The record grabs your attention even before the wrap comes off the sleeve. It's in the gaze. No one else was making that kind of immediate challenge from an album cover. Even Dylan, for whom the outer photo is as much a performance as the music inside - from the smug come-on of his 1962 debut to the quizzical stare of Bringing It All Back Home - was pushing something new. The look he gives almost defies you to buy the disc, to put it on the turntableBetween the fitfully brilliant Bringing It All Back Home and the sprawling masterwork that is Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited stands as the defining moment in both Dylan's career and the musical evolution of the mid 1960's. But beyond its place in history, Highway 61 works because of its enduring emotional appeal. Few songwriters before Dylan or since have combined so effectively the intensely personal with the spectacularly universal.
In this incisive book, Marl Polizzotti shines a critical light on these remarkable songs and shows us the timeless qualities that make them - and the album as a whole - so affecting.
Mark Polizzotti is the author of five previous books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton (1995) and Los Olvidados (2006). He lives in Boston. 33 1/3 is a new series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years. Focusing on one album rather than an artist's entire output, the books dispense with the standard biographical background that fans know already, and cut to the heart of the music on each album. The authors provide fresh, original perspectives - often through their access to and relationships with the key figures involved in the recording of these albums. By turns obsessive, passionate, creative, and informed, the books in this series demonstrate many different ways of writing about music.