Highway 61 Revisited
| Bob Dylan
Highway 61 Revisited
Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, 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. Author Michael Gray has argued that, in an important sense, the 1960s "started" with this album.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
August 30, 2016. Bob Dylan‘s second album of 1965, Highway 61 Revisited, would be a historic break: For the first time, none of the tracks would feature just him and his guitar.
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Ultimate Classic Rock
August 30, 2015. a rollicking upheaval of his folk image that faced down influences, expectations and his critics. It's bitter, funny, melodic, lyrical and groundbreaking. And it's one of the best rock 'n' roll records ever made.
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BBC
2007. It’s easy to overlook the testy brilliance of “Like A Rolling Stone “on account of its having been part of the musical furniture for the last forty years. Yet the fresh air and fresh ideas, whistling alongside Al Kooper’s soaring organ lines, all add up to this being a 100% classic with one of the great cutting vocal performances to date.
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All Music
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.
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The Odyssey
November 28, 2016. Highway 61 Revisited was Dylan’s first real rock and roll album, and it included direct influences from traditional blues musicians rather than his original folk sounds.
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Consequence of Sound
August 28, 2015. Even today, everything about Highway 61 feels like a riddle, this curious musical vessel overstuffed with great songs and wiser-than-thou pearls of boho wisdom.
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Classic Rock Review
August 29, 2015. Most importantly of all though, the music is just plain great. It’s more complex than anything he had done previously and more rewarding to listen to as a result.
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Pop Matters
February 6, 2004. Dylan spins and whirls into a snarling, searing 51 minutes of anarchic imagery and music.
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MoFi
At its core, Highway 61 Revisited is about experience, reality, and the cruelties and truths that lie outside soporific safety nets and bourgeois ideals. These reasons - and the bold musicianship, ace performances, inimitable sonics, and vast lyrical expanses - are why the album means as much today as it did in the mid-1960s.
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Musician's Friend
2016. All figure prominently on the revolutionary beacon that is Highway 61 Revisited, the 1965 set that overturned rules, upended preexisting limits, and utterly changed everything in it's path.
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Gaslight Records
2015. I’m generally not one to talk in terms of best, but it might be the best album Bob Dylan recorded, maybe the best album anyone has ever recorded.
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The Current
September 11, 2017, His creative genius only blossomed more with the two records that followed: Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. He really did make a trilogy of his best work during that time.
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PP Corn
2015. Meanwhile, in 1965, only six months after releasing the groundbreaking Bringing it All Back Home, Bob Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited, somehow finding more ground to shake up. And all this without the benefit of any digital production techniques.
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Bob Dylan Commentaries
2018. he married his lyrics to blues-based rock’n’roll, and topped it off with a startling and singularly effective vocal technique that had never been heard before.
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The Best of Website
Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited is perhaps his best album. The middle of his consecutive three classic releases, though the release before and a handful after are classics as well.
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Record Collector
Highway 61 Revisited – his first full rock outing – was the greatest album ever made.
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Muziek
2015. Dylan did not seem content with his songs, while the listeners were wildly enthusiastic. After Dylan had written and recorded the song Like A Rolling Stone, he was cured of his dissatisfaction with his own music. Highway 61 Revisited is one of the most praised works by Dylan.
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itunes Apple Music
This album is electric in every sense, a nervy jangle that finds a taunting Bob Dylan fronting a full-fledged rock band and shedding his folkie past.
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Sundazed
As rapturous as that single ("Like a Rolling Stone") was, Highway 61 Revisited had much more to offer than just one stellar song. Reflecting the album's title, blues runs as a thread throughout the LP's framework, both in song titles like "Tombstone Blues" and in the unrelenting, charging chord structure of "Like a Buick 6.
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Turntable Lab
The album went on to be one of the most influential recordings of the 1960s and is heralded as one of greatest rock albums of all time.
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Sputnik Music
January 14, 2015. Considered one of Dylan's best works, Highway 61 Revisited is a masterpiece of folk and rock. Dylan is a creative genius, and this album took him literally days to write and record.
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Norman Records
2015. Highway 61 Revisited dates from 1965, and marks the point on record where Dylan moved firmly towards rock forms. Includes ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’.
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Audio Files Magazine
2006. One of the most canonized rock LPs of all time, for good reason, Bob Dylan's HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED, released in the fall of 1965, was arguably the first "psychedelic" album.
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The Top Tens
Feb. 29, 2016. This is one of history's best albums, and I'm very glad that I decided to give it a chance. It will never fail to impress me, and I tend to like it more every single time that I listen to it. This album is close to being perfect, and is probably in my top fifteen, if not top ten
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Talk Classical
Sept. 24, 2018. 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".
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Audiophile Audition
April 15, 2013. There’s no doubt this is one of the top albums in the history of rock, and well as probably the best of all the Dylan albums.
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Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews
Here he refines his mid-Sixties electric sound, making effective use of piano and organ as well as stinging guitar (courtesy of Mike Bloomfield). The lyrics are among his most successful ever: "Like A Rolling Stone" was a big hit single, and "Ballad Of A Thin Man" was a countercultural milestone.
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The Reinvigorated Programmer
October 28, 2016. It’s evident that Dylan (or, to be charitable, at least the character he’s playing) is a monumentally condescending, mean-spirited and narcissistic jerk; not someone I want to spend more time with. Worst of all, the songs are so darned boring.
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Analogue Seduction
Critics have focused on the innovative way in which Dylan combined driving, blues-based music with the subtlety of poetry to create songs that captured the political and cultural chaos of contemporary America.
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The Woodstock Whisperer
2017. I’m not much for top ten lists and such, but this is certainly a great album. If Bringing It All Back Home (released only five months earlier on March 22) had sounded the death knell of an acoustic folk Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited is the clarion call.
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Best Classic Bands
he made sure he got what he wanted from each song. He knew what he wanted. It’s an amazing talent that really knows what they want.
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Album Cover Stickers
Recorded in a staggering six days, Highway 61 Revisited – named after the road that runs from Bob Dylan's home state of Minnesota down through the Mississippi Delta – is one of those albums that changed everything.
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Puluche
August 30, 2015. The sequence of the record is another testament to its greatness, and though for several years after this record, some of his “fans” were still calling him a traitor to the genre of folk, Highway 61 Revisited is the album that first told the world Bob Dylan could and would do whatever the hell he wanted to do.
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The Student Playlist
August 29,2015. On Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan was no longer the folk troubadour of the first couple of years of his career. Now, he was a cynical, street-smart hipster, a self-styled outsider sneering at and deriding the mainstream from sidelines.
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TV Tropes
Many fans and rock historians consider it to be one of his masterpieces.
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Lemon Wire
February 16, 2018. One of his most defining. An epoch not just in the career of Dylan, but in rock itself. Highway 61 Revisited was a turning point, a defining moment; the point where Bob Dylan dropped the folk mystique and went straight-ahead into rock.
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Guitar Player
September 6, 2012. No one was doing heavy numbers combined with lyrical ferocity like this in 1965. Dylan seems light years ahead of everyone in terms of a in-your-face, heavy rock sound.
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Eric Mack Attacks
Unquestionably Dylan’s best and most dynamic work, Highway 61 Revisited is Dylan at the peak of his powers. It’s one of the greatest albums ever, recorded and released as rock came into its own.
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Countdown Kid
May 23, 2013. It was more bluesy and ballsy then the record that preceded it, shuttering gentle acoustics almost altogether in favor of the raw and the ragged. The constant was Dylan’s continued lyrical brilliance.
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Rockapedia
Oct. 4, 2014. The resulting album, Highway 61 Revisited, has been described as "Dylan's first purely 'rock' album", a realization of his wish to leave his old music format behind and move on from his all-acoustic first four albums and half-acoustic, half-electric fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home.
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