Manafonistas

Recorded at four in the morning after a session that had started 10 hours earlier, and in which the musicians had done little but play cards while Dylan worked on the lyric, this draws its sepulchral power not just from the glinting ambiguities of his magnificent wordplay but from an arrangement that ebbs and flows like a slow tide. Not having been given a clue as to the length of the song, the musicians surged to a climax at the end of every chorus, only to find the singer pulling them into yet another verse. Eleven minutes and 21 seconds long, the one and only take was given its own special setting, isolated on the fourth side of a double album. It presented itself as a masterpiece, and it was.