Like A Rolling Stone part 14: What was I to say? Hurry up, asshole?

Posted on February 6, 2025 by Tony Attwood

by Jochen Markhorst

XIV      What was I to say? Hurry up, asshole?

“Che soddisfazione essere scelti da Bob Dylan, How satisfying it is to be chosen by Bob Dylan,” is the headline above a short news item in La Stampa, 24 July 2003. The article then reports that “Come una pietra scalciata” by Italian hip-hoppers Articolo 31, their reworking of “Like A Rolling Stone” on the 1998 album Nessuno, “è stata scelta dallo stesso musicista di Duluth, has been chosen by the Duluth musician himself” for inclusion on the soundtrack of Dylan’s movie Masked And Anonymous.

Remarkable enough to ask further questions, which is what La Stampa does to frontman J-Ax. Not too deep, but Alessandro “J-Ax” Aleotti’s answer is intriguing. I had just written a lyric about the decline of a spoiled brat, he tells (la storia di una ragazza-cigno che torna ad essere brutto anatroccolo perché vive senza valori, as Alessandro poetically summarises it, “the story of a girl-swan who turns into an ugly duckling because she lives without values”), when our manager came to tell us that we had the chance to cover “Like A Rolling Stone”. The story of that song is practically the same as the lyrics J-Ax had just written, so that opportunity – after a few minor tweaks – was quickly seized.

Articolo 31 – Come una pietra scalciata:

It made little impression at the time, in 1998, apart from the predictable outrage among rabid Italian Dylan fans. But then out of the blue, two days before Christmas 1999, comes a phone call from Dylan’s management: whether they could use Articolo’s cover in a film. “We thought it was for a documentary and immediately gave permission,” he says.

In his autobiography (Imperfetta forma, 2016), the matter comes up again, of course, and here J-Ax tells it a little differently and with more detail. The very first step is particularly noteworthy:

“We got a call from Bob Dylan’s record company. They said all his songs were available to be sampled at will. We chose “Like a rolling stone “, his most famous song, mainly because it was the only (or almost the only) song we knew.”

So the initiative really seems to come from New York. Yet things still almost go wrong: before Articolo 31 can release the cover, they still need the Master’s approval. Which just doesn’t come. The release date is getting closer, and discouraged, the men are already adjusting the tracklist of the upcoming album Nessuno and moving “Come una pietra scalciata” to the bin. “Ma che gli vuoi dire a uno dei più grandi poeti del Novecento? Sbrigati, stronzo? – What was I to say to one of the greatest poets of the 20th century? Hurry up, asshole?” No, you wait and then say thank you for allowing me to wait. Patience is rewarded: one day before the album is due to be pressed, permission arrives from New York.

Why Dylan and/or his management made that sample offer, we don’t know. Articolo 31 was Italy’s best-known hip-hop group at the time – their 1996 album Così com’è was a huge hit, and to this day it is the best-selling hip-hop album in Italy – perhaps the investment firm General Dylan Dynamics Inc. felt they were not selling enough records in Italy and were looking for a key to open up that market.

Indeed, like France, Italy has the reputation of being a difficult market for English-language artists. By comparison, Dylan’s then recent album, the late masterpiece Time Out Of Mind, sells about 60,000 copies in both France and Italy. In the UK, with even slightly less population than both countries, the album sells three times more copies. While Germany has more inhabitants (about 80 million versus about 60 million in France and 60 million in Italy), it sells relatively much more than its neighbours on the other side of the Alps: 150,000 units, 150% more for a 33% bigger market. So manager Jeff Rosen may have made a marketing-driven assessment and then made his phone call to Italy’s most popular hip-hop group.

Strictly speaking, it is not a cover. The band samples a few fragments and leaves the chorus intact; we hear Dylan singing how does it feel, embellished with an Italian female chorus. The lyrics do indeed have the same plot and a similar protagonist, but nothing more: “Eri la più carina, un’eterna Miss Liceo, You were the prettiest, an eternal Miss High School,” J-Ax opens, then paints the arrogant socialite, the cruel and unapproachable Queen Bee who has nothing to offer but exterior and outward appearance, and judges only thereon at that.

As with Dylan’s Miss Lonely, things go wrong. Miss Liceo marries the handsomest douche bag in June, in September she makes her first acquaintance with his fists. Her father goes bankrupt, and then things move rapidly towards the gutter. By the end, there is nothing left of her haughtiness and she shares Miss Lonely’s fate:

Ora che sei una parte del mondo che ignoravi
Sei diventata una di quelle pietre che scalciavi

Now you yourself are part of the world you ignored back then
You yourself have become one of those rolling stones

The real Italian cover is more than 30 years older. In 1966, Gianni Pettenati scored his first hit with The Juniors: “Come una pietra che rotola”, the version that for most Italians is the first introduction to “Like A Rolling Stone”. It is a stripped-down, simplified translation of Dylan’s masterpiece. The revenge fantasy is retained, so is the object, but all colour (Miss Lonely, the Siamese cat, the diplomat, the jugglers and so on) has been erased – what remains are four fairly similar couplets. Such as:

E come guardavi tu
chi viveva un po’ più giù.
D’ora in poi, tu guarderai, tu guarderai dal fondo in sù
Ora stendi la mano, chiedi pietà.

And how you looked down at
Those who lived a little lower.
From now on, you will look, you will look from the bottom up
Now stretch out your hand, beg for mercy.

Gianni Pettenati & The Juniors – Come una pietra che rotola:

Nor can performance and The Juniors’ musical support stand in the shadow of the original. Legendary beat band The Wretched does it better. The men from Vittorio Veneto take the translation used by Pettenati and record, also in 1966, a very nice cover for the B-side of their flopped single “La mia preghiera”. It made no waves at the time, but over the years it has been used in documentaries, appeared on compilation albums and received increasing airplay – thanks to the magical powers of nostalgia, the B-side is now considered a classic. And thanks to that organ, of course. And because how does it feel simply sounds better in Italian:

Come si stà, ma come si stà
a far la pietra che
sta rotolando giù,
come stai facendo tu

The Wretched – Come Una Pietra Che Rotola:

… as everything sounds better in Italian. We are still waiting for one of the true grandmasters though. For Francesco De Gregori or for a posthumous discovery of a Fabrizio De André recording. Unlikely. But one can dream.

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To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 15: “I had no idea what the hell he was singing about”

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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