A great Rolling Stone article from Joe Levy: Bob Dylan‘s second album of 1965, Highway 61 Revisited, would be a historic break: For the first time, none of the tracks would feature just him and his guitar.

On May 10th, Dylan finished the brief tour of England – eight all-acoustic shows – chronicled in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back. By now, he was bored playing his old songs as he’d recorded them. “I was playing a lot of songs I didn’t want to play,” he’d say afterward. “It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you, if you yourself don’t dig you.”

Before long, he would bring that fight to his audience – some of whom would fight back at first – making music that embraced chaos and inspired it.

Everything was moving fast for Dylan – although he brought Joan Baez along on the U.K. tour, he was already living at New York’s Chelsea Hotel with Sara Lownds, who he’d marry in a private (and in fact secret) ceremony in November 1965. Adding to the blur – and, no doubt, the disconnection – was Dylan’s amphetamine use. “They were all so fucking high,” remembered Marianne Faithfull, part of an ever-changing cast of characters in Dylan’s suite at London’s Savoy Hotel that included Donovan and Allen Ginsberg. “Every five minutes or so someone would go into the bathroom and come out speaking in tongues.”

On May 12th, two days after a show at the Royal Albert Hall, Dylan marked the end of the tour by booking a London session with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, featuring a 20-year-old Eric Clapton on guitar, at Levy’s Recording Studio. It did not go well. “He was sitting at a piano, and we just joined in,” Clapton said. “It was just a jam session.” They played for two hours without getting anywhere. “You’re playing too much blues, man,” Bobby Neuwirth told Clapton. “He needs to be more country!”

Dylan would tell Michael Bloomfield more or less the same thing a month later. Bloomfield – the guitarist in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band – met Dylan in Woodstock the weekend before a June 15th session, a newly purchased Fender Telecaster (“a really good guitar for the first time in my life”) in hand. Dylan wanted to teach Bloomfield the songs they’d be working on. One had been condensed from a recent amphetamine-fueled go at writing a book. Dylan would later describe it as a “long piece of vomit,” 10 or 20 pages long, “just a rhythm thing on paper, all about my steady hatred, directed at some point that was honest.” It was based around the chord changes to Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba” and was called “Like a Rolling Stone.”

“I figured he wanted blues, string bending, because that’s what I do,” Bloomfield remembered. “He said, ‘Hey, man, I don’t want any of that B.B. King stuff.'” Dylan had a sound in mind, and the following Tuesday, when they got to Columbia’s Studio A in New York, Bloomfield functioned as more or less the musical director, he has said. Producer Tom Wilson had gathered some of the studio musicians who’d worked on Bringing It All Back Home – keyboardist Paul Griffin, drummer Bobby Gregg and possibly guitarist Bruce Langhorne as well – and they started with 10 takes of a jumping version of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” then called “Phantom Engineer,” and moved on to six passes through a rocker packed with punchlines called “Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence.”…