The classic Sixties album cover that betrayed Bob Dylan’s state of mind

• Bob Dylan is an artist who seems to delight in inscrutability and the great singer-songwriter certainly has a baffling approach to album covers. Blonde on Blonde (from 1966) is celebrated for a blurred portrait assumed to represent the music’s druggy otherness, although photographer Jerry Schatzberg later claimed it was simply so cold in New York that he couldn’t stop his hands shaking. Actually, of Dylan’s 38 studio albums, at least half a dozen feature out-of-focus cover shots. Maybe he is just short sighted. This slap dash approach has extended to amateurish paintings by his own hand (notably Self Portrait in 1970 and Planet Waves in 1974), trashy pulp art (Shot of Love in 1981, Knocked Out Loaded in 1986) and some of the least flattering portraits in rock history (has a major artist ever looked so monumentally disinterested as Dylan on Good As I Been To You, 1992?). And yet, given his creative mystique and towering status in pop culture, Dylan’s covers are amongst the most iconic and minutely examined in rock history. One groundbreaking album, in particular, has been dissected and debated with forensic zeal. What is it? Bob Dylan’s fifth album Bringing it All Back Home from 1965 marked the moment the folk bard chose to go electric. The cover is a teasing cornucopia of clues as to the state of his mind. It is formally posed, reminiscent of the portraiture of Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, but also a pastiche of a celebrity lifestyle magazine: at home with the voice of a generation. Forsaking the folky earthiness of earlier albums, Dylan has swapped his rustic attire for a hipster shirt and black jacket. He stares with deadly intent at the camera, a Persian cat in his lap, whilst a glamorous woman in a red dress reclines with model imperiousness on a chaise longue.