Highway 61 Revisited

The Songs

Arguably the most celebrated recording in rock history, "Like A Rolling Stone" is a song directed at a person (possibly 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."

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When the single was released, Paul McCartney recalls hearing it as 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 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."

Related Topics:
Paul McCartney - John Lennon - Bruce Springsteen - Frank Zappa

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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?"

Related Topics:
Robert Christgau - The Sopranos

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"If Salvador Dali or Luis Bunuel 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')."

Related Topics:
Salvador Dali - Luis Bunuel

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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 1960's 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,"

Related Topics:
NPR - F. Scott Fitzgerald

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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?')."

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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 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")."

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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... encounter 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 Allen 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."

Related Topics:
Malcolm Lowry - Edgar Allen Poe - Rimbaud

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At the time, "Desolation Row" was arguably Dylan's most ambitious song and for many years his longest recording. 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."

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