Like A Rolling Stone part 2 “It all just about got to be too much”

by Jochen Markhorst

II “It all just about got to be too much”

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

With “The first two lines which rhymed “kiddin’ you” with “didn’t you” just about knocked me out,” the now over-familiar quote with which he atypically pats himself on the back, Dylan looks back in 1988 at No 2 on Rolling Stone’s The 100 Best Singles of The Last Twenty-Five Years (No 1 is “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”). Understandable; the lyrics of “Like A Rolling Stone” are an early highlight of Dylan’s songwriting in his mercurial years – lyrics that are a mountain range of exclusively eight-thousanders anyway.

Dylan’s pride is a testament to his preoccupation with sound, with the euphony of his lyrics. Insightfully articulated by Dylan himself in one of the very most fascinating interviews with him, in the Ron Rosenbaum interview in November 1977:

“It’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it. They— they— punctuate it. You know, they give it purpose.”

A love of sound that sometimes overshadows or even trumps the content, but in Nobel Prize-worthy cases the lyrics strike the Holy Trinity of rhyme, rhythm and reason. In the early years, we actually see this love of how things sound more in his weak-spot for alliteration, inner rhyme and assonance. Verse fragments like misty mountains, seven sad forests, a dozen dead oceans and none is the number (“Hard Rain”), for instance. Or verse lines like The breeze will cease to be breathin‘ (“When The Ship Comes In”) and It’s all just a dream, babe / A vacuum, a scheme, babe (“To Ramona”), word combinations that already sing even if you just read them off paper in your head.

But roughly from “Mr Tambourine Man” onwards (originated in early 1964), we see an increasing fondness for rhyme, for finding frenzied rhymes and more complex rhyme schemes. And especially for the tail rhyme (or chain rhyme), for aaab-cccb, the medieval rhyme form that is rather unusual in popular music. In “Mr Tambourine Man” six times in the four stanzas, where – as usual in official publications of Dylan’s lyrics – the formatting hides the form, in this case the tail rhyme . In Lyrics, we see on paper:

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming

… but of course we hear aaab-cccb:

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand
but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s
too dead for dreaming

Tighter still, he then squeezes the monumental “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” into one of those tail rhyme corsets, albeit with a slight deviation (aaaaab-ccccb, alternating with aaaaab-ccb, so with varying amounts of a’s and c’s).

Franz Nicolay – It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding):

And after Bringing It All Back Home, then, when he writes the songs for the follow-up Highway 61 Revisited, he is definitively hooked on the tail rhyme: up to and including the closing hurrah of the Quicksilver Trilogy, Blonde On Blonde, Dylan seeks and finds most ferocious rhymes to keep his lyrics in that straitjacket. With the culmination in that category being “I Want You”, in which he crafts furious, Cole Porter-like enjambments to stick to the tail rhyme aaab-cccb ;

The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say I s-
-hould refuse you
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn
But it’s not that way I wasn’t born
to lose you

Technically “clean” rhyme perfection Dylan then achieves with the lyric he writes after “Like A Rolling Stone”: “Tombstone Blues”. Twelve stanzas that are not only audibly but also graphically, on paper, unwaveringly cast in that scheme. Frenzies, pure and wild rhyming pleasure we see there mainly in the c’s. Nervous/commerce, boys-in/poison, sick-in/chicken, jungle/uncle, laughter/after… one rhyme finding more eccentric than the other. “Is rhyming fun for you?” Paul Zollo asks in the 1991 SongTalk interview.

“It’s more like, it’s mentally… mentally… it gives you a thrill. It gives you a thrill to rhyme something you might think, well, that’s never been rhymed before.”

… and a moment later Dylan explains that he then indeed works ‘backwards’: “You get the rhymes first and work back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way.”

“Making sense” at least still works just fine in the first lines of “Like A Rolling Stone”, where it seems as if Dylan more or less accidentally ends up with an aaaab-ccccb tail rhyme while rhyming internally:

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

… more or less by accident, because in the rest of the lyrics he allows himself minor deviations – a preconceived intention to write lyrics in tail rhyme it does not seem to be. Apparently, Dylan finds it more important to insert more sense-making qualifiers like “Miss Lonely” and vile one-liners like They’re drinkin‘, thinkin’ that they got it made than to keep the rhyme scheme at all costs. But the temptation is there, and the rest of the quote from Paul Zollo’s 1991 interview suggests that Dylan succumbs to that temptation more often than not:

“… and later on, when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much.”

Referring to couplets like

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

… from which the coherence, as we still have in the first verse, slowly evaporates in favour of the thrill to rhyme something you might think, well, that’s never been rhymed before.

John Mayer – Like A Rolling Stone:

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 3: It was just a riff really

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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:

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