The record’s title references the road that spans North Minnesota to the Mississippi Delta, and the formative blues, country, and roots sounds connected to its existence. The highway also lays claim to towering musical myths and deaths, many tied to the blues lexicon and narrative. All figure prominently on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, the 1965 landmark that overturned rules, upended preexisting limits, and changed everything in its path. Ranked the fourth-greatest album ever made by Rolling Stone, its reach, power, and content boggle the mind nearly five decades after its release.
Dylan’s bonfire of cynicism, fury, indignation, and absurdity forever transformed rock, what it could mean, and what it could do. These reasons—and the bold musicianship, ace performances, inimitable production, and vast lyrical expanses—are why the album means as much today as it did in the mid-1960s.
Mastered on Mobile Fidelity’s world-renowned mastering system, these sonically restored 180g 45RPM 2LP and SACD versions of Highway 61 Revisited present the life-altering music in referencequality sound—so much so that the record’s famous first lightningstrike note is now indeed the “snare shot that sound[s] likesomebody’d kicked open the door to your mind,” as described by Bruce Springsteen.
Teeming with organic energy, palpable voltage, and countless textures, these reissues faithfully recreate the dimensions, vibes, and events associated with the six days Dylan and Co. spent at Columbia’s Studio A. Everything from thesoundstages to dynamics, instrumental separation to balances, resonates with enormous might and insightful perspective. Accept no substitute.
