"After writing that, I wasn't interested in writing a novel or a play. I wanted to just write songs." The story of the song that saw Bob Dylan pivot from folk to rock

Bob Dylan and manager Albert Grossman listen back to the recordings of Highway 61 Revisited surrounded by engineers and other listeners at Columbia's Studio A in the summer of 1965 in New York City.

In May 1965, at the end of a two-month solo tour of the UK, Bob Dylan was considering giving up performing. “I was drained,” he said afterwards. “I was playing a lot of songs I didn’t want to play. I was singing words I really didn’t want to sing.”

On his flight home, Dylan wrote something that would change his mind. It was a 20-page stream-of-consciousness poem, which he jokingly called “a long piece of vomit.” A few days later, in his Greenwich Village apartment, while looking it over, he hit on what he called the “slow motion phrase” of “How does it feel?” and that brought the song into focus.