'Like A Rolling Stone' redux

Deciphering Bob Dylan's all-time classic

In watching “A Complete Unknown” again on Saturday (and I have a feeling I’m not done), what struck me this time was how it actually felt to be Bob Dylan standing in front of that silver microphone in Columbia Studios on June 16, 1965, the day “Like A Rolling Stone” was actually recorded for all time and how he was ready to let it go!

There were so many other wonderful moments in that painstakingly constructed film but near the end, seeing Timothee Chalamet, Ray Bans on, guitar slung over his skinny shoulders, lift his voice up to that hungry microphone, a steely, shiny impassive face eager to hear something new and finally, here it was…when Chalamet/Dylan started to sing “Like A Rolling Stone…” Well, damn!

To me, that song, the ascending chords, the ebullient way everything in the room seems to be rising at the same time and here’s the 24-year-old Dylan, who has to know he’s on the verge of a whole new world, a different existence, a wider audience, he’s into something new, a land nobody has explored yet, pouring out everything he has into this vocal for all time, for all time!

Singing "Like A Rolling Stone" had to be a thrill for both Timothee and Uncle Bob. Sounded it, anyway.

You had to know everybody in that room, these old studio vets who’ve played a million songs for a million artists, felt the goosebumps, the hair go up on the back of their neck. Here’s this scrawny kid, just a few records under his belt, only one with a band, and here he is, running the show, giving directions, showing them how to play it and, then, when it counted, putting it all on the line, daring that microphone to capture it. There is no other way to hear that song or how Dylan sings it, if you ask me.

And whatever he brings to those the opening of those verses, “Once upon a time…” “You’ve gone to the finest schools…” “Princess on the steeple…” he’s just painting a world of people that he’s seeing through, in a way he never had, and surging forward, always forward, on and on, no matter the wreckage and what he leaves behind.

For the inescapable truth is when he sings, “How does it feel? How does it feel? To be without a home. Or “On your own?” Or “No direction home” Or “Like a complete unknown. Like a rolling stone” he’s actually singing about himself, how he feels and how he’ll have to feel to keep doing what he’s going to keep doing. setting a course for the next however many years ahead.

Deciphering the song, why it has the impact it does for us and for Bob, I’d always wondered. Of course, I loved it right away as did Bruce Springsteen and many others. But I’m not sure I really understood it the way I might have other Dylan songs. Then, I read an essay by Mark Ford, who taught English at University College in London, and he wrote an essay I found in a hard-to-find book of Dylan essays called “Do You, Mr. Jones; Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors.”

In “Trust Yourself: Emerson and Dylan.” Ford writes: “It might seem like he’s really going after Miss Lonely but on closer examination, he’s really, truly talking about himself! “Like A Rolling Stone” may have started out as a satirical description of the descent of an Edie Sedgewick-type poor little rich girl into despair and poverty, but its extraordinary charge derives from the extent to which, beneath its surface narrative, it seems to be a compulsive attempt to exorcise the speaker’s own deepest fears …despite its appearing initially to be a vituperative, lower-Manhattan, score-settling song like, say, “Positively Fourth Street,” it seems to be inspired – as much as Emerson’s “Nature” – by a kind of artistic exhilaration at the possibilities suddenly discovered within a seemingly exhausted genre.”

Now, this is EXACTLY how Dylan described how he felt after writing it, as if he didn’t have to write plays or novels or poems, he could write SONGS.

So Ford concludes “Paradoxically then, “Like A Rolling Stone” seems to condemn the very ideal of freedom which is in fact its own life blood. ‘Do I contradict myself?/Very well then…I contradict myself;/I am large…I contain multitudes.”

Note that Ford wrote this long before “Rough And Rowdy Ways’ opening track was even thought of. Did Bob read this?

Ford concludes: “Dylan seems to have felt that “Like A Rolling Stone” was the first song in which he fully staged the drama of his own self-divisions, and it is also the song which has become obviously the badge of his own commitment to the troubadour lifestyle he has led for most of the thirty-five years since he wrote it.”

It might seem hard to believe but Greil Marcus, dogged on the trail of Uncle Bob for years, actually did an entire book on this one song – “Like A Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan at the Crossroads” in 2005 for Public Affairs Books. In his Epilogue, he walks through every recorded take of the song; there were 24 more or less, not the kind of care we imagine Bob takes with his stuff as a general rule.

They started recording it on June 15 and did eight rehearsals/run-throughs. Dylan asks out of one “My voice is gone, man.”

They went back at it the next day, a Wednesday. And on the fourth take, they got it. However, they didn’t know they got it and tried 12 more takes, before realizing that Take Four was it. And you know what?

It was the ONLY TIME THEY MADE IT THROUGH THE WHOLE SONG.

You can hear all the takes, one right after the other, on Disc 3 of “Bob Dylan: 1965-1966 The Cutting Edge.” That’s been most of my morning and early afternoon. You can hear they had a heck of a time getting it right. The one time they did, it soars out of those speakers. Still.

In a little over a month, 39 days, he’ll be debuting this song at Newport on July 25, five days after the song had been released. “Like A Rolling Stone” reached No. 2 on the charts then, behind “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones who hit No. 1 on the 17^th. Bob, of course, got his first No. 1 with “Murder Most Foul” 55 years later on April 11, 2020.

As it turned out, “Rolling Stone” was on the charts for 12 weeks, the same as his “Lay Lady Lay” and “Gotta Serve Somebody.” According to what it says on the Internet, Bob Dylan has performed this song 2,075 times. The last time was on October 14, 2016 in Indio, California.

So was it the kind of thrill for Timothee Chalamet standing on a soundstage somewhere, pretending to be Bob Dylan on June 16, 1965 with the world not quite ready for what was going to come out of his mouth? Probably not. But I bet it was close.