12 - Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

Summary

First the liner notes, and their magnificent candor. You can almost appreciate the notes for Highway 61 Revisited as a Dylan performance in anxious, mischievous anticipation of future press conference taunts, “What is your weird new record about? How do you write your strange new songs?” Yet his sly jacket stories focus his musical designs with generosity, even precision. Consider, for instance, that about question. On the sleeve Dylan's hint is forthright: “Lifelessness.” So that if a listener didn't quite catch that line in “Desolation Row” where Ophelia's “sin” is “her lifelessness,” or twig that her condition designates a spiritual despond circulating through the songs like a virus - the echoes everywhere: Miss Lonely's inclination to “let other people get your kicks for you” (“Like a Rolling Stone”), the “useless and pointless knowledge” decomposing inside “the old folks home and the college” (“Tombstone Blues”), Mister Jones's impotent mastery of “all of / F. Scott Fitzgerald's books” “Ballad of a Thin Man”), the “very bored” gambler intent on staging “the next” world war (“Highway 61 Revisited”), the numb border-town dissipation of “I cannot move /My fingers are all in a knot” (“Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues”), “all this repetition” which Queen Jane might someday find herself “sick of” (“Queen Jane Approximately”), Dr. Filth's “sexless patients” (“Desolation Row”), the “broken” pipeline and the “lost” driver on the bridge of “From a Buick 6,” and the singer's own admission in “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” that he “Can't buy a thrill” - if somehow a listener missed all that, then right there on the jacket of Highway 61 Revisited is a character named “Lifelessness,” reenacting his recurrently bad faith: . . . when the Cream met savage Rose & Fixable, he was introduced to them by none other than Lifelessness - Lifelessness is the Great Enemy & always wears a hip guard - he is very hipguard . . . Lifelessness said when introducing everybody “go save the world ” & “involvement! that's the issue” & things like that . . .”