64. Bob Dylan - Blonde on Blonde (June 1966)

1. Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35

2. Pledging My Time

3. Visions of Johanna*

4. One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)

5. I Want You

6. Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again*

7. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat

8. Just Like a Woman*

9. Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine

10. Temporary Like Achilles

11. Absolutely Sweet Marie

12. 4th Time Around

13. Obviously 5 Believers

14. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

A+

It's always hard to know how to deal with a double album from the LP era. Something like The Wall, for example, is obviously meant to be listened through from start to finish. But Blonde on Blonde is more the sort of thing where you just put on whichever side you're in the mood for, listen to that, and really just dip in as you like. It's something we've sort of lost in the era of CDs and downloadable singles, where albums can run for 75 minutes straight and you just sort of have to endure them.

Anyway, this album is a bit misleading. The title is quite cheeky, and the first song is an enjoyable goof playing on the multiple meanings of the word "stoned". But this is actually quite an intelligent and mature work. Dylan has managed to rein in his vocal and lyrical excesses (no cowboy angels here) and create a synthesis between his colloquial, straightforward songs and his grander lyrical ambitions. The result is an album with fewer highs than his earlier works that manages to be much more consistent throughout. There's really only one bad song here ("Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat"), and even that has some pretty cool guitars in it.

Stylistically, a lot of these songs are blues and the like, but there are also ventures into something that might be called pop music. "I Want You" and "Just Like a Woman" sound like something from the 1970s, and are brilliant songs, even if they did obviously lead to the invention of Billy Joel. In fact this album is an obvious touchstone for so many 1970s singers and songwriters.

There's a lot of material here, so I won't go through it all. If I want to manage this project I really need to be more concise and stop agonising over things, or I'll still be doing it in ten years. Instead I want to focus on one song in particular - "Visions of Johanna". This is easily the best song Bob Dylan ever wrote, and maybe one of the best songs anyone ever wrote. It follows the narrator as he spends a restless night working his way through his own mind, gradually peeling back layers of fears and regrets until language itself fails him, and he's left a broken man looking at the dawn. It's an extraordinary piece of work and I'm not really doing it justice. I'd quote lyrics but I'd just quote the whole thing. Although I do often wonder what the hell he meant by "Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule". I mean, really?

There are a lot of other great songs her. "Just Like a Woman" is very affecting, and not at all as misogynistic as the title makes it sound. "Stuck Inside of Memphis" has a wonderful 1950s flavour to the guitar rhythms, and is a rollicking and enjoyable song. "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" drones a little but is quite pretty. Really, all the songs on this album are pretty good.

Honestly, they go on about Dylan's lyrics but after listening to him quite a bit, at least on the three albums from 65-66, a lot of it is just wordplay and a search for interesting imagery. I wouldn't call him a charlatan - the guy wrote "Visions of Johanna" and "Like a Rolling Stone" - but I do think people are obsessing a bit more than they should. 

I'd also like to give credit to the astonishing musicianship of the band on this album. Apparently Dylan went to Nashville and recorded with seasoned session musicians, and the leap in musicality is astonishing. This album is, musically, about ten years ahead of its time. 

Anyway, that's it for Dylan for a while. It's been fun, but after such a vast album I'm glad to see the back of him. Next up is something completely different.

63. The Byrds - Fifth Dimension (July 1966)

1. 5D (Fifth Dimension)

2. Wild Mountain Thyme*

3. Mr. Spaceman

4. I See You

5. What's Happening ?!?!

6. I Come and Stand at Every Door*

7. Eight Miles High*

8. Hey Joe (Where You Gonna Go)

10. Captain Soul

11. John Riley

12. 2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)

B+

Well this is a weird album. The Byrds had moved on from weed to LSD, and at the same time lost their principle songwriter. The result is a darker, weirder album than Mr. Tambourine Man, less consistent but at the same time featuring some truly exceptional songs. 

Things kick off with "5D (Fifth Dimension)". Musically it has a Dylanesque melody and swirling, hypnotic guitars. According to Wikipedia, Jim McGuinn wrote this song about the theory of relativity and the idea that there are more dimensions to space-time than can be perceived by the human mind. According to anyone who's ever heard the song, though, it's pretty clearly describing a trip on hallucinogens. It's an OK song, but whenever someone goes on about peace and love and a benevolent universe I get very annoyed and just think about that line in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon where Li Mu Bai talks about meditation bringing him to a place of great sadness that his sifu never told him about. 

The next song, "Wild Mountain Thyme", is just beautiful, and one of the most gorgeous songs I've ever heard. It's just a simple folk song about wandering the hills and "gathering thyme" (I think this may be a euphemism), but it's just lovely, and features the Byrds' signature folk rock sound fleshed out with some beautiful, vaguely Eastern strings. It's easily my favourite song on the album, and fast becoming one of my favourite songs, period.

Then you have "Mr. Spaceman". This is a country rock song about being contacted by aliens. It's a fun song but fucking weird. 

Then there are a couple of nice enough throwaways. They have pleasant melodies but aren't really very deep or engaging. The song that really stuck with me is "I Come and Stand at Every Door". It's a setting of a translation of a Turkish poem (I do research!) about a child who died in Hiroshima, and now wanders the Earth entreating people to fight for peace. It's haunting and hypnotic and strange and genuinely moving. 

After that is "Eight Miles High", a good song but also possibly the most overrated piece of music I've ever heard. I mean, it's cool and droning and hypnotic psych rock, and it features a kick-ass guitar riff, but I don't really get why people adore it so much. It's still a great song, though. And also, apparently, not written about drugs - it's about flying to London and being weirded out by the experience, and the musical oddity is because the Byrds were listening to a lot of Ravi Shankar and John Coltrane. But then again, the Byrds were constantly high, so who knows?

After "Eight Miles High", the album kind of falls apart. I never liked "Hey Joe" to begin with, but the version here is particularly shitastic. "Captain Soul" is an utterly forgettable instrumental of the sort that should only be found at the end of a second disc of studio outtake bonus tracks. And "2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)" may be innovative in its overdubbing of jet engine sounds and pre-flight take-off cabin noises, but is ultimately just someone saying "Gonna ride a Lear jet baby" over and over again, and genuinely annoying. The saving grace of side two of this album is a lovely setting of the traditional ballad "John Riley", about a sailor who returns to his true love. It's pretty great, and shows that even though the Byrds were transitioning into a new sound, folk rock is really where their strengths lay.

So anyway, is this an album worth listening to? The criterion for the List is that it must be one of the 1001 albums you hear before you die. And honestly, you could skip this. The songs I've asterisked are all brilliant, and I guess this album is important for context as a major work of psychedelia that influenced a lot of people, but as pure music it's very patchy. There are only a couple of genuinely bad songs, but there are only a couple of really good ones, too. I'm glad I listened to it, though. Being introduced to the Byrds has been one of the real pleasures of doing this project, and while I don't know where they're going after this, I'm excited to find out. This is an uneven album, but it takes risks, and it's always exciting to see a band trying something new, especially when the rewards are as great as the best songs on this album.

62. Fred Neil - Fred Neil (Dec 1966)

1. The Dolphins*

2. I've Got a Secret (Didn't We Shake Sugaree)

3. That's the Bag I'm In

4. Badi-Ba

5. Faretheewell (Fred's Tune)

6. Everybody's Talkin'*

7. Everything Happens

8. Sweet Cocaine

9. Green Rocky Road 

10. Cynicrustpetefredjohn Raga*

B+

Let's start with the cover, a black and white image of a man embracing a boy. Does it have anything to do with the music within? No, not really. Then there's the first song - a slow, amorphous number about searching for dolphins in the sea which, while brilliant, bears no relation to the rest of the music on the album. It's a beautiful song - Neil's voice is deep and gorgeous, and the strange combination of oddly metered chords on the electric guitar with a deep, echoey bass and classical guitar makes for a wonderful mood piece. But unfortunately, the rest of the album is (with one exception) fairly unexceptional. In fact, it's frequently downright annoying. Neil has an irritating tendency to extend his voice into vibrato moaning of the sort that sets my teeth on edge. If he had stuck to the proto-Tim Buckley I might have enjoyed this album a lot more.

Thankfully, there's also "Everybody's Talkin'", which, while better known as a Harry Nilsson song, is beautiful and strange and honestly, why didn't they just use this version in Midnight Cowboy? It's better than the Nilsson version. Although I guess it is dark and strange, in keeping with the rest of the album, as possibly a little too downbeat for the movie.

As for the rest of the album - It's... fine, I guess? I like "Cynicrustpetefredjohn Raga", which, while obviously filler, is also a great mishmash of blues, Indian and klezmer that sounds like nothing else and prefigures a lot of world music. The rest of the songs are sad ballads of quotidian disappointment which I don't hate, but which don't really grab me. I think part of the problem is that there are two songs which are so amazingly great that they overshadow the rest of the record. It makes you wonder why the rest of the album isn't the same strange, challenging, odd music that the three tracks I've asterisked are. 

Also, quite frankly, "Badi-Ba" is just annoying.

So that's my take on the album - three amazing songs that redefined folk music, and led to great work by Tim Buckley and Joni Mitchell (among others), and seven songs I found faintly annoying. 

61. The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds (16/05/66)

1. Wouldn't It Be Nice*

2. You Still Believe in Me

3. That's Not Me

4. Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)

5. I'm Waiting for the Day

6. Let's Go Away for a While

7. Sloop John B*

8. God Only Knows*

9. I Know There's an Answer

10. Here Today

11. I Just Wasn't Made for These Times

12. Pet Sounds

13. Caroline, No

A+

So Pet Sounds is frequently cited as the greatest album of all time. Fair enough. I don't see the point of arguing, really. It's not my favourite album, but much as Citizen Kane might as well be considered the greatest film ever made, Pet Sounds is as worthy of being called the greatest album as any I can think of.

As to why that might be - I think a lot of the enduring popularity of this album comes from the fact that it sounds so out of step with the world. It sounded like little else when it was released, and even after almost 60 years of imitators it still sounds strange and unique and out of place. I've always thought of it as a sort of swansong for the sort of pop music that preceded it. In a lot of ways 1966 was an end to an era, and Pet Sounds feels like that era's definitive statement. At a time when rock was reinventing itself, with Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin on the horizon, here's a tender and strange work of orchestral pop that owes more to Burt Bacharach, Phil Spector, Martin Denny and classic Tin Pan Alley music than it does to anything rock & roll. The lyrics are strange, introspective and frequently pessimistic mediations on love, loss, growing older and growing apart. At a time when the hippies were declaring their cult of youth and warning people to never trust anyone over thirty, "Wouldn't It Be Nice" is a gorgeous paean to growing older and finally being able to enjoy life and find peace in the world. "God Only Knows" is not only a beautiful piece of music, but one of the few truly honest songs about love, about what it can mean to someone on a personal level and what it can mean for that love to end (it's famous coda is also one of the prettiest things ever recorded).

The suits might have been baffled by the absence of many obvious singles, but the rest of these songs are great too. "Sloop John B", a cover, might seem out of place lyrically, but its story of a disasterous ocean voyage fits the themes of the album perfectly (and I won't pretend I don't find myself singing "I wanna go home, let me go home" to myself a lot during rough days at work). The two instrumental tracks, "Let's Go Away for While" and "Pet Sounds", are both beautiful pieces of exotica - the first a gentle orchestral piece, the latter a sort of stoned-out surf number. The rest of the tracks cover themes ranging from the loneliness of striking out on your own the world, to the collapse of a relationship, the a tender moment shared wordlessly between lovers. The definitive statement of the album, probably, is "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times", which perfectly encapsulates the feeling of being out of step with the world, born either too early or too late to fit in. 

Above all, though, this is beautiful music. The strange instrumentation (including, among other things, a bicycle bell, a rubber horn, and a Theremin) never seems out of place. The complex arrangements are melded into a cohesive whole, with the complex and layered vocals creating a gorgeous wall of sound. There are moments of incredible beauty on thus album, perfectly complemented by brief forays into strange breakdowns or quieter instrumental passages that stop the album from being overwhelming in its sound. This is also a very well-sequenced album - all the tracks flow from one to another perfectly.

Well I'm probably gushing but this is an album worth gushing over. It's not quite perfect, but then again what is? And while it will never be my favourite album it's indisputably a masterpiece. It's a remarkable piece of work, managing to synthesise decades of popular music into a new form which is still inspiring bands today, and doing so in a beautiful, complex, occasionally challenging but always accessible way. A+.

60. The Beatles - Revolver (05/08/66)

1. Taxman

2. Eleanor Rigby*

3. I'm Only Sleeping

4. Love You To

5. Here, There and Everywhere

6. Yellow Submarine

7. She Said She Said

8. Good Day Sunshine

9. And Your Bird Can Sing

10. For No One*

11. Doctor Robert

12. I Want to Tell You

13. Got to Get You Into My Life

14. Tomorrow Never Knows*

A+

Well here it is - the Beatles' best album, and a highwater mark in 20th century music. I've been pretty hard on the Beatles so far, but that's mostly just because I knew this was coming. It's not quite a perfect album (I've never much cared for "She Said She Said", and "Doctor Robert" is just an obnoxious drug song and not very interesting musically beyond the little vocal harmony breakdown in the middle), but is an incredibly good one.

But what, you may ask, makes it so good? 

Well, for a start, there's the eclecticism. There's a wonderful range of music on this album :

- the mutant funk of "Taxman"

- the driving, strings-only "Eleanor Rigby"

- the gentle psychedelia of "I'm Only Sleeping"

- the Indian classical (with fuzz guitars!) of "Love You To"

- the gorgeous multi-layered harmonies of "Here, There and Everywhere"

- the goofy, music hall children's song that is "Yellow Submarine"

- the chiming guitars of the experimental rocker "She Said She Said"

- the funk-pop hybrid "Good Day Sunshine"

- the Byrds-influenced, swirling pop-rock of "And Your Bird Can Sing"

- the heart-breaking chamber pop of "For No One"

- the shuffling boogie of "Doctor Robert"

- the bold, psychedelic soul of "I Want to Tell You"

- the big, brassy R&B of "Got to Get You Into My Life"

- "Tomorrow Never Knows", a driving electronic collage of tape loops, Indian drones, backmasked instruments, seagulls (actually Paul mcCartney laughing, sped-up), processed vocals, and the world's greatest drum beat, that sounds like nothing else before or since. 

And really, the production on this album is astonishing. This is the album where the Beatles decided not to worry about being able to reproduce their songs live, and the result is an unprecedented use of the studio as an instrument. Everything, from the guitars to the vocals to the drums, is twisted and warped until it sounds like nothing before. True, some of the novelty has worn off over the years, but the fact that these songs hold up just goes to show how well-written and produced they really are. 

Lyrically, too, this album represents a massive leap from the Beatles' previous work, and a major shift for pop in general. Suddenly, instead of writing goofy pop songs, the Beatles were meditating on the nature of life and death, embracing Indian philosophy, preaching universal love, and railing against unfair tax policies of all things (it's kind of hard to overstate just how strange "Taxman" is, given that it's a dance song about taxes). "Here, There and Everywhere" would have to be one of the sweetest love songs ever recorded, while "For No One" is a devastating look at the failure of a relationship. "Eleanor Rigby" defies all conventions of pop - McCartney singing a sad character piece about a lonely old woman with nothing but a string octet for his backing track. And "Yellow Submarine" is one of the most joyful goofs in pop, as well as being a production masterpiece.

The real highlight of this album, though, is "Tomorrow Never Knows". If the other songs on this album borrow from, warp, or defy the conventions of pre-existing musical forms, then "Tomorrow Never Knows" takes a running jump into the deep end of "What the fuck am I listening to?". It's a purely experimental song, of a kind barely classifiable as rock music, let alone pop. And the lyrics, which explore the commonalities between ego death on an LSD trip and Eastern meditation practices (inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead), are some seriously trippy shit. Yet at the same time it's wonderfully catchy and danceable. It's an incredible, strange dance track that's about 30 years ahead of its time, and easily my favourite Beatles song.

Well anyway, there's not much I can say about this album that hasn't already been said. The Beatles would go on to bigger, bolder things, but I don't think they'd ever make a better album, even if they made some more consistent ones. This is an incredible collection of songs, and an album everyone should definitely hear at least once. 

59. The Who - My Generation (03/12/65)

1. Out in the Street

2. I Don't Mind

3. The Good's Gone

4. La-La-La-Lies

5. Much Too Much

6. My Generation*

7. The Kids Are Alright*

8. Please, Please, Please

9. It's Not True

10. I'm a Man

11. A Legal Matter*

12. The Ox

A-

And so we come to the Who, easily one of the strangest bands to ever conquer the world. And if you don't believe me, I'd ask you to explain The Who Sell Out. Or the inclusion of an elaborate synthesiser part on "Baba O'Reilly". In my head, I tend to dismiss the Who as fatuous hard rock, but that's really not fair. True, their lyrics seldom managed to match their musical inventiveness, but you only have to listen to My Generation to appreciate the extraordinary musical range of the band. "Out in the Street" is a straight shuffle bookended by thunderous, feedback laden power chords. "The Good's Gone" is a droning proto-psychedelic stomp that must have packed the dancefloors when it first hit. The title track is a sui generis precursor to heavy metal and punk, and at the same time a killer pop single, and at the same time one of the definitive rallying cries in rock.  "The Kids Are Alright", with its lilting melody and glorious harmonies, is one of the most lovely songs to come out of the 60s. And "A Legal Matter" basically invented XTC.

Backing all of this you have Keith Moon on drums, giving even the softest and sweetest songs on this album a rumbling, driving rhythm that must have seemed unprecedented at the time. And really, that's a large part of the genius of this album. The Who embraced pop while at the same time playing it harder and heavier than anything before (except maybe the Sonics, but nobody had really heard of them at the time). Pete Townsend also incorporated some deeply unusual guitar techniques. The cover of Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man", for example, is really just an excuse to morph the track into a rambling, feedback-drenched jam. "The Ox", on the other hand, is sort of a surf song, but with Townsend playing distorted, twisted, growling guitar parts and messing around with feedback from his amp, all over Moon's insistent drum beat.

So this is a great album, tremendous fun. Unfortunately there are a few clunkers to bring things down a bit. "I Don't Mind" is a fine, faithful cover of the James Brown classic, but the version of "Please, Please, Please" is kind of weak, mostly due to Roger Daltrey's vocals. "Much Too Much" has a lovely chorus but the lyrics are kind of dumb, and Daltrey sings in that bellowing style of his that I find off-putting. And "It's Not True" is kind of a stupid goof, in which the singer just lists all the things he didn't do, including being born in Baghdad and killing his dad. I'm really not sure what the point of it was.

When all's said and done, though, the main thing this album is is a lot of fun. It has a wealth of musical inventiveness, a nice variety in the styles of songs which range from straight R&B covers to incipient noise rock to Beatlesesque pop, and just enough depth to keep things interesting. True, it doesn't all work, but that messy, try anything quality is a part of what made the Who so vital in their early years. Plus, they hated hippies, which is always nice. 

58. Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

1. Like a Rolling Stone*

2. Tombstone Blues

3. It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry

4. From a Buick 6

5. Ballad of a Thin Man

7. Queen Jane Approximately

8. Highway 61 Revisited

9. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues*

10. Desolation Row*

A

J.R.R. Tolkien once made the observation that he detested allegory, and instead strove for applicability in his work. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, as I recently rewatched Persona and Black Bear. These are works that people have approached as puzzles to be decoded, but I think it's more accurate to view them as experiences which the authors have created designed to force us to confront things in ourselves. Rather than attempting to find the hidden, "true" meaning, we should be using them as mirrors in which to examine ourselves - our own anxieties and hang-ups and hopes and fears. 

I think this is pretty relevant to Bob Dylan's writing on most of the songs on Highway 61 Revisited. While a few of them are pretty straightforward, most of them are rambling, impressionistic assaults on the senses, with lyrics that hint at countless things going on the mid-60s but never resolve into straight allegory and in many cases actively resist interpretation. The result is a sort of sprawling fever dream of an album. The title refers to a road that runs from Dylan's home town of Duluth straight down through the American heartland and into the deep south, and in a way it's pretty appropriate - Dylan is cutting straight through the heart of America, indulging in Americana, and switching to a more amplified, bluesy sound. Of course at this point Bob Dylan was also a borderline autistic amphetamine addict burned-out by years on the road, so very little of what he has to say is particularly coherent. 

Things kick off with "Like a Rolling Stone", which is one of the most astonishing songs ever written. Musically it sets the tone for the album, sounding like literally nothing else at the time. It's a bizarre mish-mash of blues, rock and folk music, all anchored by a gorgeous organ riff. The density of the music makes it sound claustrophobic and yet epic at the same time. And the lyrics, which tell of a socialite who used to laugh at the down-and-out but has now become one of them, are both a viciously intimate story of revenge and a warning about the state of the Establishment in the mid-60s, just as the counterculture is about to break though. My favourite lyric? Probably verse two:

Aw, you've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely

But ya know ya only used to get juiced in it

Nobody's ever taught ya how to live out on the street

And now you’re gonna have to get used to it

You say you never compromise

With the mystery tramp, but now you realize

He's not selling any alibis

As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes

And say, “Do you want to make a deal?"

It's a grim and wonderful song, and every private school kid who dreams of being poor and authentic should be forced to listen to it on repeat until it clicks.

After that opus, you get "Tombstone Blues", which is a rollicking number with a great guitar solo that contrasts depictions of the high and mighty with the refrain "Momma's in the factory, she ain't got no shoes. Daddy's in the alley, he's looking for food. I am in the kitchen with the tombstone blues".

Unfortunately, the next two songs are kind of bad, and the reason I didn't give this album an A+. "It Takes a Lot to Lugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" is as pointless and rambling as its title. And "From a Buick 6" is I guess an attempt by Dylan to write one of his comedy songs, but there's not much to it beyond rambling about some mother earth death goddess he knows, and it's not very interesting musically.

As for "Ballad of a Thin Man", I really don't know what to make of it. I mean, I kind of like the song, and I like the way it describes a member of the old guard and how completely out of touch he is, but the lyrics and imagery are kind of stupid. 

(worst lyric:

Now you see this one-eyed midget

Shouting the word "Now"

And you say, "For what reason?"

And he says, "How?"

And you say, "What does this mean?"

And he screams back "You're a cow

Give me some milk or else go home"

)

Musically, it's very interesting, though - it's slow, minor-key doom and gloom anchored by a chiming piano, and it sounds great.

Side two of the album, however, is all great. "Queen Jane Approximately" is one of those bitter, world-weary, yet tender love songs that Dylan is so good at writing. "Highway 61 Revisited" is almost derailed by the world's most annoying slide whistle, but rescued by funny and interesting lyrics in which various people with absurd problems ranging from a lack of shoes to a desire to stage World War III are all advised to head over to the titular highway and try their luck there. (Personally, I prefer the PJ Harvey version, but the original is pretty good too). "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" is another song I love as a cover version - in this case, Nina Simone's gorgeous piano ballad version. At first I found the original a little off-putting, but really I suppose Dylan's raw and harrowed interpretation makes more sense for this description of a nightmare sojourn in a Mexican border town.

The final song, "Desolation Row", is a song I didn't really get at first. I think part of the problem is that after an entire album of sense, fast, claustrophobic music, the sudden appearance of a world-weary acoustic track threw me a little. I guess maybe listener's fatigue. But I listened to it again yesterday and I get it now. It's very much the song on this album that made me think about that allegory-vs.-applicability thing. I mean, I defy anyone to explain what this song is "about", but it's a beautiful and terrifying song and Dylan reins in his vocal excesses to give a genuinely moving performance. By the end of the song I still wasn't sure if he hated or loved Desolation Row - possibly both - but it's a wonderful parade of strange characters and sad little observations and a fitting close to an excellent but deeply peculiar album.

Well, that's that. If I'm being honest, I didn't enjoy this as much as the previous two Dylan albums on the list. There are a lot of great songs, but the style of music isn't really my cup of tea and I missed the humour and the gentle love songs of Freewheelin' and Bringing It All Back Home. Still, this is a great album and an obviously pivotal moment in popular music. I look forward to struggling through Blonde on Blonde.

Maybe one day I'll write a short review of a Bob Dylan album. That would be nice.