Highway 61 Revisited - Background To Recording Sessions

Background To Recording Sessions

In May 1965, Dylan returned from his tour of England feeling tired and dissatisfied with his material. "I was going to quit singing. I was very drained ... I was playing a lot of songs I didn't want to play," Dylan told Nat Hentoff in 1966. "It's very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don't dig you."

Out of this dissatisfaction, Dylan wrote an extended piece of verse which he later described as a "long piece of vomit". He refined this long poem into a song consisting of four verses and a chorus—"Like a Rolling Stone". Dylan told Hentoff that the process of writing and recording "Like a Rolling Stone" washed away this dissatisfaction, and renewed his enthusiasm for creating music. Discussing the breakthrough of writing that song, nearly forty years later, Dylan told Robert Hilburn in 2004, "It's like a ghost is writing a song like that ... You don't know what it means except the ghost picked me to write the song."

Highway 61 Revisited was recorded in two blocks of recording sessions, which took place in Studio A of Columbia Records in New York City, located at 799 Seventh Avenue, just north of West 52nd Street. The first session, June 15 and June 16, was produced by Tom Wilson and resulted in the single "Like a Rolling Stone". On July 25, Dylan performed his controversial electric set at the Newport Folk Festival, where some sections of the crowd booed his performance. Four days after Newport, Dylan returned to the recording studio. From July 29 to August 4, Dylan and his band completed recording Highway 61 Revisited, but under the supervision of a new producer, Bob Johnston.