Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 1: The Rumpelstilskin tantrum

Uncategorized

 

by Jochen Markhorst

I           The Rumpelstilskin tantrum

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

Since its first publication in Egypt in 1917, the Jewish Heine’s work has been rippling through the Arab world; in 2015, for instance, an umpteenth translation of his work is published in Kuwait. Japan is sold on Heine way earlier; the first translations appear there in 1854, and his greatest hit is still being sung today. The Lorelei Fountain (aka Heinrich Heine Memorial) has stood in The Bronx since 1899. With interruptions and relocations admittedly (it is New York’s “statue most affected by vandalism and destruction”), but still, it is a further demonstration of the global impact of Heinrich Heine’s own “Like A Rolling Stone”, the indestructible world hit “Lied von der Lorelei” (Song of the Lorelei, 1824), the ballad that tells the story of the fair nymph along the Rhine who lures boatmen onto the cliffs with her wondrous singing. Essentially a Germanic variation on the age-old story of Odysseus and the Sirens, then, but biographers prefer to think that with this ballad, Heine processes the so-called “Amalien-Erlebnis”, the “Amelie-Incident”, the rejection he suffered. The young Heinrich is immortally in love with his niece Amalie Friedländer and sings her his love in sweet poems. And she, she ruthlessly ridicules his poems, and his infatuation, for that matter.

Heino – Die Lorelei (Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten):

“On April 26 God Himself checked into the Savoy Hotel,” writes Marianne Faithfull in Faithfull; An Autobiography (1994), referring to Bob Dylan, who takes up residence there on 26 April 1965. The London hotel on the Thames will be Dylan’s base of operations for the next five weeks, the entire month of May that is, for the England tour that will conclude at the Royal Albert Hall, an hour’s walk from the hotel. We know the footage from the documentary Dont Look Back (1967), the chaotic, overcrowded hotel room, the alley behind the hotel where the music video avant-la-lettre “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is shot, Joan Baez, Donovan and all those others. Fascinating, revealing images – yet still somewhat clinical without the filleting knife, self-mockery and superior irony of Faithfull’s descriptions of that unreal circus. Or the casual cruelty, a quality Faithfull charmingly camouflages by portraying herself throughout as a silly wench. The flowery condescension with which she introduces Donovan, for example:

“This little curly head peeps in and then three or four others, beards and long hair and sheepskin jackets; Donovan’s entourage. A very earnest bunch. Donovan came in, glowing. He was just such a sweet little person, very elfin and jolly. Not a bit like Bob.”

… from Chapter 3, with the wonderfully chosen title What’s a Sweetheart Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

In that same chapter, the Dylan analyst finds a promising clue to locate the genesis of “Like A Rolling Stone”. Faithfull recounts how, paralysed by the fear of making a fool of herself, she spends her days at the hotel mostly curled up in a recliner in a corner of Dylan’s hotel room, but apparently still (or precisely because of it) manages to pique the interest of “the hippest person on earth”.

Which does not end well, if Marianne’s amusing reconstruction is to be believed. She inspires him, she is told;

“For days I had been told that Bob “was working on something.” I asked what (I was meant to ask). “It’s a poem. An epic! About you.” Why bless his heart, I thought, he’s hung up too! But you don’t ever quite know with Bob; he wears his heart very close to his vest. No one was ever such a seducer as Dylan.”

And then shortly after, the nightly session takes place in which La Faithfull and Dylan are finally alone together in a room. The neurotic, incomprehensible Dylan plays DJ, puts his own Bringing It All Back Home on the turntable, looks piercingly at Marianne, repeats verse lines with meaningful intonation and wants to know from poor Marianne Didja unnerstan what I was gettin’ at? Didja know what that was all about, to which, of course, she doesn’t know much to say. Above all, she is hugely intimidated and afraid of saying something wrong – and meanwhile apparently completely misses the advances made by “the gangling Rimbaud of rock”. At least according to her, Dylan is suddenly “cross and rejected”, accuses her of leading him on, and finally explodes when Marianne says in her defence that she is pregnant, and getting married soon:

“Without warning he turned into Rumpelstiltskin. He went over to the typewriter, took a sheaf of papers and began ripping them up into smaller and smaller pieces, after which he let them fall into the wastepaper basket.”

That, Marianne suspects, was that mythical poem about her, the “epic”.

 

There were five hundred days between the first day of recording Bringing It All Back Home on 13 January 1965, and the performance at the Royal Albert Hall on 27 May 1966, the last performance before the legendary motorbike accident and subsequent withdrawal from public life. Five hundred pretty busy days:

– recordings Bringing It All Back Home (13, 14, 15 January ‘65);

– a dozen concerts until 26 April;

– from 26 April to 1 June tour of England;

– from 15 June to 4 August recordings Highway 61 Revisited;

– in between the glorious electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival, 25 July;

– from 28 August to 28 November tour of North America with The Hawks, 26 concerts, from New York to Austin, from Newark to Ontario, from Los Angeles to Washington D.C.;

– in between starting Blonde On Blonde already. Recording resumed on 30 November, followed by further touring from 3 December to 19 December, through California;

– until 10 March 1966 recordings for Blonde On Blonde, interrupted by five performances;

– from 26 March world tour: Canada, Australia, Europe, concluding on 27 May 1966 with the performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London;

… the five hundred mercurial days. By itself, the “Rumpelstilskin tantrum” is a rather silly, petty and insignificant interlude in that raging vortex that is Dylan’s life in these 500 mercurial days. But music-historical weight is given to the (supposedly) torn poem when we look at the timeline and listen to Dylan’s explanations about the origins of “Like A Rolling Stone”.

We owe an initial public statement to a Canadian journalist, in a radio interview, 20 February 1966 in Montreal, in which Dylan reveals the anomalous genesis. “I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit about twenty pages long, and out of it I took Like A Rolling Stone.” When Jules Siegel interviews him a month later in Los Angeles, he repeats it in much the same words:

“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.”

… where the “vomited hatred” has already been reduced to ten pages. And when Robert Shelton asks about it, it has become even less:

“Like a Rolling Stone, man, was very vomitific in its structure. It seemed like twenty pages, but it was really six. You know how you get sometimes.”
(No Direction Home, Ch. 8)

Like a Rolling Stone (Takes 1-3, Rehearsal):

The “Rumpelstiltskin incident” was sometime in May 1965, and the first take of “Like A Rolling Stone” is recorded during the first Highway 61-session, 15 June 1965. That timeline, Faithfull’s recollections, Dylan’s outpourings, and Marianne’s striking similarities to the “Miss Lonely” who attended the “finest schools” and “dresses so fine”, and Dylan’s riled-up, somewhat unstable state of being in the whirlpool of the Five Hundred Days… it is a confluence that almost inevitably must lead to a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred, to an adolescent revenge fantasy about the downfall of a nymph who has so cruelly rejected him.

Which would make the genesis of Dylan’s very own “Lied von der Lorelei” identical to Heine’s – the Marianne-Erlebnis, so to speak.

 

Continuation: Like A Rolling Stone part 2 “It all just about got to be too much” – Untold Dylan

———————-

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

2 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *