Lisnaholic

Chips Fontaine is a newcomer to MB, and deserves a welcome: ( *EDIT: oops! Chips isn' t a newcomer - this is a bumped thread from last year!* )

Nonetheless, I share blackdragon’s disappointment with Chips’ post about Highway 61 Revisited. I never expected that a beleaguered Bob Dylan would need me to defend him, but what with illustrious members like Plankton and grindy ganging up against him too, I feel that poor old Bob could do with a champion.

Firstly, of course, it’s not obligatory to like Dylan. More than most vocalists, his voice dominates every album without respite, so if his voice is the problem you really just have to move on.

As grindy says, Dylan’s songs are all about the lyrics and he’s not known for being musically adventurous, although this album does have some pretty good touches imo; there is Al Kooper’s driving organ on Like a Rolling Stone and the wonderful plunking piano of It Takes a Lot to Laugh. Often, though, the song structure is some unexceptional (borrowed?) blues-rock riff that chugs along without much variation until Bob has had his say and vented his spleen.

^ Yes, there's a lot of hype around the album which is difficult to ignore. ChipsF suggests that the album lives off the hype, when surely it's the other way round; the album came first and sold well - the hype is a parasitical growth that attached itself to the album. Back in ’65 the album was doing fine without the help of the hype, thank you very much, and in fact the album today would convey more of its original impact if people weren't pre-primed to expect something fabulous. They say there’ s no smoke without fire and to swap metaphors, hype, like smoke, both indicates and obscures the original flame that started it all - but Dylan and his album can't be blamed for that.

^ No plan to take up Chips' challenge; obviously, anybody playing the album for the first time makes their own appraisal, but Chips seems to speculate unfairly that no new listener will care about the album. To refute that notion, I’d like to mention just one enthusiastic post I read on YouTube yesterday; some guy, discovering that Desolation Row wasn't written by My Chemical Romance, was exploring Dylan for the first time. This suggests that there is a continuing interest in the songs of Highway 61 Revisited.

Actually, the whole debate about “is it relevant/popular today” is itself in some ways irrelevant. Although Chips ascribes it all to hype, Highway 61 Revisited has already earned its place in rock history, even if the tingle of how innovative the album was cannot be experienced by somebody hearing the album today.

And what made it innovative? Well, firstly, at a time when many singles were about 2 mins 45 seconds long, the album spawned a staggering 6 min single. This was unheard of in mainstream music, but there are other, more significant, surprises in this album too. Dylan didn’t only outrage his folk fanbase by his shift to electric, on H61R he went electric in such an aggressive uncompromising style, which other groups weren’t risking at the time. Bear in mind that The Byrds’ version of Mr. Tambourine Man was in the charts that same year, outraging nobody, and even the Stones, for all their swagger, were following the cleaner-sounding conventions of pop.

But Dylan broke another, wider-ranging taboo as well. I remember a musician, perhaps in the 90s, enthusing on tv about the very first opening second of H61R – the single snare drum beat that starts the whole onslaught. The death knell, he called it, of everything that had gone before, and in a way he was right; up until this album nobody, to my knowledge, was expressing so much anger, scorn, derision and cynicism in their music. Dylan’s whiney voice wasn’t particularly whining about his hard life. You won’t find confessional songs on Highway 61 Revisited, with Bob complaining that “my girlfriend dumped me” or “my dad wanted me to sell insurance”. Instead he’s giving voice to a generalised bunch of negative emotions that no other artist had the nerve to enunciate at the time. A drug-fuelled aggressive contempt runs through the album, hitting a nerve of undirected anger which became the rallying cry of punk about 20 years later.

Which rather brings me back to the lyrics again. There maybe some weak moments on this album, as Dylan tries to name-check every cultural icon he can think of, taking us through a whole dramatis personae of characters, from Miss Lonely, Mr. Jones and Romeo to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. But there are plenty of killer couplets too. Here’s just one personal fave from the all-verse, no-chorus, Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues:

OK, I’m about done with this over-long post: hadn't planned on doing an album review, because MB already has a good one here written by TheCellarTapes :-

http://www.musicbanter.com/members-j...tml#post706336
^

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953