferent to the outrage swirling around him, and prepares to bring an even more drastic challenge to stages on both sides of the Atlantic. His journey down Highway 61 remains a tear impossible to mend in the fabric of America and of rock. The betrayal is complete: the reluctant prophet is ready to become Judas. (Gabriele Benzing)

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