Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited

Dylan’s music has always struck me with a feeling of both deep sorrow and deprivation yet it holds the beauty of Nature and Man. His ability to grasp sadness and laughter within the same breath of air has always impressed me. The feelings of Man expressed in one song. For me Dylan binds together the negative and positive sides of life, thus underlining that what makes human life worth living is that we experience both. He is as much a common man as a flamboyant artist, a man with a bleeding heart and a laughter resounding every album, song or text.

A woman whose beauty sooths or eyes yet our memory of her causes us pain. Or a memory many years ago which fills us with joy but whose impermanence is painful. His ability to describe and make us feel the world that we live in through his music and thoughts are for me brilliant. 

On Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited released in 1965, Dylan successfully creates an album that contains a wide palette this wide palette of feelings and notions. He takes on a trip across America discussing, debating and commenting on himself, American History and everything in between. With 110 miles an hour Bob collides with the contemporary America as this is his first album where his songs are electrified – a choice not likened by Dylan’s fans and the folk movement. But luckily Dylan had the courage to rewrite and challenge a genre that, despite it not being conservative in any way, had its identity and self-image in a country that no longer existed. And if I may blatantly and tastelessly quote the man himself: “Then you better start swimmin’ Or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a changin’.”

His eyes are fixed on the road ahead of him; sticking it to the man, the development of welfare America, the breaking up of traditional values: family, race, classes and politics. But while at the same time managing this mishmash – he has a third eye looking through the rearview mirror. The young folksinger is never stupid or naïve enough not to acknowledge that the ground he stands on and the breath he breaths was there long before his time. He is as well travelling down memory lane. He never forgets that he is rooted in the North Country, his past and the musical roots of folk. In the same way, the modern and progressive America that Dylan describes originates from a time long gone. A time of slaves and slave owners, wars and world wars, blacks and whites - deprivation and depression.  In order to understand our own time and foresee the future ones we must investigate and rationalize our past. Anything doesn’t originate from nothing, and we must break with our past in order to write our future.

The road on which we are travelling was paved by the Man of the past, a man of history and identity as well as a social identity. A man who domesticated the Wild, a man who “made” America with a pick axe, pencil and shovel. For me, this is Dylan’s way of saying that to change America  into something better, we must first deal and rationalize its past so that we may pave the road ahead ourselves and kick out the man in a suit. And that is for me what makes Highway 61 Revisited such a great album: This is an album whose, songs, themes, lyrics and persona are as multifaceted as the country it describes. It is a reflection of a society whose diversity and sheer scale is tearing it apart but at the same time adding a great deal of cohesion. Like the album America is one big melting pot.

It’s a Buick 66 travelling at a hundred different directions with the pedal to the metal. With endpoints miles apart with nowhere but everywhere to go. It is a car whose cabinet is long torn apart but whose engine is still running held together by an idea of equality, sense of community and a shared past.