If I Go Down Dying: Bob Dylan's 'Highway 61 Revisited' Turns 60

If I Go Down Dying: Highway 61 Revisited Turns 60

“I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere, even down into the deep Delta country,” Bob Dylan wrote about U.S. Route 61 in 2004. “It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.” The highway in question stretches from northeast Minnesota down to New Orleans. On it, you can follow the Mississippi River from beginning to end, passing by the homes of Elvis, Muddy Waters, and Son House on the way. A car crash on U.S. Route 61 killed Bessie Smith; Robert Johnson sold his soul where the highway intersects with Route 49. And the blues songs Dylan began singing were kindred to its majesty and strangeness.

On a U.S. Route of my own, 800 miles east, I grew up in a family of Johnny Cash evangelists. During my sixteenth summer, Mamaw and Papaw gifted me my first vinyl record, a first pressing of At Folsom Prison they’d tucked away in a closet some forty years prior. Out of the smithereens of my nascent OCD, I grew quite fond of Cash’s work. His cover of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” was one of my first iTunes purchases; David and I would have campouts on his trampoline, singing “Highwayman” under the stars while the neighbor with no arms yelled at us to pipe down. But at the beginning of my compulsiveness, I watched movies over and over.

There was a July, in 2012 I’d wager, where I wore my Walk the Line DVD so thin that it’d skip the same beat every time. The credits would eventually come and end, transporting me back to the menu screen so I could start again immediately. I think I watched Walk the Line 250 times that month, which means that I listened to Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” 250 times that month, as it whops in the background as Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin) leaves Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) for good. It’s impossible to forget a song like that, as you’re welcomed into the rollicking, gambler sojourn by a siren whistle.

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Highway 61 Revisited was the first Dylan record I bought on CD, but it’s also the Dylan record I have the most temperamental relationship to. I listened to it often ten years ago, in my Dylanologist infancy, when my listenings were casual and the local oldies station, 106.1 FM, played it sporadically but kept it out of rotation and fashion. I hadn’t the foresight to interact with his music like an anthropologist, but ten years ago, I’d have said Highway 61 Revisited was Dylan’s greatest work, buying up all the “Like a Rolling Stone” stock like a fucking normie. By the time when I was in college and shit-deep in the hours and hours of bootlegs, live recordings, demos, and lost tracks available to me, I wouldn’t touch Highway 61 Revisited with a ten-foot pole. Now, as I’m closer to forty than my own mother, Highway 61 Revisited is the best music I’ve ever heard.

After releasing the half-acoustic, half-electric Bringing It All Back Home in April, Dylan flew to England to tour and grew dissatisfied with the returns. The concerts were fine, but a month-long deluge of praise contrasted greatly with his perceptions of his own work, which were rather uncharitable. So upon his return to Woodstock that June, he threatened to quit singing and wrote twenty pages of nonsensical verse instead (though, in 1966, Dylan himself told Jules Siegel that it was only ten pages long). A four-page manuscript later revealed that the chorus’ refrain didn’t originally show up until the final page and featured lines like “like a dog without a bone” and “now you’re unknown.” After editing the “word vomit” into four verses and a chorus on an upright piano tuned to D flat, a breakthrough emerged: “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Dylan asked Paul Butterfield Blues Band guitarist Mike Bloomfield to come to Woodstock and jam on some new material. But upon hearing Bloomfield’s string-bending blues, he said, “Hey, man, I don’t want any of that B.B. King stuff.” On June 15, Bloomfield and Dylan, along with drummer Bobby Gregg and pianist Paul Griffin from the Bringing It All Back Home sessions, bassist Joe Macho Jr., and tambourinist Bruce Langhorne, began tracking “Like a Rolling Stone” at Columbia Studio A on 7th Avenue, doing five takes in 3/4 waltz time with Dylan on piano and playing the song by ear. A day later, the band reconvened to do fifteen more takes, this time with guitarist Al Kooper in the room as producer Tom Wilson’s guest. The twenty-one-year-old wasn’t supposed to play—the story goes—but Kooper eventually came up with an organ part and, without guidance or permission from anyone present, sat at the keyboard and hammed those breathy, phantom blows. During the playback, Dylan wanted Kooper’s organ turned up even louder, but Wilson told him that Kooper wasn’t an organ player. “Like a Rolling Stone” was the final Bob Dylan song he worked on.

The initial release of “Like a Rolling Stone” was canceled by Columbia for being too rowdy and too long. Shaun Considine, a release coordinator for the label, took a thrown-away acetate to a disc-jockey at a then-new Manhattan disco joint called Arthur, which had been founded by Sybil Burton where El Morocco used to be. In June 1965, Dylan and his friends were turned away at the door, but “Like a Rolling Stone” was not. Considine recalled Arthur playing the acetate at 11 PM that night, writing in the New York Times twenty-one years ago that “people jumped to their feet and took to the floor, dancing the entire six minutes.” Patrons asked the disc-jockey just who the hell was singing, and Considine yelled “Bob Dylan!” back to them. “The name spread through the room,” he said, “which only encouraged the skeptics to insist that it be played again, straight through. Sometime past midnight, as the grooves on the temporary dub wore out, the needle began to skip.”

That night, a WABC disc-jockey was present, as was the WMCA’s chief music programmer. By the next morning, Columbia was getting hammered with phone calls about the new Bob Dylan “hot new single” and, on July 15, promotional copies of it were pressed on red vinyl and shipped to stores and radio states across the country. Similar to how Atlantic cut Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” into two parts on one 7” disc, Columbia split “Like a Rolling Stone” in half. But disc-jockeys got wise, eventually, as Considine recounted, “record[ing] both sides of the disc on tape and splic[ing] the whole thing together.” All six minutes of “Like a Rolling Stone” would, a week later, hit the Billboard Hot 100 and Dylan celebrated by giving a Newport Folk Festival performance that, in a swatch of derision and delight, alienated him from the truth-telling, Guthrie-and-Seeger hollow of folk music he’d first emerged from.

After replacing Macho with Harvey Brooks and Wilson with Bob Johnston, Dylan and his bandmates returned to Studio A on July 29 and began working on “Tombstone Blues,” “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” and “Positively 4th Street.” Dylan tried tracking “Desolation Row” with Kooper on guitar and Brooks on bass, but wasn’t satisfied with the outcome. His focus quickly pivoted to “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,” but the song was left behind and later finished with the Hawks that autumn. As July roared into its dusk, Kooper and Dylan wrote chord charts for “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “Queen Jane Approximately,” and “Ballad of a Thin Man” together, all of which were recorded the following Monday, August 2. Two days later, Charlie McCoy, at the behest of Johnston, was invited to join Dylan at Columbia and write an improvised guitar part to pair with Russ Savakus’ bass melody on “Desolation Row.” Seven takes were captured, the final two getting spliced together for the final master. Dylan called the completed record Highway 61 Revisited.

That is all history, but the rest is myth: Highway 61 Revisited became rock and roll’s twisted Iliad—a sweeping manifestation of biblical figures (“Tombstone Blues”), graveyard women (“From a Buick 6”), blues song reconstructions (“It Takes a Lot to Laugh”), Philistines (“Ballad of a Thin Man”), quatrains of mockery (“Queen Jane Approximately”), World War III (“Highway 61 Revisited”), anti-heroism (“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”), a curio of oddities, anti-escapism, and cowboy poetry (“Desolation Row”), and, subtextually, an escalating Vietnam War. In his letters, Dylan called on Ma Rainey, Bette Davis, John the Baptist, Miss Lonely, Mr. Jones, Queen Jane, Abraham, Albert Einstein, Nero, T.S. Eliot, and Ophelia and Romeo.

The music itself was radical and obsessive, pairing displaced, crowded, and aimless lyrical impressionism and political allegory with deranged, plugged-in and turned-up moods. Built out of “Like a Rolling Stone”’s template, which Bruce Springsteen called a “snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind,” Highway 61 Revisited was acerbic and raucous, performed by a twenty-four-year-old hophead whose surrealistic turns of phrase cluttered the vocabularies of a generation. The songs—anti-romantic, grotesque, busy, and apocalyptic—are a kind of post-folk, rabble-rousing ennui that not even D.A. Pennebaker, who filmed a forlorn Dylan during his May tour of Europe, could have envisioned actually materializing. And Daniel Kramer captured that growing “hostility” in the album’s cover artwork—a photograph of a pouty Dylan sitting on the stoop outside Albert Grossman’s Gramercy Park apartment, sporting a Triumph motorcycle T-shirt beneath an almost-tropical silk button-down. Behind him, half of friend Bob Neuwrith’s colorful, striped silhouette.

Because a million words have been written about “Like a Rolling Stone,” and no words can do the enchantments of the eleven-minute, pirouetting “Desolation Row” justice, I’ve grown especially infatuated with some of Highway 61 Revisited’s lesser-loved inserts, like “Queen Jane Approximately” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” The introductory piano lick on the former, I think, is among the prettiest melodies ever caught on tape. And, if it were up to me, Kooper—who’d later play on the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” form Blood, Sweat & Tears, and produce Lynyrd Skynyrd’s remarkable debut album—would be remembered first for how his wisps of organ exhale beneath Griffin’s plinking, nebulous keyboard. And in Bloomfield’s cresting guitar swoons on the record’s melancholic middle, a web of ornate, midtempo muscles splendidly contract.

Highway 61 Revisited’s entropy, from the anti-critic sophistications of “Ballad of a Thin Man” to the Juarez-bound, tack-pianoed drug escapades of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” orbits the man hollering in its middle. In his stupor of apathy, Dylan was a madman mainlining 12-bar blues and William S. Burroughs’ prose. He cared more about the sinking of the Titanic than the world horrors collapsing around him. So, his stream-of-consciousness lyrics, tweaked ever-so-slightly between takes, reveled in inexplicable contrasts yet their meanings remain impossibly unknowable—and perhaps frustratingly so. Coming from anyone else, volumes and verses as fucked up as the ones on Highway 61 Revisited would have aged like piss. But language like this, ideas that “skirt the edge of reason” and “had reasons to be written,” you only get one shot at inventing it. So Dylan self-immolated inside the parts of old Brownie McGhee, Sleepy John Estes, Charlie Patton, Ritchie Valens, and Leroy Carr tunes he borrowed, pitching half-charred through tales of death-givers, chicken-colored suns, whorish socialites, and political fence-riding.

And yet, Highway 61 Revisited’s baptism by fire is perhaps most emblematic in the best song left off of it, “Positively 4th Street.” An acidic, rat-race dig at the Greenwich Village folksters who castigated Dylan’s abandonment of traditionalism, “Positively 4th Street” gleans retaliation and dissatisfaction. But Dylan, ever rock music’s wrench-wielding guerrilla, saw not only the Americans and Russians racing for position in space, but the Beatles and Beach Boys beginning to revolutionize pop music with complex studio hokum, and promptly affixed his gaze on the minutiae of street gossip that hounded him.

Steven, Wes, and I used to listen to “Positively 4th Street” during our free periods, always in the room where we filmed the morning announcements. We didn’t know what any of its story meant but knew it sounded revolutionary enough to remember. It’s still in me even now—the tender drags of Kooper’s comely organ splashing through the doldrums of our traceable love, us frolicking around the room like wrestlers suspended above a ring. And, as scrapes of out-of-tune guitars spilled into our out-of-time hearts, we fell onto the floor and made snow angels in the dust, singing, “I used to be among the crowd you’re in with!” together, because Bob Dylan made “Positively 4th Street” sound like the universe itself, just as he had “Like a Rolling Stone.” It was in our blood, music that didn’t make sense but could take us everywhere that did.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

If I Go Down Dying: Highway 61 Revisited Turns 60

Released on August 29, 1965, Bob Dylan’s second album in four months was acerbic and raucous, performed by a twenty-four-year-old hophead whose surrealistic turns of phrase cluttered the vocabularies of a generation.