Bob Dylan has gotten an astounding amount of press over the last two years, given the release of his 2024 biopic, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet. The film spotlighted his early career and his decision to incorporate electric guitar and rock instruments into folk music, which was controversial at the time. However, as rock enthusiasts everywhere now know, Dylan’s decision proved to be not only popular but revolutionary, and it yielded what many consider to be his greatest album, hands down: Highway 61 Revisited. And now, that album just turned 61.
Before Bob Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited in its entirety, he put out feelers with “Like A Rolling Stone,” which was released as a single in June 1965. The track was a near-instant hit, racing up the charts and sitting at number two on the Billboard Hot 100, almost displacing the three-week number one hit “I Got You Babe” by Sonny & Cher in the process. Its success was a shock to Columbia Records, though, which was dubious about the song’s lengthy six-minute timestamp and its electric aspects.
Clearly, rock lovers had an appetite for the changes Dylan was trying to make. Just as he’d begun melding rock music with folk in his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, he married the two popular genres with ease on Highway 61 Revisited, inspiring generations of musicians in the process. For fellow rock legend Bruce Springsteen, Highway 61 Revisited was the first Bob Dylan album he ever heard—and it was a transformational experience. He once commented that Dylan’s work “thrilled and scared him,” making him “feel kind of irresponsibly innocent. And it still does.”
Indeed, it’s hard to believe that Dylan’s world-weary lyrics on Highway 61 Revisited were written when he was a mere 24 years old. That said, it’s important to remember that the album was Dylan’s sixth, and that he’d been immersed in the gritty world of beatniks and musicians that dominated New York City’s West Village during the 1960s. Furthermore, when writing his lyrics, Dylan drew from musical and historical sources of inspiration that deepened his work.
‘Highway 61 Revisited’ Is More than Just an Album—It’s an American Reckoning
Highway 61 runs from Louisiana to the Canadian border, passing through Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota. Music writer David Sheppard points out that this highway also traces the path of African Americans seeking employment during interwar years—a path that also brought blues music from the south to the north. By incorporating blues into his album (most vividly in the album’s final song, “Desolation Row”) and nodding at the impact of this highway, Dylan subtly acknowledges the Black roots of his own genre. He also borrows from Mexican-American musician Richie Valens’ “La Bamba” in “Like a Rolling Stone,” further incorporating the diversity of American music into his album.
Finally, through his lyrics, Dylan elevates American culture to biblical proportions in Highway 61 Revisited. In “Desolation Row,” for instance, he references Cain and Abel, while in the album’s titular song, he applies the story of Abraham to the American Midwest just as John Steinbeck applied the story of Genesis to the West in East of Eden. And, like Steinbeck, Dylan taps into the beauty, rot, and heartbreak of America all at once.
At 61, Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited is no less important than it was when it debuted in 1965. Without its melding of rock and folk genres, we would not have much of the music that defines and delights America today, and many artists of the 1960s and beyond would not have found the inspiration they needed to create their own historic work. Plus, Dylan’s vision of America—as a collection of haves and have-nots struggling to scramble ahead of one another— is perhaps even more poignant today.
