Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 11
by Jochen Markhorst
XI I was transformed
The Guinness Book of World Records states that Bing Crosby’s 1942 “White Christmas” is the best-selling single of all time with an estimated 50 million units. The disclaimer “estimated” already indicates that the figures – or records and charts at all – are not too exact. The sales numbers of Bing’s world hit are based on the National List of Best-Selling Retail Records Chart, a precursor to the Billboard Hot 100, and in those years, lists were based on surveys, samples and reports from radio DJs; not very reliable and not at all comprehensive, all things considered.
And indeed it’s still not much more reliable; since 1958 we have used the Billboard Hot 100 as a measure of record sales, and to this day that list is compiled from a combination of radio airplay, audience impressions as measured by Nielsen BDS, sales data compiled by Nielsen Soundscan (both retail and digital) and streaming activity as provided by online music sources. It has to make do. We simply do not have something like a Central Record Sales Administration; we do not have some registration point to comprehensively track sales figures from around the world.
The same goes for establishing what the world’s most covered songs are. Guinness World Records hails “Yesterday”, claiming more than 1,600 cover versions of it have been recorded, but secondhandsongs.com has only found 1304 so far. Stacker counts only 512 and puts “Yesterday” at position 2 – Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” is at 1 with 516 covers. At secondhandsongs.com, “Silent Night” is at one (4046 covers), the Washington Post agrees, but according to UK’s Independent, “Eleanor Rigby” is at 1, and we could go on and on. Little consensus, all in all – only in the case of “most covered artist” is Dylan somewhere at the top of almost all lists (not at secondhand songs, by the way – that’s where Lennon tops, followed by McCartney and Rodgers; Dylan is only fifteenth. Though if you filter by solo artists, Dylan is third, after Irving Berlin and Antônio Carlos Jobim).
Of “Like A Rolling Stone” a surprising number of covers can be found. At the end of 2024, the – unreliable – tally stands at 212, and that will presumably increase exponentially after the success of the film A Complete Unknown. Surprisingly many covers, as you would be inclined to think it is a song in the same category as “Strawberry Fields Forever” or, say, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, as songs whose final version already exists, to which there is nothing to add, where any deviation would be a deterioration, and which can be covered at most as a tribute or parody. Or, in an exceptional case, gains ironic value as when the Rolling Stones play “Like A Rolling Stone” (and even score a hit with it, 1995).
That untouchability has been expressed countless times, by half a generation of Baby Boomers, journalists, music historians and professors, up to and including the Olympus, by Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney, and Bruce Springsteen with his famous reverence at Bob Dylan’s induction to the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame in 1988: “The first time that I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother, and we were listening to, I think, WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind … the way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind.” Remarkably similar, by the way, to the declaration of love and childhood memory shared with us by John Hiatt in Stereogum in May 2021, on the occasion of Dylan’s 80th birthday:
“My mother and I drove into a small town, we were up in a little fishing cabin my grandpa built. She had to go to the drugstore, and she went in and “Like A Rolling Stone” came on the radio. I was certain when she came back out, she wouldn’t recognize me. I felt like the song had changed me that much, just by hearing it. I was 13 or so. I was transformed. I had never heard lyrics like that. I had never heard a thing put together like that.”
Zappa, McCartney, Costello and Hiatt remain at a respectable distance from “Like A Rolling Stone” in their careers, but there are still plenty of daredevils to be found in the echelons below. At least 212.
The single “Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden” is released on Tuesday 20 July 1965, and within a month the first cover has been crafted: the Brooklyn garage band The Soup Dragons cover Dylan’s new single for the B-side of their flopped single “That’s Too Bad”. Although, cover… the three men (organ, drums and guitar) limit themselves to the chorus without much variation and without much sophistication, and those few words of it they also mix and change at will. So it’s more of a pleasantly disrespectful pastiche than a cover, but still: they’re the first ones (the actual release date can’t be traced, but in the UK the single was released September 17 – so in New York it must have been in shops sometime in late August).
A nose length behind them then come California sunshine nepo babies Dino, Desi & Billy in September with their superfluous cover. Toe-curling vocals, but expert musical support from the legendary Wrecking Crew, and as sons of Dean Martin, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, they actually get quite a bit of understandable but not very deserved airplay. And well alright, the same debut album features the hit song “I’m A Fool”, Lee Hazlewood’s “The Rebel Kind” and especially “Not The Lovin’ Kind”, and these still have some nice, antiquarian charm. However, the Dylan covers (including “It Ain’t Me Babe”, “Chimes Of Freedom” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”) are rather atrocious. Not to mention the insane idea of having “Satisfaction” sung by three beardless adolescents with clean nails and washed and combed hair.
In the wake of those two early birds, a cover was then recorded somewhere every month for a few years. Cher, The Turtles, The Four Seasons, Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs with a somewhat bizarre bluegrass-pop-country crossover thing (one of the last drops for poor Lester, who really, intrinsically disliked all that horrible hippie music Earl absolutely wanted on the setlist), … however, the only one who matches the excitement of the original is the otherworldly Jimi Hendrix.
Jimi unfortunately never records the song at Electric Lady Studios, but does play “Like A Rolling Stone” on stage 36 times. The first time in December ‘66 in England, the last time with historical awareness at Newport ’69, and perhaps the most beautiful, intense and loving one is the one from Winterland, 11 October 1968 in San Francisco. A tender, drawn-out intro of more than two minutes, “Here’s a song written by a cat named Dylan,” slowly building on with, for the time being, all focus on melody, and only just before the chorus a first hint of one of those ferocious, irresistible Hendrixian derailments. Almost 12 minutes, but twice that length would have been fine too.
And around it then, a whole string of lesser gods with mostly embarrassing or failed covers. It takes until 1975 before we can sit up straight again: the psychedelic, hypnotic, drawn-out interpretation of Spirit on their kind-of-comeback album Spirit Of ’76, the album that also opens with Dylan, with the dreamy mash-up “America The Beautiful/The Times They Are A Changin’”. Over “Like A Rolling Stone”, Randy California (the album is actually more of a solo album by Randy with help from his stepfather Ed Cassidy than really a Spirit reunion) has laid the same misty, meditative veil, ticking off the two main cover criteria: he transforms the song and adds something to the original. Over a tapestry of three guitars, metered use of the phaser, vocals extremely tastefully varying from whisper to falsetto to tenor, from double-tracking to hollow bathroom reverb to bone-dry living room sound, and an ebb-and-flow orchestration similar to Jimi’s arrangement. Not coincidentally, in all likelihood; Randy did play in Jimi’s band Jimmy James and the Blue Flames in Greenwich Village at the time, and since then Hendrix has always been under Randy’s skin. In any case, the last three minutes (out of nine) are awfully close to what Jimi would have made of it had he been able to remain in Electric Ladyland a bit longer.
Spirit of ’76 is now considered a highlight in Spirit’s discography. But at the time, the album did not get beyond a paltry 147th place in the Billboard 200. Randy won’t make it to the Guinness Book posthumously either. He’s invisible now.
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Continued: Like A Rolling Stone part 12. How Does It Feel?
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:
- Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2nd Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971
Thanks, Jochen. I really enjoyed the Hendrix track.
So do I, Mark. Is on repeat, here. Interspersed with Spirit’s.