Hwy 61 Revisited was the one that did it for me as a teenager. Still does it for me, too.
Also, forget about Lay Lady Lay & listen to the rest of Nashville Skyline. My second favorite Dylan album, with Bob's newfound country voice which was so surprising, and the sunburst J-200 he's holding on the cover that had me drooling for days!
Can't get much better than having Michael Bloomfield & Norman Blake as your session guys, huh?
Actually Bloomfield left after
Highway 61... (right about the time of the
Skyline sessions at time he would have been hanging around with Al Kooper and recording his solo album in SF
*), but Charlie Daniels(!) and
Johnny Cash are on it........and while reading the Wiki page for it one more time I came upon this quote from Kris Kristofferson, which hadn't really registered before:
"Our generation owes him our artistic lives," observed Kris Kristofferson, who later sang with Cash in The Highwaymen, "because he opened all the doors in Nashville when he did Blonde on Blonde and Nashville Skyline. The country scene was so conservative until he arrived. He brought in a whole new audience. He changed the way people thought about it – even the Grand Ole Opry was never the same again."[7]
*
Yet another veer:
During '69 Bloomfield based himself in SF where a bunch of his old buddies were hanging out played on Mother Earth's debut album.
Anybody remember Tracy Nelson?:
Only one video allowed so I'll just post a link on this one, her signature song and covered by the likes of Linda Ronstadt, Etta James and even Cyndi Lauper(!) (and me!) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY5wlDA40sw
She shoulda been as big as Janis, on the other hand, she
survived.....
Back to Bloomfield: Sadly, during his residency in SF in '69 the heroin addiction started exerting its python's grip:
"...and I put the guitar down – didn't touch it. Shooting junk made everything else unimportant, null and void, nolo contendre. My playing fell apart. I just didn't want to play.[5] "
:blue: