Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde. Surely, that eighteen-month stretch from the start of 1965 to the middle of 1966 was - and will remain - the most creative and influential period in Dylan's career. During this time he was not only producing ground-breaking works at a phenomenal rate, but also getting them heard by a larger audience than any artist had ever had available before. His influence could be heard everywhere, from The Beatles to The Golden Gate Strings. But it seems that Dylan was moving so fast in this period that his record company could barely keep up with him, and the result was an unparalleled degree of confusion and inconsistency in the production and packaging of his recorded work. I have already written in The Bridge about Blonde On Blonde, the most confused release of all; the album which preceded it, Highway 61 Revisited, comes in a clear second. Like nearly all of Dylan's 1960s albums it has a split personality, divided between the once-definitive mono version and the now ubiquitous stereo release. However, unlike Blonde On Blonde, which at the latest count has had two mono and five stereo mixes, Highway 61 Revisited appears only to have one of each. The variation has come in different ways: an occasionally-appearing out-take, remasterings from different generation tapes, different sleeve designs and content. This article attempts to document the album's history. As with the earlier Blonde On Blonde article, I make no claims of completeness or total accuracy. Rather, this is intended to be a structured presentation of all the information I can muster at this point in time. I will be very happy to keep building on this foundation as further information becomes available.1 If you have any corrections or further information, please send them: contact details are given at the end of the article. A few parameters: I have generally confined discussion to the US and UK issues of the album, with one or two notable exceptions. I am aware that there are countless editions from other countries, some with changes to the sleeve design and occasionally even to the album title. But these alterations are just matters of local marketing policy, and appear to reflect no variation in Dylan's artistic intentions. As far as I am aware there is no further variation in musical content. I have also generally ignored releases in different formats such as tape or mini-disc, or alternate mixes and remasterings of individual tracks from Highway 61 Revisited which have appeared on acetates, promotional releases or anthologies. To make up for the relatively low number of alternate mixes of the album, I have included in the discussion the early "rough mix" working tape of the album which has circulated widely in tape and bootleg form. I do appreciate that this cannot be judged in the same light as officially released versions of the album, but it fits well into the article and is a subject which I suspect will be of interest to readers.Part I: History
Recording Like Dylan's previous albums, Highway 61 Revisited was recorded entirely at Columbia's Studio A in New York. The first sessions, on June 15 and 16, were produced by Tom Wilson, who had handled all of Dylan's sessions for the previous two years. The musicians too were mostly chosen from those who had accompanied Dylan five months earlier on Bringing It All Back Home, but with the key additions of Mike Bloomfield (invited to play) and Al Kooper (invited to watch). While these sessions yielded Dylan's greatest single, Like A Rolling Stone, this was the only track which made it to the final LP. Indeed, it seems likely that these June sessions were primarily intended for the recording of the single rather than for work on the next album. Two other songs were recorded, Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence and an early version of It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry, maybe as potential B-sides for the single. However, Dylan cannot have been happy with either song, as he ended up using Gates Of Eden, a track from his previous album, as the single's flip side, and the rejected songs only saw official release in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3.2 Work on the album proper began just after the Newport Folk Festival, on July 29, and continued through until August 4. Bob Johnston replaced Tom Wilson as producer, and some of the ex-Bringing It All Back Home musicians departed. Some new studio musicians were brought in, perhaps at Bob Johnston's behest; Charlie McCoy was hired late on to do the memorable second guitar part on Desolation Row. Details of the dates, the musicians and the songs recorded have been well documented by Michael Krogsgaard, working from the records in Sony's archives - see Appendix C. Mixing The studio recording sheets for June 15-16 3 and July 30 4 indicate that selected takes were cut or copied out to a "Master Reel" with the reference number SW 98151. This is almost certainly the source of the "rough mix" tape which eventually circulated in the 1970s and later formed the bulk of the bootleg Highway 61 Revisited Again. It contained the released take of Like A Rolling Stone plus one take of each of the songs recorded at the second group of sessions, including Positively 4th Street and Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window. The fact that the tape contained an out-take of Desolation Row recorded on August 3, rather than the released version which was the product of an overdub session the following day, suggests that this compilation was completed after the August 3, session. This was clearly only a working tape of the preferred takes at that point, rather than an early version of the final album. The circulated tape derived from the master reel is in mono, but it sounds very much a rough mix compared with the released mono album. The ends of the tracks are not faded properly - most of them just go on until the musicians run out of steam, or are abruptly cut; and the total length is over an hour, so some further narrowing down of the track selection was inevitable. Positively 4th Street and Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window were of course the two songs that were finally dropped, the former clearly being saved for single release.5 Apart from the fact that the tape starts with Like A Rolling Stone the sequence is nothing like the finished album; though, interestingly, nor is it the sequence in which the songs were recorded. From A Buick 6 in fact sounds as though it was added to the end of the tape from an acetate disk, so perhaps it was not originally considered for inclusion in the album; or perhaps its initial omission was just an oversight. The mono album proper was probably mixed by Dylan and Bob Johnston in the week or two following the recording sessions. The single mix of Like A Rolling Stone was included unaltered in the mono album; the track was remixed for the stereo album. Dylan's involvement in the mixing of the stereo version of the album is very questionable, given its many differences from the mono version. To begin with, the wrong take of From A Buick 6 was used for the initial US stereo release - surely not a mistake Dylan would have made if he had been involved in the process. The editing of the ends of the tracks is also a lot less tidy on the stereo album. Perhaps whoever made the stereo mix felt they could take some liberties with extended fade-outs given that the stereo version was much less likely to be used for radio airplay.
The track-by-track differences between the rough mix and the released mono and stereo mixes are detailed later on. Vinyl Releases The album was released in the US at the very end of August 1965; the official release date is given by Sony as August 30, three days after Dylan's celebrated concert at the Forest Hills tennis stadium. In Britain the album appeared sometime in September, but here the stereo edition contained the same version of From A Buick 6 as the mono. The early US stereo version with the alternate take of this song seems to have been pressed in substantial numbers (any copy with a matrix number ending -1A to -1C apparently contains the alternate take), but of course thirty-five years later good copies are hard to find. However, the US was not the only country where the alternate take appeared: it reportedly also appeared on some early stereo copies in Canada, and in Japan it was used for all vinyl issues of the album right through into the 1980s at least. I've yet to find any evidence to support rumours that the alternate take also appeared on some early US mono copies of the album; first pressings of the mono album all seem to contain the standard take of the song. The mono version of the album seems to have been deleted in 1968 in the US, and in 1969 in the UK, but in some countries - Italy, at least - the mono Dylan LPs remained in print until the latter half of the 1970s. The stereo LP still appears to be in production in the US; certainly, new US copies can be found in some English record shops at the time of writing. There is also a vinyl edition produced by the English audiophile reissue company Absolute Analogue; this is the regular stereo version of the album, but pressed on high-grade vinyl from the UK copy of the stereo master tape. CD Releases Highway 61 Revisited was one of the first Dylan albums to be issued on CD, in March 1987. Whereas Blonde On Blonde was remixed for CD from the 4-track studio master tapes, Highway 61 Revisited and most of Dylan's other back-catalogue albums were digitally converted from the same master tapes as had been produced for the purpose of cutting the original stereo LPs. The problem with this approach was that the CD inherited a sound which was severely compromised by the limitations of 1960s stereo vinyl-cutting technology. Bass, in particular, had to be restricted in those days because of the greater width of the stereo groove, especially if the album's playing time was long. In 1991 Steve Hoffman of DCC Compact Classics negotiated with Sony/Columbia for a licence to release Highway 61 Revisited in DCC's series of audiophile gold CDs. His original ambition was to remaster both the mono and stereo versions of the album and include some of the session out-takes (including Positively 4th Street). Dylan's management, though, reportedly refused permission for him to do anything other than the standard stereo album, with no alterations - not even extra photos on the sleeve. However, what Hoffman proceeded to do within these limits was an object lesson in remastering, so I'm going to go into some detail about it; bear with me.Hoffman spent a long time trying to get Columbia to locate the pair of tapes he wanted: not the studio multi-tracks (he didn't want to re-mix the album), not the compressed, equalised "cutting masters" which had been used for making the vinyl LP and the standard CD release; but the stage in between these, the original undoctored stereo mix-down tapes. These turned out to be in some dusty corner, on reels labelled "DO NOT USE", simply because they were technically unusable for the purpose of mastering vinyl discs. They were, however, the only true record of what would have been heard over the studio monitors during the mixing sessions. Having found the right tapes, Hoffman spent most of the first half of 1992 working on getting the best possible sounding digital transfer. Despite the fact that this was done before the advent of Super Bit Mapping and other 20- and 24-bit digital transfer technologies, the resulting CD has gained universal praise for its astonishing sound quality, which I'll discuss further in Part II of this article. The lesson to be learned by those who remaster 1960s recordings is that the source tapes used - and the care taken in reproducing them - are far more important than the use of the latest refinement in digital technology. Sadly, the DCC disc has now been deleted; perhaps the licence from Sony has expired. At the time of writing new copies can still be found on the Internet, but the price is steadily going up.
In the early 1990s a German bootleg appeared containing mono mixes of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde, transferred from vinyl copies. Blonde On Blonde was done well, but Highway 61 Revisited was not: the start of Like A Rolling Stone is cut, and other tracks are clipped or badly indexed. In 1996 Sony in Japan produced limited edition CD reissues of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde using SBM 20-bit mastering. While the latter appears simply to be a clone of the Blonde On Blonde MasterSound gold CD, the genesis of the Highway 61 Revisited disc is not so clear. It is certainly not a copy of the DCC gold CD, and is possibly just a 20-bit remastering from the same vinyl LP cutting master as was used for the standard CD. It does not, alas, contain the alternate version of From A Buick 6 which had been on all Japanese vinyl issues of the album. And what does the future hold? Rumours have now been circulating for at least a couple of years about Sony embarking on a long-term program of remastered Dylan albums. These would, like the recent reissues of The Byrds' albums, generally contain additional contemporary tracks. It now seems that the first pair of Dylan releases will be Freewheelin' and Blood On The Tracks, but Highway 61 Revisited is among the two or three other titles allegedly short-listed for early inclusion in the project. Meanwhile, in late 1999 Sony launched their new Super Audio CD technology (SACD); this involves the use of a new analogue-to-digital transfer process known as Direct Stream Digital encoding (DSD), carrying across much more of the information contained in the original analogue source tape and resulting in a sound quality even vinyl enthusiasts are unlikely to quibble with. Sony reportedly intend to use DSD to preserve their archive of decaying analogue master tapes for posterity, so this technology will almost certainly be used for the Dylan remasters, at least in the preparatory stages. The initial wave of Super Audio CD releases6 have been on "single-layer" discs, which are (a) expensive and (b) only playable on very expensive Sony SACD hardware. When manufacturing facilities permit, though, Sony will start producing all their new music titles in a single "hybrid" SACD format; this has one layer for the extended SACD information, and a second layer of standard CD information which can be read by any CD player. The indications are that this move will come later in 2000, so when the reissue of Highway 61 Revisited comes it will be probably be in this new format. Album Sleeves The original US mono album is probably the best starting point and standard for the comparison of alternative sleeves. The front cover of this initial release had the title and Daniel Kramer's colour photo centrally placed, with a wide white border all round, while the back had three uncredited monochrome studio shots of Dylan apparently from a series taken at the late July/early August album sessions by Chuck Stewart.7 It also had credits for the musicians, for both Bob Johnston and Tom Wilson as producers, and for Dylan as author of the sleeve notes. At the bottom of the rear sleeve was a box giving the track timings - always something to marvel at on a Dylan LP in those days. Also squeezed in were some useful hints about "Other albums by Bob Dylan you will enjoy". The original US stereo release followed a convention often used by Columbia at that time, which was to take the front cover layout of the mono album, shift it down an inch or so, and add at the top the stereo serial number and the "360 Sound" double-arrow logo. On Highway 61 Revisited this resulted in the white border at the bottom practically disappearing. Later US stereo pressings from around the mid-70s onward - when there was no need to distinguish them from the deleted mono version and the "360 Sound" tag had been dropped - moved the front picture and title back up to a central position, and for some reason removed the track timing box from the rear sleeve, along with the "Other albums . . ." information. In Europe all sorts of variant sleeves appeared, right from the album's release in 1965. The front sleeve was always similar to the US mono layout, but there the similarities ended. Some countries, Holland included, used the US rear sleeve layout, with the same three photos. France, as usual, went its own way and produced a gatefold sleeve with the transcribed lyrics in English and some short notes in French on the inside; the rear cover had the track listing, the musician credits and two of the three photos from the US rear sleeve, together with adverts for other French Dylan LPs and EPs. Dylan's own sleeve notes did not appear at all, probably being judged neither translatable into French nor intelligible in English. England and some other countries - certainly Italy - received a more interesting rear sleeve. This did include Dylan's notes, but a different version, with various small but intriguing changes - the characters Savage Rose & Fixable, for example, being replaced throughout by Savage Rose & Openly.8 The layout and typography of the rear sleeve was also completely different; there was only one black and white photograph, again uncredited, but almost certainly from the sequence taken by Columbia staff photographer Don Hunstein at the mid-June Like A Rolling Stone sessions.9 The normal UK sleeve omitted the credits for musicians, sleeve notes and cover photo, and only gave Bob Johnston as the album's producer. Some early UK copies, however, in both mono and stereo versions, did include these credits, and put Tom Wilson's name against Like A Rolling Stone. Why they were subsequently dropped is not clear; possibly it was because they made the layout too cluttered. All variants of the UK sleeve, like the early US editions, contained the track timing details and the "Other albums by Bob Dylan . . ." information. So, where did this alternative rear sleeve originate? Some of the differences in Dylan's notes are just alternative ideas which could only have come from Dylan himself: "the barbarians jammed into pay phones" instead of "Vivaldi's green jacket", for instance. Others, though, appear to be more in the nature of corrections. For example the UK sleeve's "Paul Sargent, & plainclothes man from 4th street, comes in" becomes "Paul Sargent, a plainclothes man . . ." on the US version; likewise "some college kid whose read all about Nietzsche" becomes "some college kid who's read . . .". This, and the fact that the UK rear sleeve includes an earlier photograph, leads me to think that the US version is the final, corrected one, and that the English album's artwork is an earlier version which was sent to CBS in London by mistake. Maybe CBS in Holland got their artwork a little later from Columbia in the US, while Italy and others obtained theirs - the early version - from CBS in England. The UK sleeve disappeared when CBS stopped producing vinyl in the UK in the early 1990s; subsequent Sony/Columbia copies were imported from Holland and therefore had the standard US rear sleeve layout. Recently, however, the Absolute Analogue reissue revived the original UK stereo sleeve layout, though without the personnel and other credits.Moving on to CD sleeve designs, the standard US Sony edition has a strangely cropped look to it: the main cover photo and title are centrally-placed, but with only a very narrow border all round. The back uses one of the three photos from the US LP rear sleeve (the one of Dylan at the piano wearing a striped shirt); this photo is repeated in the fold-out front insert to accompany the standard version of Dylan's sleeve notes and the personnel and other credits. European CDs look from the front like the original album, with the wider borders, but with no CBS logo in the corner. The same single photo from the original US trio is on the back, but the booklet also contains the other two photos along with the notes (standard US version) and credits. The DCC gold CD has a booklet which reproduces exactly the front and back of the original US stereo album, with the lowered title and front picture. Inside the booklet it merely prints at a legible scale the track listing, credits and notes. The 1996 Japanese limited edition is packaged in a CD-sized card sleeve inside a clear plastic slip-case. The sleeve is pretty well a replica of the Japanese LP sleeve, which in turn was a rather poor quality reproduction of the US sleeve. A folded sheet inside the cover contains the lyrics in Japanese and English. Part 2 will be in the next issue of The Bridge. References
1 This has been my approach with the work on Blonde On Blonde, which by the time this is published should be on its third edition on The Bridge's Web site (http://users.powernet.co.uk/barrett).
2 Had either of these songs been used for the 1965 single, they would probably have appeared under their respective original titles of Over The Cliff and Phantom Engineer Cloudy. Out-takes of Like A Rolling Stone itself have appeared both on The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3 and on the Highway 61 Interactive CD-ROM.
3 see the Highway 61 Interactive CD-ROM
4 see Michael Krogsgaard's work referred to above
5 The fact that a (slightly different) take of Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window was mistakenly released as Positively 4th Street probably arose from the fact that both songs were on the same studio tape reel but both under baffling pseudonyms: Look At Barry Run and Black Dalli Rue, respectively.
6 These include Blonde On Blonde, remixed yet again, but with no extra tracks.
7 Other photos from this series appeared, credited to Stewart, in the original Bob Dylan Songbook.
8 The full details of the changes can be found in Part One of Rod MacBeath's excellent series of articles on Dylan's album sleeves in The Telegraph.
9 Other photos from this series can be found in the Live 1966 CD booklet and on the Highway 61 Interactive CD-ROM.
Books and Publications
Information was drawn from the following: Bob Dylan Songbook, Witmark, 1965
Anthony Scaduto, Bob Dylan, W. H. Allen, 1972
Al Kooper with Ben Edmonds, Backstage Passes, Stein and Day, 1977
M. C. Strong, The Wee Rock Discography, Canongate, 1996
John Bauldie: Interview with Steve Hoffman in issue 44 of The Telegraph, 1992
Rod MacBeath, Looking Up Dylan's Sleeves, Part 1, in issue 50 of The Telegraph, 1994
Michael Krogsgaard, Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions, Part 1, in issue 52 of The Telegraph, 1995 (this can be seen online at http://www.punkhart.com/dylan/sessions-1.html )
Lars M Banke & David Eckstrom, A Few Notes About Foreign Bob Dylan Albums, Part IV, in issue 23 of Look Back, 1989
Highway 61 Interactive CD-ROM (Columbia / Graphix Zone CDAC 085700), 1995
CD Universe web site (for US CD release dates)
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Richard Batey, Peter Stone Brown, Fredric J Einstein, BJ Ellis, Andrea Falesi, Richard Feirstein, John Howells, Dan Jordan, Al Kooper, Bob Stacy, Paul Woods and Matthew Zuckerman for information, recordings, opinion or encouragement. Thanks too to anyone else who has posted contributions on the subject to rec.music.dylan over the past few years, and whose name I've overlooked here.
Comments are welcomed, and can be sent via The Bridge or e-mailed direct to rogerford@blueyonder.co.uk .
This is the first part of the Highway 61 Revisited article which was published in Issue 7 of The Bridge. However, as Roger is continually updating the article a more current version may seen on Roger's site Electric Dylan
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