The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

June 14, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Soundtrack Of Our Lives 

The Soundtrack of Our Lives looks back at some of the music that was popular, and the performers who were influential, around the time, forty years ago in 1969, when Richard Nixon became POTUS.

LIKE A ROLLING STONE by BOB DYLAN

Rolling Stone chose Bob Dylan’s 1965 “Like a Rolling Stone” for the Number One position on its 2004 list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Even allowing for the obvious affinity (the magazine was named after the song); and for the fact that many of the journal’s founding fathers (now founding geezers) were cutting their rock teeth at exactly the time the song was released and had felt —as Bruce Springsteen described the first time he heard it— “like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind”; and taking into consideration that Dylan has enjoyed all but mythic status for going on four decades —- even allowing for all these factors, there is a strong objective case to be made for  ”Like a Rolling Stone’s” legitimate preeminence among rock songs.  (As a superannuated geezer I would hold out for some standard like “Stardust” as the all-time all-purpose numero uno.)

As RS sees it:

“I wrote it. I didn’t fail. It was straight,” Bob Dylan said of his greatest song shortly after he wrote and recorded it in June 1965. There is no better description of “Like a Rolling Stone” — of its revolutionary design and execution — or of the young man, just turned twenty-four, who created it.

To this day, the most stunning thing about “Like a Rolling Stone” is the abundance of precedent: the impressionist voltage of Dylan’s language, the intensely personal accusation in his voice (“Ho-o-o-ow does it fe-e-e-el?”), 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.

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’ ’s the best song I wrote,” he said flatly at the end of 1965. It still is.

Recorded over two days without any sheet music, the song was, literally and figuratively, a work in progress. After the fourth take on the second day, producer Tom Wilson said: “That sounds good to me,” and that was the version released a month later.

“Like a Rolling Stone” was released as a 45-rpm single (which reached Number Two on Billboard’s Hot 100), and was the first track on Dylan’s 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited.

Cover art for Highway 61 Revisited: the photograph of Bob Dylan was by Daniel Kramer.  Highway 61 ran down and out — from the Canadian border through Dylan’s home town of Duluth to the stretch between New Orleans to Memphis that was known as the “Blues Highway”.

If you were around at the time, it really was something new and exciting under the sun.  As British musician and writer Mick Farren said, “Like a Rolling Stone” had “a song structure and rhyme pattern that boldly went where no other rock tune had gone before and imagery that touched the imagination of every teenage malcontent in the western hemisphere.”

And even today, with the bloom of youth long past, and when its familiarity and widespread influence has all but made it part of The Muzak Of Our Lives, if you give the song a chance, its impact is scarcely diminished.  As singer-songwriter Grant-Lee Philips put it, ”It’s the song I’d play for an alien who had just landed, asking to be taken to our songwriting leader.”

If you can carve 6:14 out of your day, give yourself over to the accumulating propulsive power of the words and the music and the hortatory and hypnotic quality of Dylan’s delivery.  And allow your heartbeat to pace itself to the sinuous flow of Al Kooper’s fortuitous organ riff (the twenty-one year old guitarist had come to observe the session and his break-time noodling ended up as the song’s basic signature).  Give it a chance, and  ”Like A Rolling Stone” 2009 can have some of the same impact as “Like A Rolling Stone” 1965.

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People’d call, say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall”
You thought they were all kiddin’ you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin’ out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you’re gonna have to get used to it
You said you’d 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 ask him do you want to make a deal?

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?

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and 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 the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain’t it hard when you discover 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?

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They’re drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you’d better lift your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

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?

The song began life buried in twenty pages of verse possibly based on a relationship with Edie Sedgwick — the poor little rich girl whose nostalgie de la boue led to a short and tragic life that also fascinated the likes of Andy Warhol and George Plimpton. From that point of view, the lyrics can be read as a classic narrative of a lost soul’s downward spiral.  Dylan later said that this experience of distilling a song from his unfocused prose was what tipped the balance for him between writing and songwriting.

The first verses were composed on an upright piano at his home in Woodstock, New York.  As with “Blowin’ in the Wind” —with a melody built on the slave song “No More Auction Block,” “Like a Rolling Stone” owed a lyrical tip o’ the cap to Hank Williams’ song “Lost Highway,” which was also part of Dylan’s traditional repertoire.

“Like a Rolling Stone” was recorded on 14-15 June.  The single was released on 15 July; and the album Highway 61 Revisited was released on 30 August 1965.  Its first public performance was on 25 July.  That was when Dylan stepped on stage at the Newport Folk Festival and, greeted by boos and catcalls, introduced “Like a Rolling Stone” as the second of three songs in his first electric set.

I had the opportunity to meet Bob Dylan and experience “Like a Rolling Stone” (or at least what passed for a facsimile of it) at first hand when I worked for Late Night with David Letterman.  The tenth anniversary show was broadcast in prime time from Radio City Music Hall on 6 February 1992.  The Rockettes danced Dave on stage. (In light of current events, it’s perhaps notable that among the jokes in his opening monolog was: “Here’s good news. We’re a month into 1992 and so far no Kennedys have been arrested.”)

Paul Shaffer had assembled an incredible Super Band for the evening. In addition to the Will Lee, Syd McGuinness, and Anton Figg, there were Carole King on keyboard, guitarists Steve Vai and Chrissie Hynde, and an augmented horn section.  The backup singers (backup singers!) were Roseanne Cash, Nanci Griffith, Emmylou Harris, Michelle Shocked, and Mavis Staples.  And the musical guest was Bob Dylan.

Booking Dylan —at Dave’s request— was considered a coup. And the notion of him singing  all six minutes of  ”Like a Rolling Stone” with that band in that place on that show seemed to have the makings of TV history.

Hunkered down: Bob Dylan in the studio during the recording of “Like a Rolling Stone” in June 1965.

Among my assignments was dealing with the musicians, and long after everyone else had arrived and been led through the labyrinthine backstage to their dressing rooms, Dylan was nowhere in sight. Finally, when concern was beginning to segue into worry (with outright panic just around the corner), someone pointed to a slight figure —wearing blue jeans and a sweat shirt with the hood pulled over his head— hunkered down next to one of the stage entrances.

To the extent that I had noticed him before, I had assumed it was one of the stage hands or animal wranglers (later in the show border collies shepherded  a herd of sheep across the stage, through the aisles, and into cabs on Sixth Avenue). When I walked over and hunkered down opposite him, a familiar face greeted me from under the hood. He couldn’t have been nicer  or more cooperative.  He said that he had no need to go to his dressing room, and had just been waiting for the rehearsal and sound check to begin.

The rehearsal was really just a low-key run through, so the fact that the famous melody made no appearance didn’t seem particularly ominous. By this time it was well known that, at many Dylan performances, any reproduction of the original song might be purely coincidental.  But it had been assumed that the spectacular nature and clear intention behind this 10th Anniversary show rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone” would require —and therefore  inspire— at least some fidelity to the classic original.

Both the afternoon dress rehearsal and the early evening show-for-air were taped. There was a wake-like aspect to the post-dress production meeting, as the realization dawned  that, during the air show, Dylan might once again —as he had just done in the dress— turn in a performance that  essentially amounted to six minutes and eleven seconds of unintelligibly mumbled words delivered in what might optimistically be considered a monotone.

Which is exactly what happened.  The result —the seemingly interminable result— was like some ghastly karaoke, costing millions of dollars a minute, gone hopelessly awry.  Looking at it today I can laugh —in fact, a couple of times, out loud— at the sheer shambles of it.   But at the time, and at the subdued after party, it seemed like the end of civilization as we knew it.

Rolling Stone had the first word; and now it has the last:

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’ ’s the best song I wrote,” he said flatly at the end of 1965. It still is.

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