Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited

(Album ©1965, Columbia Records)

This is (IMO) one of the two most important albums of all time (along with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), containing songs that brought a depth to rock-n-roll. (Read Greil Marcus’ Like A Rolling Stone to learn more about the impact of this album.) The cover image was a photo taken by Daniel Kramer at Dylan’s manager’s brownstone in NYC, and shows Dylan looking defiant, if not confrontational. The cool Triumph t-shirt and ray-bans make up for the shiny, psychedelic silk shirt, which seems to be so not Dylanesque.

I don’t associate this record with a specific time in my life – it was just always there. My folks didn’t have similar musical tastes, and so Dylan was one of the only artists that they both liked. My dad was a serious folkie – and Dylan was more important to him for his work before he went electric. He listened to Pete Seeger and The Weavers, Peter, Paul, & Mary, and other folk acts. My mom was a Beatles fan and loved Motown. So this record was a good meeting ground for them, and it’s where I started listening to music. I knew this album before I knew what music I did or didn’t like.

There are other Dylan albums I love, but this is my top pick both for impact and listenability. The songs are amazing – each and every one. The title track, “Tombstone Blues,” “Desolation Row,” “Just Like Tom Thumb Blues,” “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “Queen Jane Approximately,” “From a Buick 6,” “It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” and what I consider the most influential song in rock history, “Like A Rolling Stone” – all on one album! And think … this was the second amazing album Dylan released in 1965… Bringing It All Back Home came out just five months earlier!! And then he released what others consider his magnum opus, Blonde on Blonde in the Spring of 1966. The quality of the output in such a short time is absolutely mind-boggling. Only The Beatles and Creedence Clearwater Revival ever came close to this much high-quality music created in such a short time (again, in my opinion).

It went reached #3 on the billboard charts in the States, and #4 in the UK, but the impact of this album was so much more than record sales. If the Beatles opened up the pop music market to musicians who recorded the songs they wrote, then this was the next step in the evolution of rock-n-roll into the musical form of the masses, bringing Dylan’s intense, rich writing out of folk and into the rock world. He put The Beatles (and everybody else) on notice, and the era of the sing-songwriter had begun in earnest. Rock and roll would never be the same, and when I first became aware of it 6 or 7 years later, it sounded as amazing to me as anything I have ever remembered.