Bob Dylan / 6:13
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Mike Bloomfield: guitar
Al Gorgoni: guitar
Paul Griffin: piano
Al Kooper: organ
Joseph Macho Jr.: bass (?)
Russ Savakus: bass (?)
Bobby Gregg: drums
Bruce Langhorne: tambourine
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: June 16, 1965
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Pete Dauria
Bob Dylan’s UK tour from April 26 to May 12, 1965, was very hard. Every night, despite an acoustic set, he had to face a public hostile to his conversion to rock music. Bringing It All Back Home had just been released in stores. Returning from his UK tour, Dylan was greatly affected by the public’s reaction and seriously considered ending his career. “Last spring, I guess I was going to quit singing. I was very drained, and the way things were going, it was a very draggy situation… Anyway, I was playing a lot of songs I didn’t want to play. I was singing words I didn’t really want to sing. I don’t mean words like ‘God’ and ‘mother’ and ‘President’ and ‘suicide’ and ‘meat cleaver.’ I mean simple little words like ‘if’ and ‘hope’ and ‘you.’ But ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ changed it all.”4 In 2005, Dylan stated, “After writing that I wasn’t interested in writing a novel, or a play. I just had too much, I want to write songs.”6
The lyrics to “Like a Rolling Stone” began with a long version of a dozen pages that Dylan himself described as a “long piece of vomit.”4 He selected some verses and the chorus from this draft during his stay at Woodstock, New York, at the house he had rented from the mother of the folksinger Peter Yarrow. These lyrics are fundamentally innovative. “Once upon a time you dressed so fine / You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?” Playing on the assonance, Dylan portrays a heroine once powerful, who “never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns,” who “used to be so amused / At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used.” And the narrator is ruthless: “How does it feel / How does it feel / To be on your own / With no direction home / Like a complete unknown / Like a rolling stone?”
The poetic originality of “Like a Rolling Stone” derives its substance from the narrator’s resentment of and desire for revenge on this mysterious “Miss Lonely.” These two feelings, however, diminish over the stanza, even if at the beginning the narrator does not hide his satisfaction at seeing the “princess on the steeple” face the reality of a world that she once despised. Gradually, the narrator moves toward compassion.
Beyond the history of decadence, Dylan also subtly describes American society of the mid-sixties. At the beginning of the second verse, he sings, “You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely.” What the songwriter wants to express is that the best education is not one that is given at gilded universities or in the family cocoon, but the one drawn from the vicissitudes of daily life. Dylan’s biographer Robert Shelton wrote that “Like a Rolling Stone” “is about the loss of innocence and the harshness of experience.”7
Who is the person behind this “Miss Lonely”? As usual opinions differ. Miss Lonely could be Joan Baez or Sara (considering the background of her painful divorce from photographer Hans Lownds), but is more surely Edie Sedgwick, the daughter of a wealthy California family and Andy Warhol’s muse. She acted in no less than eight of Warhol’s films in 1965, including Poor Little Rich Girl. Dylan had a brief affair with her at the time at the Chelsea Hotel. In an interview with Scott Cohen, he firmly denied any relationship. “I don’t recall any type of relationship. If I did have one, I think I’d remember.”49
In 2004, Dylan gave a very interesting explanation of his writing technique in “Like a Rolling Stone: “I’m not thinking about what I want to say, I’m just thinking ‘Is this OK for the meter?’” There is a sense of wonder: “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except that this ghost picked me to write the song.”20
“Like a Rolling Stone” revolutionized the recording industry. Rolling Stone magazine said, “No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time.”50 Meaning that no other song released as a single had previously exceeded six minutes. Its success, however, does not rest on its 6:13 length. Critics described the song as revolutionary in its combination of musical elements: a brilliant arrangement between organ chords and guitar licks wrapping perfectly around Dylan’s vocal, and with an intensifying interpretation. “The song was written on an upright piano in the key of G sharp and was changed to C on the guitar in the recording studio.” Dylan said in 1988, “The first two lines, which rhymed ‘kiddin’ you’ and ‘didn’t you,’ just about knocked me out. And later on, when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much.”50 He later admitted that his inspiration for the chorus was the harmonic progression in Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba.”
An early version of “Like a Rolling Stone,” dating from June 15, 1965, was subsequently released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 in 1991. The song was recorded in 3/4 time with Dylan at the piano, which is rather remote from the album version, but nevertheless very interesting. The final recording (the fourth of five takes) took place on the afternoon of June 16. Al Kooper: “[Tom] Wilson felt comfortable enough to invite me to watch an electric Dylan session, because he knew I was a big Bob fan. He had no conception of my limitless ambition, however. There was no way in hell I was going to visit a Bob Dylan session and just sit there pretending to be some reporter from Sing Out! magazine! I was committed to play on it… The session was called for two o’clock the next afternoon at Columbia Studios… Taking no chances, I arrived an hour early and well enough ahead of the crowd to establish my cover. I walked into the studio with my guitar case, unpacked, tuned up, plugged in, and sat there trying my hardest to look like I belonged.” Suddenly Dylan arrived with a curious person carrying a Fender Telecaster. Kooper: “It was weird, because it was storming outside and the guitar was all wet from the rain. But the guy just shuffled over into the corner, wiped it off with a rag, plugged in, and commenced to play some of the most incredible guitar I’d ever heard.”42 Annoyed, Kooper put his guitar away and ran quickly to the control room. He had just met the very talented Mike Bloomfield. A while later, in the middle of the session, Paul Griffin was moved from organ to piano. Although Kooper did not master the instrument well, Kooper sat down quietly at the organ. When Wilson discovered him, the take was about to start. “He really could have just busted me and got me back in the control room,” Kooper recalled, “but he was a very gracious man, and so he let it go.”6
At the end of the song, everyone went into the control room to hear the playback. After thirty seconds into the second verse of the playback, Dylan asked Tom Wilson to turn up the organ. Wilson’s response: “[T]hat cat’s not an organ player.” But Dylan wasn’t buying it: “Hey, now don’t tell me who’s an organ player and who’s not. Just turn the organ up.” Al Kooper comments, “That was the moment I became an organ player!”42
But most impressive was the influence the song exerted. Critics and musicians are unanimous. The critic Paul Williams: “Dylan had been famous, had been the center of attention, for a long time. But now the ante was being upped again. He’d become a pop star as well as a folk star… and was, even more than the Beatles, a public symbol of the vast cultural, political, generational changes taking place in the United States and Europe. He was perceived as, and in many ways functioned as, a leader.”51 According to Paul McCartney, “It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful… He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further.”15 Finally, Bruce Springsteen, at the ceremony celebrating Bob Dylan’s entrance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1988): “The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind… The way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind. And he showed us that just because the music was innately physical, it did not mean that it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and the talent to expand a pop song until it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound. He broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and he changed the face of rock ’n’ roll forever and ever.”52
On July 20, 1965, more than one month before the release of the album Highway 61 Revisited, “Like a Rolling Stone” was released as a single with “Gates of Eden” on its B-side. The song would never have been selected as a single, but when the discarded acetate was played at the club Arthur in New York City, the audience was so enthusiastic that Columbia decided to make an exception. On August 14, “Like a Rolling Stone” reached number 2 on the US Billboard charts, just behind the Beatles’ “Help!” The song was number 3 in Canada and number 4 in the United Kingdom. “Like a Rolling Stone” is number 1 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”
In 1978 Dylan told Ron Rosenbaum, “It’s the dynamics in the rhythm that make up ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and all of the lyrics.”20 The snare shot that starts the song like a pistol, and which so impressed the young Bruce Springsteen, was the initiative of the drummer Bobby Gregg, who had worked on the previous album. The rhythmic pulse of the whole is absolutely unstoppable; all the musicians contribute. The bass, probably played with a pick by Joe Macho Jr. (Clinton Heylin talks about Russ Savakus), is a real locomotive—a strong framework on which two rhythm guitars are grafted: Dylan (on his Fender Stratocaster) and Gorgoni. Paul Griffin’s piano brings, despite a big miss at 2:10, a very honky-tonk tone. Al Kooper’s organ, which gives the song its “color,” is remarkable not just for the sound, but also for the playing. Kooper wrote, “If you listen to it today, you can hear how I waited until the chord was played by the rest of the band, before committing myself to play in the verses. I’m always an eighth note behind everyone else, making sure of the chord before touching the keys.”42 Bloomfield, an outstanding guitarist, provides the required bluesy touch on his white Fender Telecaster while intervening cautiously in the service of the song. Bruce Langhorne, the famous “Mr. Tambourine Man” (according to Al Kooper), played tambourine. Bob provided an excellent vocal and an upbeat harmonica solo (in C). The result is the great impact the song had upon release: Dylan said that it was his favorite and the best he had written.
After five takes on June 15, fifteen other attempts were recorded the following day, the fourth being the final. This is far from the legend that the song was cut in one take…