1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (19 page)

Others have postulated that Dylan’s muse for the song might have been Marianne Faithfull. She was the queen of British folk-pop when Dylan came to England for his May tour. The
Daily Mail
had run a story about her headlined, “Miss Lonely Sobs into the Pops” when she recorded Jagger and Richards’s “As Tears Go By.”
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In her memoir, Faithfull recounts Dylan’s attempts to seduce her in his hotel suite between sessions of ignoring her while banging away furiously on his typewriter. “The Out-tuning and Seduction Machine,” she called him. She was told he was working on an epic poem about her (the memoir doesn’t specify if Dylan or his entourage told her), but when he hit on her, she declined because she was pregnant and engaged to be married the next week. He “turned into Rumpelstiltskin,” tore up the papers he was writing, and threw her out.
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Sadly, Faithfull was also derailed for a number of years due to heroin addiction, homeless before getting her life back together for her late ’70s comeback.

Others speculate that Dylan was writing about himself and his alienation from the folk music world. He was bored to death but feared that if he left the safety of his genre for pop and flopped he could end up homeless himself. He told
Playboy
, “Last spring, I guess I was going to quit singing. I was very drained, and the way things were going, it was a very draggy situation … It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you … But ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ changed it all. I mean it was something that I myself could dig.”
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Regardless of who inspired the song, Dylan wrote “this long piece of vomit, 20 pages long, and out of it I took ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and made it as a single. And I’d never written anything like that before, and it suddenly came to me that was what I should do … After writing that I wasn’t interested in writing a novel or a play.”
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In 2004 he told music journalist Robert Hilburn, “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.”
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The documentary of Dylan’s spring tour,
Don’t Look Back
, captures Dylan singing “Lost Highway” with Joan Baez in his hotel room. Written by Leon Payne and made famous by country icon Hank Williams in 1949, the song starts with the singer calling himself a lost rolling stone, paying the cost for a life of sin. In 1950, blues master Muddy Waters released “Rollin’ Stone,” after which the British band named themselves.

When Dylan’s song was first announced but before anyone had heard it, many assumed that it was about the band, since to record the album
Bringing It All Back Home
Dylan had formed a group that sounded very much like the Stones.

On June 15, nine days after “Satisfaction” was released, Dylan went into the studio and recorded “Like a Rolling Stone.” He brought back the same pianist, bassist, drummer, and Bruce “Mr. Tambourine Man” Langhorne from his previous album, plus blues guitar wunderkind Michael Bloomfield.

A key part of his sound actually found him unexpectedly. Brill Building songwriter–session musician Al Kooper (“This Diamond Ring”) was a friend of producer Tom Wilson, so Wilson allowed Kooper to visit Dylan’s session to watch. But Kooper sneaked into the empty organ seat.

“Man, what are
you
doin’ out there?” Wilson asked. He knew that Kooper didn’t even play organ. But then Wilson was distracted, and didn’t get around to telling Kooper to move, so Kooper stayed.

Bobby Gregg struck his snare, the band kicked in, and Kooper listened for the other musicians’ chords for half a moment before playing them himself.

Afterward, everyone gathered to listen to the playback. When the song entered the second verse, Dylan told Wilson to turn the organ up.

“Hey, man, that cat’s not an organ player,” Wilson said.

“Hey, now don’t tell me who’s an organ player and who’s not. Just turn the organ up.”
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Dylan then almost let the song die when he refused to cut the six-minute, thirteen-second track in half for the single. Columbia’s sales and marketing department considered it a cancelled release.

But Shaun Considine, Columbia’s coordinator of new releases, sneaked out with an acetate of the song and asked the deejay at the über-hip New York nightclub Arthur to play it. The huge crowd response prompted two of New York’s top deejays to call the label asking for the new Dylan single.
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The song was released on July 20 and shot to No. 2—breaking the barrier of how long pop singles could be.

Bruce Springsteen recalled, “The first time that I heard Bob Dylan I was in the car with my mother, and we were listening to, I think, maybe WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind … Dylan was—he was a revolutionary, man; the way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind.”
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Not only did the song break the length barrier, but the willful innocence of Top 40 was forever pierced by lyrics stranger and more suggestive than had been heard on pop radio before. But even though the words were dark, there was joy in Dylan’s weather-beaten voice, the joy of being all his heroes at once—Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, the Animals, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones—the joy of smashing out of the industry’s little boxes, beyond folk, beyond rock, beyond country, beyond blues, to a space where you could be all of them at the same time. The subliminal message was that the accepted rules weren’t necessary; you could have complete artistic control and a Top 5 hit. You were bound only by the limits of your imagination. The song’s wide-open possibility spoke to everyone from fellow musicians to young people living on their own for the first time. Others took it as their theme as they began “dropping out” of society in myriad ways. Some women heard their own mixed emotions as they considered alternatives to being a housewife (college, divorce, career), giving up the protection of parents or husband to stand alone. It was the sound of an old country (traditional, stable, repressive) giving way to something frightening and free.

*   *   *

Folk singer emeritus
Pete Seeger and Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman were two of the founders of the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and two of the men most responsible for the folk revival of the early 1960s. The Kingston Trio’s cover of Seeger’s antiwar “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” reached the Top 20 in 1962, the same year the folk group that Grossman had assembled, Peter, Paul and Mary, got to the Top 10 with “If I Had a Hammer.” In 1963, Dylan joined Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez onstage at Newport to sing his own civil rights anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and became the darling of the scene.

At Newport ’64, Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers (Seeger’s old group) introduced Dylan with “And here he is … Take him, you know him, he’s yours.” In his memoirs, Dylan wrote that his internal reaction was “What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn’t belong to anybody then or now.”
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On the evening of July 25, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the person that’s going to come up now has a limited amount of time. His name is Bob Dylan.”
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Dylan took the stage, and his band launched into “Maggie’s Farm,” his coded good-bye to writing protest songs. Just like the song’s protagonist, Dylan had a head full of new ideas to try, and he wasn’t going to keep singing the way they wanted him to. Ironically, the song was inspired by the old folk song “Down on Penny’s Farm,” which Pete Seeger had covered. But as Dylan played his modernized version with Seeger in the wings, the band was so loud that Seeger couldn’t understand the words. Seeger’s father was there, and wore a hearing aid, and the blasting distortion of the speakers upset him. Seeger tried to get the sound mixer to lower the band’s volume, but he refused, saying it was how Dylan wanted it.
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Seeger cursed, “Damn it, if I had an axe, I’d cut the cable right now!”
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Mike Bloomfield ripped on the guitar, but in the footage, boos can be heard mingled with the cheers. Dylan said later, “Well, I did this very crazy thing. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but they certainly booed, I’ll tell you that. You could hear it all over the place.”
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The extent—and reason—for the booing has long been debated. Probably most were booing because Dylan was no longer writing civil rights anthems but trying to be a pop star. “Like a Rolling Stone” uses the same chords as “La Bamba,” “Twist and Shout,” and “Louie, Louie,” and at New York’s Ondine nightclub, go-go girls were frugging to it. Many of the older folk singers, such as Seeger and Burl Ives, erstwhile Communist idealists, had been blacklisted, losing a decade from their careers due to their convictions.

Al Kooper thought the crowd was booing also because the drummer changed the beat mid-song and confused all the musicians.
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Others say people were booing the poor sound mix, as the festival wasn’t set up for rock bands. Kooper also thinks it was because Dylan was the headliner but did only “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” before hurrying offstage. At Yarrow’s onstage prompting, he did finally return to play acoustic songs, but only two: “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

Over the course of the next year, Dylan would grow to thrive fiendishly off the audience’s boos, tapping into that part of himself back at the high school talent show that howled “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay”—“African shrieking,” a teacher dubbed it—and prompted the principal to turn off the mic’s power. Even then, the teenage Dylan kept pounding the piano, breaking the pedal off.
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But while Dylan presumably did not care about his principal, he had once turned down an appearance on the popular
Hootenanny
TV show because they wouldn’t let blacklisted Pete Seeger play. In an interview with Martin Scorsese decades later, Dylan recalled how hearing that “Someone whose music I cherish, someone who I highly respect is going to cut the cable, was like, oh God, was almost like a dagger.” Dylan clutched his heart. “Just the thought of it made me go out and get drunk.”
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After the adoration he’d received on his spring tour, it was the first time in a long while that he had faced a negative reaction. At the after-party, while the others celebrated, he brooded by himself. When folkie Maria Muldaur asked him to dance, he replied gnomically, “I would dance with you, Maria, but my hands are on fire.”
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“I was kind of stunned,” he later told
Playboy.
“There were a lot of people there who were very pleased that I got booed. I saw them afterward. I do resent somewhat, though, that everybody that booed said they did it because they were old fans.”
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Four days later, he went into the studio and unleashed an attack on his old folk stomping grounds with “Positively 4th Street,” a reference to the street in Greenwich Village that was home to Gerde’s Folk City and other clubs Dylan used to play. In it, he sneers that the folkies are envious drags. The song became one of the most specific examples of dirty laundry to make the Top 10. As in the music of Motown, Dylan knew to milk the elements of his previous hit, so the organ is front and center, chortling “ho ho ho” at the smiling faces who think they can backstab him. The beautifully distorted guitar arpeggios give the song a burned-out, mellow groove in sharp contrast to its spiteful words.

For some reason, Dylan stopped working with Tom Wilson, who had done his last three albums and helped guide him toward rock. Years later, Wilson told one interviewer that he had been offered better money to go to a different label, in response to which Dylan shrugged, saying, “Maybe we should try Phil Spector.”
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Instead, the songwriter was paired with producer Bob Johnston, who so far had produced Patti Page and written an underrated Presley classic called “It Hurts Me” with Charlie Daniels. Johnston would also handle Simon and Garfunkel and Johnny Cash.

From July 29 to August 4, Dylan recorded
Highway 61 Revisited
, named for the freeway that ran all the way from his hometown in Minnesota to the southern states where blues, R&B, and rock were born. As Dave Marsh said of his work from this era, “This was rock and roll at the farthest edge imaginable, instrumentalists and singer all peering into a deeper abyss than anyone had previously imagined existed.”
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The careening comedy of
Bringing It All Back Home
’s “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” returned in songs such as “Tombstone Blues” and the title track, but the Bloomfield-led band was more ruthless, and the jokes were now jet-black. Dylan synthesized all his previous strands—his humorous songs with his “Hard Rain” imagery songs with his protest songs—into a phantasmagoria befouled by the stoning he’d received less than a week before at Newport. Now he had his formula down: throw characters from history, literature, movies, and the Bible into a blender with thieves, undertakers, nuns, and jugglers; write off a doomed society in cinematic aphorisms; and then give it an unwieldy title with a modifier that ends in “ly.”

“Tombstone Blues” hints at Vietnam, with city fathers trying to drum up fear of imminent invasion and super-macho presidents sending slaves to the jungle to torture and burn out camps with blowtorches. So does “Highway 61 Revisited,” in which God warns an irreverent Abraham he’d better kill Him a son.

Nobody could say for certain what the hell “Ballad of a Thin Man” was about. The song is a nightmarish mix of William Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch
with the piano of Ray Charles’s “I Believe to My Soul.” As with “Like a Rolling Stone,” there are many candidates for the identity of the song’s “Mr. Jones.” Journalists often raised Dylan’s ire with their inane or repetitive questions, and the documentary
Don’t Look Back
shows him savaging one on camera. Journalist Jeffrey Jones later claimed to have been heckled by Dylan in a hotel dining room during the Newport Folk Festival. “Mr. Jones! Gettin’ it all down, Mr. Jones?”
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