Magazine:
UNCUT

Take 100, september 2005

9 tracks, 51:19

UNCUT

Over the course of an astonishing 14 months between March 1965 and May 1966, Bob Dylan released arguably the most potent trilogy of rock'n'roll albums ever recorded. Sitting in the middle of them, sandwiched by Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde On Blonde, came Highway 61 Revisited.
Released exactly 40 years ago this month, in August 1965, it was a statement of revolutionary intent. True, one side of its predecessor, Bringing It All Back Home, had been electric. But the other side of that album had been acoustic, and at least maintained a tenuous connection with the world of folk rnusic.
Highway 61... showed no such ambivalence. This was full-on, white-hot rock'n'roll of savage and startling intensity. It was a record that took no prisoners and marked Dylan's total transformation from folk hero to rock'n'roll messiah - a process he confirmed at the Newport Folk Festival a month before Highway 61...'s release, when his first-ever live electric performance was greeted with outraged howls and boos from the traditionalists. Yet not all of his old friends from Greenwich Village deserted him. Phil Ochs, for one, summed up what was really going on when he declared: "With Highway 61 Revisited, I knew he'd produced one of the most important and revolutionary albums ever made. He's done something that's left the whole field ridiculously in back of him."
What better way to mark our centenary than by asking a bunch of our favourite artists to revisit the album 40 years on, and explore its dramatic and ongoing influence on the course of popular music.

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