“I wrote it. I didn’t fail. It was straight,” said Bob Dylan about his masterpiece shortly after it was created in June 1965. There is no better way to describe this song – its groundbreaking conception and realization – and its creator, who was only 24 years old. Al Kooper, who played the organ during the recording session, recalls, “There were no sheet music, it was all by ear. And completely disorganized – that was pure punk. It just happened.”
It is still impressive today what a precedent “Like A Rolling Stone” is – in every respect: Dylan’s impressionistically charged language, the very personal accusation in his voice (“How does it fe-e-eel?”), Kooper’s downright apocalyptic vehement Garage gospel organ, Mike Bloomfield’s prickly guitar spirals, the uncompromising six-minute length of the master take from June 16, ’65 – hardly any other pop song has ever so massively torpedoed the prevailing commercial and artistic rules of its time and thrown them overboard forever. Dylan began writing a lengthy song-poem—20 pages long, some reports say, others say six pages—while touring England in May 1965 (immortalized for posterity in DA Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back) , which he said was “just a rhythmic thing on paper that was about my massive hatred and wanted to be as honest as possible”.
At home in Woodstock, New York, he channeled the rampant flow of syllables over three days of June into the belligerent chorus and four tight stanzas of wild metaphor and compelling truth. “The first two lines where ‘kiddin you’ rhymes with ‘didn’t you’ really blew me away,” he told ROLLING STONE in 1988, “and then later when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and The beginnings of “Like A Rolling Stone” – and how the song is rooted in Dylan’s earliest musical passions – are also found in two scenes from “Don’t Look Back”. .
In the first, his friend and tour manager Bob Neuwirth gets Dylan to sing a verse from Hank Williams’ “Lost Highway.” It begins with the lines: “I’m a rolling stone, I’m alone and lost/ For a life of sin I’ve paid the cost.” Later, Dylan sits at the piano and plays a chord progression that forms the basis of “Like A Rolling Stone” and anchored the song in classic rock ‘n’ roll architecture: Dylan later identified them as the chords from Richie Valens’ “La Bamba”. At the same time he was obsessively concerned with the drive of the arrangement. Before the sessions at Columbia Records’ New York studio, he called in Mike Bloomfield, guitarist for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, to learn the song.
“He said, ‘I don’t want you to play any of that BBKing shit, none of that fucking blues,'” Bloomfield later recounted (he died in 1981). “I want you to play something different.” Dylan later ordered the rest of the studio band, which included pianist Paul Griffin, bassist Russ Savakus and drummer Bobb Gregg, to do the same. “I told them how to play, and if they didn’t want to play like that, well, they couldn’t play with me.” Just as Bob Dylan had already stretched folk’s roots and forms to his will, so he transformed the pop song with the thematic content and formal ambition of “Like A Rolling Stone”.
And the rousing vocal performance – his best ever on record – definitively demonstrated that everything he did was rock ‘n’ roll first and foremost. “‘Rolling Stone’ is my best song,” Dylan said dryly in late 1965. That shouldn’t be a statement for eternity, but it’s true. Even today. Appeared on: “Highway 61 Revisited 1965”