Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan (1965). This album is a legend for all the right reasons. The rollicking poetry and organ on “Like A Rolling Stone” kick off this collection with a signal to the listener about what’s coming. Dylan’s albums prior to this had been heading in this direction, but it still seems a bit shocking to leave behind the topical references to poverty, racism, nuclear war, and history that had been so plentiful in recordings Dylan had made just a year earlier (for instance on The Times They Are A’Changin).

Every song on this album is filled with allusion, illusion and delusion, wrapped in musical arrangements that range from pre-psychadelia (by about two months) to near-folk, as on “Desolation Row.” The organ that Al Kooper plays on “Like a Rolling Stone” is always just short of chaos. The guitar on “Tombstone Blues” adds a tinge of danger to what, on earlier Dylan albums, would have been an acoustic number. After 8 tracks like this, the album closes with “Desolation Row,” which as mystical in its lyrics as the rest of the album but which musically could fit comfortably on many earlier Dylan albums. But even on “Desolation Row” the backing musicians would have to be toned down to fit earlier Dylan recordings completely. The bass is too prominent to sound like a lone guy with a guitar and harmonica in a coffee house. There is too much evidence of production even on that track for the listener to miss the fact that something is happening here.

“Ballad of a Thin Man” is sheer genius. In the 1950s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit had called attention to a new archetype in post-WWII America, but Dylan updates that symbol by noting the confusion of would-be hipsters in the mid-1960s. John Updike’s Rabbit Redux would do similar work with a similar subject.

It’s difficult for me to know how dated this album is. It endures in part because it’s so devoid of topical references. In earlier albums Dylan made references to President Kennedy, Brigit Bardot, and other people and events that located the songs in a distinct time. I remember playing “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” in Los Angeles in 2002 and feeling that the song was perfect for that place and time.