100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Like a Rolling Stone

02 Tombstone Blues

03 It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry

04 From a Buick 6

05 Ballad of a Thin Man

06 Queen Jane Approximately

07 Highway 61 Revisited

08 Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

09 Desolation Row

‘T he first time that I heard Bob Dylan I was in the car with my mother, and we were listening to, I think, maybe WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind, from “Like a Rolling Stone”. And my mother, who was – she was no stiff with rock & roll, she liked the music, she listened – she sat there for a minute, she looked at me, and she said, “That guy can’t sing”. But I knew she was wrong. I sat there, I didn’t say nothin’, but I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard. It was lean, and it sounded somehow simultaneously young and adult, and I ran out and I bought the single … then I went out and I got Highway 61, and it was all I played for weeks. I looked at the cover, with Bob, with that satin blue jacket and the Triumph Motorcycle shirt. And when I was a kid, Bob’s voice somehow – it thrilled and scared me. It made me feel kind of irresponsibly innocent. And it still does. … He had the vision and the talent to expand a pop song until it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound. He broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and he changed the face of rock and roll forever and ever.’ (Bruce Springsteen inducting Bob Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1988)

Did Bob Dylan know in 1965 that he was blowing rock & roll wide open? Probably. Did he know what he was doing? Probably not. He was simply running on instinct. Does the bomber know how the walls will tumble down? The painter Eugène Delacroix said it best: ‘Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.’

One doesn’t get the sense that Bob Dylan is in control of his work in the way that, say, Bruce Springsteen or Neil Young are – indeed, at times in his career he has seemed to be lost or drowning, unable to make a good album.

But at those moments when the genius was engaged, Dylan saw music in a way that noone else had ever done. There are very few artists, perhaps a dozen in the 20th century, who actually had a completely new vision, but Dylan was one of them.

At the age of 21 Dylan wrote the track ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’. He took the traditional English ballad ‘Lord Randall’, supercharged it with an Old Testament perspective and then, crucially, he delivered it with a youthful righteousness that was closer to the spirit of rock & roll.

Many of Dylan’s early songs were topical; he was writing about the world he saw around him and trying to find his own voice. He was still a very young man and perhaps didn’t have a sophisticated inner life to write about yet. In any case, the important thing about Bob Dylan is not just the topics of his lyrics but the attitude.

Jean-Luc Godard said that it’s not where you get things from that matters, it’s where you take them. Dylan never disguised his sources.

Nor did he disguise his quest to learn from his elders. He sought out Woody Guthrie and studied at the knee of elder folksingers. He courted Allen Ginsberg and the senior poets of the day and unashamedly borrowed from them and evolved his own writing.

There are two things that are consistent in Bob Dylan’s writing during the 1960s: he deplored injustice and he refused to be dictated to by his audience or anyone.

Dylan’s early, acoustic albums show a clear progression as the influences become submerged by Dylan’s own language and style. His antennae were keenly attuned to the world around him and so it was natural that once the Beatles started their own revolution, Dylan would also electrify his music.

Much has been made of Dylan’s performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where he performed electric blues with the Butterfield Blues Band. However his first ‘electric’ tracks appeared on the first side of his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home, which began with ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ – a rewrite of a Chuck Berry song that was Dylan’s first Top 40 single. When the Byrds had a #1 hit with an electric version of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ in May 1965, it was inevitable that Dylan’s next album would be a rock & roll record.

By now Dylan had made it clear to anyone paying attention that he was not going through anything twice. His first professional recording date was playing harmonica for calypso singer Harry Belafonte back in 1961. (He left after one song because the producer asked him to play his part the same way in multiple takes.)

Always ambitious, Dylan’s response to stardom, when it came, was ambivalence. Fans felt they owned Dylan; that if he changed it was somehow a repudiation of them. They took it personally. Dylan, however, couldn’t have given them what they wanted even if he wanted to.

The album Bringing It All Back Home was released in March 1965. Electricity howled through Dylan’s music and expanded the ambit of his songs. A short four months later, on 20 July 1965, Dylan released a new single, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, and completely reinvented rock & roll yet again. It was a week later when Dylan headlined the Newport Folk Festival, appearing with an electric band for the first time. There was widespread disapproval – mixed with the cheers of younger fans – in what has become one of the most discussed concert performances of all time. Pete Seeger and other members of the folk establishment wanted Dylan’s set stopped but he continued, defiant.

The legend of Newport spread. It became de-rigueur at Dylan concerts for fans to jeer during the electric set. One fan famously yelled ‘Judas!’ at a gig immortalised on the Live at the Royal Albert Hall bootleg. Dylan’s response was to tell his musicians that when the booing started, to turn their amplifiers up louder. How often does an artist wilfully alienate his audience?

As much as any piece of art is inevitable, Bob Dylan’s trajectory was probably bound to lead to the electric explosion of Highway 61 Revisited. Jack Kerouac had brought the rhythms of jazz to literature. Dylan brought the vocabulary and the intellectual spirit of literature to rock & roll. That was his singular achievement.

Context is everything. In June 1965 America was still reeling from the November 1963 assassination of JFK. President Lyndon Johnson had outlined his plan for the ‘Great Society’, dedicated to delivering the benefits of the immense American prosperity to all Americans, regardless of race. It was a time of great leaps in consumer wealth – a colour TV in every home. The Space Race was in full flight. Education and opportunity were everywhere. But hanging over the party was the ever-present Cold War, Vietnam was escalating into a real war and throughout the South young black men were being murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.

The prosperity of the Pax Americana brought an unprecedented leisure, education and wealth. The Pill meant non-marital sex without fear or guilt. New industries needed new minds and where once experience and seniority counted for everything, now it meant nothing. With men orbiting the earth, how long could it be before we were holidaying on the moon? Always though, there was the palpable threat of the Bomb. With the possibility of apocalypse at any moment, having fun was critical.

This was indeed a ‘brave new world’ to use Aldous Huxley’s phrase but, to borrow another that writer also made famous, members of this generation believed that they had opened ‘the doors of perception’ and thought they could see beyond the closed world of suburbia. The new world needed a new artform.

Elvis Presley and even the Beatles were different versions of established pop music genres – Tin Pan Alley, country, R&B. The Rolling Stones were still a covers band, although ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ was released on 6 June 1965 and there’s no doubt its blues changes, soul tempo and sarcastic lyric would have been ringing in Dylan’s ears when he arrived to cut ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ on 15 June at Columbia’s Studio A on Seventh Avenue, New York. We will probably never know whether England’s newest hitmakers gave him the title of his first hit.

It was time to draw up the blueprint for the new artform and that’s exactly what Highway 61 is. Even a cursory look at the albums produced after August 1965, compared with those beforehand, will show the watershed that is Highway 61.

The change in rock music post 1965 was that it became the most effective artistic form through which young people could communicate. Dylan’s emphasis on words as equal to, but not more important than, the music, meant that people could express themselves. Few people could make mass market films or publish big books, but making a song was achievable.

Dylan was attuned to what was going on in America. Highway 61 Revisited was his response.

The highway US Route 61 rises out of New Orleans, Louisiana and runs north through the Mississippi Delta, crossing Highway 49 at Clarksdale – the ‘Crossroad’ where legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson supposedly made his Faustian pact with the devil for success. Route 61 ambles through the heartland of America, rolling across the desolate plains of Wisconsin before rising into the iron ore mountains of Minnesota, until it reaches Dylan’s hometown of Duluth on the shore of Lake Superior. This is one of the highways that transported the slaves and their children from the cotton fields of the Delta to the industrial north, carrying with them the blues.

For Highway 61 Revisited Dylan went back to Columbia’s Studio A. The first session was produced, as Dylan’s previous three albums had been, by Tom Wilson, and session players Paul Griffin (piano), Bruce Langhorne (guitar), Bobby Gregg (drums) and bass player Joe Macho Jr were back from the last album. Dylan also brought along Mike Bloomfield, a young Jewish guitar prodigy from Chicago. On the second day Al Kooper, a guitarist and friend of Wilson’s, hung around the studio hoping to get an opportunity to sit in. During that first session they recorded a couple of tracks, but most of that night and the next was spent working on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. With the song ready for release as a single, Dylan played the Newport Festival and returned to finish the album.

Wilson left the project to be replaced by Bob Johnston, who remained Dylan’s producer until 1973. However, the essential elements on Highway 61 were already in place from the ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ session: Griffin’s piano and Gregg’s drums plus Al Kooper’s scary, primitive organ playing (Kooper, a guitarist, had never played organ before the ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ session!) and Bloomfield’s switchblade guitar was the bridge between the blues and the new sound that Dylan heard in his head. Bloomfield said that prior to the recordings, Dylan had invited him up to the house to learn the songs:

‘Bob picked me up at the bus station and took me to this house where he lived … and he taught me these songs,’ Bloomfield recalled. ‘All those songs from that album and he said. “I don’t want you to play any of that BB King shit, none of that fucking blues, I want you to play something else.” So we fooled around and I finally played something that he liked. It was very weird, he was playing in weird keys which he always does, all on the black keys of the piano.’

Dylan didn’t do demos so, other than Bloomfield, the other players first heard each song in the studio when Dylan counted it in. It was rare for him to return to a song if it wasn’t working and most were recorded in one or two takes.

The tone of Highway 61 was new. The tenderness of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ or ‘Love Minus Zero’ just six months earlier, is only apparent on ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’. The other tracks are all taking names and keeping score. Dylan gave up writing topical songs on his fourth album but he never stopped writing protest songs. He just changed his gaze a little from the topical to the mythic. As far back as ’62 he was writing Rabelaisian satires on the absurdity, the mendacity and the vanity of human society. By removing the specific issues, Dylan gave freer rein to his poetic imagination but he also ensured that, humankind being what it is, these songs are as relevant now as they were half a century ago and will still be a hundred years from now.

‘Tombstone Blues’, ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh’ and ‘From a Buick 6’ are all standard blues songs borrowing from the masters with their licks and lyrics and, while they have the sharp intelligence and amphetamine frenzy of Dylan’s new sound, they are warming up for the main game.

‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ closes the first side of the album with an excoriating attack on the media specifically, but more generally on the straight world. In 1965 the world was undergoing the profound transformation and you were on one side or the other. Whereas two years earlier, on ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’, Dylan had requested that people ‘don’t criticise what you don’t understand’, now on ‘Thin Man’ he was positively spitting ‘there ought to be a law against you coming around’.

Dylan leads with his piano pounding out a funeral march and the musicians fall in behind, hard on the beat. This is not so much a ballad as a requiem. Kooper’s organ is part church and part horror movie. You can feel the weight of Dylan’s shoulders as he pumps on the piano. He sings with such a sneer that it’s almost as though he can’t bear wasting breath on this person. In the version in the film No Direction Home he’s holding his hand above the keyboard as if he’s about to plunge a dagger into its heart. Dylan’s vocal matches the violence in the music. He rolls the words around and seems to examine them before he hurls them out. No-one has ever sung with such contempt. His targets are not only the hapless journalist so frequently cited as the song’s inspiration, Dylan is also attacking the lack of imagination in ‘respectable’ bourgeois life, in academia.

The title track is the thematic cornerstone to the album. Highway 61 is the heart of America and ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ is a state of the nation address. Dylan sings about a country gone crazy with greed, violence, lust, phonies and hucksters. He had written these songs before (‘115th Dream’, ‘Bob Dylan’s Blues’, ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’) but never quite with the attack he has here. Drummer Sam Lay arrived at the recording session with a whistle that Dylan uses like a siren, and Bloomfield’s slide guitar is completely ferocious.

The only really personal song on the album is the track ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’. Set in Mexico, it’s a song about being strung out on drugs. There seems to be the influence of Kerouac’s Desolation Angels and Burroughs’ Junkie here. Critic Andy Gill sees a reference to Rimbaud’s ‘Ma Bohème: Fantaisie’, (‘My only pair of pants had a big hole in them/Tom Thumb the dreamer, sowing the roads/With rhymes’). The instrumentation with tack piano, electric piano and sharp guitar and harmonica sees Dylan move closer to the unique ‘thin, wild mercury’ sound he was aiming for.

Almost perversely, the album closes with the one acoustic song – ‘Desolation Row’. This 11-minute epic opens with the line ‘they’re selling postcards of the hanging’, which may refer to a lynching that took place in Duluth of which photographs were sold. More importantly, though, the image captures Dylan’s central complaint, which is that we live in a merciless society where nothing is beyond commercial exploitation.

Dylan said at the time that ‘Desolation Row’ was a breakthrough for him and certainly it’s a great leap in terms of poetic imagery and developing a narrative. There is an enormous cast on Desolation Row – from Romeo to Cinderella, jealous monks, T S Eliot hanging with Ezra Pound, fortune tellers and characters from the Bible. He has Cain and Abel in the same line as Quasimodo. Dylan sings the song with a weariness distinct from the earlier songs. He’s still lashing out at the people who claimed to know him well, but he’s getting beyond caring.

The roots of the song go back to the English ballad tradition – you can hear echoes of ‘Matty Groves’ in the melody. Johnston brought in Nashville guitarist Charlie McCoy and bassist Russ Savakus. McCoy, who shows a remarkable sensitivity to Dylan’s lyrics, brings a wind-blown Tex Mex flavour to the track – Dylan likened it to an old time carnival sound.

And finally there is ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. It’s clearly a finger pointing exercise. The singer ridicules and derides the rich and the fatuous. Many people have speculated on who were the ‘real’ subjects he was writing about. There are lyrical clues suggesting that Dylan was mocking Andy Warhol and his circle but it’s more likely that he composited a number of characters into this song. The gist of it – that the material world is full of distractions and vanity – is of a piece with ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ and ‘Desolation Row’.

‘It was ten pages long,’ Dylan said at the time. ‘It wasn’t called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end it wasn’t hatred, it was telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky. “Revenge”, that’s a better word. I had never thought of it as a song, until one day I was at the piano, and on the paper it was singing, “How does it feel?” in a slow motion pace, in the utmost of slow motion.’

An early run through of the song without Kooper’s organ is available on the No Direction Home soundtrack. Dylan runs it through in waltz time. The extraordinary imagery is there but Dylan hasn’t found the spirit of the song. The next day it blossomed. On take #4 (the version that made the album) the music is fitted around the words. Starting with the sharp crack of Bobby Gregg’s snare before the arrival of Griffin’s playful piano and some hammy washes of organ, Dylan lets fly with ‘Once upon a time you dressed so fine/You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?’. The music tumbles forward, wrapped in the words and following the lyrics rather than the other way around. Even the original Mr Tambourine Man, Bruce Langhorne, sits his tambourine right in the groove. Every so often the vocal rises in accusatory questions, such as ‘how does it feel?’, or statements like ‘When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose’.

The howling, scowling organ floats around Bloomfield and jibes with Dylan’s harmonica, giving the song its dark beauty and mystery. This mixture of prickly guitar, swelling organ and jabs of harmonica were to be the basis of Dylan’s new sound.

Dylan cut the song intending it to be a single. At six minutes it was almost twice as long as anything else in the Top 40 (radio stations often refused to play songs over 3.30 minutes) and it was not a love song (the Beatles’ current single was ‘Help!’). Mostly, though, it was the mood of the song – an ornate language and a venomous vocal delivery – that set it apart. It was one thing for Dylan to make complex albums and quite another to have an international hit single such as ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.

As Dylan said 33 years later, ‘The first two lines, which rhymed “kiddin’ you” and “didn’t you” just about knocked me out and later on when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it just about got to be too much.’