Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 56

Record label: CBS

Produced: Tom Wilson and Bob Johnston

Recorded: Columbia Studios, New York; June 15–August 4, 1965

Released: August 30, 1965

Chart peaks: 4 (UK) 3 (US)

Personnel: Bob Dylan (v, g, k, hm); Mike Bloomfield (g); Charlie McCoy (g); Al Kooper (k); Paul Griffin (k); Russ Savakus (b); Harvey Brooks (b); Bobby Gregg (d); Sam Lay (d); Frank Owens (k, pc)

Track listing: Like A Rolling Stone (S); Tombstone Blues; It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; From A Buick 6; Ballad Of A Thin Man; Queen Jane Approximately; Highway 61 Revisited (S); Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues; Desolation Row

Running time: 51.40

Current CD: Sony 5123512

Further listening: The other core works of Dylan’s electric period, Bringing It All Back Home (1965) and Blonde On Blonde (1966), form a triple pinnacle with Highway 61 Revisited

Further reading: Chronicles (2006); The Bob Dylan Encylopedia (Michael Gray, 2006); www.bobdylan.com

Download: iTunes; HMV Digital

Mostly written in Dylan’s new 31-room mansion (which he sold within a year, preferring not to write in the same place twice), Highway 61 Revisited was the fulfilment of the musical vision he had first developed on the electric side of Bringing It All Back Home. Using a studio band based partly on the Butterfield Blues Band musicians who had backed him at his notorious 1965 Newport Folk Festival appearance, the results were streamlined, sardonic, surrealistic, and bulging with raw blues power.

‘I can’t tell you how disorganised it was,’ recalled Al Kooper of the sessions. ‘Highway 61 has a very raw edge to it, because half the people involved were studio musicians and half weren’t, so it’s got that rough thing which Dylan loves.’ Kooper had hustled his way into proceedings by seizing the chance to contribute organ (an instrument he had never played before!) to Like A Rolling Stone, the first track recorded for the new album. Dylan liked the effect, and Kooper became a staple of his studio band, eventually serving as musical director for the following year’s Blonde On Blonde.

Dylan’s new material was a quantum leap beyond the folk and pop clichés of the time, offering new possibilities for the subject matter and vocabulary of both genres, from the damning personal put-downs of Like A Rolling Stone and Ballad Of A Thin Man to the cultural critiques of Tombstone Blues and Desolation Row. In these songs, his former protest style was transmuted into a surreal stream of imagery; the protests were still there, but had become more a matter of implication and inference than direct address, as Dylan responded to the literary influence of French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud and beat novelist William Burroughs.

The record outraged or baffled as many of his old fans as it impressed (the English poet Philip Larkin, for instance, felt that Desolation Row had ‘an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words’), though Dylan himself – usually his own harshest critic – was in no doubt about what he had achieved. ‘I’m never gonna be able to make a record better than that one,’ he said at the time. ‘[It’s] just too good. There’s a lot of stuff on there that I would listen to!’