‘Highway 61 Revisited’: the title of Bob Dylan’s masterpiece explained
Throughout Bob Dylan‘s storied career, the notion of a road-going troubadour has been a constant. He arrived as the original vagabond, and when his boots have clocked their last mile, he’ll go out as that, too. In many ways, this forever ties him to old folk traditions. This tendril to the past was all the more vital in 1965 when going electric had caused some former fans to call out Judas during his troubled tour.
However, despite disobeying the Amish standards of the genre at the time, he was borne from the tenets of folk and stayed true to them in his own way. Bound for Glory, Woody Guthrie’s autobiographical tale of weaving a serpentine path through the backroads of America, leaving a trail of songs in his wake for anyone who’d listen, had inspired Dylan so much that it formed a key reason why he dropped out of the University in Minnesota. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of his old folk hero, almost literally.
But, aside from Guthrie’s wayfaring ways of living life On The Road and propagating the poetry of the people, the notion of this numen with ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ scribbled on his dog-eared six-string was a mental seed that later flowered into Dylan’s prickly iconoclasm and early political ways. It encouraged him to go his own way with his music. However, ironically, when he did so and became the voice of a generation, the followers he soon amassed suddenly wanted him to go their way.
In this sense, Dylan saw going electric not as a huge transition but rather a return to his roots. “Highway 61 begins about where I came from, Duluth, to be exact,” Dylan explains in his memoir, Chronicles One, regarding the album’s literal origin.
He adds: “I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it, and could go anywhere from it.”
This motif wasn’t just about geographical capabilities. He felt the old traditions of America opened up possibilities, too. He didn’t want to be cloistered by his new fame or picketed by his fans, so he revisited his hometown in a figurative fashion. In doing so, he ditched the cling-ons of counterculture too, typified by the masterpiece ‘Like a Rolling Stone‘, a song about someone who had lost their spiritual guidance with no direction home, unlike Bob, who knew he could always pop back up Highway 61.
In essence, the title suggests a reconciliation of his solid base and a journey onto new heights from there. It takes the tenets of folk out on an electric road trip, returning to his original sense of individuality and redoubling his efforts with the fresh inspiration that a spiritual homecoming provides. When home is a highway of possibilities, returning there doesn’t have to be a step back. It can simply reaffirm your foundations away from the often phoney centres of culture and allow you to move on in any direction you please.
That is where Dylan found himself in 1965, and with two words and a number, he signposted that for any fans with a map.
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