Like A Rolling Stone part 19 (final): The generous ghost

Posted on March 1, 2025 by Tony Attwood

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 19 (final)

by Jochen Markhorst

XIX       The generous ghost

The turnaround is radical, though not unexpected; it has been announced. After two albums with which he establishes his name as a protest singer, very much against his will by the way, Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964) is a first “betrayal” by the then 23-year-old icon. A deliberate attempt to sabotage his status as the spokesman of the protest generation, betrayal of the folk scene, tasteless – critics do not shy away from the Big Words.

Half a century later, the bellowing is a bit difficult to follow. The album really is not that different. The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) also includes songs like “Boots Of Spanish Leather” and “One Too Many Mornings”; from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) a-political songs like “The Girl From The North Country” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” have become classics. Dylan himself doesn’t fully understand the commotion either, and 50 years later he will still – quite credibly – claim: “The last thing I thought about was who cared what songs I wrote. I just wrote them. I didn’t feel like I was suddenly doing anything else.”

The successor Bringing It All Back Home (1965) then goes one step further still. Not only is it yet another album without politically engaged or sociocritical lyrics at all, but, to add insult to the injury, it has a whole album side full of songs played on electrically amplified instruments. On that electric side are sharp, shrill rockers like “Maggie’s Farm” and “Outlaw Blues”, on the acoustic side folk-rockers with kaleidoscopic, psychedelic lyrics (“Mr. Tambourine Man”, “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”).

A volcano of creativity Dylan is in these months. Between August 8, 1964 and August 30, 1965, he produces three LPs.  In between he performs 43 times, writes one classic after another and records thirty songs. Eight of the nine Highway 61 Revisited songs are recorded in four days at the end of July, beginning of August. The ninth, the opening song, he recorded six weeks earlier, on June 15 and 16, 1965: “Like A Rolling Stone”.

At the first five attempts, June 15, he is still searching for the beat, among other things. The next day it is found, at the fourth attempt. After that eleven more attempts follow, but that fourth one eventually ends up on single. And in August on the LP.

That single still has to deal with some headwind at first. To start with, record company Columbia Records doesn’t see a single in it at all; the marketing guys are bothered because the song is far too long – over six minutes – and the sound is too unpolished, far too rough. The one employee who does see a hit in it, smuggles out a test press and hands it over to a friend: a disc jockey. That has some effect. Soon the calls start pouring in and Columbia releases a single version after all, with “Like A Rolling Stone” on the A-side and “Gates Of Eden” on the flip side. Bizarrely, a promo single for radio DJs is also released on which the song is cut in two; if a DJ wants to play the whole song, they have to flip the record over, halfway through.

It shall become Dylan’s biggest hit so far. Others have scored well in recent years with songs by his hand (Peter, Paul and Mary with “Blowin’ In The Wind”, The Byrds with “Mr. Tambourine Man”, Manfred Mann with “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”), but this time the master himself is in the highest regions of the charts. In America, he reaches number 2, behind “Help!” by The Beatles.

An important part of the song’s drive comes from organist Al Kooper creating the energetic, hectic urgency that makes the song all the more exciting, securing Kooper’s entrance ticket to Dylan’s inner circle. A month later, he sits behind the organ at the legendary Newport Folk Festival performance, in which Dylan plays electric to the audible horror of part of the audience. Afterwards, Kooper participates in the recordings of the other songs for Highway 61 Revisited and subsequently again for Blonde On Blonde, and even co-produces the kind-of-comeback album New Morning (1970). In later decades Dylan calls on him every now and then; at concerts in 1981 and 1996, for example.

There is a remarkable consensus about the meaning of the song, the meaning of the words. Many of Dylan’s lyrics are vague and ambiguous enough, and keep fans, moods, exegetes and devout disciples busy for decades. About who is meant by the visionary Johanna, whether or not “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is a hallucinatory account of a drug experience, how autobiographical “Tangled Up In Blue” is … every month a new book is published with Dylan interpretations, the discussions on the internet forums are raging daily. About “Like A Rolling Stone” even a complete book has been written. Renowned essayist/journalist and Dylan-exegete Greil Marcus devotes 300 pages to the song and its place in cultural history in his 2005 work of the same name, subtitled Bob Dylan At The Crossroads, and calls it “an explosion of vision and humour that has changed pop music forever”.

But Marcus does not look for hidden meanings and symbolism either, and joins the most popular, and also the simplest interpretation: it says what it says. A cynical sharpshooter snaps at, and ruthlessly deals with a spoiled girl who has apparently fallen off her high horse.

The tone and content of the lyrics fit into a long line of put-down songs by Dylan, songs in which he skilfully demolishes someone, usually an ex-lover. Before “Like A Rolling Stone” there are songs like the derogatory “It Ain’t Me Babe” or the acetic, hurtful ballad “Ballad In Plain D” and later Dylan still lets himself go often enough, like in “Positively 4th Street”, “Just Like A Woman” and the bitter “Idiot Wind”. The only one on this planet who doesn’t acknowledge this is Dylan himself. “Why does everybody always say that?” he asks Robert Shelton in 1965. “I’ve never put anybody down in a song, man.” There is one big difference from all those other put-down songs though: the origins of the lyrics, that mythical long piece of vomit from which Dylan claims the lyrics were extracted.

Much later, in 1985, he reluctantly admits that he might have been mean once, and says about “Ballad In Plain D”: “It was a mistake to record it and I regret it.” Striking still, is how he not so much regrets writing the song, those vicious words, but rather that he recorded it. A little later, in an interview with Bill Flanagan, he is less reserved: “I must have been a real schmuck to write that.”

Many artists have tried to articulate the song’s earth-shattering impact on their development, from Frank Zappa to Paul McCartney to Elvis Costello, but one of the many “new Dylans” the man who, because of “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City” alone may indeed have some claim to that honourably intended, somewhat disrespectful New Dylan categorisation, Bruce Springsteen, does it best, with that famous, memorable “the way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind” quote.

Springsteen’s own “Born To Run” (1975) is his conscious attempt to match that kick against the door – but for that monumental song, he had to spend six months in the studio searching for the sound of “Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan, produced by Phil Spector”.

“Like A Rolling Stone” is at the top of the 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time list of the authoritative music magazine Rolling Stone and for Dylan himself the song remains special. Apart from the last few years, it’s almost always on the playlist of his performances and thus it’s in the top 3 of his most performed songs: he’s played it more than 2000 times since 1965. In 2003 he mentions “Like A Rolling Stone” as an example:

“It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song.”
(Robert Hilburn interview in Amsterdam, 10 November 2003)

Amen to that.

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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:

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