Highway 61 Revisited was released in 1965 and allegedly changed rock and roll forever, not so much the sound of it, I guess, but the contents of lyrics, hitherto generally love songs or perhaps songs celebrating teenage rebellion, to full blown surrealistic, impressionistic and intellectualised poetry set to music. Dylanesque does not refer to musical style, except if the reference is to an idiosyncratic amalgam of folk, blues, country and rock, but to a style of writing lyrics, that are narratives, often weird, wonderful and rambling, but generally, especially in his best work, intriguing and engaging even if, on reflection, many of the “poetic” verbiage and “philosophical” insights are quite banal and nonsensical. Like the surrealists, Dylan may juxtapose conflicting images, at jarring odds with each other, as if normal and listener will then draw deeper conclusions that may come from personal experience or perspective of what these images mean, usually on the supposition that there must be more significant deeper or hidden meaning than the surface meaning, simply on the basis that Dylan wouldn’t simply say something banal or commonplace and mean it to be that. He has said, on camera, that he shouldn’t be asked to explain his songs; he just writes them. Perhaps they are simply ridiculous, with no other significance, and banal without redemption.
Rock critics, and the adoring public too often seem to want to find artistic significance in rock lyrics where none is to be had.
I was around 21 or perhaps 22 when I listened to Highway 61 Revisited in 1980 or 1981 for the first time, and this was after I’d already become a fan of Blonde on Blonde (1966), the more expansive version of the vision and attitude first expression on its predecessor, and this was in a world already influenced by Dylan to the degree that neither of these records shook my world (I was probably too old anyway to be unduly impressed) but both, with Bringing It All Back Home to complete the troika, became firm favourites and contain my top favourite Dylan songs of all times.
At the time I first delved in to Highway 61 Revisited I was newly invested in surrealism and the beat poetry of Allen Ginsberg and prose of Jack Kerouac and the songs, and those on Blonde on Blonde, made perfect sense to me and struck a deep chord of poetic recognition of a peer. I knew very little about the USA then and for me Highway 61 was a mythical road, a metaphorical road, and it was many years before I learnt that Highway 61 connected New Orleans and Mississippi (home of the blues) with Minnesota where Bob Dylan was born and grew up, and featured in at least one blues, “61 Highway Blues.” He may have used the highway as metaphor, but it was a very real stretch of tarmac. Dylan not so much revisited this iconic highway, as revised it for his vision of a semi-apocalyptic society.
Greil Marcus wrote an entire book about “Like A Rolling Stone,” another one of is investigations of the “old, weird America” that he likes to link to Dylan, amongst others, to portray an almost unbroken cultural chain, mostly, in my view, as part of the quest to elevate rock music, specifically Dylan’s, to the pyramid of high culture and cultural immortality. it’s not even my favourite song on the album and has strong competition from the rest, even, again in my view, the blues tropes of “From a Buick 6” or “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” I also think that “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Desolation Row” have as much philosophical depth even if the latter is one of those grocery list songs where Dylan drops all manner of famous names into his narrative which is seen as the quirkiness of genius that can shine a sharp spotlight on the zeitgeist by referencing the past. When it comes down to it, though, it’s just a young guy who’s read some books or heard some names or of some events and manages to shoehorn them into his rambling shaggy dog story. it could just be that youthful insouciant bullshit baffles those who know nothing.
I’ve often thought, in contrast to the lyrics of, say, the Beatles up to Rubber Soul, that Dylan’s apparent erudition must have seemed as incontrovertibly brilliant purely because they were either about nothing much, but so well said, or if they were love songs, they were more direct and ostensibly personal than the usual generalised love songs Lennon and McCartney wrote until they, too, fell under the Dylan spell and realised that one could be more adventurous in the way one expresses oneself, but then you got Lennon’s “Help,” seen as heartfelt psychological cry for support yet was as facile as the earlier love songs.
The rock and roll of Highway 61 Revisited is not as tough as the typical sound of the mid-Sixties bands from the UK or the American groups influenced by the “British invasion” and is far more informed by blues, folk and country so that one could call it an early form of what eventually became known as “Americana” (fittingly, given Greil Marcus’ referencing of the “old, weird America”) and see Dylan, insofar as he had a real influence on how the music was played, an American auteur who relies on the musical heritage of his own country to form the backdrop for his literary song writing that’s firmly based on American literary tradition, both the highly sophisticated and the more “country” and homespun variety. Dylan is not a highly trained, technical composer of music; he’s a composer of visionary verbal narratives. This means that one must listen closely to the records to reap the full value, unlike so much mid-Sixties rock where the beat and the raucous guitar rave ups are the main focus and the lyrics are there, more or less, to avoid the song being characterised as an instrumental.
Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding are the three most completely satisfying Dylan albums for me and of these Highway 61 Revisited is the most visceral fun though “Visions of Johanna” from Blonde on Blonde is my favourite Dylan song of all time and John Wesley Harding’s punchy acoustic tunes are perhaps more satisfying aesthetically. On Highway 61 Revisited it’s as if Dylan found the motherlode of exuberant creativity both in himself and the backing musicians and all parties were high on the euphoria of creating s seamless synergy between the erudite wordiness of the songs, the winding melodies and the craft of putting instinctive, almost improvised, loose yet intense music to inspired vocals.
Rock music is best when made by young people who coast on enthusiasm, verve and unselfconscious ambition, in the struggle days before they realise that a very long career may stretch out in front of them and before age and the passing of time dilutes and often removes the exuberance and the creative flame and replaces them with professional craftsmanship. I’m one of those bores who don’t care much for anything Dylan recorded after John Wesley Harding (though I’ve listened to and/or bought various of the subsequent releases) and I don’t quite believe that Blood on the Tracks is the unalloyed masterpiece that orthodox rock criticism holds it to be. My criticism of the “born again” phase is that Dylan either lost or abandoned his gift for lyrics. He lost his way in the Eighties, like most of his peers, and if there were a revival of fortunes in the late Nineties, he’s become guilty of just throwing together lines, almost for the sake of a rhyme, with much the same kind of mix ‘n match narrative of his youth but without the nous or any engaging, alluring content. Now it’s just a narrative, mostly utterly banal, with no incentive to the listener to find something deeper than the surface meaning.
Having said that, if Dylan’s lyrics sounded more serious, poetic and meaningful than standard Sixties pop lyrics, on listening to the songs now, his words sometimes seem risible, like jokes on straight society pulled by a smart alecky young guy who realised, once his reputation was made, that he could get away with stringing together stream of consciousness non sequiturs, in the wake of beat poetry, put them to music and, without making a fuss, be perceived as a genuine poet, a rock and roll poet, but when you really examine the lyrics much of them are just nonsense jumbled together and that have no meaning on the face of it and probably no deeper meaning either. The adoring fan or the intellectual rock critic seek to impute meaning because, according to their view, this apparent nonsense cannot be simply nonsense; there must be deeper philosophical, poetic or intellectual truths and enlightenment. And so everyone develops a vested interest in elevating Bob Dylan into being a genius he most probably isn’t. He saw and exploited a gap in the market, got lucky, and here we are.
Rock criticism is as rigidly orthodox and reactionary as most intellectual pursuits and once the hagiography has become cast in stone and the view of a certain artist and their worth has been entrenched, with continuous repeats, by critics seeking to find meaning whether it’s there or not, and by interpretations that can become wilder and ever more ridiculous. There is a standard, accepted viewpoint of Dylan’s position in the rock pantheon and it’s not likely to change any time soon. Rock revisionism is never looked on kindly by the establishment and, as is typical of generational change, the older, original rock critics will hardly ever change their opinions and will simply blame younger insights on the lack of cultural depth or insight of the newer generations.
The typical response is that a breakthrough artist must be judged and experienced from the perspective of the time in which they break through, and not from a perspective of twenty, thirty of forty years later when that shock of the new no longer applies and when what was once revolutionary has now become the norm. Fair enough, one should bear that in mind to understand why an artist was so highly rated or was seen as such a maverick in their time, but, especially when studying Dylan’s lyrics, one must conclude, if he were considered a genius in the Sixties, that he had no competition from other pop lyricists who were still bound to a more old-fashioned, traditional template and that rock critics, in order to be taken seriously when they were talking up rock as a serious, significant cultural endeavour, that they were desperate to find a figurehead who could justify their view and bolster their arguments. However, as I’ve said, one close examination, Dylan’s lyrics, however clever or innovative, are often just silly and at an intelligent, well read, adolescent level of smartness. They are just rock lyrics after all, where close scrutiny is useless and pointless; they only work in the context of a song where the superficial poetics and pseudo philosophical insights strike deeper because the emotional framework of the performance makes the whole superior to the sum of the parts.
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