Bob Dylan
Highway 61 Revisited

For all those who want to insult me: now I call myself "Viva Lì" but my real name is Poletti Marco. Remember? The one who sends in a batch of reviews almost every week? Well, that's me.

Bob Dylan's rock breakthrough is a healthy and very delightful breath of fresh air after the protest songs, beautiful yet perhaps a bit musically simplistic, of the early 1960s. "Highway 61 Revisited" is therefore the album of transformation, of definite consecration, of the birth of a myth besides being a glorious preacher, somewhat moralistic. Naturally, in 1965, at the release of the album, many accused Dylan of betrayal and revisionism. Nothing could be further from the truth: Dylan has lost neither a gram nor a centigram of his scathing anger, his irony, only this time he has added a good amount of music, many instruments, and a great desire to surprise (and not to betray). "Highway 61 Revisited" leaves you speechless even after the umpteenth listening, while Dylan's voice, curiously less nasal and more refined than usual, grimly pronounces phrases and stories of a world that has now digested the shock of the Vietnam War (but has always tried to annihilate it, at least musically) and that, like the USA, has lost its purity and dignity: when the American dream has now become a nightmare, when the heroes like John Wayne are tired and outdated, when the girls decide it's time to wear miniskirts and bend men as they haven't been able to do for ten centuries, even a singer like Dylan feels obliged, there's no doubt, to change his music, to dive into rock, to inveigh against society using, for the first time, the deadly weapon of irony and casual detachment. Rock, the one invented by Gene Vincent and Chuck Berry, is a genre on the decline.

The classic harmonious and flaming guitars, symbols of musical and cultural revolution, are now giving way to metal drums and the electric guitars of Keith Richards and Roger Waters. Rock therefore, is serious business, it is not a toy for ladies: it is art, it is the scent of freedom, it is life, it is sex, it is love. But not Bob Dylan, he, according to many, could never have become a rockstar. Too austere, too gray, too silent, too smoky. Guitar and harmonica: how could he become a rockstar? Yet Bob Dylan, surprising everyone a bit (and perhaps even himself a bit) changes look, changes attire, changes skin, changes life: tough look, guitar and drums always ready for use, talent to spare and, say what you will, experimentation and provocation, anger and the will to scream, or rather, to roar, to growl. "Highway 61 Revisited" quickly becomes a phenomenon album, a symbol album: it is the album of hidden truths, of generational change, of the 1968 that is coming (but many do not notice it), of the desire to change, to mature, to live, to grow after having already grown (after all, Dylan is only 26 years old). Life changes, rock too. The world, from that day, will never be the same again.

The songs on the album are epochal, magnificent, legendary, historic. Just the first two minutes of "Like a Rolling Stone" are enough to understand that here, guys, we're serious. The first song to last more than three minutes (to be precise, it lasts exactly seven), full of acoustic guitars, frenzied drums, with vibrant and very warm instruments. Bob's voice declaims, with precision, word for word, syllable by syllable. The refrain is contagious, perfect, rhythmically nervous with stratospheric peaks of madness and burnt youth. The story of a woman, perhaps outcast, perhaps unloved, who sees stones rolling as her own helpless (and lifeless) life sadly rolls, is the clearest symbol of a defeated, conquered America, now bent by the chains of capitalism, where myths are born in the morning and are already old by the afternoon. The only one not going out of style is Dylan: there's no doubt. Very evident blues and folk contamination (and even a bit of country) in some sharp mid-album tracks: notably the crazy "Just like Tom Thumb's blues", a sort of nostalgic and creative ballad. Almost embarrassing, in its pathetic magnificence, the final piece, the last pearl of an album history will honor and glorify: "Desolation Row". Eleven minutes of pure brilliance, a sort of dreamy delirium in which Dylan cites Eliot, Einstein, and Pound by blending notes and dreams thanks to marvelous guitar flickers at times very similar to certain works of the earliest Jimi Hendrix.

n album thus perfect, absolutely brilliant. Surely the most meticulously crafted, and therefore the most successful, album by Bob Dylan. An immortal masterpiece that, with all due respect to all detractors and alleged revolutionaries, will remain in the history of music and, believe it or not, will never go out of style.