So, as mentioned in the Rubber Soul review, I’m not a huge fan of anything that came out in the 1960s. It all sounds a bit too tinny to me – I prefer the clean, glacial production of the 80s (think Too Low for Zero or Rio). But of all the 60s luminaries, I’ve long been particularly perplexed by the popularity of Bob Dylan. I generally find folk and country music to be pulse-stilling and one-dimensional, but when it’s coupled with Dylan’s nasal, whiny, not very tuneful voice… It’s hard for me to understand not only the level of hagiography, but how anyone can sit through it for extended periods of time. It’s like someone rubbing sandpaper against my brain.
But I knew I couldn’t escape the 1960s without reviewing at least one Bob Dylan album, so I plumped for Highway 61 Revisited, which is, from the little I know, commonly considered his best, alongside Blonde on Blonde. And, I will admit, the more I listened to it, the more it started to grow on me. I remain unpersuaded of the merits of twangy, countryfied American folk music, especially when it’s married with the willfully imperfect production style of the 1960s, and particularly when its historical roots lie in the insufferably pretentious and self-indulgent counterculture of the decade, which from my point of view, looks like the preserve of narcissistic middle-class poseurs. So this album was already fighting a losing battle before I even heard it. Nonetheless, there is something intriguing about Dylan’s elevation of lyrics to the centerpiece of his songs, to the point where everything else is mere background music. The more I listened to it, the more I warmed to it, without ever fully embracing it.
“Like a Rolling Stone” is a good song, obviously. I like the organ, I like how it sounds kind of warm and exuberant, but with scathing and bitter lyrics. But again, those lyrics… they are positively sprawling. If I look at the lyrics tab of this song on YouTube music and compare it to Rubber Soul or My Generation, other albums I’ve recently listened to, then the difference is striking. It looks like an undergraduate essay, lines and lines of text piling over each other. I’m ambivalent about this, because I tend to think that lyrics should be pared down, organically rooted into the song, whereas there’s a clunkiness to this excessive verbiage, which is only worsened by Dylan’s overly dominant, whiney vocals. And yet, as I said above, I’m kind of intrigued by it, the sheer acerbic nastiness and contrariness of it.
“Like a Rolling Stone” is, I guess, about Bob’s resentment of some formerly self-important woman, some senator’s ex-wife, who has fallen from grace and finds herself alone in the world, and who probably rejected him when he propositioned her or something. He pulls almost the same trick on the sixth song, “Queen Jane Approximately”, by laying into another superficial tart living an inauthentic life who should come find herself – with him, presumably. It’s less caustic than “Like a Rolling Stone”, though still quite funny. Overall, though, it’s striking how mean-spirited such songs are toward ex- or prospective lovers. Not unlike the songs on Rubber Soul, in fact. It would be harder for a male performer to get away with this sort of thing today without being blacklisted. Maybe it’s evidence of an improvement in civic standards, of people getting nicer, but it certainly represents a narrowing of artistic parameters, let’s say.
Then you’ve got the songs that are infused with religious references. “Tombstone Blues” is bluesy, typically 50s/60s rock’n’roll, and not my cup of tea, particularly, but the lyrics indicate how biblical a lot of Dylan’s stuff was even in the beginning, before he adopted the lunatic Christian gimmick in the late 70s. The album is peppered with this kind of thing – and not exclusively references to the New Testament either, because the song “Highway 61 Revisited” talks about God asking Abraham to kill his firstborn son. I don’t know much about Dylan’s religious upbringing, except that he grew up in a pretty tight-knit Jewish community, and later became a born again Christian, so who knows what the relevance of all of this is. Either way, if these are supposed to be protest songs, I find them overly opaque and not particularly effective.
Bob includes what I assume he takes to be love songs, though they’re Dylan love songs, so riddled with venom and irony. “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Lot to Cry” has too much of a rockabilly, music hall swing to it for my tastes, while the rocky and raucous “From a Buick 6” is, I assume, a kind of morbid tribute to some poor wench who foolishly agreed to put up with the little shit. The ground up glass of Dylan’s voice remains off-putting, though you do kind of get used to it, I suppose, and it’s hard not to appreciate the sneering swagger of the song.
Two of the later songs, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Desolation Row”, were surely written about the same or similar experiences – they are droll and, in the case of “Desolation Row”, unexpectedly sad accounts of Dylan’s forays into dens of inequity, gatherings of prostitutes, clowns, dubious performing artists, criminals, and travelers. Some very cursory Wikipedia research reveals that they were written about his visits to Mexico and attendance of an Easter carnival, and “Desolation Row” in particular must be about a circus and the various down-and-outs who worked there. Anyway, listening to these songs while walking through some of the seedier parts of the city where I live was stimulating, in the sense that you realise – contrary to what Bob insisted – that the times they don’t change that much. There are always pockets of desperation and lunacy, in every city in every historical era, in Cromwell’s Britain and the Ayatollah’s Iran. In fact, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
But the album’s highlight is surely “Ballad of a Thin Man”, a doleful, condemnatory, piano-driven dismantling of a square, suit-wearing, try-hard middle-class male (Mr. Jones) who stumbles into a space occupied by braying freaks of the new, hip counterculture. Basically a stick-up-his-ass university professor in a lecture hall full of bearded kids holding up Chairman Mao posters. A mean-spirited, amusing, very listenable song, but the lyrics are a bit hit-and-miss, I find. Is the reference to lumberjacks about how the indigenous Western working classes generally held aloof from the 1968 student protests (which were, of course, the work of insufferably pretentious middle-class poseurs, that is, the exact demographic Bob was appealing to)? You tell me.
Which I suppose brings me to my overall gripe with Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, and folk music in general; it’s a genre that prioritizes not so much the smoothness or even melodiousness of the sound, but rather the point that’s being made, the message being conveyed, through the lyrics in particular. In fact, smoothness could actually be considered a detraction from the perceived ‘authenticity’ of the music, because indigestibility apparently equates to integrity, or something. I’m sure there’s a powerful critique of consumer society here somewhere, and in theory, I’m all for centering the lyrics – in the beginning was the word, after all. And as it happens, I was in a rock band as a teenager, and the only interesting or inspiring thing to me was writing the lyrics – playing music itself was a chore. But Dylan takes this impulse too far – it’s too intellectual, the lyrics too prominent, the message and narrator too central to the song. Sometimes I like to turn my brain off when I’m listening to music and just enjoy the overall mood and tune – which is certainly not possible here, because the voice is so jarring, and the lyrics so voluminous that they demand complete concentration.
Which brings me to my closing thought: Is Highway 61 Revised the first punk album? The whole listening experience is unpleasant, uncomfortable, jarring, acerbic, like it’s designed to make you wince and writhe. The lyrics are venomous and expansive. The sound is not as hard as punk, of course, but the “fuck you” sentiment that runs throughout the whole album is comparable. Were the likes of Joe Strummer and Sid Vicious inspired by Bob Dylan? I have no idea, but if there’s one highway I have no immediate plans to revisit, then it’s 61.
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Highlights: “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Ballad of a Thin Man”, “Desolation Row”.