Like a Rolling Stone

The song is a sound, but before that it is a story. But it’s not one story. “I have the audacity to play ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ in my show, just about every night,” the country singer Rodney Crowell said in 2004. “I did it as a lark, to show off to some of the guys in my band that I knew all the words. But I was immediately struck by the audience response to the song. From six-year-olds to seventy-year-olds—they all know the chorus to that song. I couldn’t put it away; every night, it’s a unifying thing. I think it’s somehow part of the fabric of our culture.”

“This is about growing up, this is about discovering what’s going on around you, realizing that life isn’t all you’ve been told,” Jann Wenner said that same year; thirty-seven years before, in 1967, he had named his magazine Rolling Stone because, as he explained in the first issue, “Muddy Waters took the name for a song he wrote; the Rolling Stones took their name from Muddy’s song, and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was the title of Bob Dylan’s first rock and roll record.”

He’s throwing it at you in the verse: here’s your problem. Here’s what’s happened. So now you’re without a home, you’re on your own, complete unknown, like a rolling stone. That’s a liberating thing. This is a song about liberation. About being liberated from your old hang-ups, and your old knowledge, and the fear, the frightening part of facing that, particularly when he gets to scrounging for your next meal—the worst thing that happens to you. Or, “Do you want to make a deal”—there’s a lot of fear in that, in the line, in the lyric, in the melody.

“Once upon a time you dressed so fine”—I don’t see it as being about a rich person who falls apart, I see it as being about a comfortable individual, or a comfortable society, suddenly discovering what’s going on. Vietnam—the society we’re taught about, and you realize, as you become aware, drug aware, socially aware, the disaster of the commercial society.

The key line is, “You’ve got no secrets to conceal.” Everything has been stripped away. You’re on your own, you’re free now. You’ve gone through all these levels of experience—you fell, someone you believed in robbed you blind, took everything he could steal, and finally, it’s all been taken away. You’re so helpless, and now you’ve got nothing left. And you’re invisible—you’ve got no secrets—that’s so liberating. You’ve nothing to fear anymore. It’s useless to hide any of that shit. You’re a free man. That to me is the message. You know: “Songs of Innocence and Experience.”

I always thought it was my story, in a certain sense. I used to go to the finest schools. Nobody ever taught you how to live out on the street. So, to me, coming from private schools, and my background, being a preppy, ending up at Berkeley, and all of a sudden, taking drugs, things change, you’re no longer in a private school, all of a sudden you’re running around with Ken Kesey, Hell’s Angels, and drug dealers—and one of them’s the Mystery Tramp. At some Acid Test, and some weirdo comes up to you, with a beard, a top hat—you stare into the vacuum of his eyes, and ask him, do you want to make a deal. That happened to me. Too many times.

In 1978, in Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child of the Aquarian Age, David Henderson made it Jimi Hendrix’s story. The finest writing there is on “Like a Rolling Stone” is Henderson on the performance of the song at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Hendrix’s first band. It was a great stomp, as much a fan’s tribute as a master’s appropriation: “Yes, I know I missed a verse, don’t worry,” Hendrix says after skipping from the second to the fourth. Huge chords ride over the beginning of each verse like rain clouds; the tune is taken very slowly, with Hendrix’s thick, street-talk drawl sounding nothing at all like Dylan’s Midwestern dust storm. Laughter erupts all over the song: “Hey, baby—would you like to, ah, ah, make a deeealllllll?” But for the six minutes Hendrix is playing, across five pages Henderson all but leaves the song on the stage and enters Hendrix’s mind as he plays. Now “Like a Rolling Stone” is about Hendrix’s childhood in Seattle, where as a schoolboy he attended an Elvis Presley show at the Rainiers minor-league baseball park, when Elvis asked all present to rise for the National Anthem and then plunged into “Hound Dog”; his years as a journeyman on the Chitlin’ Circuit; his tours with Joey Dee and the Starlighters of “Peppermint Twist” fame; his life in Harlem—an odyssey. Henderson turns himself into Hendrix’s shade, as if in these pages of fiction he was watching from across the street, writing it down as it happened.

“Once upon a time you dressed so fine . . .” Right there in that moment Jimi saw himself as he had lived in America. Yeah, he had been the fine-dressing R&B entertainer, and then suffered what many of his friends at the time thought was a great fall. Hanging out in the Village with all those beatniks and hippies. Taking all that speed for energy and to fend off starvation. The slick veneer front of the R&B musician destroyed for him in the Village. Disdain from his friends “uptown”—“he’s looking scruffy and acting crazy.”

He saw himself walking MacDougal Street hearing the song, and every time always so amazed at how it hit so close to home. “Like a Rolling Stone” seemed to come forth from every window, every bar. Once he had walked clear across the Village to the East Village, and stopped in a bar called The Annex on Tenth Street and Avenue B. Out of the sodden, snow-encrusted streets, dark and severe and utterly desolate, he walked into the slit-windowed one-room Annex where a great swell of music greeted him, and the entire bar was singing along. The jukebox was turned up to full volume. The place was dark but packed, and they were all singing “. . . Rolling Stone” jubilantly, as if it were the National Anthem.