Best Things Ever
#3 Highway 61 Revisited
ruce Springsteen described
first hearing the opening snare shot of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ as sounding
“like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind.” The first track on Bob
Dylan’s 1965 album, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, is certainly a powerful statement
of intent. That opening salvo expands outwards, like the illuminated initial
letter of a medieval manuscript, heralding the arrival of the soon to be
sneered opening words, “Once upon a time...” Few other rock n’ roll albums
begin so perfectly.
“Once upon a time...” let’s
us know exactly where we are. This is myth making country, the land of fairy
tales, reinvention and the American Dream. Here do we find jugglers, clowns and
mysterious tramps. Napoleon is in rags and the Cheshire Cat has become Siamese.
As abstract to the remainder of the album, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ sets a chain
of events in motion that spiral, snowball and roll all the way to the
Desolation Row of its final track.
Movement plays a major role
in the dynamic of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’. The real Highway 61 runs, or ran,
from the Canadian border in the north to New Orleans in the south. Known as the
‘Blues Highway’, it was aptly named. Not only did Bessie Smith die in a car
crash on a stretch of the road, but the intersection with Highway 49 is
believed to be the mythical crossroads where Robert Johnson made his legendary pact with the devil. Elvis
grew up on a housing project not far away and it was in a motel off the Memphis
leg where Martin Luther King Jnr was assassinated in 1968.
Highway 61 also ran past Duluth
and Hibbing, two nondescript towns in Minnesota. The former gave birth to
Bob Dylan, the later served as his childhood home. To the young Dylan, Highway
61 must have seemed like an escape route, a road to freedom from small town
America. In a country where the automobile is king, the highway is a powerful
symbol of liberation. ‘Highway 61 Revisited‘ is an album about liberation, with
parallels to both Woody Gutherie’s ‘Bound for Glory’ and Kerouac’s ‘On the
Road’.
Much has been made of the
comparison between the title track and Wilfred Owen’s, ‘The Parable of the Old
Man and the Young’. In his poem, Owen gives a modern retelling of the story of
Abraham’s sacrifice of his son to Jehovah. Yet unlike the biblical version,
where Jehovah sends an angel to stay Abraham’s hand at the last possible
moment, Owen’s version has a very different ending:
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
‘The
Parable of the Old Man and the Young’ is a denunciation of the killing fields
of the First World War. The first verse of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ follows a
similar vein:
Oh God said to
Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run"
Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61."
On March 8th 1965, the United States deployed 3,500 troops to South Vietnam. By December that year, the number had increased to over 200,000. ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ was released on August 30th 1965 and resonates with references to war, past, present and future.
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run"
Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61."
On March 8th 1965, the United States deployed 3,500 troops to South Vietnam. By December that year, the number had increased to over 200,000. ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ was released on August 30th 1965 and resonates with references to war, past, present and future.
In the final verse of
‘Highway 61 Revisited’, we see the roving gambler trying to create the next
world war and finding a promoter to help him. In a country where public opinion
is everything, US politicians and the mainstream media have a history of
carefully manipulating public perception to promote the benefits of war.
Vietnam was the first television war and, contrary to the revisionism practiced
by some historical commentators, the American media continued to support the
war until it was obvious just how unpopular the conflict had become. Even
today, Vietnam is denounced in many quarters not as an invasion that cost the
lives of as many as four million Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotians, where more
tons of TNT was dropped than by all sides during World War Two, but as the country’s first defeat.
In ‘Tombstone Blues’, we hear
of the king of the Philistines who, ‘fattens the slaves and sends them out to
the jungle’. A disproportionate amount of African-Americans, descendants of the
slaves, were sent to fight in the jungles of Vietnam. Highway 61 bisects the
United States like the civil rights movement that was dividing the country at
the tiime. The opening lines of ‘Desolation Row’, “They’re selling postcards of
the hanging” recalls the sickening practice of photographing and selling
souvenirs of the lynchings of black men, women and children, even in Dylan’s
home town. African-Americans could be sent to die for their country, but not to
expect anything to have changed when, if, they came home.
‘From A Buick 6’ reads like
the tale of someone trying to dodge the draft. He’s being hidden by his girl
(could be his ‘mamma’ but given Dylan’s repeated use of the word, seems more
likely to refer to a girlfriend). If he should die, his simple request is that
she should put a blanket on his bed (again, this could be his mother, repeating
a ritual dating back to childhood):
Well, if I go down dyin’, you know she bound to put a
blanket on my bed.
The word “bound” in the
refrain has a double meaning, like ‘determined’ in Richard III’s, “determined
to prove a villain.” The woman bound is obliged to put a blanket on his bed,
but there is the doubt that she might forget. The jaunty, blues feel of ‘From A
Buick 6’ detracts from the grim imagery. The idea of needing a shovel and a
dump truck to deal with the dead puts one in mind of WWII and the extermination
camps.
One can compare the whole of
‘Highway 61 Revisited’ to ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’, a track from
the other album he released in ’65, ‘Bringing It All Back Home’. ‘Highway 61
Revisited’ is ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ writ large. The walls
between fantasy and reality, past, present and future break down. A cavalcade
of characters, both real and fictional, swell the lyrics, a kingdom for a
stage, with princes (and princesses) to act: Einstein and Galileo, Ma Rainey
and Beethoven, Romeo and Ophelia, Paul Revere, Jack the Ripper, Abraham, Cain
and Abel, The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ezra Pound and
T. S. Eliot, Jack the Ripper, John the Baptist and F. Scott Fitzgerald (not to
mention Woody Guthrie, Kerouac and Rimbaud, who haunt the album without ever
receiving recognition). By comparison, Dylan’s next album, ‘Blonde on Blonde’,
mentions only Shakespeare by name.
Then, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’
is a very different beast even to its immediate predecessor. There are no love
songs of the kind to be found on ‘Bringing It All Back Home’. No ‘She Belongs
to Me’ or ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’. ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a
Train to Cry’ comes closest, but even here our hero is on the run from love
(“Don’t my gal look fine, when she’s comin’ after me?). The characters of ‘Highway
61 Revisited’ are all escaping from the past or find themselves in situations
not of their own devising: Poverty, skid row, the cops, death, addiction and
the draft.
As much transient movement as
there is on the album, it is all ultimately futile. The action begins in New
York City and it ends in New York City, via Highway 61 and Juarez in Mexico, to
form a Dantean circle of hell. The rolling stone that began tumbling during the
opening track by the end has come crashing down to Desolation Row. The same
note of bitterness which opens proceedings, brings matters to a close:
“Don’t send me no more letters, no, not unless you
mail them from Desolation Row.”
In the year of the album’s
release, Dylan faced accusations that he had abandoned the protests songs of his
folk era for the bright lights of mainstream electric guitar music. While it is
true that ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ represents Dylan’s first wholly electric album (excluding the eleven
minutes of ‘Desolation Row’), the irony is that the album is one of Dylan’s most politicised works. Sure, it doesn’t contain the sledgehammer subtlety
of previous compositions like ‘Masters of War’, ‘With God on Our Side’ or ‘The Lonesome Death of
Hattie Carroll’, but politics, gender and
race abound on ‘Highway 61 Revisited’.
Dylan had matured as a song
writer, become more nuanced, and the harsh black and white texturing of his folk songs just wasn’t going to cut it
anymore. With
an electric guitar in hand and a band to back him, Dylan broke forth into
glorious Technicolor. ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ represents his most vivid composition.
Get it done.
See Also (click link)
Absolutely awesome post. Thanks for the brilliant insight. I just did this album as well and wanted to see what else had been written about it and I'm glad I found your blog!
ReplyDelete