The song that changed songs

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. 

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Up next: The WORLD History Book.

Today, how Bob Dylan’s most famous song endured for more than 60 years.

When Columbia Records released “Like a Rolling Stone” on July 20th, 1965, Bob Dylan was already a pop star. In just three years he’d gone from aping folksingers and bluesmen, to writing and singing some of rock and roll’s most galvanizing songs.

EICHER: But until the record “Like a Rolling Stone,” it took other singers to turn those songs into hits.

WORLD’s Arsenio Orteza considers why Dylan’s most famous recording still resonates six decades on.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: Rolling Stone magazine ranked Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” the “greatest song of all time” not once, but twice. 

But it wasn’t immediately esteemed everywhere. The British critic Bob Dawbarn called it “substandard Dylan” and expressed relief that Columbia wasn’t planning to release it as a single in England. He wrote “[t]he paucity of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is emphasized by the flip side….”

MUSIC: [ “Gates of Eden” by Bob Dylan]

Dawbarn said “Gates of Eden” was better because it’s “just Dylan with guitar and harmonica.” He added that “without the extraneous backing noises, one can concentrate on what the man is saying.” 

But people really liked those “extraneous backing noises.” Dave Marsh wrote: “The pistol shot that opens ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is really a drum, but it could hardly be more appropriate if it were the real thing.”

MUSIC: [“Like a Rolling Stone (original version)” by Bob Dylan]

Greil Marcus, who wrote an entire book about “Like a Rolling Stone,” goes further. He says it’s not in the song’s famous lyrics, but in its sound that the “action” is really taking place.

MARCUS: What the sound was about was this sense that it was an event. And an event takes place as you listen or as you watch. And this sense of event that the song carries, it gives it this feeling of starting over every time you hear it, and as if you have no idea what will happen or how it will affect you or how you’re going to respond.

Pop culture responded to the six-minute song in several ways. Previously, singles had to come in at three-and-a-half minutes or less. When “Like a Rolling Stone” proved popular, radio programmers realized they’d have to make exceptions. If not for “Like a Rolling Stone,” the Beatles’ biggest hit, for instance, might have remained a deep cut.

MUSIC: [“Hey Jude” by the Beatles]

Speaking of the Beatles, the most popular song the year before “Like a Rolling Stone” was “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The gap between the simplicity of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s lyrics and the complexity of Dylan’s is vast. 

The difference between “Like a Rolling Stone” and what had been Dylan’s best-known composition is pretty vast too.

MUSIC: [“Blowin’ in the Wind” by Peter, Paul and Mary]

The lyrics of “Like a Rolling Stone” have been called surreal. The poet Allen Ginsberg detected the influence of the avant-garde art movement Dada. Dylan himself said that he whittled the lyrics down from what he called a “long piece of vomit about 20 pages long.” 

One thing’s certain: the lyrics gave rock and rollers permission to incorporate thoughts, imagery, and feelings beyond the pop-lyrics norm. Dave Marsh called them “continually stunning.”

The song certainly stunned Dylan’s fans. They’d hailed Dylan as the messiah of the acoustic-folk-protest movement and praised him for speaking unambiguous truth to political power. But now, he’d dared to “go electric” and to dive into the collective unconscious. And instead of attacking social injustice, he was giving voice to his generation’s sense of cultural and spiritual displacement. 

His first public performance of the song at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival remains a landmark in expectation-defying confrontation.

MUSIC: [“Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan (Newport, 1965)]

Perhaps it’s a sign of Dylan’s own affection for “Like a Rolling Stone” that, unlike most of his other songs, he hasn’t subjected it to extreme rearrangements onstage. In fact, it took more than 50 years and almost 2,000 performances before he significantly experimented with it at all.

MUSIC: [ “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan (2018)]

But what does the song mean? 

One way to approach the question is to ask to whom Dylan is singing: a privileged female socialite—the “Miss Lonely” in verse two? Someone different in each verse? Himself? 

Or maybe the song’s meaning lies in its refrain’s perennially relevant—and uncomfortable—questions: “How does it feel to be / to be on your own / with no direction home?” is something God could’ve asked Adam and Eve at the end of Genesis 3.

That the answers to those questions are different for everyone may be what makes the song seem continuously fresh.

MUSIC: [“Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan and the Band]

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Arsenio Orteza.

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