Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Listen up, Abraham!, August 11, 2005
I started listening to Bob Dylan when I was eighteen years old and lived in Calcutta, India. This was before the 'glory' days of corporate globalization and the global brands hadn't painted the nation with its broad strokes of corporate colour. No MTV, just a state controlled basic TV for under 30 hours a week in all meant that we listened to good music and read good books. We realized early that good music, like good literature had no political boundaries, yet so much of it was pure politics.
Arindam Mitra, an old friend of mine, now settled in Mumbai, gave me the vinyl LP and swear to god, I probably listened to it a 100 times in a short span of time. It wasn't my first Dylan album, but it was one that would have an indelible mark on a young mind.
Music, as you know, in its best form, can change your life.
I wonder if there's one performer these days who even comes close to having the ability to make a record of this stature. The words are like burning coal, the music like rolling thunder and hits you like a jet plane.
I do not recommend that you go and buy this album unless you are exploring what real music is all about. On the other hand, if you do decide to listen to Highway 61 for the first time, it may well change your life.
If you do possess this album, go and listen to it again. Mr. Dylan may tell you something completely different this time.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"She walks like Bo Diddley, and she don't need no crutch", February 10, 2008
Bob Dylan is a frustratingly inconsistent artist. The worst albums in his catalog - and there are a lot of those - are pretty much insufferable. But if you catch Dylan on a good day, when his creative powers are at their height and his lyrics are some of the best known to man - and there are a lot of those, too - every good word you've heard about the guy suddenly turns true. This is definitely one such album, and his most famous, acclaimed work. It may not be as revolutionary as Bringing it All Back Home or as personal as Blood on the Tracks, but the lyrics here are better than on ANY other Dylan album, or any other album, period.
So, right. It's Dylan vs. the establishment here. And if you aren't betting on Dylan, you're betting on the wrong horse. The most fierce attack on the "straight" (in more senses than one, if you're reading between the lines) culture is on "Ballad of a Thin Man", a creepy, organ-driven track with Dylan's sneering at its best. And the lyrics are brilliant, as usual. Another favorite of mine is the resident classic, "Like a Rolling Stone", which was later covered by everyone from Bob Marley to the Replacements to Jimi Hendrix. In other words, it's an across-the-board standard, and it just might be Dylan's signature song. It's not just the infamously nasty lyrics that make it the masterpiece it is, either (though that sure is part of it), but the melody, the triumphant organ part, and the little guitar fills, provided by Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield, respectively. In short, it's Dylan at his peak as a songwriter, lyricist, and arranger. It's more or less as good as a song can get. Sharply contrasting this carefully arranged song are the several literally offbeat (as in, the bass and drums aren't even together) garage-rockers: "Tombstone Blues" is a propulsive, ramshackle rant against everything, taking "Subterranean Homesick Blues" to a new level; "From a Buick 6" is a funny blues rave-up parody with a great bass line and several great lyrics such as "I need a steam shovel mama to keep away the dead, I need a dump truck mama to unload my head" and various others that only Dylan could come up with. The title track is hilarious - the satirical lyrics ("God said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son', Abe said, 'Man, you must be puttin' me on'") are gutbusters, and who doesn't love that little toy police siren? "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" is more of Dylan at his finest, a witty travelogue with several sly, subtle references to prostitution, drugs, corrupt authorities, and general decadence. Let us not forget Dylan's sarcastic, satirical love song "Queen Jane Approximately" either, or the gentle majesty of the straightforward blues "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry".
And then there's "Desolation Row", arguably the most cryptic piece in Dylan's discography. It's more than eleven minutes long, and the entirety of it is played on an acoustic guitar with Dylan calmly intoning downright apocalyptic lyrics. It's certainly an ambitious piece, namechecking Ophelia, the Phantom of the Opera, Casanova (in the same verse!), Quasimodo, Cain & Abel, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and containing more than one reference to genocide. By anyone else it would fall apart, but there's something about Dylan's presence here that makes it arguably the best song on the album. I myself haven't the faintest idea of what he's getting at here - I suspect that "desolation row" itself is an afterlife of sorts - but the words sure do sound good together, whatever they're supposed to convey.
In conclusion, this was probably the album that gave the name "Bob Dylan" the messianic undertone it conveys. But here's what separates Bob from his many imitators. It's clear that he wasn't even TRYING to be the voice of his generation here - if he was, he probably would've put a lot more care into producing this album and DEFINITELY would've fixed all those little mistakes the band makes that just add to how GOOD this record is - but he succeeded in it just the same. Everyone else who tries it fails. See? That's what's so good about him.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Easily one of the greatest milestones of the rock era, July 3, 2006
Hyperbole rules in customer reviews, but I honestly believe that this is the greatest album ever released. It almost certainly influenced the history of rock and roll more than any other single album made, even more than SGT PEPPER. Why? The greatest influence on the Beatles after their initial fame was listening to Bob Dylan. The influence of the single "Like a Rolling Stone" alone was staggering. (It was released as a single months before the album.) Upon listening to Dylan and this album/song, Sam Cooke wrote a masterpiece in trying to imitate him ("A Change is Gonna Come"), as did Otis Redding ("Sitting on the Dock of the Bay"). Both Lennon and McCartney abandoned the pop love songs that had been the staple of the Beatles success through 1965 to write the more complex lyrics found on REVOLVER and RUBBER SOUL. Virtually every rock songwriter on both sides of the Atlantic had to rethink everything that they were doing with their music. His previous albums had found a wide audience, but primarily in the folk scene. This was true even of BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME. Primarily because of the success of "Like a Rolling Stone" as a single, this was the first Dylan album that was primarily a rock album rather than folk.
There are so many remarkable aspects to this album. The lyrics are so incredible as to seem beyond the capacity of someone as young and uneducated as Dylan, full of deep cultural resonances and references while maintaining a poetic perfection. Every fan can name his or her own favorites: mine are "Like a Rolling Stone," the title song, "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," and "Desolation Row." The success of the album made his earlier albums equally essential for rock performers, instantly providing rock with a verbal palette that dramatically extended the simple love song to almost any subject.
One thing that sets this album from so many Dylan albums that followed is the excellence of the session musicians. As great as Dylan is, on many of his albums he employs musicians that simply aren't among the best. Take the guitar work alone. Although Robbie Robertson would provide superb work on BLONDE ON BLONDE, no Dylan album after HIGHWAY 61 would feature such stellar solo work as what Michael Bloomfield would provide on this one. The filler lines he provides at the end of the various lines in "Tombstone Blues" is just one example. But as fine as Bloomfield is, he is matched by the astonishing playing by country guitarist Charlie McCoy on "Desolation Row," who achieves the near impossible by playing eleven minutes of acoustic guitar in counterpoint to Dylan's strumming, and manages to make it compelling throughout.
Above all else, HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED created the potential for rock to be difficult and challenging. Before Dylan, no one listening to rock had to use more than just a tiny fraction of their brain. After this album, rock became intelligent, or at least had that potential. Take "Desolation Row." Apart from Chuck Berry telling Beethoven to roll over, rock contained in its first decade virtually no cultural references to speak of. But in that song alone Dylan sings of Cinderella, Bette Davis, Romeo, Cain and Abel, the hunchback of Notre Dame, the Good Samaritan, Ophelia, Noah, Einstein, the Phantom of the Opera, Casanova, Nero, Neptune, the Titanic, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. Rock had never been so literate before and has only rarely been this intelligent since. Somehow in an eleven-minute song Dylan managed to sum up huge hunks of modern culture. In conjunction with the other songs on the album, in particular "Ballad of a Thin Man" and "Highway 61 Revisited," Dylan seemed to sum up all the alienation that the youth of the sixties was feeling in regard to the consumerism that had exploded in the fifties.
It is hardly conceivable that any serious fan of music in general or rock in particular isn't already familiar with every second of this album, but if not, you must get it. On its own merits, it is one of the supreme cultural achievements of the century, and its massive influence on every single songwriter who grew up in its wake only makes knowing it all that more essential.
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Bob Dylan: "Johnny Cash's voice was so big, it made the world grow small... When I first heard 'I Walk the Line' so many years earlier, it sounded like a voice calling out 'What are you doing there, boy?' I was trying to keep my eyes wide opened, too." Read more musical excerpts from Chronicles, Vol. 1 on our Music You Should Hear page.
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