Dylan concludes Highway 61 Revisited with the sole acoustic exception to his rock album. Gill has characterized "Desolation Row" as "an 11-minute epic of entropy, which takes the form of a Fellini-esque parade of grotesques and oddities featuring a huge cast of iconic characters". These include historical celebrities such as Albert Einstein and Nero, the biblical characters Noah and Cain and Abel, the Shakespearean figures of Ophelia and Romeo, ending with literary titans T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The song opens with a report that "they're selling postcards of the hanging", and adds "the circus is in town". Polizzotti connects this song with the lynching of three black circus workers in Duluth, Minnesota, which was Dylan's birthplace, and describes "Desolation Row" as a cowboy song, "the 'Home On The Range' of the frightening territory that was mid-sixties America". Shelton suggests Dylan is asking, "What difference which side you're on if you're sailing on the Titanic?" and is thus satirizing "simpleminded political commitment". although on an early pressing of the single Columbia used another Highway 61 outtake, "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?", by mistake. "Crawl Out Your Window" was subsequently re-recorded with the Hawks in October, and released as a single in November 1965. as well as alternate takes of "Desolation Row", "Highway 61 Revisited", "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", "Tombstone Blues", and "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" on The Bootleg Series Volume 7. released in February 1995.
In 2015, Dylan released Volume 12 of his Bootleg Series, The Cutting Edge, in three different formats. The 18-disc Collector's Edition was described as including "every note recorded during the 1965–1966 sessions, every alternate take and alternate lyric". The 18 CDs contain every take of every song recorded in the studio during the Highway 61 Revisited sessions, from June 15 to August 4, 1965.
The Highway 61 Revisited out-takes from the first recording session in New York, June 15 and 16, 1965 comprise: ten takes of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry", six takes of "Sitting on a Barbed-Wire Fence", and fifteen takes of "Like a Rolling Stone". Additionally, The Cutting Edge contains four instrumental "stem" tracks, lifted from Take Four which was the released "Master take" of "Like A Rolling Stone": Guitar (Mike Bloomfield); vocal, guitar (Bob Dylan), piano and bass; drums and organ.
Artwork and packaging
The cover artwork was photographed by Daniel Kramer several weeks before the recording sessions. Kramer captured Dylan sitting on the stoop of the apartment of his manager, Albert Grossman, located in Gramercy Park, New York, placing Dylan's friend Bob Neuwirth behind Dylan "to give it extra color". Only the lower half of Neuwirth is visible and he holds a camera. Dylan wears a Triumph motorcycle T-shirt under a blue and purple silk shirt, holding his Ray-Ban sunglasses in his right hand.
As he had on his previous three albums, Dylan contributed his own writing to the back cover of Highway 61 Revisited, in the shape of freeform, surrealist prose: "On the slow train time does not interfere & at the Arabian crossing waits White Heap, the man from the newspaper & behind him the hundred inevitables made of solid rock & stone."
|rev2 = Chicago Tribune
|rev2Score =
|rev3 = Encyclopedia of Popular Music
|rev3Score =
| rev4 = Entertainment Weekly
|rev4Score = A+
| rev5 = The Great Rock Discography
| rev5Score = 10/10
| rev6 = Music Story
| rev6Score =
| rev7 = MusicHound Rock
| rev7Score = 5/5
| rev8= The Rolling Stone Album Guide
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| rev9 = Sputnikmusic
| rev9Score = 5/5
| rev10 = Tom Hull
| rev10Score = A
In the British music press, initial reviews of Highway 61 expressed both bafflement and admiration for the record. New Musical Express critic Allen Evans wrote: "Another set of message songs and story songs sung in that monotonous and tuneless way by Dylan which becomes quite arresting as you listen." The Melody Maker LP review section, by an anonymous critic, commented: "Bob Dylan's sixth LP, like all others, is fairly incomprehensible but nevertheless an absolute knock-out." The English poet Philip Larkin, reviewing the album for The Daily Telegraph, wrote that he found himself "well rewarded" by the record: "Dylan's cawing, derisive voice is probably well suited to his material ... and his guitar adapts itself to rock ('Highway 61') and ballad ('Queen Jane'). There is a marathon 'Desolation Row' which has an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words."
In September 1965, the American trade journal Billboard also praised the album, and predicted big sales for it: "Based upon his singles hit 'Like a Rolling Stone', Dylan has a top-of-the-chart-winner in this package of his off-beat, commercial material." The album peaked at number three on the US Billboard Top LPs chart of top albums, In the US, Highway 61 was certificated as a gold record in August 1967, and platinum in August 1997. For Stereo Review in March 1969, Robert Christgau included Highway 61 Revisited in his piece "A Short and Happy History of Rock", comprising his recommended rock "library" of 25 albums. On its merits, he said Dylan showed good taste in accompanying musicians, but his style of rock "had a loose feel, almost tacked on, in contrast to the tight arrangements which had become typical." Despite observing flaws in the music and lyrics, he concluded that both are "great" and "healthy". Of the music's impact up to that point, Christgau added: