Bob Dylan Way

08/30/2025

ON THIS DATE (60 YEARS AGO)
August 30, 1965 - Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited is released.
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 5/5 (MUST-HAVE!)
# Allmusic 5/5

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Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by Bob Dylan, released on August 30, 1965. It reached #3 on the Billboard 200 Top LP's chart, and features the single, "Like a Rolling Stone", which reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2003, it was ranked #4 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list, and three songs, "Like a Rolling Stone" ( #1), "Desolation Row" ( #185), and "Highway 61 Revisited" ( #364) were listed on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.

On his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan devoted Side One of the album to songs accompanied by an electric rock band, and Side Two to solo acoustic numbers. For Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan used rock backing on every track, except for the closing 11-minute acoustic song, "Desolation Row". Critics have written that Dylan's ability to combine driving, complex, blues-based rock music with the power of poetry, made Highway 61 Revisited one of the most influential albums ever recorded.

Leading off with his hit single of that summer, "Like a Rolling Stone", the album features many songs that have been acclaimed as classics and that Dylan has continued to perform live over his long career, including "Highway 61 Revisited", "Ballad of a Thin Man", and "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues". Dylan named the album after one of the great North American arteries, which connected his birthplace in Minnesota to southern cities famed for their musical heritage, including St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans.
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“I never wanted to write topical songs, have you heard my last two records, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61? It’s all there. That’s the real Dylan.”
~Bob Dylan (Frances Taylor Interview, Aug 1965)
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ORIGINAL LINER NOTES

Notes by Bob Dylan

On the slow train time does not interfere & at the Arabian crossing waits White Heap, the man from the newspaper & behind him the hundred Inevitables made of solid rock & stone - the Cream Judge & the Clown - the doll house where Savage Rose & Fixable live simply in their wild animal luxury .... Autumn, with two zeros above her nose arguing over the sun being dark or Bach is as famous as its commotion & that she herself - not Orpheus - is the logical poet "I am the logical poet!" she screams "Spring? Spring is only the beginning!" she attempts to make Cream Judge jealous by telling him of down-to-earth people & while the universe is erupting, she points to the slow train & prays for rain and for time to interfere - she is not extremely fat but rather progressively unhappy ... The hundred Inevitables hide their predictions & go to bars & drink & get drunk in their very special conscious way & when tom dooley, the kind of person you think you've seen before, comes strolling in with White Heap, the hundred Inevitables all say "who's that man who looks so white?" & the bartender, a good boy & one who keeps a buffalo in his mind, says "I don't know, but I'm sure I've seen the other fellow someplace" & when Paul Sargent, a plain-clothes man from 4th street, comes in at three in the morning & busts everybody for being incredible, nobody really gets angry - just a little illiterate most people get & Rome, one of the hundred Inevitables whispers "I told you so" to Madame John .... Savage Rose & Fixable are bravely blowing kisses to Jade Hexagram-Carnaby Street & to all the mysterious juveniles & the Cream Judge is writing a book on the true meaning of a pear - last year, he wrote one on famous dogs of the civil war & now he has false teeth & no children .... when the Cream met Savage Rose & Fixable, he was introduced to them by none other than Lifelessness - Lifelessness is the Great Enemy & always wears a hip guard - he is very hipguard .... Lifelessness said, when introducing everybody- "go save the world" & "involvement! that's the issue" & things like that & Savage Rose winked at Fixable & the Cream went off with his arm in a sling singing "summertime & the Livin is easy" .... the Clown appears - puts a gag over Autumn's mouth & says "there are two kinds of People - simple people & normal people" this usually gets a big laugh from the sandpit & White Heap -sneezes - passes out & rips open Autumn's gag & says "What do you mean you're Autumn and without you there'd be no

spring! you fool! without spring, there'd be no you! what do you think of that???.” then Savage Rose & Fixable come by & kick him in the brains & color him pink for being a phony philosopher - then the Clown comes by, and screams, "You phony philosopher!" & jumps on his head - Paul Sargent comes by again in an umpire's suit & some college kid who's read all about Nietzsche comes by & says "Nietzche never wore an umpire's suit" & Paul says "You wanna buy some clothes, kid?" & then Rome & John come out of the bar & they're going up to Harlem .. " We are singing today of the WIPE-OUT GANG - the WIPE-OUT GANG buys, owns & operates the Insanity Factory - if you do not know where the Insanity Factory is located, you should hereby take two steps to the right, paint your teeth & go to sleep ... the songs on this specific record are not so much songs but rather exercises in, tonal breath control ... the subject matter - tho meaningless as it is - has something to do with the beautiful strangers .... the beautiful strangers, Vivaldi's green jacket & the holy slow train

you are right john cohen - quazimodo was right - Mozart was right.... I cannot say the word eye anymore .... when I speak this word eye, it is as if I am speaking of somebody's eye that I faintly remember .... there is no eye there is only a series of mouths - long live the mouths - your rooftop if you don't already know - has been demolished .... eye is plasma & you are right about that too - you are lucky - you don't have to think about such things as eyes & rooftops & quazimodo.
~ Bob Dylan 1965
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Singer-songwriter Phil Ochs told Broadside magazine, immediately after the record’s release, that Dylan had "produced the most important and revolutionary album ever made". Speaking to Anthony Scaduto five years later, Ochs said, "I put on Highway 61 and I laughed and said it's so ridiculous. It's impossibly good, it just can’t be that good. How can a human mind do this?"

The English poet Philip Larkin, reviewing Highway 61 for The Daily Telegraph, wrote that he found himself "well rewarded" by the record: "Dylan’s cawing, derisive voice is probably well suited to his material... and his guitar adapts itself to rock ('Highway 61') and ballad ('Queen Jane'). There is a marathon 'Desolation Row' which has an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words."

Dylan critic Michael Gray called Highway 61 "revolutionary and stunning, not just for its energy and panache but in its vision: fusing radical, electrical music ... with lyrics that were light years ahead of anyone else's; Dylan here unites the force of blues-based rock'n'roll with the power of poetry. Rock culture, in an important sense, the 1960s, started here."

TRACKS:
All songs written by Bob Dylan
Side one
"Like a Rolling Stone" – 6:09
"Tombstone Blues" – 5:58
"It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" – 4:09
"From a Buick 6" – 3:19
"Ballad of a Thin Man" – 5:58

Side two
"Queen Jane Approximately" – 5:31
"Highway 61 Revisited" – 3:30
"Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" – 5:31
"Desolation Row" – 11:21

07/31/2025

05/24/2025

From your friends in Duluth... Happy 84th birthday, Robert.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Bob Dylan / Robert Zimmerman (singer, songwriter) (84)

Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, is an American singer-songwriter, widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. Emerging from the 1960s folk scene in New York’s Greenwich Village, he gained fame with songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which became anthems for civil rights and anti-war movements. His shift to electric rock with Highway 61 Revisited (1965), featuring “Like a Rolling Stone,” and Blonde on Blonde (1966) revolutionized popular music. Dylan’s prolific career spans over 40 studio albums, including Blood on the Tracks (1975), Time Out of Mind (1997), and Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). His lyrical depth, blending folk, blues, rock, and gospel, earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.

Dylan has also explored painting, with exhibitions of his artwork since the 1990s, and published a memoir, Chronicles: Volume One (2004). He has won 10 Grammy Awards, an Oscar for “Things Have Changed” from Wonder Boys (2000), and a Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012). Known for his enigmatic persona, Dylan has toured extensively, including the Never Ending Tour since 1988. Married twice, to Sara Lownds (1965–1977) and Carolyn Dennis (1986–1992), he has six children, including musician Jakob Dylan.

05/17/2025

Here is our updated virtual poster. Please share widely! We had a few line up changes since our poster was printed. 🎶🎶

04/17/2025

03/19/2025

ON THIS DATE (63 YEARS AGO)
March 19, 1962 - Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan is released
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 4.5/5

Bob Dylan is the eponymous debut album by Bob Dylan, released on March 19, 1962. It did not chart in the US, but did reach #13 on the UK Albums chart.

It features folk standards, plus two original compositions, and was produced by Columbia's legendary talent scout John H. Hammond, who signed Dylan to the label.

Dylan met John Hammond at a rehearsal session for Carolyn Hester on September 14, 1961, at the apartment shared by Hester and her then-husband, Richard Fariña. Hester had invited Dylan to the session as a harmonica player, and Hammond approved him as a session player after hearing him rehearse, with recommendations from his son, musician John Hammond Jr., and from Liam Clancy.

Hammond later told Robert Shelton that he decided to sign Dylan "on the spot," and invited him to the Columbia offices for a more formal audition recording. No record of that recording has turned up in Columbia's files, but Hammond, Dylan, and Columbia's A&R director Mitch Miller have all confirmed that an audition took place. (Producer Fred Catero, then a recording engineer for Columbia Records, claims to have the master of that session. It is not the original demo for Columbia, but a session from December 6, 1962, recorded by John Hammond, Sr..)

On September 26, Dylan began a two-week run at Gerde's Folk City, second on the bill to The Greenbriar Boys. On September 29, an exceptionally favorable review of Dylan's performance appeared in the New York Times. The same day, Dylan played harmonica at Hester's recording session at Columbia's Manhattan studios. After the session, Hammond brought Dylan to his offices and presented him with Columbia's standard five-year contract for previously unrecorded artists. Dylan signed immediately.

That night at Gerdes, Dylan told Shelton about Hammond's offer, but asked him to "keep it quiet" until the contract's final approval had worked its way through the Columbia hierarchy. The label's official approvals came quickly.

Studio time was scheduled for late November, and during the weeks leading up to those sessions, Dylan began searching for new material even though he was already familiar with a number of songs. According to Dylan's friend Carla Rotolo, "He spent most of his time listening to my records, days and nights. He studied the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, the singing of Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd, Rabbit Brown's guitar, Guthrie, of course, and blues...his record was in the planning stages. We were all concerned about what songs Dylan was going to do. I remember clearly talking about it."

The album was ultimately recorded in three short afternoon sessions on November 20 and 22. Hammond later joked that Columbia spent "about $402" to record it, and the figure has entered the Dylan legend as its actual cost. Despite the low cost and short amount of time, Dylan was still difficult to record, according to Hammond. "Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike," recalls Hammond. "Even more frustrating, he refused to learn from his mistakes. It occurred to me at the time that I'd never worked with anyone so undisciplined before."

Seventeen songs were recorded, and five of the album's chosen tracks were actually cut in single takes ("Baby Let Me Follow You Down," "In My Time of Dyin'," "Gospel Plow," "Highway 51 Blues," and "Freight Train Blues") while the master take of "Song for Woody" was recorded after one false start. The album's four outtakes were also cut in single takes. During the sessions, Dylan refused requests to do second takes. "I said no. I can't see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That's terrible."
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LINER NOTES

Columbia records is proud to introduce a major new figure in American folk music -- Bob Dylan.

Excitement has been running high since the young man with a guitar ambled into a Columbia recording studio for two sessions in November, 1961. For at only 20, Dylan is the most unusual new talent in American folk music.

His talent takes many forms. He is one of the most compelling white blues singers ever recorded. He is a songwriter of exceptional facility and cleverness. He is an uncommonly skillful guitar player and harmonica player.

In less than one year in New York, Bob Dylan has thrown the folk crowd into an uproar. Ardent fans have been shouting his praises. Devotees have found in him the image of a singing rebel, a musical Chaplin tramp, a young Woody Guthrie, or a composite of some of the best country blues singers.

A good deal of Dylan's steel-string guitar work runs strongly in the blues vein, although he will vary it with country configurations, Merle Travis picking and other methods. Sometimes he frets his instrument with the back of a kitchen knife or even a metal lipstick holder, giving it the clangy virility of the primitive country blues men. His pungent, driving, witty harmonica is sometimes used in the manner of Walter Jacobs, who plays with the Muddy Waters' band in Chicago, or the evocative manner of Sonny Terry.

Another strong influence on Bob Dylan was not a musician primarily, although he has written music, but a comedian -- Charlie Chaplin. After seeing many Chaplin films, Dylan found himself beginning to pick up some of the gestures of the classic tramp of silent films. Now as he appears on the stage in a humorous number, you can see Dylan nervously tapping his hat, adjusting it, using it as a prop, almost leaning on it, as the Chaplin tramp did before him.

Yet despite his comic flair, Bob Dylan has, for one so young, a curious preoccupation with songs about death. Although he is rarely inarticulate, Dylan can't explain the attraction of these songs, beyond the power and emotional wallop they give him, and which he passes on to his listeners. It may be that three years ago, when a serious illness struck him, that he got an indelible insight into what those death-haunted blues men were singing about.

-- His Life and Times --

Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941. After living briefly in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Gallup, New Mexico, he graduated from high school in Hibbing, Minnesota "way up by the Canadian border."

For six troubled months, Bob attended the University of Minnesota on a scholarship. But like so many of the restless, questioning students of his generation, the formal confines of college couldn't hold him.

"I didn't agree with school," he says. "I flunked out. I read a lot, but not the required readings."

He remembers staying up all night plowing through the philosophy of Kant instead of reading "Living With the Birds" for a science course.

"Mostly ," he summarizes his college days, "I couldn't stay in one place long enough."

Bob Dylan first came East in February, 1961. His destination: the Greystone Hospital in New Jersey. His purpose: to visit the long-ailing Woody Guthrie, singer, ballad-maker and poet. It was the beginning of a deep friendship between the two. Although they were separated by thirty years and two generations, they were united by a love of music, a kindred sense of humor and a common view toward the world.

The young man from the provinces began to make friends very quickly in New York, all the while continuing, as he has since he was ten, to assimilate musical ideas from everyone he met, every record he heard. He fell in with Dave Van Ronk and Jack Elliott, two of the most dedicated musicians then playing in Greenwich Village, and swapped songs, ideas and stylistic conceptions with them. He played at the Gaslight Coffeehouse, and in April, 1961, appeared opposite John Lee Ho**er, the blues singer, at Gerde's Folk City. Word of Dylan's talent began to grow, but in the surcharged atmosphere of rivalry that has crept into the folk-music world, so did envy. His "Talkin' New York" is a musical comment on his reception in New York.

Recalling his first professional music job, Bob says:
"I never thought I would shoot lightning through the sky in the entertainment world."

In 1959, in Central City, Colorado, he had that first job, in rough and tumble st******se joint.

"I was onstage for just a few minutes with my folk songs. Then the st*****rs would come on. The crowd would yell for more stripping, but they went off, and I'd come bouncing back with my folky songs. As the night got longer, the air got heavier, the audience got drunker and nastier, and I got sicker and finally I got fired."

Bob Dylan started to sing and play guitar when he was ten. Five to six years later he wrote his first song, dedicated to Brigitte Bardot. All the time, he listened to everything with both ears -- Hank Williams, the late Jimmie Rodgers, Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Carl Perkins, early Elvis Presley. A meeting with Mance Lipscomb, Texas songster, left its mark on his work, as did the blues recordings of Rabbit Brown and Big Joe Williams. He speaks worshipfully of the sense of pace and timing the great blues men had, and it has become a trademark of his work already. His speed at assimilating new styles and digesting them is not the least startling thing about Bob Dylan.

The future:

"I just want to keep on singing and writing songs like I am doing now. I just want to get along. I don't think about making a million dollars. If I had a lot of money what would I do?" he asked himself, closed his eyes, shifted the hat on his head and smiled:

"I would buy a couple of motorcycles, a few air-conditioners and four or five couches."

-- His Songs --

The number that opens this album, "You're No Good," was learned from Jesse Fuller, the West coast singer. Its vaudeville flair and exaggeration are used to heighten the mock anger of the lyrics.

"Talkin' New York" is a diary note set to music. In May, 1961, Dylan started to hitchhike West, not overwhelmingly pleased at what he had seen and experienced in New York. At a truck stop along the highway he started to scribble down a few impressions of the city he left behind. They were comic, but tinged with a certain sarcastic bite, very much in the Guthrie vein.

Dylan had never sung "In My Time of Dyin'" prior to this recording session. He does not recall where he first heard it. The guitar is fretted with the lipstick holder he borrowed from his girl, Susie Rotolo, who sat devotedly and wide-eyed through the recording session.

"Man of Constant Sorrow" is a traditional Southern mountain folk song of considerable popularity and age, but probably never sung quite in this fashion before.

"Fixin' to Die," which echoes the spirit and some of the words of "In My Time of Dyin'," was learned from an old recording by Bukka White.

A traditional Scottish song is the bare bones on which Dylan hangs "Pretty Peggy-O." But the song has lost its burr and acquired instead a Texas accent, and a few new verses and fillips by the singer.

A diesel-tempoed "Highway 51" is of a type sung by the Everly Brothers, partially rewritten by Dylan. His guitar is tuned to an open tuning and features a particularly compelling vamping figure. Similarly up tempo is his version of "Gospel Plow," which turns the old spiritual into a virtually new song.

Eric Von Schmidt, a young artist and blues singer from Boston, was the source of "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down." "House of the Risin' Sun" is a traditional lament of a New Orleans woman driven into prostitution by poverty. Dylan learned the song from the singing of Dave Van Ronk: "I'd always known 'Risin' Sun' but never really knew I knew it until I heard Dave sing it." The singer's version of "Freight Train Blues" was adapted from an old disk by Roy Acuff.

"Song to Woody," is another original by Bob Dylan, dedicated to one of his greatest inspirations, and written much in the musical language of his idol.

Ending this album is the surging power and tragedy of Blind Lemon Jefferson's blues -- "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean." The poignance and passion of this simple song reveals both the country blues tradition -- and its newest voice, Bob Dylan -- at their very finest.
-- Stacey Williams

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"Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist"
From the "New York Times," Friday, September 29, 1961

by Robert Shelton

A bright new face in folk music is appearing at Gerde's Folk City. Although only 20 years old, Bob Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Manhattan cabaret in months.

Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.

Mr. Dylan's voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch. All the "husk and bark" are left on his notes and searing intensities pervades his songs.

Mr. Dylan is both comedian and tragedian. Like a vaudeville actor on the rural circuit, he offers a variety of droll musical monologues: "Talking Bear Mountain" lampoons the overcrowding of an excursion boat, "Talkin' New York" satirizes his troubles in gaining recognition and "Talking Havah Nageilah" burlesques the folk-music craze and the singer himself.

In his serious vein, Mr. Dylan seems to be performing in a slow-motion film. Elasticized phrases are drawn out until you think they may snap. He rocks his head and body, closes his eyes in reverie and seems to be groping for a word or a mood, then resolves the tension benevolently by finding the word and the mood.

Mr. Dylan's highly personalized approach toward folk song is still evolving. He has been sopping up influences like a sponge. At times, the drama he aims at is off-target melodrama and his stylization threatens to topple over as a mannered excess.

But if not for every taste, his music-making has the mask of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth. Mr., Dylan is the more noteworthy for his youth. Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up.

TRACKS:
Side one
1 You're No Good (Jesse Fuller) - 1:40
2 Talkin' New York (Bob Dylan) - 3:20
3 In My Time of Dyin' (trad. arr. Dylan) - 2:40
4 Man of Constant Sorrow (trad. arr. Dylan) - 3:10
5 Fixin' to Die (Bukka White) - 2:22
6 Pretty Peggy-O (trad. arr. Dylan) - 3:23
7 Highway 51 (Curtis Jones) - 2:52

Side two
1 Gospel Plow (trad. arr. Dylan) - 1:47
2 Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (trad. arr. von Schmidt) - 2:37
3 House of the Risin' Sun (trad. arr. Dave Van Ronk) - 5:20
4 Freight Train Blues (trad., Roy Acuff) - 2:18
5 Song to Woody (Bob Dylan) - 2:42
6 See That My Grave Is Kept Clean (Jefferson) - 2:43

02/23/2025

Looking forward to the 2025 Duluth Dylan Fest. We will be holding a pre-event kickoff in Hibbing on May18th. More details to come.

01/09/2025

Elvis Presley was born on this date in 1935. He died on August 16, 1977, aged 42.