"Highway 61 Revisited" would certainly be one of "those songs."
"Highway 61 Revisited" is the title track of Dylan's landmark 1965 album of the same name. It's a high-energy, blues-rock number driven by a pounding rhythm, Mike Bloomfield's searing guitar, and Dylan's snarling, playful delivery. The song is structured as a series of five surreal, loosely connected vignettes (verses), each presenting an absurd or outrageous "problem" that gets resolved with the refrain: "Out on Highway 61."
Highway 61 itself is no ordinary road—it's the legendary "Blues Highway" running from here in Northern Minnesota, where Dylan was born and raised, down through the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans, tied to blues legends like Robert Johnson (who mythically sold his soul at the crossroads), the Great Migration of Black musicians, and American cultural contradictions.
Tourists come from all over the world to travel the Blues Highway, staying a few days in Duluth and Hibbing before heading south. This fall we'll see the third caravan of Airstreamers, for example, traipsing through here, visiting the Historic Armory where young Dylan "felt a spark" while watching Buddy Holly perform, and stopping at the Nobel Prize winner's two childhood homes.
As Manchester researcher David Leaver observes, music tourism is emotion-driven, shaped by pilgrimage, nostalgia, and heritage. Highway 61 embodies this pull. It traces the places where the blues were born, where artists learned their craft in juke joints, cotton fields, and river towns. To drive it is to move through stories of struggle and creativity, visiting sites that shaped lives, sounds, and identities—places where music is not just remembered, but felt.
Dylan uses Highway 61 symbolically as a place where taboo, impossible, or extreme things happen—a back alley for humanity's darkest or most ridiculous impulses, free from conventional morality or societal norms. The verses blend biblical allusion, social satire, absurdity, and dark humor.
Verse two features Georgia Sam (a down-and-out figure with a bloody nose), who complains to the Welfare Department about lacking clothes or a home. They dismiss him, so he heads to Highway 61—perhaps to escape bureaucracy or find rough justice.
"Mack the Finger" in verse three has bizarre surplus items (forty red, white, and blue shoestrings, a thousand non-ringing telephones) he needs to offload. "Louie the King" suggests dumping them on Highway 61. And verse four get's stranger still with disorienting family matters.
In the climax verse a bored gambler wants to start the "next world war" for kicks. His promoter cynically advises staging it like a spectacle: "Put some bleachers out in the sun / And have it on Highway 61." This has a clear anti-war/political edge, mocking Cold War madness and spectacle-driven destruction.
This whole notion of war as spectacle was illustrated when the U.S. started the bombing of Baghdad during the evening news in March 2003. And today's social media "coverage" seems to have become a whirlwind spiraling out of control.
Overall, the song itself is a wild, satirical panorama of human folly, violence, bureaucracy, materialism, and apocalypse. It critiques mid-1960s America—war, inequality, hypocrisy—while celebrating the raw energy of the blues. It's playful yet biting, blending sacred and profane, history and nonsense, in Dylan's signature surreal style.
Many see it as a tribute to the blues tradition, Dylan's roots, and the idea that real truth (or madness) happens on the margins, "out on Highway 61." It's not a linear narrative but a fever-dream commentary on inevitability, absurdity, and where society's underbelly spills out. For sure Dylan highlights it as a signature song, having played it more than 2000 times in concerts around the world for over 55 years.
EdNote: Bob Dylan will be 85 this year. Duluth Dylan Fest will be celebrating the week of May 17 - 24. Join us for if you are able. Details Here.
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