Like A Rolling Stone part 3: It was just a riff really

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 3

by Jochen Markhorst

Previously in this series

Part 1: The Rumpelstilskin tantrum
Part 2: It all just about got to be too much

III It was just a riff really

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

“Man, I steal, I steal.” A relaxed John Hiatt laughs and smiles brightly, when in the 1980s a Dutch interviewer asks him about his sources of inspiration. “Wait. I’ll show you,” Hiatt says. He grabs the guitar lying next to him on the couch, plays the chords of the over-familiar opening riff of “Smoke On The Water”, then looks at the interviewer with a leering grin as he continues to play the same chords and the same riff, but now with a swing – and suddenly we hear “I Don’t Even Try”, the opening of Hiatt’s recent album, his first masterpiece Riding With The King (1983).

Unintentionally, Hiatt draws an amusing parallel here with the record that started it all for him, Highway 61 Revisited. As a kid, he is initially only a fascinated radio listener. “You know, The Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin and The Monkees and 1910 Fruitgum Company,” but then, when little Johnny has just turned 13, the earthquake Highway 61 Revisited takes place.

He immediately wants to learn to play guitar, feels inspired to follow the trail back from H61 to antique folk and country blues and “I started piecing together songs from the moment I knew two chords.” Which he manages quite well, as we all know. John develops into an excellent songwriter of Olympic stature, enriching us with such gems as Bring The Family (1987), Slow Turning (1988) and Leftover Feelings (2021) and becoming a song supplier for the premier division (Bob Seger, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Joe Cocker) and even the division above that, the stratosphere; the gods play his songs too. Eric Clapton and B.B. King, for instance, and Willie Nelson. And Bob Dylan, of course (“The Usual”, 1986).

Great minds think alike, we then see when we juxtapose Hiatt’s amusing “Smoke On The Water” anecdote with an outpouring of Dylan in those same 1980s. On 17 June 1985, Dylan is a guest on Bob Coburn’s Hollywood radio programme, Rockline.

This is the first time in 20 years that Dylan has lent himself to such a chat show, a talk show where listeners can dial in and ask questions (the previous one was the Bob Fass Show in January 1966, on WBAI-FM – apparently Dylan prefers Bob’s). Overly spectacular this 1985 show is not, but entertaining enough. Coburn is a competent DJ, keeping the conversation lively and giving plenty of space: as many as 23 listeners get the chance to ask questions. For the majority of questions, however, Dylan is as he usually is: vague and evasive. Q: “Is Egyptian mythology behind the song Isis, since Isis is an Egyptian goddess?” A: “[Laughs] I guess so.” One of the exceptions is Caller 17, Tommy from Virginia:

C17: “I was just wondering what inspired you to write the song Like A Rolling Stone.”
Pause
Coburn: “Do you remember the inspiration for that?”
Dylan: “Well, it was just a riff really. It was like the, you know, the La Bamba riff. I just…”
Coburn: “You mean Richie Valens.”
Dylan: “Yeah. I was just fooling with that, I think.”

Alright, Dylan ignores the fact that the questioner is most likely far more curious about the lyrics than the accompanying music, and then limits his answer to the memory, to some sort of anecdote revealing from where only the chorus sprung. At any rate, the refrain does indeed have the same, bog-standard I-IV-V progression that we know from every traditional blues and have been playing since Bach (Das wohltemperierte Klavier, 2. Teil, Prelude in C-Dur, c. 1740), and Bach hadn’t come up with it himself either. In the centuries since, it has been the most popular structure; apart from the blues, there must be thousands of folk and pop songs alone in the guitar- and piano-friendly C-F-G variation of the I-IV-V progression. “Twist And Shout”, “Honky Tonk Women”, “The Joker”, “Every Grain Of Sand”, “Pretty Flamingo”… ad infinitum. Still, Dylan’s association with precisely Richie Valens’ “La Bamba”, of all songs, is understandable:

C F G C F G
Para bailar la Bamba How does it feel

C F G C F G
Para bailar la Bamba se necesita, How does it feel

C F G C F G
na poca de gracia To be without a home

C F G C F G
Una poca de gracia pa mi pa ti y, Like a complete unknown

C F G C F G
arriba arriba Like a rolling stone?

The structure in which the C is set like a hammer blow on the last word of the verse line, the F and the G to bridge the pauses between the words to the next verse line… indeed, it is conceivable that Dylan, like Hiatt with “Smoke On The Water”, is just fooling around with “La Bamba”, playfully pulling the groove of the over-familiar riff a little tighter, et voilà – Bob’s your uncle.

The musical foundation of the legendary chorus is, of course, not the epicentre of the earthquake. The magnitude of “Like A Rolling Stone” is first and foremost the sum of urbane poetry plus the mercurial sound plus the perfect evocation of viciousness generated by the symbiosis of music and lyrics in the verse.

The musical foundation of the verse is a lot more unusual than that of the chorus. Dylan has the brilliant inspiration to choose an ascending staircase for the words with which he kicks down in his revenge fantasy: G – Am – Bm – C – D, so neatly ascending stepwise, and even with mathematical precision the first five steps of the Ionic scale G major, as the music professor would add (I-ii-iii-IV-V). Very unusual. Sure, we do know some songs with the first four steps – “Here, There And Everywhere”, “Boys Don’t Cry”, “Uptown Girl” – but they all take a different turn after step four. Then again, the bridge in Dylan’s own “Mississippi” is an original variation where the bass climbs the entire scale step by step, all eight steps:

G /a /b /c
Got nothing for you, I had nothing before

/d /e F G
Don’t even have anything for myself anymore

But there is hardly any “Rolling Stone variation”, where the chords take the first five steps in a row. The bridge of The Doors’ underappreciated “Hyacinth House” (under I see the bathroom is clear) comes very close – there are not many more examples.

It is a beautiful find to use the five-step ascension to musically represent rage. The rise depicts something like bitterness – cynicism – contempt – anger – fury, ascending stages of ire. Dylan’s fellow Nobel Prize winner (1912) Gerhart Hauptmann had the same idea, 77 years earlier. The protagonist of Bahnwärter Thiel (1888) has lost his wife at the birth of their infant son. His second wife treats that child, her stepson, badly, especially after the birth of her own child. One day, Thiel accidentally witnesses how viciously his wife treats the little boy:

“Phew, phew, phew!” it sounded again; you could hear someone spitting out the three words with every sign of anger and contempt.
“You wretched, vile, backstabbing, sneaky, cowardly, mean-spirited lout!” The words followed each other with ascending emphasis and the voice uttering them turned into shrieking. “Hitting my little boy, eh? You have the nerve to slap that poor, helpless child on the mouth? – Eh? – Eh? – I just don’t want to get dirty, otherwise – …“
At that moment, Thiel opened the door to the living room, leaving the end of the sentence stuck in the startled woman’s throat. She was chalk-white with rage; her lips twitched diabolically; she had raised her right hand.

“Die Worte folgten einander in steigender Betonung, the words followed each other with ascending emphasis,” until her voice starts shrieking… if Dylan ever decides to turn Bahnwärter Thiel into an opera, we already know what kind of music he’ll put under this passage. He’ll play the Like A Rolling Stone riff, and then starts just fooling with that.

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 4: You’ll curse the day you started goin’ down that lost highway – 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:

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