“I haven’t listened for a while”: The album Bob Dylan never revisited
When an artist is finished with an album, the last thing they want to do is go back into the studio and start revisiting everything. Even though it might have been a labour of love, the “labour” part shouldn’t be forgotten about, and usually any artist is going to want to run away from the studio to perform their songs live rather than have to put up with hearing the sound of their own voice for hours on end. Although Bob Dylan wasn’t known for putting too much flash behind his biggest albums, he admitted that he didn’t want to revisit this classic once he was finished.
Then again, Dylan was never meant to paw over a recording, either. Usually, the song’s final version is the tune that has all of the verses intact. Unless someone hits a wrong note or flubs the chord progression, there’s a human aspect to capturing the raw performance instead of focusing on whether the bassline should move at the right spot.
That’s not to say that Dylan didn’t know how the songs should go. When working alongside Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers during a tour in the 1980s, Dylan usually only needed to move his arm a certain way for the group to follow him, usually correcting them midsong if the tune sounded a little too rushed or if they needed to slow everything down for a certain section.
When he first started making rock and roll tunes, though, the magic behind his songs was about how ramshackle they were. As much of a classic as ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ is today, the core behind it is the fact that it sounds like it’s on the verge of falling apart in every other line that Dylan sings.
If that was the preparation, though, Highway 61 Revisited was the watershed moment for Dylan’s turn as a rock and roll star. Blonde on Blonde may have been a more sweeping statement, but hearing him test his audience on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ or take his critics to task on ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ was the kind of pure swagger that few could have imitated during the 1960s.
Then again, it wasn’t a style that Dylan wanted to get caught up in. By the time he worked on Nashville Skyline, he expressed never catching up with those songs, saying, “I’m not probably as aware of that [musical] change, because I haven’t listened to that album Highway 61 for a while. I’d probably do myself a lot of good going back and listening to it. I probably could pinpoint it right down if I heard that album.”
Even if Dylan didn’t bother returning to it, this is where he fully came into his own as a songwriter. Despite being known as one of the most caustic poets of his generation, songs like ‘Desolation Row’ should be held up as watermarks for his career, especially considering how much of it still rings true for people on the fringes of society today.
But becoming nostalgic never crossed Dylan’s mind during his glory years. He was always concerned with writing the next great song, and over the course of his life, going back to one of his masterpieces is irrelevant if he can still write tunes as good as ‘Murder Most Foul’.
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