Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 5: To live outside the law you must be honest

by Jochen Markhorst

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

Although we are graphically (on the site and in Lyrics) still in the first verse, we have actually already had two quatrains, together one octave, in the tail rhyme aaab-cccb. And with You used to laugh about , we enter the bridge to the chorus.

Well, “bridge” may be a somewhat too austere designation for this part of the landmark – “three-lock flight” perhaps does more justice to this thrilling, goosebump-inducing transition to the chorus. [See Editor’s Note 1 below]. The first stage of the lock is deceptively simple. Twice the IV and the V (the F and the G) of the chorus – every listener feels the climax, the liberating C (the I) coming:

F          G
You used to laugh about
F                 G
Everybody that was hangin' out

… but that liberating climax does not come (yet). Instead, Dylan leads us to the second stage of the lock, to the pre-chorus:

F C/e** Dm7 C
Now you don’t talk so loud

F C/e** Dm7 C
Now you don’t seem so proud

(** See Editor’s note 2 below)

… a stage with once again a neat step by step progression: f – e – d – c. Descending steps this time, thus mirroring the ascending steps with which the song begins, without the fifth step though – our foot lingers in the air for a while, searching for the liberating G/b. Which only comes at the end of the third step of our three-lock flight:

Dm F G
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

Spirit – Like A Rolling Stone:

… not only musically a compelling, smooth transition to the chorus’s upcoming C-F-G, but Dylan the Song Poet throws a wonderful enter hook to how does it feel lyrically as well: rhymingly, too, the pre-chorus flows into the chorus. Which seems a simple, obvious artifice, but it is not that conventional at all. “Imagine” (Imagine all the people/Living life in peace), Billy Eilish’s “Copycat”, Steve Winwood’s “Valerie”, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Hello, hello, hello, how low)… famous pre-choruses that do what they are designed for: they bridge the distance between verse and chorus musically and often enough content-wise as well, with lyrics announcing the chorus.

And Dylan does so too, quite beautifully in fact, but also makes a lyrical connection by having the closing line of the pre-chorus rhyme with the opening line of the chorus;

About having to be scrounging for your next meal
How does it feel

Not some happy coincidence either; the poet applies the artifice consistently. After this meal/feel again in both other leads to the chorus (steal/feel and conceal/feel).

Content-wise, the songwriter still stays entirely on the track laid by that mythical “long piece of vomit”; for now, it’s still a coherent put-down, a spiteful revenge fantasy about a lady’s decline from riches to rags. And after this first chorus, Dylan keeps on track for a little while longer:

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

… although we do see the first hint of playfulness here, as the language artist is taking pleasure in the rhyme and rhythm game with used to get / juiced in it / used to it, at the expense of reason if necessary. We are thus approaching the turn Dylan is probably referring to when he analyses years later, “… 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.” At least, the continuation not only has a different tone but undeniably cares less about reason, in favour of rhymes like realize-alibis, the euphoniousness of an exotic identity description like mystery tramp and the poetic beauty of a sentence like As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes:

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?

… with the veiled suggestion that Miss Lonely is offering sexual services in exchange for some necessity of life, so indeed has ended up in the gutter – but the original coherence is starting to fade. After all, it is unlikely that Miss Lonely would ever have said something like “Oh dear, I’d never compromise with the mystery tramp” during her heyday, just as not selling alibis is a bit alienating in this context. Which is no weakening; it opens the floodgates to what Dylan calls a little too self-critically too much: the colourful side characters who soon after the song’s release became something like Dylanesque archetypes (Napoleon in rags, the jugglers and the clowns, the diplomat with the Siamese cat), the snapshots of a wonderfully chaotic scene and the granite one-liners (one of which even is quoted in a Supreme Court ruling: when you got nothing, you got nothing lose, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., 2008).

At the latest from the third verse, it then seems clear that Dylan has abandoned his notes, the long piece of vomit, and dips a first toe into his mercurial stream of consciousness:

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

The driving force now seems to be the ambition to stay within that aaab – cccb tail rhyme. Reason is slowly starting to fade away. “You get the rhymes first and work back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way,” as Dylan explained in 1991. And alright, some sense can still be made of it, of course. Indeed, with some indulgence, we can even grant Dylan spider-sense here, as he seems to detect a danger before it happens: Marianne Faithfull, again.

Just as the Ophelia -couplet of “Desolation Row” not only offers a portrayal of La Faithfull, but even has a prophetic quality (the bizarre coincidence that on 29 December 1968, “on her twenty-second birthday” Marianne does indeed play Ophelia in Tony Richardson’s staging), here in “Like A Rolling Stone” we see not only a portrayal but also a remarkably accurate prediction of the future:

“I was also getting involved in a long affair with Tony Sanchez, dealer by appointment to the Stones. I can’t believe I did that! I didn’t get enough pocket money from Mick and I didn’t have any money of my own, so how else would I have been able to get my own drugs? That was the level of my thinking. Not a pretty picture. I had charge accounts at every shop, but I never had any cash. I now realize that if you do want drugs, then you have to make your own money and buy them! To live outside the law you must be honest, but I didn’t understand that yet. For years I simply charmed and seduced people to get what I wanted.”
(Faithfull; An Autobiography, 1994)

The Lumineers – Ophelia:

It is quite literal. You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you. It took Faithfull long years before she understood that it ain’t no good. And while we’re building castles in the air: it’s really not that hard to see a mystery tramp in the dubious Tony Sanchez, with whom Marianne compromises.

As the prophecy foretold.

* Editor’s footnote 1: As one who lives close to the seven-lock flight on the Grand Union Canal (built at Stoke Bruerne, Northamptonshire England, opened in the 1790s), but I thought I would add for clarity that the “3 lock flight” phrase refers to locks on a canal.

** Editor’s footnote 2: It has become common for those writing the chord sequence of the “Now you don’t talk so loud” line to write “C/e” for the chord that occurs on the word “don’t”, although this is somewhat confusing. The chord played is C major, so “C” is correct, but during this sequence, the bass guitar is playing a classic descending bass line and has reached the note E at this point. In classical terminology, to be precise the chord is therefore “C (first inversion)” and is written “C(b)”.* In more recent times writing C/E has come to mean the chord of C with E as the bass note, and of late this seems to have mutated in C/e.

Confusing Editor’s Footnote to the Footnote (which it is not necessary to read) continued:

*As to why it is C(b), in classical notation, just writing C suggests the chord of C in the root position, which means for the chord of C, C is the bass note with E and G above it. To be exact one would write C(a) but because most chords are in root position, the (a) is omitted in classical notation. If the middle note of the chord (E in this case) is at the bottom (as it is in this song at this point) one would write C(b) and if the top note of the three note chord is in the base position one would write C(c). Writing C/e seems to be a recent development, perhaps specifically to help bass guitarists who have not had the benefit (or perhaps confusion) of a theory of music education.

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 6: Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat

———

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

Larry Fyffe says:

December 23, 2024 at 11:26 am

Though they have ears, at last as evidenced with Editor’s footnote 2, and the text of the article above, the musically “unwashed” majority will soon be able to understand printed musical script once the book “Dylan Without Words” is complete ….even if they don’t play instruments! Indeed, the bother of paying attention to any lyrics at all will become a thing of the past; even why Dylan himself engages with words that have meaning will become a deep mystery.

Leave a Reply