Five Things Comprising Viking Andrew’s Gigantic Cornucopia of Assomeness

Released in 1965, Highway 61 Revisited is the album that marks a time before Dylan was the pop-culture moneymaker he is today but after he had shaken off the influence of Woody Guthrie and found his true voice. It runs a mere fifty-minutes, is as tight as a duck’s ass and hits that perfect balance of thematic unity while avoiding redundancy. The songs are a bizarre mixture of nonsensical lyricism—the result of Dylan’s continued interest in the bible and a newfound intrigue for the works of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, as well as a desire to disentangle himself from the labels hip folksters were tagging him with, i.e., “The voice of a generation” and even (and surely LSD played a role here) “a prophet sent from God”—and almost vaudevillian musical arrangements. The kazoo, the harp, the Spanish guitar, the church organ; what this album really reminds me of is some non-tetanus, non-disease-ridden junkyard where everything sort of contrasts in a delightful way. Okay, so that was a tad bit overwrought. But what’s important to note is this: Highway 61 Revisited is the album that made the Beatles pull their heads out of their asses, quit chasing teenage poon and get serious. It’s the album on which Frank Zappa once remarked, “[I remember thinking] [i]f this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else.” Would you disagree with a crazy motherfucker like Zappa? It’s Dylan’s best work.

Points off? What makes me sick? Dylan was twenty-four, nearly a full year younger than I, when he wrote it.

Rating: 95%

(Photo courtesy http://www.audio.ya.com)