The iconic, highly rated albums just keep coming in 1966. Today we have “Blonde on Blonde” by Bob Dylan, the much-anticipated follow-up to “Highway 61 Revisited”. As I have noted before, there is no shortage of appreciation and affection for Bob Dylan at Rolling Stone, and they have this album rated #38 on their Top 500 Greatest Albums of All-Time.
I would say that in total, I probably favor “Highway 61 Revisited” over “Blonde on Blonde”, and I don’t think this would be MY #38 album of all time, but it certainly has its moments of greatness. The album kicks off with “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”, or as most people probably know it, “Everybody Must Get Stoned”. I would say the other most well-recognized track on this album is “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”. Other songs that stand out for me are the blues-rocker “Obviously Five Believers”, the slower blues tune “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”, and the slower acoustic track “Fourth Time Around”, taking us back to earlier Dylan. Overall, this album is a really diverse and well compiled mix of songs that reflects the breadth of capabilities he had as a songwriter.
There are times on this record when I feel like Bob Dylan starts to sound a bit like the cliché Dylan we all came to know. He will never be a classic vocalist, to say the least, and I occasionally feel like we start drifting a bit far down the nasally black hole of strained vocals on a couple of these songs. That being said, the songwriting remains stellar and it definitely holds its own within the steady stream of classic albums released in the mid-1960s.
A Lifetime-Plus of Music 