#Seven moments worth revisiting full

The first block, June 15 and 16, was produced by Tom Wilson and resulted in the single 'Like a Rolling Stone'. Highway 61 Revisited was recorded in two blocks of recording sessions that took place in Studio A of Columbia Records, located in Midtown Manhattan. You don't know what it means except the ghost picked me to write the song.' Describing the experience to Robert Hilburn in 2004, nearly 40 years later, Dylan said: 'It's like a ghost is writing a song like that . He told Hentoff that writing and recording the song washed away his dissatisfaction, and restored his enthusiasm for creating music. He reduced this to a song with four verses and a chorus-'Like a Rolling Stone'. I was very drained.' The singer added, 'It's very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don't dig you.' Īs a consequence of his dissatisfaction, Dylan wrote 20 pages of verse he later described as a 'long piece of vomit'. He told journalist Nat Hentoff: 'I was going to quit singing. In May 1965, Dylan returned from his tour of England feeling exhausted and dissatisfied with his material. Many bluesmen had been there before, all recording versions of a blues called 'Highway 61'.' Recording Background I had to go up the fucking ladder until finally the word came down and said: 'Let him call it what he wants to call it'.' Michael Gray said the album's title represents Dylan's insistence that his songs are rooted in the blues: 'Indeed the album title Highway 61 Revisited announces that we are in for a long revisit, since it is such a long, blues-travelled highway. He told biographer Robert Shelton: 'I wanted to call that album Highway 61 Revisited.

ĭylan said he had to overcome resistance at Columbia Records to give the album its title. The highway had also been the subject of several blues recordings, notably Roosevelt Sykes' 'Highway 61 Blues' (1932) and Mississippi Fred McDowell's '61 Highway' (1964). Critic Mark Polizzotti points out that blues legend Robert Johnson is alleged to have sold his soul to the devil at the highway's crossroads with Route 49. The 'empress of the blues', Bessie Smith, died after sustaining serious injuries in an automobile accident on Highway 61. Along the way, the route passed near the birthplaces and homes of influential musicians such as Muddy Waters, Son House, Elvis Presley and Charley Patton. Highway 61 stretched from the Canada–US border in far northeast Minnesota (redesignated in 1991 as MN-61), through Duluth, near where Dylan was born in Hibbing, along the Mississippi River down to New Orleans. When he was growing up in the 1950s, U.S. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.'

#Seven moments worth revisiting full

It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors . I always felt like I'd started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere, even down in to the deep Delta country. In his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan described the kinship he felt with the route that supplied the title of his sixth album: ' Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began.

3.1.3 'It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry'.

2.3 Recording sessions, July 29 – August 4.

Two other songs, 'Desolation Row' and 'Highway 61 Revisited', were listed at No. 1 on Rolling Stone 's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. 'Like a Rolling Stone' was a top-10 hit in several countries, and was listed at No. 26 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000) and was featured in Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2010). 4 on Rolling Stone 's ' 500 Greatest Albums of All Time'. Positively received on release, the album has since been described as one of Dylan's best works and among the greatest albums of all time, ranking No. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, and the Delta blues area of Mississippi.

He named the album after the major American highway which connected his birthplace of Duluth, Minnesota, to southern cities famed for their musical heritage, including St.

Leading with the hit song ' Like a Rolling Stone', the album features songs that Dylan has continued to perform live over his long career, including ' Ballad of a Thin Man' and the title track. Author Michael Gray has argued that, in an important sense, the 1960s 'started' with this album. Critics have focused on the innovative way Dylan combined driving, blues-based music with the subtlety of poetry to create songs that captured the political and cultural chaos of contemporary America. Having until then recorded mostly acoustic music, Dylan used rock musicians as his backing band on every track of the album, except for the closing track, the 11-minute ballad ' Desolation Row'. Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 30, 1965, by Columbia Records.