Highway 61 Revisited Bethesda MD

Highway 61 Revisited

Bob Dylan

Columbia, 1965

REVIEW BY: Benjamin Ray

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 01/10/2008

Eschewing any pretense of commercial appeal, Bob Dylan appeared at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 with an electric guitar.

The fans booed, even though the electric portion of the set was short. No longer a folkie like Woody Guthrie, but too weird and original to be classified as pop, the moment marked the point where Dylan entered into his own genre -- and where, one could argue, the music of the 60s began to change.

Bear in mind Dylan had a profound effect on the Beatles in 1965, and shades of him are all over Rubber Soul. Where the Beatles were still writing short pop songs, though, Dylan was pursuing a longer, looser, weirder vibe, where the drugs and the poetry and the revelations of life mixed in an intoxicating haze. You either got it or you didn't.

More than 40 years after the fact, Highway 61 Revisited remains as fascinating and confusing at it was upon first listen. Three of the first five songs are each six minutes long; none of them have any sort of traditional structure, but rather repetitious phrases -- verse, chorus, verse, chorus, etc. until Dylan gives up and fades out. As he writes in the incomprehensible liner notes, "...the songs on this specific record are not so much songs but rather exercises in tonal breath control. The subject matter -- though meaningless as it is -- has something to do with the beautiful strangers, Vivaldi's green jacket and the holy slow train."