6. Highway 61 Revisited

I saw parts of a documentary on Dylan the other day, spanning mainly the first five years of his career. To me it was amazing to notice how much emotional involvement I have built up the past year, listening to his first six CDs. (By the way, in this tempo it will take me some seven or eight year to finish my project...)

I write this to remind myself that the aim of this blog-project is not to write music criticism. It is to report to myself about my particular experiences getting to know the work of Dylan. As those particular experiences involve - in my case, but maybe in yours too - a lot of comparison (it seems to me that in listening to music I am constantly busy to build a 'fit' between my new experiences and my older ones) the result inevitably looks a bit like music criticism, I must admit. But where the critic is supposed to have a sort of de-personalized, professional frame of reference, mine is purely personal. For a music critic, it would matter if he would know the later work of the Beatles much better than the early work; for me it doesn't, it simply is a fact of life making up my personal music biography.

Just a couple of observations on my listening to Highway 61 Revisited. This is a fully band-driven CD; Dylan the singer-singwriter is largely replaced by Dylan the band frontman. The music is heavily blues-oriented (I must remind myself that this album appeared roughly in the same time as the Beatles' Help; the Beatles were on their way to musically grow up, Dylan was grown up by his second album and already had taken a sort of U-turn in his career).

The lyrics are, to my ears, very impressionistic and associative, up to the point of being incomprehensible. As I am a non-native English speaker, this may matter to me in different ways than to native speakers. One of the things happenig to me is that I pick up particular phrases and remember them, rather than orient myself on the complete song or on the exact and deeper meaning of the words.

"They're selling postcards of the hanging" is one of those I pick up (first sentence of Desolation Row). Retaining such a sentence is more meaningful to me than trying to figure out who exactly 'Mr. Jones' from Ballad of a Thin Man is (however much I like the "Do you, Mr. Jones?"-phrase).

Musically, I love the band sound; it sounds fresh and improvized, but that may be because I know - because I have read so - that Dylan didn't rehearse much but simply played through the songs once or twice with the band and then recorded it.

One of the things irritating me is the Siren used in the title song Highway 61 Revisited. It is one of the few things that sound outdated to me in Dylan's work so far - it reminds me of cheap 1960s psychedelics too much (it also reminds me of the one song on the Dylan sampler I won I really don't like, Everybody Must Get Stoned - also because its message is so outdated by now). Indeed the remarks I read in Sounes' biography of Dylan that Dylan avoided references to specific persons and places (singing about "the president" rather than giving him a specific name) in order to make sure his songs would not be too specifically tied to contexts makes sense. As does Dylan's remarks that A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall is actually nót about 'atomic rain', so nót about the actual threat of nuclear fall-out after a nuclear war.

For the rest, it was a joy to listen and relisten to this one. Onwards to the next one!