Dylan: I don’t know what else I can do. I’ll continue making the records. They’re not gonna be any better from now on. […] NH: How can you be so sure it’s not gonna be better? That you’re not gonna find something that’s beyond? Dylan: Because on this last record, it’s just too good. There’s a lot of stuff on there which... I mean, I would listen to. NH: What’s the title of that one, uh...? Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited . (Nat Hentoff interview voor Playboy, Autumn 1965, New York) U.S. Route 61 is a highway extending 1,400 miles (2,300 km), following roughly the Mississippi River. Called the Blues Highway, it connects the north, Dylan's birthplace Duluth, with New Orleans in the south. Along the way, the highway cuts through quite a few mythical places. Elvis’ Memphis, for instance, Chuck Berry’s St. Louis, Muddy Waters’ hometown Rolling Fork, the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil, and more. Dylan knows what he wants when he insists on calling his new album Highway 61 Revisited . The marketing guys at Columbia Records don't like it, but are overruled by the top floor: let him call it whatever the hell he wants to call it . At the time, the two mellow songs, "It Takes A Lot To Laugh" on Side 1 and "Tom Thumb's Blues" on Side 2, fell away in the shadow of surrounding eight-thousanders like "Like A Rolling Stone" and "Desolation Row", and drowned out anyway in the deluge of brilliant songs Dylan produced in these 500 mercurial days from Bringing It All Back Home to Blonde On Blonde , shaking one masterpiece after another out of his polka-dot shirt sleeve. But when the waves have calmed down, the extraordinary beauty of these two indispensable breathers emerges too. In It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylans melancholy blues , Dylan author Jochen Markhorst takes the reader through the beauty and background of the songs, the genesis and the sketches, the build-up to the masterpieces and its reverberations.
