Highway 61 Revisited
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Highway 61 Revisited | ||
 |
||
| Studio album by Bob Dylan | ||
| Released | August 30, 1965 | |
| Recorded | June 15 - August 4, 1965 | |
| Genre | Garage rock Psychedelic blues Folk |
|
| Length | 51:04 | |
| Label | Columbia Records | |
| Producer(s) | Bob Johnston (except "Like A Rolling Stone" - Tom Wilson) | |
| Professional reviews | ||
|---|---|---|
| Bob Dylan chronology | ||
| Bringing It All Back Home (1965) |
Highway 61 Revisited (1965) |
Blonde on Blonde (1966) |
Highway 61 Revisited is Bob Dylan's 6th studio album, released in 1965 by Columbia Records.
It is Dylan's first album to be recorded entirely with a full rock band, after he experimented with the approach on half of Bringing It All Back Home. It is commonly tagged as documenting the "angry young man" period in Dylan's career, in-between the playfulness of its surrounding albums; most of the songs on Highway 61 are of an accusatory nature and featured in rough, loud takes.
Featuring hits and concert staples such as "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Ballad of a Thin Man", it is also generally considered to be among the artist's best and most influential efforts.
The album peaked at #3 on Billboard's Pop Albums chart and #4 in the UK, while "Like a Rolling Stone" reached #2 on the US Pop Singles chart and #4 in the UK. The album usually features in the top 5 of the Rate Your Music: Top 100 Albums of All Time, although the order of this list changes constantly as the site's users rate albums.
Contents |
[edit] Notes
Highway 61, sometimes called the "Blues Highway," stretched from New Orleans through Memphis and from Iowa through Duluth (Dylan's city of birth) to the Canadian border. It was regularly featured in blues songs, notably Mississippi Fred McDowell's "61 Highway" and James "Son" Thomas's "Highway 61." Bessie Smith met her death in an automobile accident on that roadway; Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads of Highway 61 and Highway 49 (itself the subject of a Howlin' Wolf song); Elvis Presley grew up in the housing projects built along it; and Martin Luther King, Jr. would be murdered at a motel just off Highway 61.
"A lot of great basic American culture came right up that highway and up that river," Robert Shelton told a BBC interviewer. "And as a teenager Dylan had travelled that way on radio. ... Highway 61 became, I think, to him a symbol of freedom, a symbol of movement, a symbol of independence and a chance to get away from a life he didn't want in Hibbing."
While "Like A Rolling Stone" was completed in mid-June of 1965, the rest of the album was recorded with a different producer, Bob Johnston, in four days of sessions shortly after Dylan's legendary appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival; the sessions also produced Dylan's next single, "Positively 4th Street", not included on the LP.
[edit] Background
As stated above, this album was his first to be entirely electric. Before Dylan recorded the songs, or finished composing them, he made a historic appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The amount of planning and preparation for this performance is unclear, but in any case, Dylan played two sets at Newport. The first was an acoustic set played at a songwriters' workshop held on a Saturday afternoon. However, the performance was cut short when his presence alone was drawing too much attention. "The crowd around the songwriters' workshop was so immense that it was swamping the other workshops," recalls organizer Joe Boyd.
The situation grew more volatile the following day. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was already creating controversy because members of the festival's board, including Alan Lomax, did not fully approve of their appearance. Though bluesmen were always invited to Newport Folk Festival, a young band like The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was not viewed the same way as revered veterans like Son House, Muddy Waters, and Lightnin' Hopkins.
Nevertheless, Dylan was preparing to perform his next set with Bloomfield on guitar, Kooper on organ, and Barry Goldberg on piano. To complete the band, he recruited two more members of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, bassist Jerome Arnold and drummer Sam Lay.
Eyewitness accounts of the resulting performance have elevated the incident to mythical proportions. Though some details remain hazy, it's clear that Dylan and his band performed three songs in the following order: "Maggie's Farm," "Like A Rolling Stone," and "Phantom Engineer" (an early version of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh"). When he introduced the band, Pete Yarrow elicited an unruly response when he announced that Dylan "has a limited amount of time" for his set. It is not clear why Dylan planned on just three songs; years later, even Kooper would admit that it was "weird." Soundboard recordings of the proceedings support eyewitness accounts that the performances were a bit rough, and virtually everyone agrees that the P.A. sound during the performances was very inadequate. What is not clear is the audience reaction. Soundboard recordings show a fair share of applause as well as booing during the performances. It is not known what proportion of the crowd was voicing its displeasure, how much of that displeasure was directed at the P.A. sound, and how much was directed at the music itself. Pete Seeger was famously upset by the proceedings; he would later insist that he was upset at the P.A. sound, which allegedly distorted Dylan's vocals to a large degree. At one point, Seeger intended to cut Dylan's microphone cord with an axe.
Eyewitness accounts say Dylan was shaken by the experience, and after the electric set, Johnny Cash and Pete Yarrow, among others, convinced Dylan to placate the unruly crowd with an acoustic performance. Dylan played solo renditions of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" before leaving the stage.
Though Dylan's popularity continued to grow, his Newport appearance prompted a number of fans to vocally oppose his new direction. In the year following the appearance, the folk community was seemingly split over the new music. Dylan's friend, Paul Nelson, had just assumed editorship of Sing Out when he wrote a piece in support of Dylan, while Sing Out!'s Irwin Silber published a piece criticizing Dylan's Newport set as "not very good 'rock' ... [and not] very good Dylan;" Nelson also resigned in a show of support to Dylan.
This marks a significant event in his career, especially concerning his movement from acoustic to electric music. The shift and this festival are closely related in Dylan's musical history.
[edit] Recording sessions
Before work began on his sixth studio album, Dylan embarked on a brief English tour in May of 1965, which was filmed and recorded by Don A. Pennebaker. (Pennebaker would use the footage to create the film, Dont Look Back, which was released the following year.) The tour lasted eight shows over the course of two weeks; by the end of the tour, Bringing It All Back Home was released in the UK, topping the English charts by the end of the month. Its rapid ascent in the UK seemed to indicate widespread commercial acceptance of his new 'electric' sound, but as Don't Look Back would ultimately show, there were 'fans' who weren't afraid to voice their disapproval. (The film documents one fan telling Dylan she didn't like "Subterranean Homesick Blues," at the time his latest single. Dylan's response: "Oh, you're one of those. I understand now.") Furthermore, Dylan's new musical direction was so far confined to the studio, as his live performances remained strictly acoustic and often solo.
Nevertheless, Dylan was intent on continuing in his new direction. A large English R&B movement had emerged in recent years, including such notable bands as The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, Van Morrison's Them, and The Animals. Dylan had become an avid listener of these bands (he was particularly struck by The Animals' rendition of "House of the Rising Sun"), and he decided to audition one of them while he was in England. Producer Tom Wilson was flown out to England, and a session was held at Levy's Recording Studio on May 12. For this experiment, Dylan recruited John Mayall's Bluesbreakers — a popular guitarist named Eric Clapton had recently joined the band after leaving The Yardbirds, but the Bluesbreakers were still a relative obscurity.
The session was ultimately a failure. "It was just messing around," recalled drummer Hughie Flint, "I don't think we played a complete number. It was a real mess. There was a lot of booze there ... I'd never seen so much wine, and everybody got very [drunk], very quickly."
If the session wasn't discouraging enough, Dylan suffered an attack of food poisoning later that spring. During his week of bed rest, Dylan felt he "was going to quit singing. I was very drained. I was playing a lot of songs I didn't want to play. I was singing words I didn't really want to sing." It was a fleeting decision, one he would not reveal until months later, when he was confident about continuing his career, but it was a strong reflection of his uncertainty at the time.
In the meantime, Dylan was nearing completion of a book he'd been writing. Titled Tarantula, it would not be published until 1971, but it was Dylan's prime motivation for writing a substantial amount of prose during 1964 and 1965. At least one piece of prose became the source for an actual song. As Dylan recalled in 1966, "I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit about twenty pages long, and out of it I took 'Like A Rolling Stone' ... After writing that, I wasn't interested in writing a novel, or a play."
The original twenty-page manuscript has been described by biographer Clinton Heylin as "an ill-formed mass of words whose direction was uncertain." As it was rewritten down to ten pages, "it wasn't called anything," recalled Dylan, "just a rhythm thing on paper, all about my steady hatred, directed at some point that was honest."
When Dylan felt it was ready to record, he and Tom Wilson assembled a band. On lead guitar, Dylan recruited an old acquaintance, Michael Bloomfield. Bloomfield had met Dylan on a few occasions, even jamming with him in Chicago back in April of 1963. By 1965, he was the lead guitarist in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a critically-acclaimed, American blues-rock band. Dylan contacted Bloomfield and invited him to his retreat in Woodstock, New York. "I didn't even have a guitar case," recalled Bloomfield, "I just had my Telecaster. And Bob picked me up at the bus station and took me to this house where he lived ... he taught me these songs, 'Like A Rolling Stone,' and all those songs from Highway 61 Revisited, and he said, 'I don't want you to play any B. B. King-type leads, none of that standard blues, I want you to play something else.' So we fooled around and [I] finally played something he liked ... he was playing in weird keys which he always does, all on the black keys of the piano."
Days later, on June 15, Dylan held a recording session at Columbia's Studio A in New York. In addition to Bloomfield, Dylan and Wilson recruited pianist Frank Owens, bassist Russ Savakus, and drummer Bobby Gregg. Also present was Al Kooper, a young musician invited by Wilson, apparently to play lead guitar. With Bloomfield present, Kooper became a mere observer.
Dylan and his band recorded three songs: a new composition titled "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," a song held over from the Bringing It All Back Home sessions titled "Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence," and "Like A Rolling Stone." A number of unsuccessful attempts were made at "It Takes a Lot to Laugh" and "Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence" before Dylan turned his attention to "Like A Rolling Stone."
After several false starts, Dylan decided to use both a piano and an organ on "Like A Rolling Stone." Kooper volunteered to play organ, and even though Wilson made it very clear that he was aware of Kooper's inexperience with the instrument, he allowed him to play it. In Kooper's widely-quoted words, he was feeling his "way through the [chord] changes like a little kid fumbling in the dark for a light switch." Kooper was so uncertain he purposely played behind the beat in order to hear the chord changes first. After recording one complete take, they "all adjourned to the booth to hear it played back," recalls Kooper. Halfway through the take, Dylan asked Wilson to push the organ up in the mix. With a little reluctance, Wilson accommodated Dylan; Dylan liked what he heard and now had the blueprint for the famous organ-guitar sound that would define the recordings of this era.
Everything recorded on the 15th was ultimately rejected, but it set the stage for the remaining sessions. Dylan and his band returned to Studio A the following day. Virtually the entire session was devoted to "Like A Rolling Stone," with Kooper once again playing organ. The fourth take was ultimately selected as the master, but Dylan and the band would record eleven more takes before listening to the recorded results in the studio booth.
Though recorded for a single, Dylan ultimately decided to include it on his next album. With a shortage of new material, Dylan spent a month in his new home in Byrdcliffe, New York (located in upstate New York), writing new songs.
Four days after the Newport Folk Festival, on July 29, Dylan returned to Studio A and resumed work on his next album. He was backed by the same band from the previous studio session (pianist Paul Griffin was also recruited for the remainder of the sessions), but for reasons unknown, Tom Wilson did not return; instead he was replaced by Columbia producer Bob Johnston, who had lobbied to work with Dylan (he was not involved in Wilson's dismissal).
When Johnston arrived, he picked a new staff engineer, Mike Figlio, who had also recorded Tony Bennett's "I Left My Heart In San Francisco," and who would follow Johnston down to Columbia Nashville a few years later.
Johnston recalls, "I don't know how Tom Wilson recorded him, but when I did Dylan, we set up all of the musicians in the same room, with Bob behind a glass baffle so you could see him. With Dylan, you always had to keep your eye on him. He came in and played a song to the band once and that was how they learned it. He never counted off, just launched right into it, so you always had to keep the tape rolling. And that wasn't easy at Columbia; we were using 4-track for that record, 8-track on [early sessions] of Blonde on Blonde, and the machines were way down the hall. We had union engineers, so one would be in the control room at the console with me, and I'd say, 'Roll tape,' and he'd tell his assistant near the door, 'Roll tape,' and he'd yell down the hall to a guy at the other end, 'Roll tape,' and then they'd start all over again yelling, 'Is tape rolling?' God, it took 20 minutes to get those damned machines going. It was like a Three Stooges short. So I got in the habit of using several machines with Dylan so as not to lose anything. He would start a song on the piano, and if the musicians dropped out during it, he'd go to the guitar and start playing another one. I lost one song that way and said never again, so I always used multiple machines.
"I always used three microphones on Dylan, 'cause his head spun around so much," recalls Johnston. "I used a big [Neumann] U47 on him, same as I used on Johnny Cash later. I would put a baffle over the top of his guitar because he played while he sang lead vocals. I didn't use any EQ on the band, just set the mics up right to make each instrument sound the best it could. I used some EQ on Dylan's voice."
Their first session together was devoted to three songs. After experimenting with different keys and tempos, master takes of "Tombstone Blues," "It Takes a Lot to Laugh," and "Positively 4th Street" were successfully recorded. "Tombstone Blues" and "It Takes a Lot to Laugh" were included in the final album, but "Positively 4th Street" was issued as a single-only release.
The following day, Dylan and his band returned to Studio A and recorded three songs. A master take of "From a Buick 6" was successfully recorded and later included on the final album, but most of the session was devoted to "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" Dylan was not satisfied with the results, and set the song aside for a later date; it would eventually be re-recorded months later. (An 'alternate' take from this session was accidentally released on a mis-pressed single. It's easily identified by a different arrangement, featuring a glockenspiel.) A complete take of "Desolation Row" was also completed, but the full band performance of this epic song was ultimately rejected. "By the first verse into it, it was obvious that Bob's guitar was rather painfully out of tune," recalls Dylan's friend Tony Glover, who was an observer at the session. "Both [Bobby] Neuwirth and I pointed it out, but [they] didn't want to stop the take ... Some twelve minutes later, Bob called for a playback and as it began he scowled, 'It's way outta tune — why didn't you stop me? It's a long song.'"
During the next two days, Dylan spent much time writing out chord charts for the remaining six songs he had yet to record. (By now, bassist Russ Savakus had left, replaced by Harvey Brooks.) Sessions resumed at Studio A on Monday, August 2, this time with Sam Lay sitting in on drums. "Highway 61 Revisited," "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," "Queen Jane Approximately," and "Ballad of a Thin Man" were all recorded successfully and master takes were selected for the album. "Desolation Row" was also recorded in a smaller arrangement (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and bass), but once again, the results were rejected.
One final session was held on August 4, again at Studio A. Most of the session was devoted to "Desolation Row," recorded with just two acoustic guitars. According to Johnston and Kooper, guitarist Charlie McCoy was flown in from Nashville, Tennessee to accompany Dylan on the song. Seven takes were recorded (with only three complete), and takes six and seven were spliced together to create the master recording included on the final album. One take of "Tombstone Blues" was also recorded, but it did not replace the master take selected from an earlier session.
[edit] The songs
One of the most celebrated recordings in rock history, "Like A Rolling Stone" is a song directed at a woman who once lived a life of privilege but has now experienced a reversal in fortune. Soon after recording the master, Dylan cut a test pressing for his music publisher and played it for several friends. It made an immediate, strong impression. One early listener was producer Paul Rothchild, who said "I knew the song was a smash, and yet I was consumed with envy because it was the best thing I'd heard any of our crowd do and knew it was going to turn the tables on our nice, comfortable lives." Dylan's friend, Paul Nelson, was recording a folk album at the time, and upon hearing it, he thought, "Oh boy, this just makes what we did obsolete."
When the single was released, Paul McCartney recalls hearing it at John Lennon's house: "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful ... He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further." A very young Bruce Springsteen would hear the recording on WMCA while driving in a car with his mother: "That snare shot that [kicked it off] sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind." Frank Zappa later recalled, "When I heard 'Like A Rolling Stone,' I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else.' ... It sold, but nobody responded to it the way that they should have."
Robert Christgau described it as "the poor boy's put-down" while Clinton Heylin calls it "a truly vengeful song — on a level of misogyny even the Stones had yet to scale..." Salon.com critic Bill Wyman wrote that "Like a Rolling Stone" "portrays an entire youth generation as a slumming sorority girl — and that's just the first verse. Then he gets nasty: The rest of the song is the rock 'n' roll equivalent of one of those scenes in The Sopranos in which a mobster systematically kicks the bejesus out of someone who's already down. Is 'Like a Rolling Stone' the most powerful, difficult, unexpected and unrelenting performance in rock? Got another candidate?"
Some people claim that "Like A Rolling Stone" is a song about Edie Sedgwick, who was also linked to Andy Warhol But Dylan had written and recorded the song before meeting Sedgwick. Dylan was in conflict with Warhol, as he accused him of letting Sedgwick become addicted to heroin. This may suggest that Napoleon in rags refers exactly to Warhol.
"If Salvador Dalí or Luis Buñuel had picked up a Fender Strat to head a blues band, they might have come up with something like 'Tombstone Blues,'" writes critic Bill Janovitz. "Like the work of these surrealists, Dylan's song is rich with non sequiturs like 'The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly / Saying, 'Death to all those who would whimper and cry' / And dropping a barbell he points to the sky / Saying, 'The sun's not yellow it's chicken',' and takes irreverent jabs at religious, political, and bureaucratic figures ('The ghost of Belle Starr she hands down her wits / To Jezebel the nun she violently knits / A bald wig for Jack the Ripper who sits/At the head of the chamber of commerce')."
In 1986, Dylan said that "Ballad of a Thin Man" was written "in response to people who ask questions all the time ... I figure a person's life speaks for itself, right? So every once in a while you gotta do this kinda thing — put somebody in their place ... This is my response to something that happened over in England, I think it was '63 or '64..." The song's lyrics are directed at a 'Mr. Jones,' whom NPR's Tim Riley describes as "a pedigreed archetype, a person to whom knowledge is a class distinction. ('You're very well read / It's well known.') As usual, there's more to it than that. When Dylan notes his pride in having read the complete F. Scott Fitzgerald, he's saying that the 1960s scene makes the Roaring Twenties look quaint ... 'Ballad of a Thin Man' taunts its subject so thoroughly it almost makes you sympathetic toward the poor scribe,"
On "Queen Jane Approximately," Dylan "sounds simultaneously condescending, self-righteous, sneering, contemptuous, and compassionate," writes Janovitz. "The narrator in the song ... seems to be warning someone of a great fall from grace, an awakening, as if he has either been through it all himself already or is just too smart to fall into such traps ('Now when all of the flower ladies want back what they have lent you / And the smell of their roses does not remain / And all of your children start to resent you / Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?')."
Wyman describes the song "Highway 61 Revisited" as possibly "Dylan's most disturbing composition, a tone poem of brutal capitalism, incest, biblical farce, warmongering and family entertainment, all set to a carnival beat that to this day gets his yuppie fans up to boogie at his live performances." Riley called it a "leering salute to America's heartland [that] goes after authority with a broad stroke, evoking his own father's name ('God said to Abraham, kill me a son / Abe said, 'Man, you must be puttin' me on")."
Janovitz calls "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" a "masterpiece ... For anyone else, its extravagant imagery and literary references would make it a sophisticated, comic tour de force...the singer comes in sounding tired and telling a tale about being lost in the rain in Juárez, Mexico, at Easter time ... [The singer] encounters shady women like Saint Annie and Sweet Melinda, as well as corrupt authorities ... drinks and drugs his way into helplessness, and having done so, declares ironically at the end, 'I'm going back to New York City / I do believe I've had enough.'" Like many songs on Highway 61 Revisited, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" is overflowing with literary references, including images recalling Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano, a street name taken from Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and the title's reference to Rimbaud's "My Bohemian Life (Fantasy)," in which Rimbaud refers to himself as "Tom Thumb in a daze."
At the time, "Desolation Row" was arguably Dylan's most ambitious song his longest recording until Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, released a year later on Blonde on Blonde. Heylin describes it as an "eleven-minute voyage through a Kafkaesque world of Gypsies, hoboes, thieves of fire, and historical characters beyond their rightful time."
[edit] Outtakes
"Positively 4th Street" was recorded during the Highway 61 Revisited sessions, but it was not included on the album. The song was released as the follow-up single to "Like A Rolling Stone" and eventually charted in the top ten on both sides of the Atlantic. Critic Dave Marsh praised it, calling it "an icy hipster bitch session" with "Dylan cutting loose his barbed-wire tongue at somebody luckless enough to have crossed the path of his desires." However its similarity to "Like A Rolling Stone" was also noted, journalist Andy Gill later describing it as "simply the second wind of a one-sided argument, so closely did it follow its predecessor's formula, both musically and attitudinally".
"Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" was later re-recorded in November with a different band, the Hawks (later known as The Band). An outtake recorded during the Highway 61 Revisited sessions was accidentally released on a single; it was soon withdrawn and replaced with the later master take recorded in November.
"Sitting on a Barbed-Wire Fence," a track left over from the Bringing It All Back Home album, was left off of the record and eventually saw release on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991.
[edit] Aftermath
Years after its release, Dave Marsh wrote that Highway 61 Revisited was one of Dylan's "best albums, and [one] of the greatest in the history of rock & roll." Subsequent polls in recent years prove that it remains a fixture in the rock pantheon. In 1995 Highway 61 Revisited was named the fifth greatest album of all time in a poll conducted by Mojo Magazine. In 1998 Q magazine readers voted Highway 61 Revisited the 57th greatest album of all time; in 2001 the TV network VH1 placed it at number 22. Then in 2003, Rolling Stone magazine placed it fourth on its list of the greatest albums of all time and named "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Highway 61 Revisited" the first and 364th greatest songs respectively.
Clinton Heylin wrote it was "an album that consolidated everything 'Like A Rolling Stone' (and Bringing It All Back Home) proffered ... an amalgamation of every strand in American popular music from 'Gypsy Davey' to the Philly Sound." Tim Riley said it was "the first Dylan record to posit protest as a way of life, a state of mind, something as psychologically bound as it is socially incumbent."
A massive influence on Dylan's contemporaries, it also coincided with greater commercial success as singles like "Like A Rolling Stone" and "Positively 4th Street" brought him to a wider audience. The controversy that ignited with Newport would continue to follow Dylan throughout 1965, but he had no intention in turning back.
[edit] Track listing
- "Like a Rolling Stone" – 6:13
- "Tombstone Blues" – 5:58
- "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" – 4:09
- "From a Buick 6" – 3:19
- "Ballad of a Thin Man" – 5:58
- "Queen Jane Approximately" – 5:31
- "Highway 61 Revisited" – 3:30
- "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" – 5:31
- "Desolation Row" – 11:21
Total running time: Approx. 51:04
[edit] Personnel
- Michael Bloomfield - Guitar
- Harvey Brooks aka Harvey Goldstein - Bass
- Bob Dylan - Guitar, Harmonica, Piano, Vocals, Liner notes, Police car
- Bobby Gregg - Drums
- Paul Griffin - Organ, Piano
- Al Kooper - Organ, Piano (Hohner pianet)
- Sam Lay - Drums
- Charlie McCoy - Guitar.
- Frank Owens - Piano
- Russ Savakus - Bass
- Tom Wilson - Producer, "Like A Rolling Stone"
- Bob Johnston - Producer
