401-600 (See 001-200 201-400)

401 | Bob Dylan | Blonde on Blonde | CBS 66012 | 1966

If Timothy Leary’s oft-quoted adage Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out was a thinly disguised call to mass drug taking back in 1966, then Dylan’s contemporary opening song on this album was much less ambiguous.  “Rainy Day Woman #12 and 35” almost demands that the hoards attend the party.  Like Dylan’s two previous releases, Bringing it All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde has an immediately memorable opener, though the bar had been raised staggeringly high on the previous album, “Like a Rolling Stone” being perhaps Dylan’s definitive statement.  Had Dylan waited to stick that song on this album, his first double set, then we might be talking of a near perfect album.  As the size of the album suggests, there’s a lot to go at, with one or two immaculate songs included, certainly “Just Like a Woman” and “Visions of Johanna”, with many of the others occupying their place on Dylan’s set list for some time to come.  Listeners tend to remember “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” being an over long rambling ballad, but at just over ten minutes, it’s not quite as long as we tend to remember.  Perhaps it’s because it takes up an entire side that we recall it thus.  I don’t mind long Dylan songs as long as they’re performed by Dylan himself.  If Adele had recorded “Highlands”, “Tempest” or indeed “Murder Most Foul”, then I probably wouldn’t remember them with quite as much fondness as “Make Me Feel Your Love”.  Blonde on Blonde is not just an essential Dylan album, it’s an essential album period.