“Rolling Stone’s the best song I wrote.”
– Bob Dylan, 1965
Link to Song
What you should know about this song:
“I wrote it. I didn’t fail. It was straight.” – Bob Dylan, shortly after the recording session in June 1965
Dylan had just turned 24 when he wrote this revolutionary song. A few weeks before the recording, Dylan had started documented an extended verse over 20 pages long, which he referred to as “”just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred, directed at some point that was honest.”
The title was inspired by a key line in the Hank Williams song, “Lost Highway,”: “I’m a rolling stone, I’m alone and lost.” The title also references the phrase, “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”
Because the song is over 6 minutes long, it was a major musical breakthrough when radios started to play it and it became a hit. Up until this point, most stations refused to play songs longer than 3 minutes.
Dylan recorded another version in 1970 for his Self Portrait album, this time with guitarist Ron Cornelius in Nashville:
“You’re not reading manuscripts. In Nashville the players are booked because of what they can create right now, not what’s written on a piece of paper. Everybody’s creating their part as the tape is rolling. Out of everybody I’ve worked with, I don’t know of anyone who’s been any nicer than Bob Dylan. He treated me wonderfully, but at the same time you knew being around him day after day that this man wakes up in a different world every morning. On a creative level that’s a really good thing and to try to second guess him or to ask him what he actually meant by these lyrics, you’re shooting in the dark because he’s not going to tell you anyway.” – Ron Cornelius (1970)
In the November 2004 issue, Rolling Stone Magazine named this #1 on their list of the greatest songs of all time, and it still remains top of the list.
“The most stunning thing about ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is how unprecedented it was: the impressionist voltage of Dylan’s language, the intensely personal accusation in his voice, the apocalyptic charge of Kooper’s garage-gospel organ and Mike Bloomfield’s stiletto-sharp spirals of Telecaster guitar, the defiant six-minute length of the June 16th master take. No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time.”
– Rolling Stone Magazine
“There was no sheet music, it was totally by ear. And it was totally disorganized, totally punk. It just happened.”
– Al Kooper, organ player during 1965 recording session
“Over three days in early June, Dylan sharpened the sprawl down to that confrontational chorus and four taut verses bursting with piercing metaphor and concise truth.”
– Rolling Stone Magazine
“What happened over the two days of recording sessions makes it clear that had circumstances been even slightly different… the song might never have entered time at all, or interrupted it.”
– Greil Marcus, Music Journalist and author of Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads.
“The first two lines, which rhymed ‘kiddin’ you’ and ‘didn’t you,’ just about knocked me out, and 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.”
– Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone Magazine interview 1988
“Just as Dylan bent folk music’s roots and forms to his own will, he transformed popular song with the content and ambition of “Like a Rolling Stone.” And in his electrifying vocal performance, his best on record, Dylan proved that everything he did was, first and always, rock & roll.”
– Rolling Stone Magazine
*Sources
“Dylan: 100 Songs and Pictures” by Fine Communications
“500 Greatest Songs of All Time: Bob Dylan ‘Like a Rolling Stone’“ by Rolling Stone Magazine
NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4585587
