1 In September 1918 in Duluth, near the end of the First World War, a group calling itself the Knights of Liberty claimed responsibility for kidnapping and then tarring and feathering an anti-war Finnish immigrant, Olli Kinkkonen, to set an example for those who might avoid the draft; the report was not confirmed until two weeks later, when Kinkkonen’s body was found hanging from a tree outside of town, covered with tar and feathers. His death was ruled a suicide. Then on 15 June 1920, six black workers with John Robinson’s Circus, passing through Duluth for a one-night performance, were arrested and accused of raping a nineteen-year-old white woman who had attended the show the night before. Between five and ten thousand citizens stormed the Duluth jail and seized on Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie as the guilty men, and despite the pleas of the Rev. William Powers of Sacred Heart Cathedral hung them from a single light post. Afterwards members of the crowd posed with the bodies for photographs; one was made into one of the most widely circulated of the many lynching postcards that were popular at the time as “Wish You Were Here” greetings and signs of home-town pride. In 2002, the city of Duluth erected a memorial to the murdered men, three seven-foot-high bronze sculptures designed by Carla Stetson; it was denounced on the Web site V Dare as an attempt “to make whites ashamed of their race.” Dylan’s paternal grandparents had settled in Duluth in 1907; on 15 June 1920 his father, Abraham Zimmerman, was eight. It is not known if he or his parents attended the lynching.
2 In May 2004 Mojo magazine ranked “Masters of War” number one on a chart of “The 100 Greatest Protest Songs.” Directly behind were Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome” (1963), James Brown’s “Say it Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” (1968), the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” (1977), and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (1939). Also included were Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” (1958), Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” (1964), and Negativland’s “Christianity Is Stupid” (1987); inexplicably omitted were the Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” (1980), Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” (1956), Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” and at least a dozen other Bob Dylan songs.
3 “His favorite song is “Like a Rolling Stone,” Spector told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone in 1969, elaborating on what he’d said two years before, “and it stands to reason because that’s his grooviest song, as far as songs go. It may not be his grooviest message. It may not be the greatest thing he ever wrote, but I can see why he gets the most satisfaction out of it, because rewriting ‘La Bamba’ chord changes is always a lot of fun and anytime you can make a Number One record and rewrite those changes, it is very satisfying.” With George Harrison on guitar and Charlie Daniels on bass, Dylan recorded a frat-house-basement version of “Da Doo Ron Ron” in 1970: “I met her on a Monday . . . I saw her last Friday . . . ”
4 “A folk trio out of Greenwich Village was riding the charts with a song called ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ that caught and held Sam’s attention,” Daniel Wolff wrote in 1995 in You Send Me: The Life & Times of Sam Cooke, speaking of 1963. “Peter, Paul & Mary were a long way from rock & roll (which they disliked and mocked) but it wasn’t the group or the folk poetry of Bob Dylan’s lyrics that struck Cooke. It was the fact that a tune could address civil rights and go to #2 on the pop charts.”
5 On 28 March 2004, at Apollo at 70: A Hot Night in Harlem, an all-star benefit for the Apollo Theater Foundation, Natalie Cole sang a song into the ground, there was a tribute to Ray Charles, and then the actor and civil rights activist Ossie Davis, in his eighties and speaking as if he had all the time in the world, took the stage. “At the end of the fifties,” he said, “the Civil Rights Movement was growing very insistent—hot and heavy. My generation was involved, challenging America’s deep racial divide. We marched, we prayed, we preached—and fought—for freedom. Music became a significant force in bringing these issues to light, and bringing the people together.” So, far, Davis was simply mouthing awards-show blather; then he took a turn. “A young singer by the name of Sam Cooke was dominating the charts,” he said as footage of Cooke performing with more than a dozen singers and dancers appeared on the theater screen. “One day, Sam heard a song that asked, a mighty important question.” As the sound came up on the screen, you could hear that Cooke was singing “Blowin’ in the Wind”: “Yes, and how many deaths will it take till he knows/ That too many people have died?/ The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind”—and to hear Cooke’s seamless voice inside Dylan’s “blowin’” was to hear the song as something new. “It prompted him,” Davis said, “to write what is perhaps his most heartfelt and moving work: ‘A Change . . . Is Gonna Come.’ A song which became an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement. To perform it for us tonight is someone I’ve had the pleasure of introducing before”—and Davis filled up the word with weight, finally hitting his rhetorical stride—“when we were together once, on that historic day in Washington, D.C., in nineteen, sixty, three, when Dr. Martin Luther King told us about the dream he wanted to share with all America. I’m pleased—nay, happy—to reintroduce this artist again tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Dylan.”
With his band in darkness—hatted guitarist and stand-up bassist, hatless guitarist and drummer—Dylan stood behind an electric piano and went right into the song. The sound of his voice was the sound of shoe leather scraping a sidewalk; the song was out of Dylan’s vocal range, so he brought it into his range as a comrade. At first, with a circular guitar pattern and taps on a wood-block, the song came out soupy. Slowing the pace as radically as he could, Dylan gave himself space to drag out certain words, to flatten the melody, and
[continued] by the second verse—the singer in front of a movie theater, being told he couldn’t come in—you saw someone on a WPA stage from the thirties, bare except perhaps for a backdrop of a setting sun. The performance was made of dignity and authority—qualities that, as Dylan sang, were passed from him to the song to Cooke and back again to him. The gorgeous, sophisticated record Cooke had made four decades before was now rough, primitive; where Cooke was a nightclub prophet, Dylan was a tramp on the street, a prophet content to say his piece and disappear. That’s how he sounded; in a rakish, cutaway beige jacket, pink satin shirt, black string tie, and pencil moustache, he looked like a card shark.
6 Their fourth Google entry turns up not the band but “The thesis of Coup d’Etat in America suggested that Watergate conspirator and longtime CIA spook E. Howard Hunt was one of the three mystery tramps renowned in Kennedy assassination lore.” Given that the tramps, “photographed in the vicinity of the grassy knoll,” were “picked up by the Dallas police and then released without any record of arrest,” maybe they are the band.
7 “I think Jimi’s gonna be remembered for centuries, just like people like Lead-belly and Lightnin’ Hopkins,” the late John Phillips, one of the organizers of the Monterey Pop Festival, said in 1992, then placing Hendrix in an America so alluring and mysterious that it changed Hendrix’s story once again, recasting his whole brief career as a dare, or a race against an opponent Phillips didn’t name, opening up a tale yet to be told: “He’s really a folk hero, another John Henry.”
8 As a way to start a song, this has always struck me as completely singular—not, it’s plain, because it is singular, but because the drama created by the isolation of the sound for “Like a Rolling Stone,” perhaps the echo that surrounds it, for me erased all analogues. “Do you remember how that came about?” I asked Al Kooper. “It’s a very common situation,” he said. “Somebody counts off, and somebody plays a lead-in. It’s a very common thing to play a drum fill on one of the first bars. He [drummer Bobby Gregg] could have gone, one, two, three—chickaboom; there’s a million things you could do. He just chose to do that. It’s the four of the bar before it starts. One, two, three, FOUR! And there you go.” Kooper then offered a list of thirty records that begin the same way, including the Impressions’ 1963 “It’s All Right,” Richard Thompson’s 1985 [continued] “When the Spell Is Broken,” the Dixie Chicks’ 2000 “Goodbye Earl,” the Beach Boys’ kabbalistically obscure 1964 “Pom Pom Playgirl,” and the Ronettes’ 1963 “Sleigh Ride.” Jon Langford, of the Mekons, noted the Mekons’ own 1986 cover of Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,” where the effect is so similar it qualifies as a cover of “Like a Rolling Stone.” Dave Marsh offered the Beatles’ 1964 “Any Time at All”: “It has the drum beat opening, and it is very close in effect; in fact, Ringo does the drum beat opening at the top of the record and at the top of every chorus. It’s got that gunshot effect—not quick and sharp as on ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ more duration, like a real gunshot.” I am sticking to my guns. There is nothing like it.
9 Sometimes it’s in Dylan’s own performances of these songs that you can hear “Like a Rolling Stone,” though not always: his desultory 1970 recording of “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” omitted from the already thrown-together Self Portrait and included on the bottom-of-the-barrel release Dylan in 1973 (Dylan had temporarily jumped to another label and Columbia was attempting to embarrass him by releasing the worst stuff they could find), said nothing about anything. His 1992 “Little Maggie” was stark, syncopated, and deathly, but it owed nothing to the Stanley Brothers; if Dylan drew on their performance for “Like a Rolling Stone,” it was for its structure, its melody, and most of all its [continued] lift, a sense of triumph. The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun,” at four and a half minutes in its full-length version, was taken from the broken reading Dylan gave the song on Bob Dylan two years before; with the kind of reach beyond a song’s past or even its future that would power “Like a Rolling Stone,” a five-man British blues band from Newcastle transformed an American folk ballad about a New Orleans whorehouse into an international hit that more than forty years later still circles the globe. But when Dylan sang “Don’t Start Me Talkin’” on The Late Show with David Letterman in 1984 he was plainly possessed by the song, by the chance it gave him to run over everyone in town (“I’ll tell EVERYTHING I know!” he shouted with superhuman glee); when he threw “New Minglewood Blues” off his stages in the 1990s, his band crashing down on “born” and “den” as he ripped the words away from them, every line built on the last until you couldn’t see the top of their staircase.
10 “They were doing something in their own right that was just as major as what Dylan was doing,” Kooper says of the Aldon writers, whose work for the Drifters (“Up on the Roof”), the Chiffons (“One Fine Day”), the Shirelles (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow”), the Righteous Brothers (“You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’”), and many more of the finest artists of early 1960s rock ’n’ roll stands as one of the truest achievements of postwar pop music. Dylan more than anyone ended their careers as songwriters. “You were watching silent movies,” Kooper says, speaking of the way Dylan changed what a pop song could be, of how his use of language changed the language of the song. “And all of a sudden there was sound in them. Ohhhh—and that put a lot of people out of work. These handsome people, that talk like this. They were out of work, Jack.” They knew it, too: there is no overstating how terrified these great writers were of Bob Dylan. Years before “Like a Rolling Stone,” he had all but challenged them to a duel. “Unlike most of the songs nowadays being written uptown in Tin Pan Alley, that’s where most of the folk songs come from nowadays,” he said on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1963, introducing “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” “this wasn’t written up there—this was written somewhere down in the [continued] United States.” You’re fakes, heard Goffin and King, nightclub prince Bobby Darin, star singer Dion, and so many others: You’re fakes, and this is real. In 2001, for The Hitmakers, an A&E documentary on 1650 Broadway, Goffin spoke in broken, coulda-been-a-contender cadences, sounding beaten down, used up, passed by: “I wish we had tried more to write some songs that—really meant something . . . Dylan managed to do something that not one of us was able to do: put poetry in rock ’n’ roll, and just stand up there like a mensch and sing it. And Carole felt the same way too, and so we had to do something dramatic, so we took all the [demos of] songs that hadn’t been placed, not the songs there had been records on, and smashed them in half. We said, we gotta grow up, we gotta start writing better songs now.” “There was a cultural phenomenon around us that had nothing to do with songwriting,” King said on the same show, sitting around a table with Goffin, Weil, and Mann, a hint of contempt for the rest of them in her voice. “So it was: Wait a minute! What’s happening, what’s going on? Things are changing. How do we write this stuff? How do we fit in?” In other words, they were hearing all the questions Dylan was asking in “Like a Rolling Stone,” and beginning to answer them. That they had to devalue their own work to do it is a testament to how scary the song can be, or how dangerous.
11 “I’d do a Dylan opera with him,” Spector said in 1969. “I’d produce him. You see he’s never been produced. He’s always gone into the studio on the strength of his lyrics and they have sold enough records to cover everything up . . . He doesn’t really have the time nor do any of his producers necessarily have the ambition or the talent to really overrule him and debate with him. I would imagine with Albert Grossman there is a situation of business control just like it would be with Elvis Presley and Colonel Parker. Maybe nobody has the guts, balls, or ambition to get in there, but there is no reason unless Dylan didn’t want it. But he could be made to want it.”
12 “John Hammond told me once that I should take over Columbia Records,” Johnston says, as if telling the story of a broken treaty, of how his Apache ancestors were driven from their land. “And so I said, ‘Well, how do you do it?’ I went up and met with Paley and Stanton [William S. Paley, the legendary capitalist buccaneer who bought the tiny Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928, was chairman of the board of CBS; Frank Stanton had been president of the company since 1946] and those people up there, and they said, ‘What would you do if you came into this?’ And I says, ‘Well, you’re not [continued] gonna like it, and you won’t do it, but I think the first thing is, you should get your shit together. And by that, you should have the tenth floor, of attorneys. And the eleventh floor, of accountants. And the twelfth floor, of music. And they should never be allowed, to pass one another. Whatever you want to do, however you want to cheat, and fuck these artists around, is your opinion—but at least give them the opportunity of doing something, without people who tap their foot and whistle out of tune, and judge what’s being made according to what somebody did last week, to keep their job six months longer.’ And I said, ‘If you do that, the music will always be the music, and those son-of-a-bitches will never have any chance at it, you can make all the money you want to, but they can’t fuck with the music.’ Paley said, ‘That’s very interesting.’ John walked out and said, ‘You didn’t want the job, did you?’”
13 “After the release of Highway 61, and the success of it,” Kooper says, “there were times when Bob and I would go to a record store and buy the imitation records of it, and then go back to his place and listen and sit there and laugh. I was particularly amused by the fact that really great musicians were imitating my ignorance. I really had devoted my time to being a guitar player, and I was now just starting to play keyboards, for a living. I had so much to learn.”
14 “There’s a very odd way to hear the song for the first time, I think,” Paula Radice, an elementary school teacher in Hastings, England, said in 2004 in a modest, soft-spoken voice; she was one of several people interviewed for a BBC radio documentary on “Like a Rolling Stone,” produced for the Birmingham series “Soul Music.” “Because I came to Dylan late, and only encountered him in the 1980s, as opposed to all these people who’ve known the song since the sixties, it came to me completely fresh and completely new. I was sitting in a pub in Durham, in 1984, at about the time of the miners’ strike, and Durham was a rather downbeat place at the time—people were out collecting in tins. It was a strange time to be at a fairly well-off university, in a very unhappy part of the world. And I was sitting in this pub, very old-fashioned type, nonstudenty pub, so traditional in fact that I don’t think they even served women at the bar. There was just a general hubbub of conversation. The jukebox was playing, and suddenly this song started. I didn’t know what it was—I was probably the only person in the pub that didn’t recognize it. But everything stopped. Everybody’s conversation stopped, and everybody started singing. And I thought, what on earth is going on, I’ve never heard this song before, how come everybody else knows it? And not only did everybody else know it, they obviously loved it, and relished it, and were throwing their heads back singing the chorus, ‘How does it feel,’ really sort of howling it out. Looking back on it, it seems to me highly emblematic of what was going on in Durham at the time. There was a sort of vituperative elation in the song that they cottoned on to. At the end of the song, as if nothing had happened, everybody went back to drinking and talking.”
15 “The thing that was most apparent to me was how ghostly it was,” the historian Sean Wilentz wrote me about the festival in 2002, “—because they’re all dead. All the people the young folk artists were drawn to in 1965 or before. Mississippi John Hurt is dead. Son House is dead . . . There were a lot of ghosts around. At the same time it was a very conscious passing on of that tradition to something new—on the part of the older folks. Dylan did that very intentionally. Songs that he was singing in 1965, and songs that recalled that tradition.
“There was a roots stage—but given the explosion of interest in old-time music, there was too little of it. Most of the music was personal song-stories. What with O Brother, Where Art Thou? Alison Krauss, the festival seemed to be out of step with where folk music now is. It was largely virtuoso self-indulgent adolescent angst. It was Shawn Colvin.
“Dylan walked out on stage with Jewish earlocks—and a ponytail, and a fake beard. He looked like a guy who was on the bus to [the Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhood] Crown Heights and got lost. From another angle, not really seeing the beard, he could have been in the Shangri-Las. Then he looked like Jesus Christ. He was putting on a show, and he was donning a mask—because he’s a minstrel. A Jewish minstrel. An American minstrel. “There came a point when he could have said something [about what had happened in 1965]—when he was introducing the band. I looked at him very closely then—but he just sort of smiled. He twitched. And then he went into the last song, ‘Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat.’ Then he does a sizzling Buddy Holly, ‘Not Fade Away.’ Again it was ghosts. He was the whole fucking tradition. He was a one-man festival.”
16 Even in 1974, when Dylan and the Band once again toured the country, the segment of the show that featured Dylan alone, accompanied only by his own acoustic guitar and harmonica, almost always brought the most ecstatic response, with many cheering and applauding with such fervor they were enacting a rejection of everything else that was played.
17 In Minnesota the driving age was fifteen; Dylan made his first recordings at Terline Music, an instrument and sheet music store, in St. Paul on Christmas Eve, 1956. Included were fragments of Little Richard’s “Ready Teddy,” Sonny Knight’s “Confidential” (a song Dylan took up again in 1967 with the Hawks, [continued] as part of the Basement Tapes recordings, and was still performing on stage twenty-five years after that), Carl Perkins’s “Boppin’ the Blues,” Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” the Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Nite,” Shirley and Lee’s “Let the Good Times Roll,” and the Penguins’ “Earth Angel.” Dylan accompanied himself on piano; friends Howard Rutman and Larry Keegan also sang. Left a paraplegic after accidents in his teens and twenties, Keegan, in his wheelchair, joined Dylan onstage in Merrillville, Indiana, in 1981, for an encore of Chuck Berry’s “No Money Down” (Dylan played saxophone), and in 1999 sang at Jesse Ventura’s inauguration as governor of Minnesota. Keegan died in 2001 of a heart attack, at fifty-nine; he had always kept the aluminum disc that resulted from the 1956 session, and after his death relatives listed it on eBay, supposedly with a $150,000 floor, though no bid close to that was forthcoming. “Awful,” says one sympathetic listener who heard the songs.
18 “I didn’t give a fuck about Electric Bob or Folk Bob, and I didn’t know anyone who did,” the singer Bob Geldof wrote in 2003 of his thirteen-year-old self in Dublin in 1965. “It was the words, the voice, the shirt. I couldn’t find one like it, so I painted spots on my blue shirt collar, the shoulders, and halfway down the front and didn’t take my jacket off. One night I forgot and the girl who became the song ‘Mary of the 4th Form’ said I was tragic and told her friends.”