Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
Bob Dylan’s sixth album Highway 61 Revisited, which recently celebrated its 60th anniversary, opens with the landmark single “Like a Rolling Stone.” The song that follows it on the album, “Tombstone Blues,” is far less famous, but Dylan himself thought highly of it. Interviewed by Cameron Crowe for the liner notes of the 1985 box set Biograph, Dylan said, “I felt like I’d broken through with this song, that nothing like it had been done before…just a flash really.”
An elliptical song about the escalation of the Vietnam War, “Tombstone Blues” is full of vivid images and characters, best remembered for one of Dylan’s funniest one-liners: “The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken.” Like many of his songs of the era, Dylan and his backing musicians ran through a dozen takes of “Tombstone Blues” in a single day, choosing the twelth and final performance for the album. A couple of the alternate takes have appeared on archival releases, some a couple minutes shorter or a couple minutes longer than the Highway 61 version, all of them featuring fantastic lead guitar performances by Mike Bloomfield.
“Tombstone Blues” hasn’t been widely covered relative to Dylan’s ’60s output. But one of his old Greenwich Village folk scene contemporaries, Richie Havens, performed the song for the soundtrack to the deconstructed Dylan biopic I’m Not There in 2007. The 1999 live album Sheryl Crow and Friends: Live from Central Park ends with an all-star rendition of “Tombstone Blues,” with Natalie Maines and Chrissie Hynde passionately tearing through some of the song’s verses.
“Tombstone Blues” isn’t a major factor in Dylan’s live repertoire—according to Setlist.fm, he hasn’t played it in concert since 2006, and it’s not among his 100 most performed songs. He has occasionally returned to it on significant occasions, though: “Tombstone Blues” opened Dylan’s 1995 episode of MTV Unplugged, and was dramatically slowed down for the 2021 performance film Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan.
Three more essential Bob Dylan deep album cuts:
“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”
The penultimate track on The Times They Are A-Changin’ is, more than most of Dylan’s topical songs, largely a straightforward factual account of a news story, the 1963 death of a Baltimore barmaid: “William Zantzinger killed poor Hattie Caroll with a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger at a Baltimore hotel society gathering.” Dylan read about Zantzinger’s paltry six-month sentence for manslaughter on the way home from witnessing Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and was moved to write a song that slowly builds up in righteous anger.
“The Man in Me”
1970’s New Morning was well received at the time, but the song “The Man in Me” was relatively forgotten until Joel and Ethan Coen used it to soundtrack a memorably surreal scene in 1998’s The Big Lebowski.
“Silvio”
“Silvio,” from 1988’s Down in the Groove, is arguably the best song to come out of Dylan’s long association with the Grateful Dead and the band’s lyricist Robert Hunter. Last year President Barack Obama included “Silvio” on his summer playlist and Dylan performed it for the first time in decades.
