Highway 61 Revisited (18) is the sixth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in August 1965, by Colmbia Records. Having until then recorded mostly acoustic music, Dylan used rock musicians as his backing band on every track of the album, except for the closing track, the 11-minute ballad “Desolation Row”. Critics have focused on the innovative way Dylan combined driving, blues-based music with the subtlety of poetry to create songs that captured the political and cultural chaos of contemporary America. Author Michael Gray has argued that, in an important sense, the 1960’s “started” with this album.
In May 1965, Dylan returned from his tour of England feeling exhausted and dissatisfied with his material. He told journalist Nat Hentoff: “I was going to quit singing. I was very drained.” The singer added, “It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you.” As a consequence of his dissatisfaction, Dylan wrote 20 pages of verse he later described as a “long piece of vomit”. He reduced this to a song with four verses and a chorus —”Like a Rolling Stone”. He told Hentoff that writing and recording the song washed away his dissatisfaction, and restored his enthusiasm for creating music. Describing the experience to Robert Hilburn in 2004, nearly 40 years later, Dylan said: “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that … You don’t know what it means except the ghost picked me to write the song.”
Leading with the hit song “Like a Rolling Stone”, the album features songs that Dylan has continued to perform live over his long career, including “Ballad of a Thin Man” and the title track. He named the album after the major American highway which connected his birthplace of Duluth, Minnesota to southern cities famed for their musical heritage, including St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, and the Delta blues area of Mississippi.
The cover artwork was photographed by Daniel Kramer several weeks before the recording sessions. Kramer captured Dylan sitting on the stoop of the apartment of his manager, Albert Grossman, located in Gramercy Park, New York, placing Dylan’s friend Bob Neuwirth behind Dylan “to give it extra color”. Dylan wears a Triumph motorcycle T-shirt under a blue and purple silk shirt, holding his Ray-Ban sunglasses in his right hand. Photographer Kramer commented in 2010 on the singer’s expression: “He’s hostile, or it’s a hostile moodiness. He’s almost challenging me or you or whoever’s looking at it: ‘What are you gonna do about it, buster?'” As he had on his previous three albums, Dylan contributed his own writing to the back cover of Highway 61 Revisited, in the shape of freeform, surrealist prose: “On the slow train time does not interfere & at the Arabian crossing waits White Heap, the man from the newspaper & behind him the hundred inevitables made of solid rock & stone.” One critic has pointed out the close similarity of these notes to the stream of consciousness, experimental novel Tarantula, which Dylan wrote during 1965 and 1966.
Highway 61 Revisited peaked at No. 3 on the US Billboard and No. 4 on the UK Albums Chart. Positively received on release, the album has since been described as one of Dylan’s best works and among the greatest albums of all time, ranking No. 18 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”. It was voted No. 26 in the third edition of Colin Larkin’s All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000) and was featured in Robert Dimery’s 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2010). “Like a Rolling Stone” was a top-10 hit in several countries. Two other songs, “Desolation Row” and “Highway 61 Revisited”, made the Rolling Stone list at No. 187 and No. 373 respectively.
