Like A Rolling Stone part 4: You’ll curse the day you started goin’ down that lost highway

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by Jochen Markhorst

IV         You’ll curse the day you started goin’ down that lost highway

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

“Over with it,” commands Krazy Kat’s bully, the cruel mouse Ignatz, in one of George Herriman’s many masterful miniatures, in this case a 1910 episode. And when Kat has painstakingly pushed the rock over the obstacle, and the rock rolls down the steep slope, Ignatz orders, “Now follow it.” Herriman has tilted the panels 45 degrees; our eye follows the downward thundering boulder and the trail of destruction with the same speed and stress as Kat does.

“Well, I followed it, Ignatz,” reports Kat still panting after completing his task.
“Good,” the mouse says, “did it gather any moss?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought,” Ignatz replies paternalistically.
Impressed, Krazy Kat is left behind: “L’il fillossippa. Always seeks the truth, and always he finds it.”

In 1500, Erasmus of Rotterdam publishes the first edition of his Adagia, a collection of 818 classical quotations and proverbs. It becomes hugely popular, especially after cheap and bilingual editions of it are printed from 1521 onwards, and Erasmus continues to work on it until his death; when he dies in 1536, it has grown to a collection of 4151 adagia.

Its popularity also explains the striking similarity of sayings in the various European languages; crocodile tears; throwing oil on the fire; in the land of the blind, one-eyed man is king… hundreds of expressions from Erasmus’ hit have been adopted in German, English, French, Italian, Spanish and all the less prominent European languages.

The collection would make an inspiring birthday present for Dylan.

  • “A fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi, in front of us an abyss, behind us wolves,”
  • “Tempus omnia revelat, Time reveals all,”
  • “Dulce bellum inexpertis, war is pleasant to those who do not know it”

“Every line in it,” as Dylan says of his own “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, “is actually the start of a whole song.” And indeed: under 3.4.74 we find “Saxum volutum non obducitur musco; a rolling stone gathers no moss,” the proverb that drives Ignatz to his empirical research, and which, after many detours, leads to one of the greatest rock songs in our music history.

When the first issue of music magazine Rolling Stone appears on 9 November 1967, publisher Jann Wenner explains the connection right in the beginning, in “A Letter From The Editor”:

“The name of it is Rolling Stone, which comes from an old saying: A rolling stone gathers no moss. Muddy Waters used the name for a song he wrote; The Rolling Stones took their name from Muddy’s song, and “Like A Rolling Stone” was the title of Bob Dylan’s first rock and roll record.”

So an old saying it is indeed. Much older even than Erasmus’ 1500 publication, which after all compiles ancient sayings. Five hundred years before Erasmus we already find it at Egbert of Liège (around 1023; Assidue non saxa legunt volventia muscum – constantly rolling stones gather no moss), and presumably Egbert is paraphrasing a saying from Publilius Syrus’ collection of proverbs, the Sententiae. Publilius was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, so wrote this before our era, more than a thousand years before Egbert.

Jann Wenner’s five-step leap (old saying – Muddy Waters – Rolling Stones – Dylan – the magazine) thus suggests a connection between Muddy Waters’ hit and Dylan’s inspiration. Well, possibly. Muddy’s “Rolling Stone” was his first hit for Chess Records (1950), the single that gave him the courage to quit his day job. Actually an adaptation of Robert Petway’s version of the old blues traditional “Catfish Blues” (1941, from which Muddy also literally copies his opening lines Well I wish I was a catfish / Swimmin’ in an oh, deep blue sea ), but the Hoochie Coochie Man then turns it into the account of a womaniser, waiting for his prey’s spouse to leave the house. And sings in the third verse:

Well, my mother told my father
Just before I was born
“I got a boy child's comin', he's gonna be
He's gonna be a rollin' stone
Sure 'nough, he's a rollin' stone”

… with which rolling stone penetrates blues jargon and, by extension, the rock idiom.

Muddy Waters – Rolling Stone (Catfish Blues): https://youtu.be/bnsw4sySaxw

All true – yet it doesn’t seem to be Dylan’s trigger for the namesake and legendary chorus of “Like A Rolling Stone”. For that, we have a much more obvious candidate, one who is much deeper under Dylan’s skin: Hank Williams.

I was just a lad, nearly 22
Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you
And now I'm lost, too late to pray
I started goin' down that lost highway

Now boys don't start to ramblin' round
On this road of sin, are you sorrow-bound?
And you’ll get lost till curse the day
You started goin’ down that lost highway

Neuwirth: O no, no, there’s another verse. With “I’m a rolling stone.” –
Dylan: Oh, yeah.

I'm a rollin' stone, all alone and lost
For a life of sin, I have paid the cost
Take my advice, you -- you'll curse the day
You started goin' down that lost highway

Dylan & Baez – Lost Highway (Don’t Look Back):

“Oh and what about ehm,” Dylan interrupts himself, only to then immediately after “Lost Highway” switch to that other Hank Williams signature song, to “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. We’re at 32’58”, about a third of Dont Look Back (1967), Pennebaker’s documentary on Dylan’s 1965 UK tour, we find ourselves with Dylan and Joan Baez in the hotel room at the Savoy Hotel, and it’s May: these are the days when Marianne Faithfull sits curled up in a chair in the corner looking pretty, the days when “Like A Rolling Stone” germinates.

A second and even stronger argument that rolling stone enters the creative part of Dylan’s brain not via Muddy Waters but via Hank Williams is its semantic connotation. With Muddy, after all, a rolling stone is something like a free bird, a man who goes his own way, a womaniser, befitting Muddy’s image – a good-looking man, dresses well, attracting the audience in this boastful, manly kind of manner, in the words of Willie Dixon. Close to the original connotation assigned to it by Publilius (“one who is always on the move, without roots here or there, shunning responsibilities and cares”), and far from the meaning rolling stone has with Hank Williams.

Hank’s rolling stone is no enviable fortune-hunter. On the contrary, he is just another guy on the lost highway – alone and lost, some poor sod paying the price for a sinful life, with no hope of redemption. He is, in short, a complete unknown without a home, he is the rolling stone Dylan will lead into the greatest rock song of the 20th century a few weeks after he sings his lament in a London hotel room.

And whom he then leads from the Lost Highway to Desolation Row – but that is another story and shall be told another time.

 

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 5: To live outside the law you must be honest – Untold Dylan

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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:

One comment

  1. Let’s not forget the Canadian poet, the bard of the North Country~ well-known to Dylan:

    My golden youth l’m squardering/
    Sun- libertine am I/
    A-wandering, a-wandering/
    Until the day I die/
    (Robert Service: A Rolling Stone)

    And this:

    He was never meant to win/
    He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone/
    He’s a man who won’t fit in/
    (Robert Service: The Men That Don’t Fit In)

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