Highway 61 Revisited

Dylan, Bob

album cover

"Well I Started Out on Burgundy, but Soon Hit the Harder Stuff. . ."

This is a mile marker. Starting here, the vocabulary of rock music undergoes significant expansion. New ideas about words and music and their relationship are loosed into the air, to be puzzled over and endlessly analyzed. Before this, the folk musicians in Dylan's milieu sorta tiptoed through the blues, avoiding complete overhauls of the source code. Bob Dylan swoops in, complaining to the chamber of commerce (about Samson and Delilah), taunting that square Mr. Jones because he doesn't know what's happening, and suddenly it's a new day. The blues can be anything—especially when Mike Bloomfield is playing them. The guitars speak the folkie chords, but they're electric and howling and they jangle nerves in a very different way. Suddenly everybody's hitting the harder stuff.

And you're going to need harder stuff to figure out what the hell Dylan is talking about. Who's the target of all this ire, the scorn of "Just Like Tom Thumb Blues" and the derision of "Queen Jane Approximately"? From the very beginning of the first song, "Like a Rolling Stone," the words arrive by the boxcar, forming a portrait of what Dylan sees as smug bohemian arrogance. Possibly the most vituperative song ever to become a hit, this one signals how drastically the game has changed. Everything that follows—the cryptic callouts to former lovers, the grave warnings about assorted vanities, and especially the harangues at the self-important characters stalking on the fringes of folk—aims not so much for a "story" with a "point," but a more general scene-setting of a chaos in progress.

Scholars have done exhaustive etymologies of these lyrics, tracing every reference and every possible living person who pops up. It's safe to say this has not brought them closer to understanding the songs, which unspool like epic foreign films. This is a key aspect of the enduring allure of Highway 61 Revisited: Its conjoining of word and blues is so delirious and convoluted and evasive, it cannot be pinned down. The eleven-minute finale, "Desolation Row," catches the great contrarian seeing how far he can go, how much memory he can erase ("Don't send me no more letters, no, not unless you mail them from Desolation Row"), how much distance he can put between himself and the staid trappings of troubadourdom. Dylan lets rage take a turn behind the wheel, and when he looks into the rearview mirror, those strumming-and-humming days are far back in the distance, and fading fast.

Genre: Rock
Released: 1965, Columbia
Key Tracks: "Like a Rolling Stone," "Tombstone Blues," "Queen Jane Approximately," "Desolation Row."
Catalog Choice: Bootleg Series Vol 6: Live 1964—Concert at Philharmonic Hall
Next Stop: You've arrived at the next stop.
Book Pages: 243–244

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