| Highway 61 Revisited | 
 enlarge | Artist: Bob Dylan
Label: Sony
Category: Music
List Price: $11.98
Buy New: $5.18
You Save: $6.80 (57%)
New (43) Used (24) from $5.18
Avg. Customer Rating:  54 reviews
Sales Rank: 669
Format: Original Recording Remastered
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.5
MPN: 92399
UPC: 827969239926
EAN: 0827969239926
ASIN: B00026WU82
Release Date: June 1, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Tracks:
| • | Like a Rolling Stone | | • | Tombstone Blues | | • | It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry | | • | From a Buick 6 | | • | Ballad of a Thin Man | | • | Queen Jane Approximately | | • | Highway 61 Revisited | | • | Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues | | • | Desolation Row |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Dylan was virtually gushing great songs when this masterpiece arrived in the summer of 1965. From the epochal opening of "Like a Rolling Stone" through the absurdly apocalyptic closer, "Desolation Row," his command of surrealistic language was daring and amazing. As a vocalist, he was rewriting the rules of the game. Jimi Hendrix made note of Mr. Z's technically suspect pitch and decided that he too was a singer. And the backing, though ragged, is precisely right. Is this the essential Dylan album? It's certainly one of them. --Steven Stolder
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| Customer Reviews: Read 49 more reviews...
 The sun's not yellow - it's chicken June 30, 2005
38 out of 46 found this review helpful
"The sun's not yellow - it's chicken."
It's a line from Bob Dylan's "Tombstone Blues" that stuck with me as I was listening to Highway 61 Revisited on the way to work this morning.
The line was spoken by a military leader, a "Commander-in-Chief" after berating one of his generals for weakness when the general expressed disgust at having to carry out an order to torture a captive. "Tell me great hero, but please make it brief/Is there a hole for me to get sick in?" he asks.
The Commander-in-Chief's reply is mixed in with the narrator's voice: "Death to all those who would whimper and cry/And dropping a bar bell, he points to the sky/Saying, the sun's not yellow, it's chicken."
It's more than a fantastic play on words. This whole section of the song has so many contemporary parallels, not the least of which is that last line, where, after the leader dismisses ethical concerns, and motions with a pointless show of strength (the bar bell), he issues the ultimate, useless gesture, calling the sun chicken.
The swagger and hubris involved in that challenge are both revealing and utterly unbelievable.
This is the power of Bob Dylan, and of this record in particular. His words cut deeper and more true than any straightforward newspaper editorial, protest or political accusation.
Just About the Best Rock & Roll Record Ever April 21, 2005
30 out of 38 found this review helpful
Nobody spins words like Bob Dylan and the master weaver has turned this web into a psychedelic, prophetic, intense, hard driving, gut grabbing rock and roll, folk rocking masterpiece. This, in my humble opinion, is not only the best album that mastercrafter has turned out, but the best rock and roll record to come down the pike, ever. Sure the Beatles "White Album" and "Sgt. Pepper," were landmarks and without a doubt the Stones have defined the genre. The Boss has let fly with some pretty good stuff, too. Those guys may all be in contention for the number two rocker, but this record is by far number one. And for my money, "Desolation Row," is the capper of this record, though every lickin' stickin' song on this album is a masterpiece in its own right.
Jack Priest, Sailor Home from the Sea
Listen up, Abraham! August 11, 2005
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
I started listening to Bob Dylan when I was eighteen years old and lived in Calcutta, India. This was before the 'glory' days of corporate globalization and the global brands hadn't painted the nation with its broad strokes of corporate colour. No MTV, just a state controlled basic TV for under 30 hours a week in all meant that we listened to good music and read good books. We realized early that good music, like good literature had no political boundaries, yet so much of it was pure politics.
Arindam Mitra, an old friend of mine, now settled in Mumbai, gave me the vinyl LP and swear to god, I probably listened to it a 100 times in a short span of time. It wasn't my first Dylan album, but it was one that would have an indelible mark on a young mind.
Music, as you know, in its best form, can change your life.
I wonder if there's one performer these days who even comes close to having the ability to make a record of this stature. The words are like burning coal, the music like rolling thunder and hits you like a jet plane.
I do not recommend that you go and buy this album unless you are exploring what real music is all about. On the other hand, if you do decide to listen to Highway 61 for the first time, it may well change your life.
If you do possess this album, go and listen to it again. Mr. Dylan may tell you something completely different this time.
Easily one of the greatest milestones of the rock era July 4, 2006
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
Hyperbole rules in customer reviews, but I honestly believe that this is the greatest album ever released. It almost certainly influenced the history of rock and roll more than any other single album made, even more than SGT PEPPER. Why? The greatest influence on the Beatles after their initial fame was listening to Bob Dylan. The influence of the single "Like a Rolling Stone" alone was staggering. (It was released as a single months before the album.) Upon listening to Dylan and this album/song, Sam Cooke wrote a masterpiece in trying to imitate him ("A Change is Gonna Come"), as did Otis Redding ("Sitting on the Dock of the Bay"). Both Lennon and McCartney abandoned the pop love songs that had been the staple of the Beatles success through 1965 to write the more complex lyrics found on REVOLVER and RUBBER SOUL. Virtually every rock songwriter on both sides of the Atlantic had to rethink everything that they were doing with their music. His previous albums had found a wide audience, but primarily in the folk scene. This was true even of BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME. Primarily because of the success of "Like a Rolling Stone" as a single, this was the first Dylan album that was primarily a rock album rather than folk.
There are so many remarkable aspects to this album. The lyrics are so incredible as to seem beyond the capacity of someone as young and uneducated as Dylan, full of deep cultural resonances and references while maintaining a poetic perfection. Every fan can name his or her own favorites: mine are "Like a Rolling Stone," the title song, "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," and "Desolation Row." The success of the album made his earlier albums equally essential for rock performers, instantly providing rock with a verbal palette that dramatically extended the simple love song to almost any subject.
One thing that sets this album from so many Dylan albums that followed is the excellence of the session musicians. As great as Dylan is, on many of his albums he employs musicians that simply aren't among the best. Take the guitar work alone. Although Robbie Robertson would provide superb work on BLONDE ON BLONDE, no Dylan album after HIGHWAY 61 would feature such stellar solo work as what Michael Bloomfield would provide on this one. The filler lines he provides at the end of the various lines in "Tombstone Blues" is just one example. But as fine as Bloomfield is, he is matched by the astonishing playing by country guitarist Charlie McCoy on "Desolation Row," who achieves the near impossible by playing eleven minutes of acoustic guitar in counterpoint to Dylan's strumming, and manages to make it compelling throughout.
Above all else, HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED created the potential for rock to be difficult and challenging. Before Dylan, no one listening to rock had to use more than just a tiny fraction of their brain. After this album, rock became intelligent, or at least had that potential. Take "Desolation Row." Apart from Chuck Berry telling Beethoven to roll over, rock contained in its first decade virtually no cultural references to speak of. But in that song alone Dylan sings of Cinderella, Bette Davis, Romeo, Cain and Abel, the hunchback of Notre Dame, the Good Samaritan, Ophelia, Noah, Einstein, the Phantom of the Opera, Casanova, Nero, Neptune, the Titanic, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. Rock had never been so literate before and has only rarely been this intelligent since. Somehow in an eleven-minute song Dylan managed to sum up huge hunks of modern culture. In conjunction with the other songs on the album, in particular "Ballad of a Thin Man" and "Highway 61 Revisited," Dylan seemed to sum up all the alienation that the youth of the sixties was feeling in regard to the consumerism that had exploded in the fifties.
It is hardly conceivable that any serious fan of music in general or rock in particular isn't already familiar with every second of this album, but if not, you must get it. On its own merits, it is one of the supreme cultural achievements of the century, and its massive influence on every single songwriter who grew up in its wake only makes knowing it all that more essential.
Well, I ride on a mailtrain, baby. January 5, 2007
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
Highway 61 Revisited was a dramatic development in Bob Dylan's career. Coupling the power of Little Richard with that of Woody Guthrie, he further cranked up the electricity--with Al Kooper playing remarkable organ and Mike Bloomfield turning in blazing B.B. King guitar, "Like a Rolling Stone" was phenomenal rock & roll. For the mythic backroads that had inspired his early work, Dylan now substituted the street--from the album's cover, he stares slightly menacingly; in a motorcycle t-shirt, silk jacket and pompadour, he comes off as nobody's folkie, but an updated James Dean. The 11-minute epic "Desolation Row" showed him working out his new surrealism, and the entire record wasn't only that of a new Dylan, it was music and words of a force seldom heard in pop music ever before.
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