‘From a Buick 6’ is the fourth track on Bob Dylan’s classic 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. A rollicking blues romp fueled by Al Kooper’s distinctive work on the organ, this is a bawdy and hilarious jolt of adrenaline on one of the greatest albums of all time.
Apparently ‘From a Buick 6′ was Steve Jobs’ favorite song, or at least he said as much during one of his celebrated Apple product presentations.
Infidels is probably my 16th or 17th favorite Bob Dylan album, but that’s enough to make it my 10th favorite album of 1983.
I didn’t discover this album until I did a Dylan deep-dive on the blog in 2010. As big a Dylan fan as I am, I had a blind spot for his work between 1976’s Desire and 1989’s Oh Mercy. Oh Mercy was the first Dylan album I bought upon its release, while I had gobbled up his pre-Desire albums (almost all classics) as a younger teen.
A few years ago I made a quick reference to a website called PopSpots, where a man named Bob Egan tracks down and documents the exact locations of album covers.
The PopSpot I referenced was the cover of Billy Joel’s 52nd Street. That was a relatively easy one (the location is right there in the title), but Egan still did a very thorough job of finding the exact location despite 40 years of New York City development.
Bob Dylan’s 27th album, 1990’s Under the Red Sky, isn’t likely to warrant a mention among either his best or his worst work.
The album was met with tepid sales and critical shrugs, in part because it followed 1989’s celebrated Oh Mercy, which had been rightly heralded as a solid return to form. Under the Red Sky was nothing like its sonically and thematically rich predecessor.
I toyed with some other titles, but I was never in any real danger of not listing Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft as my #1 album of 2001.
This was the Bard’s 29th studio album, in his fifth decade of recording, and it’s as vital and playful as anything he put out in the 60s. He released his meditation on death and aging, Time Out of Mind, a couple of years earlier, and people might have easily mistaken it for a swan song. Instead, Love and Theft suggested it was a rebirth.
Meet Me In Montauk 