Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited

33[fraction 13] The record grabs your attention even before the wrap comes off the sleeve. It's in the gaze. No one else was making that kind of immediate challenge from an album cover. Even Dylan, for whom the outer photo is as much a performance as the music inside - from the smug come-on of his 1962 debut to the quizzical stare of Bringing It All Back Home - was pushing something new. The look he gives almost defies you to buy the disc, to put it on the turntable. A good ten years before the fact, Dylan was already out-punking Johnny Rotten.

Mark Polizzotti’s previous books include the collaborative novel S. (1991), Lautréamont Nomad (1994), Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (1995), The New Life: Poems (1998), and a study of Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados for the British Film Institute (2006). His articles, reviews, and poetry have appeared in The New　Republic, ARTnews, Parnassus, Partisan Review, and elsewhere. He is also the translator of over thirty books, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, and Jean Echenoz. He lives in Boston, where he directs the publications program at the Museum of Fine Arts.