Highway 61 Revisited

Bob Dylan

Columbia, 1965

bruce springsteen has described the beginning of “Like a Rolling Stone,” the opening song on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, as the “snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind.” In and of itself, “Like a Rolling Stone” forever altered the landscape of popular music — its “vomitific” lyrics (in Dylan’s memorable term), literary ambition, and sheer length (6:13) shattered limitations of every kind.

The rest of the album, recorded in a shocking six days, was just as revelatory. If anyone questioned whether Dylan had truly “gone electric,” the roaring rock & roll of “From a Buick 6” and “Tombstone Blues” — both powered by the legendary guitarist Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band — left no doubt. The album ends with “Desolation Row,” a swirling 11-minute surrealistic season-in-hell journey that, in retrospect, seems to foretell all of the Sixties cataclysms to come.

Not that Dylan wasn’t having fun all the while as well. The toy siren that opens the album’s title track was keyboardist Al Kooper’s playful way of policing the recording sessions. “If anybody started using drugs anywhere,” he explained, “I’d walk into the opposite corner of the room and just go whooooooooo.”