Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited by Polizzotti Mark

Author:Polizzotti, Mark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing
Published: 2006-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

One of the most noticeable differences between the two versions is Dylan’s use of harmonica, harsh and sketchy in the early takes, but here fluid, melancholic, a key element of the song’s gentler atmosphere, as if we’ve abandoned the highway for a stretch and continued the journey onboard an easy-rolling steam engine. The harmonica has always been a hallmark of Dylan’s performance. Audiences at the Concert for Bangladesh, the Before the Flood tour, and down to his most recent shows have applauded its first appearance as if it were a surprise guest artist brought on for a featured number. The instrument has already been heard on Highway 61, but only as punctuation between the verses of “Rolling Stone.” On “It Takes a Lot to Laugh,” it steps out into the limelight, adding strokes of its own to the landscape rolling by, stretching like the plains or whipping like a sudden crosswind.

“It Takes a Lot to Laugh” is also the first song on Highway 61 to take the measure of Bob Johnston’s influence. Anticipating the Nashville tone of Blonde on Blonde, he here injects an inaugural note of country into Dylan’s sound, replacing Wilson’s urbane jazz sophistication with a thicker, fuller, more down-home atmosphere, in which every instrument stands full forward. Crispness is replaced with depth, and perhaps nowhere more obviously than in the drum sound—an echoing, jingle-rich bass drum; a lazy, full-bodied slap, not fancy but just right, that provides the album with one of its distinctive elements.

The drum, in fact, was one of the starting points in Johnston’s approach to recording:

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