HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED

I can recommend Mark Polizzotti's short book Highway 61 Revisited, published last year in that neat little series published by Continuum in New York, 331/3. You might think everyone had written plenty about this album already, and indeed when it comes to some of Polizzotti's micro-discussion about the recording of 'Like A Rolling Stone' the feeling of deja vu ennui is unavoidable... but the enviable achievement of this book as a whole is to say fresh things, and with a nicely clipped, energetic turn of phrase, over and over.

For example: while I think he's over-harsh on Bringing It All Back Home and especially on Tom Wilson (an animus never explained), the quote that follows is surely fundamentally offering a truth I've never quite heard said before, even after more than 40 years of talk and writing:

"But for all its febrile rattling, Bringing It All Back Home still manages to sound essentially like electrified folk. Dylan is known to prefer recording 'live' - that is, with all musicians playing simultaneously rather than overdubbing after the fact. Despite this, the instruments retain the feel of being layered onto what are essentially solo pieces. The early, acoustic-only take of 'Subterranean Homesick Blues,' for instance, sounds surprisingly like the finished cut, the difference lying less in the absence of Al Gorgoni's electric than in Dylan's not yet having perfected his rapid-fire vocal delivery... [whereas] the musicians on Highway 61 are not so much accompanists as an integral part of the proceedings."