Highway 61

Bruce Springsteen first heard Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan’s seminal 1965 album, when he was a 16 year old kid growing up in Freehold, New Jersey and playing guitar with his first band, the Castiles. He recently told Ed Norton that this recording awakened something very basic in him. “I had the first indication of what my country felt like. It was exhilarating.” A folkie using little instrumentation in his first five albums, Dylan, who “went electric” in public at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, debuted a Rock and Roll sound on this new album. “Dylan had the courage,” Springsteen says, “to go places others didn’t.” And Springsteen has been doing this his entire career, from the time Mike Appel, his early manager, hyped Bruce as “the new Dylan” in the early 1970s, through his early groundbreaking albums, including his own seminal Darkness on the Edge of Town deeply reminiscent of Dylan, through his acoustic turn with Nebraska and his more recent tribute to Pete Seeger and American folk music. Springsteen has always done his music his way, and his true fans have been more than happy to follow his journey of self-discovery.

Bruce turns 61 today. He has come a long way from that skinny teenage kid playing guitar in a Jersey garage band . . . Heading down his own Highway 61 and looking back to that record that changed it all for him. I am reminded of a line from “No Surrender” - “We learned more from a three minute record, than we ever learned in school.” Perhaps this is true. Happy birthday Boss! “When they built you, brother, they broke the mold.”