Bob Dylan – Song #100: “Like a Rolling Stone”

 “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

Bob Dylan – Song #99: “Thunder on the Mountain”

“The more you listen to Modern Times, the more you sense that Dylan’s cast the songs as a modern lament, in the mask of a new Ovid, a kind of modern exile in the modern world.” 

– Cliff Fell, poet and professor

What you should know about this song:

This is the opening track to Dylan’s “Modern Times” album recorded in August 2006. It was widely acclaimed for its Chuck Berry-styled structure as well as its reference to the admired R&B star Alicia Keys.

“The more you listen to Modern Times, the more you sense that Dylan’s cast the songs as a modern lament, in the mask of a new Ovid, a kind of modern exile in the modern world.” – Cliff Fell, poet and professor.

*Sources

Bob Dylan – Song #98: “Workingman’s Blues #2”

Dylan’s like the Beatles or the Eiffel Tower… his presence is so strong that you don’t see him anymore.”

– David Gray

 

What you should know about this song:

This piece has been described as both timeless and yet utterly contemporary. Dylan self-consciously wrote it as a sequel to an earlier song (“Workingman’s Blues”) by country veteran Merle Haggard.

“Dylan’s like the Beatles or the Eiffel Tower – he’s just there, his presence is so strong that you don’t see him anymore.” – David Gray*

*Sources

Bob Dylan – Song #97: “High Water (For Charley Patton)”

“Bob Dylan! It’s like trying to talk about the Pyramids. What do you do? You just stand back and… gape.”

– Bono

 

What you should know about this song:

This song was recorded on Dylan’s 31st studio album Love and Theft (2001) as a tribute to bluesman Charley Patton. The song recaps the catastrophic 1927 Louisiana flood, which also inspired Patton’s song “High Water Everywhere.”

The song interestingly plays off of classic American songs, directly quoting songs by Robert Johnson, Larry Campbell, and Charlie Patton.

“Bob Dylan! It’s like trying to talk about the Pyramids. What do you do? You just stand back and… gape.” – Bono*

 

*Sources

Bob Dylan – Song #96: “Things Have Changed”

Link to Song: Things Have Changed

What you should know about this song:

Featured in the film Wonder Boys, this single recorded in 2000 won Dylan an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.

The director of Wonder Boys, Curtis Hanson, took a creative approach to making a music video for this song by featuring new footage of Dylan in the films’ various locations mixed with clips from the movie itself.

“Who knows more about being a wonder boy than Bob Dylan? He has successfully reinvented himself again and again. one of my biggest thrills as a director was the day when Bob Dylan came into the editing room and I showed him some hours of footage and talked about the imagery of the movie. he went off and wrote this fantastic song on the road using the musicians he was traveling with. He was singing about water under the bridge and many images from the movie. It was great for the movie but also a fabulous, stand-alone Bob Dylan song.” – Curtis Hanson, director of The Wonder Boys

*Source: “Dylan: 100 Songs and Pictures” by Fine Communications, Wikipedia

96 - 2000 - Johannasvisions

Photo Source: Visions of Johanna

Bob Dylan – Song #95: “Mississippi”

Link to Song: Mississippi

Sheryl Crow Cover: Mississippi

What you should know about this song:

In 2009, Rolling Stone named “Mississippi” the 17th best song of the decade, calling it “A drifter’s love song that seems to sum up Dylan’s entire career, and a rambling classic that ranks up there with ‘Tangled Up in Blue’” Rolling stone also listed it as number 260 in it list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Sheryl Crow recording the song for her 1998 The Globe Sessions, before Dylan released it for Love and Theft. Crow altered the melody, phrasing and arrangement for her recording. The version received strikingly mixed reviews, some referring to it as “remarkable” and others as “forgettable, head-bopping pop.” The Dixie Chicks also tried their hand at covering this tune.

“It was really an honor to get to do it. you can listen to one of his songs and think it’s so simple, you don’t even realize how intricate it actually is – the arc of the melody, the way he uses just two or three chords but everything builds to a great release. Recording that song made me re-evaluate songwriting.” – Sheryl Crow*

*Source: “Dylan: 100 Songs and Pictures” by Fine Communications, Wikipedia

95 - 2001 - USA Today

Photo Source: USA Today