Highway 61 Reimagined

Highway 61 Revisited is Bob Dylan’s sixth album, released in the summer of 1965. It was an album that changed everything in popular music, similar to the impact The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper would have two years later. It generated a groundbreaking six-minute-plus radio hit with “Like a Rolling Stone” and an 11 minute epic, “Desolation Row”, with references to everyone from Roman emperor Nero to Shakespeare’s Ophelia to poet T.S. Elliot to the political ballad “Which Side Are You On?”

Highway 61? It runs from Dylan’s home turf in Duluth, Minnesota to New Orleans, and is featured in numerous blues tunes. Other songs, from “Ballad of a Thin Man” (You KNOW something’s happening, but you don’t know what it is) to “Tom Thumbs Blues” (“When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Easter time too”) help explain why Dylan got the Nobel prize for literature. 

Highway 61 Re-imagined is a tribute orchestrated by Steve Dawson with able help from some of Vancouver’s finest, along with the occasional import: Barney Bentall, John Boutté, Jim Byrnes, Mick Flannery, Ndidi Onukwulu, Dawn Pemberton, Suzie Ungerleider,  Pharis and Jason Romero and Alvin Youngblood Hart.

– GC