The Who actually disappear for entire sections of the book as Dougan goes on a discourse into swinging London and the history of pirate radio and the BBC, which might irritate readers hoping for a laser-like focus on The Who. But Dougan unearths a forgotten time in his wandering, and deftly establishes a context for The Who's "nostalgic in-joke," as writer Dave Marsh called it.
And like the best books in this series, Dougan really shows why The Who Sell Out matters to him. While I'd quibble with him rating it above Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, his enthusiasm for this album rings through the pages.
But while The Who have lots of fans and a fair amount of books about their career, they don't come close to Bob Dylan when it comes to written analysis. Dylan's got entire libraries devoted to him – even books like Greil Marcus' Like A Rolling Stone which focuses solely on analyzing one single song in his vast oeuvre.
So to add to the towering stack of Dylan-iana, author Mark Polizzotti's book on Highway 61 Revisited really has to offer something new. He does an excellent job gathering information from the cream of the Dylan books and coming up with his own conclusions as he examines what might be Dylan's finest hour. Highway 61 Revisited was where Dylan's tentative fusions of rock and folk in his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, exploded forth. Thanks to the invaluable help of session players like guitarist Michael Bloomfield's scorching riffs and organist Al Kooper's lurching power, Highway 61 burst out with a fire that still burns.
Dylan's appeal lies in his ever-mutating nature; there's a different Dylan for almost every listener. Myths and reality freely collide in his work, and Highway 61 offers up a loose journey along that highway through his life up till now. Polizzotti loosely breaks the songs down into two themes – those that address an audience, such as "Like A Rolling Stone," and those that, as he writes, "flash by like glimpses through a car's window as it speeds through this frantic carnival of a nation," such as "Tombstone Blues" or the sprawling "Desolation Row."
Polizzotti looks at Dylan's career up to this point, and his "break" with the established folk music movement that was made final with this album. Some of Dylan's most venomous songs date from this era – "Positively 4th Street," "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Like A Rolling Stone" – and it's hard not to imagine who the targets of his bile might be.
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