About The Song
On June 16, 1965, on their second day of recording at Columbia Records’ Studio A in Manhattan, folk rock singer Bob Dylan, along with a band featuring electric guitars and an organ, laid down the master take of “Like A Rolling Stone.” It would prove to be Dylan’s magnum opus and, arguably, one of the greatest rock and roll records of all time.
By the spring of 1965, Bob Dylan’s presence in the world of music was beginning to be felt well outside the boundaries of his nominal genre. Within the world of folk music, he had been hailed as a hero for several years already, but now his music was capturing the attention and influencing the direction of artists like the Byrds, the Beatles and even a young Stevie Wonder. With Dylan as a direct inspiration, popular music was about to change its direction, but so was Dylan himself. “Like A Rolling Stone” announced that change.
It was the fourth of 11 takes that day that yielded the six-minute-and-34-second recording that very nearly didn’t become a revolutionary hit single. Returning to the CBS studios to hear “Like A Rolling Stone” several days after the recording session, Dylan and manager Albert Grossman were thrilled by what they heard, but the sales and marketing staff of Columbia Records—the gatekeepers who decided what songs would and wouldn’t be released as singles—did not agree. At 6:34, “Like A Rolling Stone” was nearly twice as long as the average single, and its raw rock sound was way outside the comfort zone of a label best known for artists like Andy Williams and Johnny Mathis.
As Shaun Considine, the coordinator of new releases for Columbia Records at the time, recounted 40 year later in a New York Times Op-ed, Dylan’s magnum opus was rejected as a single and resurrected only after Considine slipped a studio acetate to a DJ at a prominent Manhattan nightclub in mid-July. Two well-known radio DJs in the audience heard “Like A Rolling Stone”—and the overwhelming crowd reaction to it that night—and called Columbia the next day, demanding their copies of “the new Bob Dylan single.” Sales and marketing got its last dig in by chopping “Like A Rolling Stone” in half and putting it on separate sides of a 45, but a re-spliced full version was what radio stations played and what climbed very nearly to the top of the Billboard pop charts. (It peaked at #2 in the week of September 4, 1965, blocked from the #1 spot by the Beatles’ “Help.”)
The most important impact of “Like A Rolling Stone” was not commercial but creative. As Rolling Stone magazine wrote in 2004 in naming it the greatest song of all time, Dylan “transformed popular song with the content and ambition of ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’” Or as Bruce Springsteen said of the first time he heard it, “[it] sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind.”
Video
Lyrics
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People call say ‘beware doll, you’re bound to fall’
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal
How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone
Ahh you’ve gone to the finest schools, alright Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
Nobody’s ever taught you how to live out on the street
And now you’re gonna have to get used to it
You say you never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He’s not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say do you want to make a deal?
How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
A complete unknown, like a rolling stone
Ah you never turned around to see the frowns
On the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain’t no good
You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you
You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain’t it hard when you discovered that
He really wasn’t where it’s at
After he took from you everything he could steal
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
Ahh princess on a steeple and all the pretty people
They’re all drinking, thinking that they’ve got it made
Exchanging all precious gifts
But you better take your diamond ring, you better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal
How does it feel, ah how does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone
Anyone with an appreciation of poetry was/is ‘hooked’ by this Lyric. Dylan’s precise enunciation sends the ‘communication’ effectively to be ‘received’, thereby qualifying as a ‘communication’, from the Latin root, ‘com’, meaning ‘with’.
The hard rhyme and Structure thereof, ‘time, fine, dime, prime’ and then the Singer-Character’s question of the Love-Interest Character, ‘Didn’t you?’ Repeats in the next long Line, ‘call, doll, fall, all’ and ‘kiddin’ you’, has by that time piqued your interest. The ‘Hook Factor’ of Lyrical, poetic imagination enters the ears and must be processed by the listening mind. You are paying attention, wondering to know, wanting to know, where the Singer Character will go next.
Remember the context of the times, the ‘mix’ of what our little amplitude modulation (AM) radios offered, when suddenly there was this.
The Melody ‘Changes’ a bit at this point; Repetition and Change, supplying Structure the listener can follow, Change interrupting Monotony. (One tone).
The four-Line Rhyme Scheme Repeats, ‘about, out, loud, proud,’ followed by the Pre-Chorus ‘Lift’, the vivid concept of the Lyric, ‘scrounging your next meal’, that Dylanesque sustained Note on ‘meal’, signaling arrival of the main idea, the Title Line.
Check the timing; how long did it take the Singer-Character to get to that point of asking the Title question?
Was it too soon? Too late? Or right on time?
The Structure varies in succeeding Verses but continues vivid poetry, Hard Rhyme, Rhythm, Hook Factor in various forms, Lyrical, Melodic, concepts and characters, eves-dropping on the ‘conversation’ between two Characters, and leading back to the Chorus Repeat.
Verse III, Verse IV, and the Hook-Factor elements continue to hold your attention.
Radio likes short Songs; they leave more time for commercial advertising that pays the bills.
But Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” was irresistable, to the Leadership Decision-Makers in the industry, and to the listeners ‘Hooked’ like fish, unable to look…or listen…away…unable to drift off to their own thoughts while the Singer-Character was ‘communicating’ with the Love-Interest Character, this ‘Miss Lonely’ and her pecadillos of lifestyle, in a time of lifestyle revolution, when millions of Citizens, worldwide, were questioning the old order of things and trying to figure out how to live by their own choices in a new world, a world where Leadership Decision-Makers in Government running a life-threatening war could reach and snatch an American teenager out of his ‘own’ life and make him live…and die…in theirs.
Where females were ‘liberating’ themselves from the history of male domination, patriarchy, political marginalizing, religious dogma, to make choices of their own, even those going to the finest schools, and those getting juiced.
Not all of it is political or revolutionary, but simply poetic, visionary, imaginative; and it worked, it Hooked, and it sold, and Dylan went on to enunciate to any and all who will listen.
I had the experience of buying fifteen Dylan albums, listening to three each night, for five consecutive days. I got the depth and breadth of a great poet, born in the twentieth century, in a land called America, where freedom and innovation were tumultuous, exciting, inspiring. I raise my glass, to Robert Zimmerman, Bob Dylan, and music and poetry that are “Like A Rolling Stone”.
Thank you Gary E. Andrew’s for sharing your thoughts, feelings and ideas of a so song so fundamental then, and that has endured the test of time. You friend, got it right.
Probably one of the most prolific and accomplished song writers of this age. Truth be told..I never liked his voice timbre..It felt manufactured, sounded thin and unreal…sorry but 60 years of Dylan never attracted me. Yeah..I’m nuts but..