Like a Rolling Stone part 10: Just jump on it

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 10

by Jochen Markhorst

X          Just jump on it

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (2024) does romanticise it a bit, of course, but by and large the film follows the actual, researched and confirmed historical events and fun facts surrounding the recording of “Like A Rolling Stone”. Before the final take, Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) says: “No more waltz time on this one. Ascending scale, La Bamba changes for the chorus. Come in on the downbeat of four. Just jump on it.” Which is all totally unlike Dylan, but content is correct. On the first day of recording, 15 June 1965, the song is indeed still in three-four time, waltz time; the next day, when the final Highway 61 take is realised, the song is in 4/4, which is to say, four beats to a bar with the accent on the first beat.  Here it is in 3/4 (three beats to a bar).

The funniest fun fact the film also tells it historically correctly: the witty way Al Kooper sneaks into the recording room and cheekily sits down at the organ – an instrument he does not know at all. Scriptwriters Mangold and Jay Cocks apparently read Al Kooper’s 1998 autobiography Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards: we hear near-literal quotes from the book. Kooper describes with superior irony and highly infectious self-mockery how he takes advantage of a moment of inattention from producer Tom Wilson to sneak into the recording room, his relief that the complex Hammond organ is still on (“If the organist (Paul Griffin) hadn’t left the damn thing turned on, my career as an organ player would have ended right then and there”), Tom Wilson’s giggly “What are you doing there” when he suddenly sees Al sitting in the recording room (“Wilson was a gentleman, however. He let it go”), his searching for the chords which explains the slight delay with which the organ runs after the chord changes (“like a little kid fumbling in the dark for the light switch”) and then the scene in the control room, when they all listen to the playback:

Thirty seconds into the second verse of the playback, Dylan motioned toward Tom Wilson. “Turn the organ up,” he ordered. “Hey, man,” Tom said, “that cat’s not an organ player.” Thanks, Tom. But Dylan wasn’t buying it: “Hey, now don’t tell me who’s an organ player and who’s not. Just turn the organ up.” He actually liked what he heard!

With which Kooper secures the dreamed ticket to Dylan’s inner sanctum. To his delighted surprise, Dylan invites him back the next day and asks Al for his phone number. “Which was like Claudia Schiffer asking for the key to your hotel room.” Very similar to how the filmmakers tell the control room scene:

102        INT. COLUMBIA STUDIO A — CONTROL BOOTH — LATER 102

Playback of the track. Bob listens intently, critically. Albert behind him, sensing   something major in the air, and Neuwirth is wedged against the back wall.

BOB: Let me hear more of that organ.

TOM WILSON: The cat’s not an organ player.

BOB: Sounds like one to me. Lift it, Roy.

Roy Halee brings the level up on the organ. The drums 
and the kick come up with it.

TOM: It’s tied to the drums.

BOB: Keep it there.

… so paraphrasing and near-quoting from Kooper’s book. “It’s tied to the drums” is again technically correct, by the way.

To understand fully what follows, it is important to remember that the word “track” here refers to the fact that these were “four track” recordings, meaning that one might have the voice as one track, the percussion on a second track, the guitars on a third, and so on.  This meant that after the recording was made each “track” could be manipulated independently of the others, so that the volume of the vocal track might be taken up without changing the accompaniment, while everything other than the vocal track might be cut at one point to make it sound as if the vocalist were singing unaccompanied.

At the time, the unbeatable The Bootleg Series 12 – The Cutting Edge 1965-66 (2015) surprised, besides featuring all 20 takes of “Like A Rolling Stone” including the rehearsals, false starts and breakdowns, with the “stems”, the four individual tracks of the final recording. And indeed, Track 4 (“track as in the sense described in the previous paragraph) was attributed to “drums and organ.”   Only solo guitarist Mike Bloomfield was assigned his own track: Track 1.

Thanks to that same Bootleg Series 12, we also get quite a bit of studio talk in between recordings, and from that it’s easy to see that the authoritative, directing words with which Mangold’s Dylan instructs his session musicians have a high fantasy quality. In real life, we hear Dylan saying such plain banalities as “Let’s do just one verse man”, and “No, we just gotta work that part out – I finish at one, don’t you see?” and “Okay let’s cut it… it’s six minutes long man”; it doesn’t get much more technical than that.

Just as kind-of-true is the embedding of the other time “Like A Rolling Stone” comes along. As in the book that provided the template for the film, Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! from 2015, we hear the song for the second time at the end of the film, at the legendary edition of the Newport Folk Festival, where the folk world is shocked to learn that Dylan is electric now. Director Mangold seizes that earth-shattering moment to throw a few more Dylan fun facts into the mix, and why not indeed?

Timothée Chalamet – Like a Rolling Stone:

So the infamous Judas! shout is transferred from Manchester to Newport, but is now shouted by a lady, and an incredulous Dylan merely responds with “Come on man” (i.e. not with you’re a liar and not with play it fucking loud either); the mythical and probably untrue action of an axe-wielding Pete Seeger gets a nod; the film Dylan, like the real Dylan at the time, returns with an acoustic guitar after his disappointingly short set of only three electric songs at the insistence of the backstage and plays “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” – but in the film Dylan borrows the guitar from Johnny Cash and not from the historically correct Peter Yarrow; the setlist is entirely correct though – first “Maggie’s Farm”, then “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” and concluding indeed as in Manchester following the Judas!-incident “Like A Rolling Stone”; the shouted words from audience that we are able to discern (“Sellout!”, “Scumbag!”, “We love you Bob!”, “Phony!”) seem borrowed from the hubbub that erupted a month later in New York, at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium concert, 28 August 1965… and like this, there are some more small, affectionate references and adaptations of anecdotal details from Dylan’s life that are given an antedated and relocated place here – which only adds to the entertainment value. And: rewriting of history is also, fittingly enough, of course extremely Dylanesque.

“Like A Rolling Stone” is not really the alpha and omega of the film, which it is in the book; while the book does describe Dylan’s life and career from the years 1961 to August 1965, on page 1, in the Introduction, Elijah Wald begins with a flash-forward to the last chapter before Aftermath, to Chapter 10, which is called “Like A Rolling Stone”, going into more detail about those eventful July days in Newport.

The film, on the other hand, is chronologically, beginning in 1961 and ending in Newport 1965 (allright, to round out the story and make the script cyclical we still get, somewhat forcibly, a brief Woody Guthrie coda), but then again: the film is called A Complete Unknown – “Like A Rolling Stone” is alpha, omega, and all the letters in between. As it should be.

 

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 11 – I was transformed

Details of the current and recent series can be found on the home page

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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