Highway 61 Revisited. When I found the album in the Best Ever Albums list on BestEverAlbums.com in, I want to say 2013 or something, it was the highest placed Dylan record on it. So I took that to mean, you know, it’s the classic, it’s essential, it’s the go-to Dylan album. Then I listened to more of the guy’s LPs and found that you could apply that mentality to at least five other works of his. My personal favourite is Blood on the Tracks. I don’t know what that says about me. But I do know Highway… as being that important statement signifying Dylan’s firm move to using electric instruments in his music, a move seen as sacrilege in the folk music community. People would go to his shows and boo him, it was a big deal. The album has its classics. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, arguably one of the best songs ever. ‘Desolation Row’, maybe of one the best ever album closers. And I’ll give a nod to ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, just because.

But I’m here to talk about the track on the album that I return to the most. Its second, ‘Tombstone Blues’. I think I kind of liked it when I went through the whole initially in ’13. Funnily enough or not, depending on how your sense of humour is, it was a Classic Review of the album by Antony Fantano in 2015 that made me consider it some more. He made a comment on the track’s “whacked-out beat” and called it “more proto-punk than anything The Kinks ever did in the mid-’60s”. He was very enthusiastic about ‘Tombstone Blues’ in general. I listened back to the song, and yeah, the drums were indeed slapping. That cymbal and snare are thwacking away with the booming kick underneath, really packs a punch underneath the music. He also referred to the tune as “the most cleanly assembled track”, but there are definitely moments where players don’t change chords in time or kind of lose where they are in the song, either ’cause Dylan will play a few measures before going into a verse or goes into the chorus a bit earlier than anticipated. But I like the song even more ’cause of those moments. Gives it a lot of character. It is essentially a live take too, gotta take that into account.

So many interpretations are to be found online as to what Bob Dylan is on about in this song. Something that seems to be agreed upon is that it references the Vietnam War. I’m not sure I could arrive at a solid conclusion myself. I’m not prepared to write a whole thesis here. I simply see ‘Tombstone…’ as a kind of ‘state of affairs’, this-is-where-America’s-at-right-now kind of deal. The verses are wordy, filled with references, turns of phrases, irony and dry humour, with AAABCCCB rhyme schemes, detailing these almost absurd situations involving a range of different characters. And while these situations are going on, the familial unit detailed in the choruses are going through very real problems. The mom’s working in the factory with no shoes, the father’s scrounging around for food in the alley, and Dylan – or the narrator – is thinking about death. The tombstone. I guess it’s a metaphor for the ridiculous nature of the goings-on in political establishments when compared to the heavy, relatable issues people are going through at home. I’ll take that as a conclusion, actually.