Highway '61 Revisited

by Bob Dylan

Product Description:

Personnel: Bob Dylan (vocals, guitar, harmonica, piano); Michael Bloomfield Charlie McCoy (guitar); Al Kooper, Paul Griffin (piano, organ); Frank Owens (piano); Harvey Goldstein, Russ Savakus (bass); Bobby Gregg (drums).

Engineers include: Peter Dauria, Roy Halee, Frank Laico.

Recorded in Columbia Studios, New York, New York in June-August 1965.

Includes liner notes by Bob Dylan.

Though 1966's BLONDE ON BLONDE is usually singled out as the most innovative Bob Dylan album, its predecessor HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED is the one that definitively marks Dylan's transformation from progressive folk singer to visionary rock poet. It's Dylan's first fully electric album, powered by the manic intensity of Mike Bloomfield's skull-and-crossbones blues-rock guitar leads and Al Kooper's rich organ fills.

While many of the songs are presented in a traditional 12-bar blues format, the lyrics find Dylan finally abandoning conventional linear narrative in favor of poetic abstraction, surreal imagery, and biting sarcasm. In the rock world, there has never been a lambasting harsher or more cathartic than the excoriation of "Ballad of a Thin Man," and no challenge more bold than that offered in the iconic "Like a Rolling Stone." When Dylan invokes the names of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot towards the end of the poetic epic "Desolation Row," he's not just name-dropping; he's merely delineating the company in which a work as rich and ground-breaking as HIGHWAY 61 belongs.