Highway 61 Revisited (Mono)

Description

Though 1966s 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 Dylans transformation from progressive folk singer to visionary rock poet. Its Dylans first fully electric album, powered by the manic intensity of Mike Bloomfields skull-and-crossbones blues-rock guitar leads and Al Koopers 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 favour 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, hes not just name-dropping; hes merely delineating the company in which a work as rich and ground-breaking as HIGHWAY 61 belongs.