Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited LP

Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time - Rated 18/500!

Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by Bob Dylan, originally released on August 30, 1965, by Columbia Records. 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". 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.

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. 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. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, and the Delta blues area of Mississippi.

Highway 61 Revisited peaked at No. 3 on the US Billboard 200 and No. 4 on the UK Albums Chart. The album has since been described as one of Dylan's best works and among the greatest albums of all time, and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002.

"If anyone questioned whether or not Dylan had truly 'gone electric,' the roaring rock & roll of 'From a Buick 6' and 'Tombstone Blues' - both powered by legendary guitarist Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band - left no doubt. The album ends with 'Desolation Row,' a swirling 11-minute surrealist night journey of indescribable power, a Hieronymus Bosch-like season in hell that, in retrospect, seems to foretell all the Sixties cataclysms to come." - Rolling Stone, 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time

Dylan had not only changed his sound, but his persona, trading the folk troubadour for a streetwise, cynical hipster. Throughout the album, he embraces druggy, surreal imagery, which can either have a sense of menace or beauty, and the music reflects that, jumping between soothing melodies to hard, bluesy rock. And that is the most revolutionary thing about Highway 61 Revisited - it proved that rock & roll needn't be collegiate and tame in order to be literate, poetic, and complex.