Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll album ever made.
Sorry, Beatles and Beach Boys fans. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Pet Sounds” may be more self-conscious attempts to produce high art within a pop format, but for pure lyrical invention, musicianship and scope of influence, “Highway 61” remains unmatched.
Now more than 50 years removed from the album’s August 1965 release, it’s easy to forget how revolutionary it was. Just as U.S. Highway 61 links the Mississippi Delta to Dylan’s home state of Minnesota, the album serves as the bridge between rock ‘n’ roll’s blues and folk influences and the era of the progressive concept album. Roughly three months later the Beatles—acutely aware of and influenced by Dylan’s every move—would release “Rubber Soul,” which in turn inspired a game of follow the leader the following year with the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” as well as “Aftermath,” the Rolling Stones’ first set of all-original tunes.
Prior to 1965, Dylan the folk hero may have escaped the ears of the youthful masses weaned on the sounds of the British Invasion. But anyone with an AM radio would have heard “Like a Rolling Stone,” released as a single on July 20, 1965, just five days before Dylan scandalized the Newport Folk Festival by going electric. Clocking in at six minutes, 13 seconds—more than twice the typical length of a single—with waves of organ cascading over lyrics at once confrontational and enigmatic, it was a battle cry that changed the playing field more than any song of the 1960s.
Today, Dylan’s status as the poet laureate of popular music is well established, but he still doesn’t get enough credit for his musical acumen. Has there ever been a better pickup band than the one Dylan assembled for the “Highway 61” recordings? In addition to session stalwarts like pianist Paul Griffin, drummer Bobby Gregg and musical chameleon Charlie McCoy, Dylan enlisted the support of such heavyweights as Mike Bloomfield, the Chicago guitarist who was nearing the peak of his prodigious electric blues powers; Al Kooper, the accidental organist who always seemed to be in the right place at the right time; and Harvey Brooks, the jazz-influenced bassist who would later play on Miles Davis’ fusion classic “Bitches Brew.”
The guitar-bass-drums-keyboards format that Dylan codified on “Highway 61” would form the basic musical vocabulary of so-called heartland rock for the next half century. The sounds of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Bob Seger and John Mellencamp—along with countless bar bands—are inconceivable without Dylan’s accomplishment.
In terms of lyrical achievement, Dylan’s only real competition is himself. The double album “Blonde on Blonde” was a worthy follow-up, but it falls off slightly in its second half with missteps like the annoyingly sarcastic “4th Time Around” and the interminable “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” The silver medal in the Dylan discography belongs to “Blood on the Tracks,” but it gets docked a point for its lightweight closing number, “Buckets of Rain.” Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” also gives “Highway 61” a run for its money, but it’s hard to overlook the anticlimax of the album’s concluding tracks following the majesty of “Madame George.”
The cast of fictional characters and historical figures that populates the universe of “Highway 61” is staggering. Cinderella, Romeo, Ophelia, Robin Hood and the Phantom of the Opera make cameo appearances. Albert Einstein, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Casanova, Nero, Cecil B. DeMille, Paul Revere, Jack the Ripper, Ma Rainey and Beethoven rub elbows with Biblical figures like John the Baptist, Abraham, Cain and Abel, the Good Samaritan and God Himself.
That doesn’t even take into account Dylan’s own literary creations, like the pensive phantom engineer of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”; the bewildered Mr. Jones of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” perplexed by his repressed homosexuality and outsider status; or the hapless vagabond of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” who finds himself stranded south of the border, reminiscent of Sal Paradise’s Mexican misadventures in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”
Nor had Dylan completely abandoned the social consciousness of his folk protest-song period, as evidenced by the undercurrent of discontent toward the escalating Vietnam quagmire that flows through “Tombstone Blues,” or the comic absurdity of the title track, in which a profiteer and promotor conspire to start the next world war in the name of capitalism.
Besides “Like a Rolling Stone,” the album’s greatest song is “Desolation Row,” a surreal 11-minute opus which begins, “They’re selling postcards of the hanging,” and ends with a letter about a broken doorknob. There’s been much critical speculation over the years about the meaning of the song and its titular location, but for this listener, the key lies in its fifth verse:
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
Now he looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row
Einstein, the physicist who developed the general theory of relativity, learned to play the violin when he was 5 years old and maintained a lifelong love of music. “Life without playing music is inconceivable for me,” he once said. “I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. … I get most joy in life out of music.”
Desolation Row—the place where the intellectually enlightened escape the insurance men hired by the superhuman crew—is thus a retreat from the hypocrisy of a world where they sell postcards of a hanging and where the king of the Philistines fattens the slaves then sends them out to the jungle. It’s the realm of the creative mind and the place where Dylan conceived his masterpiece.
Neither he nor anyone else has been able to top it since.