http://youtu.be/hk3mAX5xdxo
On a hot, muggy night, in the attic room of an old school administration building, I sit nursing a case of undergraduate angst: what am I doing with my life? Should I drop out? Get a job? Hair grows over the collar of my shirt. In the comer a small AM radio plays softly. I hear a sharp crack and then a drum, organ, electric guitar, harmonica, and the voice of Bob Dylan:
Once upon a time, you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime
Didn’t you?
People’d call. say. “Beware, doll, you ‘re bound to fall ”
My ears perk. Dylan’s voice is, as usual, snarling. But what is this backing? I rush across the room and crank up the volume. Dylan’s voice rides over the sound of the organ….
Harmonica wailing into the distance. The Lone Ranger never made such an impression with a single visit. On the record cover Bob Dylan sits holding dark glasses, wearing an open neon-bright shirt and underneath a T-shirt with a motorcycle on it. On Highway 61 Revisited there are no folk or “protest” songs as we had come to expect.
Recently Dylan had been booed off the stage at the Newport Folk Festival for appearing with his electric band. He clearly doesn’t care (or if he does he doesn’t show it). On the back of Highway 61 he writes, “Your rooftop – if you don’t already know – has been demolished.” If there were signs (like the booing at Newport) that all this was not going to be easy, it didn’t matter. If later Dylan sang, “Everybody said they’d stand behind me when the game got rough. But the joke was on me, there was nobody even there to bluff,” we didn’t know it then.
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