2. Highway 61 Revisited
With Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan fully embraced Rock & Roll after flirting with it in his previous albums, and combined it with his unique mix of blues and poetry to create something nobody had heard before. Dylan opened the album with the revolutionary Like a Rolling Stone, a six minute outpouring of resentment and anger that is often considered the greatest rock song of all time. Following Like a Rolling Stone on the album are equally brilliant songs such as Tombstone Blues, From a Buick 6, Ballad of a Thin Man, Queen Jane Approximately, and the titular track Highway 61 Revisited. The album ended with Desolation Row, one of the most ambitious pieces of popular music ever attempted. Clocking in at 11 minutes long, Desolation Row is a winding, hypnotic, surreal blend of characters from history, the bible,fiction, and Dylan's imagination that are brought together in a series of short verses. The impact of Highway 61 Revisited was vast, with much of the acclaim being centered on Like a Rolling Stone. Bruce Springsteen described how the song impacted him by saying "Dylan freed your mind, and showed us that because the music was physical did not mean it was anti-intellect", Paul McCartney said that "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful ... He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further", Frank Zappa said that he wanted to quit the music business after he heard it, and the list of platitudes goes on and on, culminating with the song being selected the number one all time rock song by Rolling Stone magazine. There was more to the album than just Like a Rolling Stone, Desolation Row has been subjected to all kinds of analysis by fans to determine its meaning and several of the other songs have become classics in their own right. Arguably the most influential album ever made, the one-two punch of Like a Rolling Stone and Desolation Row, almost unmatched in popular songwriting for both their length and ambition, would probably be enough to place Highway 61 Revisited this highly, but the myriad of other great songs on the album cement its place as #2 in Dylan's oeuvre.