Like a Rolling Stone

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"Like a Rolling Stone"
Single by Bob Dylan
from the album Highway 61 Revisited
B-side	"Gates of Eden"
Released	July 20, 1965
Format	7" single
Recorded	June 15, 1965
Genre	Folk rock
Length	6:09[1]
Label	Columbia
Writer(s)	Bob Dylan
Producer	Tom Wilson
Bob Dylan singles chronology
"Maggie's Farm" (1965) "Like a Rolling Stone" (1965) "Positively 4th Street" (1965)
Highway 61 Revisited track listing "Like a Rolling Stone" (1) "Tombstone Blues" (2) Audio sample file info · help Label Original 45 label

"Like a Rolling Stone" is a song by American songwriter Bob Dylan, and is one of his best-known and most influential compositions.^[2][3][4] The song's origins lie in an extended piece of verse which Dylan had written in June 1965 following his tour of England. Subsequently transforming his sprawling verse into a confrontational song,^[3][4] Dylan recorded "Like a Rolling Stone" a few weeks later, but Columbia, unhappy with the single's length and sound, held up its release for a full month.^[5]

The track was released as a single in July 1965, and also appeared on Dylan's album Highway 61 Revisited. At over six minutes in length,^[1] many radio stations were initially reluctant to play it, yet it managed to reach #2 in the U.S.A.,^[6][7] and was a Top 10 hit in countries including Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.^{[8][9][10][11]} While some Dylan fans criticised the single for its hard rock sound, the record made a huge impact on many teenagers. As Bruce Springsteen recalled in his 1988 speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, "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 had kicked open the door to your mind.... Dylan freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body."^[12][13]

The song dramatically affected the music world and popular culture, as well as Dylan's image and iconic status.^[4][3] It has been covered by a number of artists, including Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones and Bob Marley .^[14][15][16] Rolling Stone magazine ranked it as the #1 song on their "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list.^[17]

Writing and recording

The basis of "Like a Rolling Stone" was an extended piece of verse written by Dylan.^[3] In 1966, Dylan described the genesis of the song to journalist Jules Siegel:

"It was ten pages long. It wasn't called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end it wasn't hatred, it was telling someone something they didn't know, telling them they were lucky. Revenge, that's a better word. I had never thought of it as a song, until one day I was at the piano, and on the paper it was singing, 'How does it feel?' in a slow motion pace, in the utmost of slow motion." ^[18]

In an interview with CBC radio in Montreal, Dylan called the creation of the song a "breakthrough," explaining that it changed his perception of where he was going in his career. He said that he found himself writing "this long piece of vomit, 20 pages long, and out of it I took 'Like a Rolling Stone' and made it as a single. And I'd never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that was what I should do...After writing that I wasn't interested in writing a novel, or a play. I just had too much, I want to write songs."^[19] From the extended version on paper, Dylan crafted four verses and the chorus in Woodstock, New York.^[20] 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.^[21]

Dylan invited guitarist Mike Bloomfield to play on the recording session. He asked Bloomfield to visit his house in Woodstock for the weekend so that he could learn the material. Bloomfield recalled: "The first thing I heard was "Like a Rolling Stone". I figured he wanted blues, string bending, because that's what I do. He said, 'Hey man, I don't want any of that B. B. King stuff'. So, OK, I really fell apart. What the heck does he want? We messed around with the song. I played the way that he dug, and he said it was groovy."^[22]

The recording sessions were produced by Tom Wilson, and took place on June 15–16, 1965, in Studio A of Columbia Records in New York City.^[23][24][25] In addition to Bloomfield, the other musicians enlisted for "Like a Rolling Stone" were Paul Griffin on piano, Joe Macho, Jr. on bass, and Bobby Gregg on drums,^[24] all booked by Wilson. Gregg and Griffin had previously worked with Dylan and Wilson on Bringing It All Back Home.^[26]

	Like a Rolling Stone 3/4 version
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On the first day of recording, five takes of the song were recorded, none of which were complete. The lack of sheet music meant the song was played by ear, and the essence of the song was discovered in the course of the chaotic session. These takes were done in a markedly different style—in a 3/4 waltz time, with Dylan on piano. It wasn't until the fourth take that they even reached the chorus but, following the chorus and harmonica fill, Dylan interrupted the song, saying, "My voice is gone, man. You wanna try it again?"^[27] This fourth take of June 15 was subsequently released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991.^[28][27] The session ended shortly afterwards.^[29]

When the session re-convened on the following day, June 16, 1965, Al Kooper had joined the proceedings. Kooper, 21 years old at that time, was not originally supposed to play but was present as a guest of Wilson's.^[30] When Wilson had stepped out, however, Kooper sat down with his guitar with the other musicians, as he was a big Dylan fan and hoped to take part in the recording session.^[31] By the time Wilson returned, Kooper, who had been intimidated by Bloomfield's guitar playing, was back in the control room. After a couple of rehearsal takes, Wilson moved Griffin from Hammond organ to piano.^[31] Kooper then went to Wilson, saying that he had a good part for the organ. Wilson belittled Kooper's organ abilities but, as Kooper later said, "He just sort of scoffed at me....He didn't say 'no'—so I went out there." Wilson, surprised to see Kooper at the organ, nevertheless allowed him to play on the track. Upon hearing a playback of the song, Dylan, despite Wilson's protestations that Kooper was "not an organ player," insisted that Kooper's organ be turned up in the mix.^[32]

This session saw fifteen recorded takes.^[33] The song had by now evolved into its familiar form, in 4/4 time with Dylan on electric guitar. Following the fourth take of June 16—the master take that was released as a single—Wilson happily commented, "That sounds good to me."^[34] Nevertheless, Dylan and his musicians persisted in recording eleven more takes.^[35]

Release

According to Shaun Considine, new release coordinator for Columbia Records in 1965, "Like a Rolling Stone" was initially relegated to the "graveyard of canceled releases," because of objections from the sales and marketing departments over the song's unprecedented six-minute length, as well as its "raucous" rock sound. In the days following the rejection, Considine took a discarded acetate pressing of the song to Arthur—then the hottest disco in New York. At the crowd's insistence, the demo was played over and over, until it finally wore out. The next morning, a disc jockey and a programming director from the city's leading top 40 stations called Columbia and demanded copies. ^[5] Shortly afterwards, on July 20, 1965, "Like a Rolling Stone" was released as a single with "Gates of Eden" as its B-side.^[36][37][38]

Despite its length, the song became Dylan's biggest hit to that time,^[39] remaining in the U.S. charts for twelve weeks and reaching #2, behind The Beatles' "Help!".^[7][40][6] The promotional copies released to disc jockeys on July 15 had the first two verses and two refrains on one side, while the rest of the song was put on the other. Deejays who wanted to play the whole song would simply flip the vinyl over.^[41][42] While many radio stations were reluctant to play the song in its entirety, public demand eventually forced them to air the full song.^[43][38] This helped the single reach its #2 peak, several weeks after its release.^[43]

Live performance

Dylan performs "Like a Rolling Stone" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, backed by Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper

Within days of "Like a Rolling Stone"'s release, Dylan performed the song live for the first time, as the headliner at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965.^[44] Many of the audience's folk enthusiasts objected to Dylan's use of electric guitars, looking down on rock 'n rollers, as Bloomfield put it, as "greasers, heads, dancers, people who got drunk and boogied."^[38] Unable to capture the song, the band stumbled through the performance, eventually reverting to a 3/4 waltz. By then, Dylan had given up singing and instead recited the lyrics as if giving a speech.^[38]

Highway 61 Revisited was issued at the end of August 1965. When Dylan went on tour that fall, "Like a Rolling Stone" took the closing slot on his setlist and held it, with rare exceptions, through the end of his 1966 "world tour." On May 17, 1966, during the last leg of the tour, Dylan and his band performed at Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England. Just before they started to play "Like a Rolling Stone", someone in the crowd yelled "Judas!", referring to Dylan's "betrayal" of folk music. Dylan responded, "I don't believe you. You're a liar!"^[45] With that, he turned to the band, ordering them to "play it fucking loud."^[44]

Since then, "Like a Rolling Stone" has remained a staple in Dylan's concerts, often with revised arrangements.^[46] It was included in his 1969 Isle of Wight show and in both his reunion tour with The Band in 1974 and the Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975-76. The song continued to be featured in other tours throughout the 1970s and 1980s.^[46] On the Never Ending Tour, which began in 1988, "Like a Rolling Stone" has been one of the five most performed songs, with 653 performances registered through 2005.^[47]

Besides Highway 61 Revisited, the song's standard release can be found on four official albums: Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Biograph, The Essential Bob Dylan, and Dylan. In addition, the early, incomplete studio recording in 3/4 time appears on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991.^[28][48] Live performances of the song are included on Self Portrait, Before the Flood, Bob Dylan at Budokan, MTV Unplugged, The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert, The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack, and The Band's Rock of Ages.^[48][49][50]

Themes

Mike Marqusee has written at length on the conflicts in Dylan's life during this time, with its deepening alienation from his old folk-revival audience and clear-cut leftist causes. He suggests that the song is probably self-referential. "The song only attains full poignancy when one realises it is sung, at least in part, to the singer himself: he's the one 'with no direction home.'"^[51] Dylan himself has noted that after his motorcycle accident in 1966 he realized that "when I used words like 'he' and 'it' and 'they,' and talking about other people, I was really talking about nobody but me."^[52]

Some have tried to tie the characters in the song to specific people in Dylan's orbit in 1965. One suggestion for the identity of 'Miss Lonely' has been Edie Sedgwick, an actress and model.^[53] Michael Gray concludes that Sedgwick had no connection with "Like A Rolling Stone", but “there’s no doubt that the ghost of Edie Sedgwick hangs around Blonde on Blonde.”^[54] Joan Baez, Marianne Faithful and Bob Neuwirth have also been mooted as possible targets of Dylan's scorn.^[39][52][55] Dylan biographer Howard Sounes, for his part, suggests "it is more likely that the song was aimed generally at those he perceived as being 'phony'".^[56]

Legacy

The song made an enormous impact on popular culture and pop music. The success of the single made Dylan a pop icon, as Paul Williams notes:

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.^[57]

Record producer Paul Rothchild, producer of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s first album and of the first five albums by The Doors, recalled a sense of elation that an American musician had made a record that successfully challenged the primacy of the British invasion groups. “ What I realized when I was sitting there is that one of US—one of the so-called Village hipsters—was making music that could compete with THEM—the Beatles, and the Stones, and the Dave Clark Five—without sacrificing any of the integrity of folk music or the power of rock’n’roll.”^[58]

Dylan's contemporaries in the musical world of 1965 were both startled and challenged by the single. Paul McCartney remembered going around to John Lennon's house in Weybridge to hear the song: "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.^[59] Frank Zappa had a more extreme reaction: "When I heard 'Like A Rolling Stone', I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else...' But it didn't do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have."^[59] Nearly forty years later, in 2003, Elvis Costello commented on the innovatory quality of the single. "What a shocking thing to live in a world where where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes "Like a Rolling Stone".^[60]

Although CBS tried to make the record more "radio friendly" by cutting the song in half and spreading it over both sides of the single, Dylan and his fans demanded that the six minute take should occupy the whole of one side of the single, and that the stations air the song in its entirety.^[61] The subsequent success of "Like a Rolling Stone" played a big part in changing the music business convention that a single had to be under three minutes in length. The surreal cast of characters and Dylan's verbal inventiveness also represented an innovation in Top 10 singles. In the words of Rolling Stone, "No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time."^[7]

More than 40 years since its release, "Like a Rolling Stone" remains highly regarded, as measured by polls of reviewers and fellow songwriters. A 2002 ranking by Uncut and a 2005 poll in Mojo both rated it Dylan's #1 song.^[62][63] As for his personal views on such polls, Dylan told Ed Bradley in a 2004 interview on 60 Minutes that he never pays attention to them, because they change frequently.^[64] Illustrating his point was the 100 Greatest Songs of All Time poll by Mojo in 2000, which included two Dylan singles, but not "Like a Rolling Stone". Five years later, the magazine named it his #1 song.^[65][63] On the other hand, Rolling Stone picked "Like a Rolling Stone" as the #2 single of the past 25 years in 1989^[66], and then upped its estimation a notch in 2004, declaring the song the #1 of all time.^[67].

Cover versions

	Jimi Hendrix's cover of Like a Rolling Stone
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Many artists have covered "Like a Rolling Stone", including Bob Marley & the Wailers, Johnny Thunders, The Four Seasons, The Rascals, Cher, Judy Collins, The Rolling Stones, Spirit, Anberlin, Johnny Winter and John Mellencamp.^[68][16] Jimi Hendrix recorded a live version at the Monterey Pop Festival.^[14][15] Hendrix was an avid fan of Bob Dylan, and especially liked "Like a Rolling Stone." "It made me feel that I wasn't the only one who'd ever felt so low..." Hendrix said.^[69] After the second verse, Hendrix skipped to the fourth. Hendrix played the electric guitar, and music critic Greil Marcus described the atmosphere of the Hendrix recording thus:

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.”^[70]

The song has also been covered in various languages. Lars Winnerbäck did a performance of the song in Swedish titled "Som en hemlös själ", literally "Like a Homeless Soul".^[71] Articolo 31 registered an Italian version titled "Come una Pietra Scalciata" (literally, "Like a Kicked-off Stone") in their 1998 album Nessuno.^[72] Articolo 31's version is a hip-hop song which contains overdubs of a confused girl's voice, rapped parts by J-Ax (Articolo 31's rapper) and DJing by DJ Jad (the same band's DJ). This version contains only three of the verses and is only four and a half minutes long.^[73] Also, Russian punk band Гражданская оборона (meaning "Civil Defence") has a song named "Take the Overcoat" ("Бери шинель") on their album Russian field of experiments (Русское поле экпериментов), which resamples "Like a Rolling Stone", and the phrase is sung in the final part.^[74]

Charts

Notes

References

• Creswell, Toby (2006). 1001 Songs: The Great Songs of All Time and the Artists, Stories and Secrets Behind Them. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 1560259159. 
• Gill, Andy (1998). Classic Bob Dylan 1962-69: My Back Pages. London: Carlton. ISBN 978-1858684819. 
• Heylin, Clinton (2003). Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0060525699. http://books.google.com/books?id=T8cp7NvcGxoC. 
• Heylin, Clinton (2009). Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957–1973. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. ISBN 978-1-55652-843-9. 
• Irwin, Colin (2008). Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited. New York. ISBN 978-0-8230-8398-5. 
• Krogsgaard, Michael (1991). Positively Bob Dylan. Ann Arbor: Popular Culture, Ink. ISBN 1-56075-000-6. 
• Lawrence, Sharon (2005). Jimi Hendrix: The Man, the Magic, the Truth. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 0060562994. http://books.google.com/books?id=Khup-WxIwg0C. 
• Marcus, Greil (2006). Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 978-1586483821. http://books.google.com/books?id=MSfa_mwdnXwC&dq=greil+marcus+like+a+rolling+stone&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=zXYQSpThIoOItge-o9iCCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5. 
• Marqusee, Mike (2003). Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art. New York: The New Press. ISBN 978-1565848252. 
• Marsh, Dave (1999). The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 030680901X. http://books.google.com/books?id=OGNPTZplEvQC. 
• McGregor, Craig (1972). Bob Dylan: A Retrospective. New York: William Morrow & Co.. ISBN 0688060250. 
• Plimpton, George (1982). Edie: An American Biography. New York: Knopf. ISBN 978-0394488196. 
• Shelton, Robert (1986). No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. New York: Ballantine. ISBN 978-0345347213. http://books.google.com/books?id=34KWSYgateQC. .
• Sounes, Howard (2001). Down the Highway, The Life of Bob Dylan. London: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0552999298. http://books.google.com/books?id=oapENIP_0GwC. 
• Trager, Oliver (2004). Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. New York: Billboard Books. ISBN 0-8230-7974-0. 
• Williams, Paul (1990). Bob Dylan: Performing Artist The Early Years 1960–1973. Lancaster: Underwood-Miller. ISBN 0-88733-131-9. 
• Williamson, Nigel (2006). Bob Dylan: The Rough Guide (2nd edition ed.). New York: Rough Guides, Ltd.. ISBN 978-1-84353-718-2. 

External links

• Lyrics, from bobdylan.com
• Audio sample, from bobdylan.com
• Vocal performance and speech intonation by Michael Daley, York University, Toronto