Bob Dylan (17 page)

Even Dylan himself, normally his own harshest critic, was impressed. “I'm not gonna be able to make a record better than that one,” he claimed. “
Highway 61
is just too good. There's a lot of stuff on there that I would listen to!”

‘Like A Rolling Stone' was unlike any rock'n'roll record that had been heard before. At one second short of six minutes, it was far longer than any previous single, and its rippling waves of organ, piano and guitar formed as dense and portentous a sound as anyone had dared to offer as pop, smothering listeners like quicksand, drawing them inexorably down into the song's lyrical hell. Dylan's performance, too, was utterly gripping, a semi-spoken blues rap delivered in a sour, offhand monotone which curled occasionally at the ends of lines, like a sneer twisting the corner of his mouth as he gloated over a hipster's downfall. At a time when three-minute declarations of love were still the pop norm, this vicious tirade of recrimination was quite simply without precedent, a strange but compelling experience made all the more troubling by the incursions of surreal imagery into its damning flow. Who, fascinated fans debated, were Miss Lonely, Napoleon in rags, and—most bizarre of all—the diplomat who rode a chrome horse while balancing a Siamese cat upon his shoulder? What on earth was going on here?

For an industry whose optimum single length—anywhere between two and three minutes—had been set during the Forties and Fifties by jukebox operators intent on maximizing the number of plays per hour, ‘Like A Rolling Stone' was far too long to secure blanket radio coverage, and yet it still managed to become Dylan's biggest hit so far, reaching number two on the American charts (and number four in Britain) in August 1965. Its effect was simply stunning: fans, peers and rivals alike realized that Bob Dylan had now raised the bar way beyond anything they had heard or done before.

More importantly, a whole new army of teenagers, for whom Dylan had previously meant little or nothing, were profoundly moved in ways they couldn't quite explain. At Dylan's Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame induction on January 20, 1988, Bruce Springsteen described hearing ‘Like A Rolling Stone' for the first time, while out in the car with his mom. “I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard,” he recalled. “It was lean and it sounded somehow simultaneously young and adult… it made me feel kind of irresponsibly innocent—it still does—when it reached down and touched what little worldliness a 15-year-old high-school kid in New Jersey had in him at the time. Dylan was a revolutionary. Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body.”

The song was written upon Dylan's return from England, in what he described as a “vomitific” manner, at a Woodstock cabin he and Sara rented from Peter Yarrow's mother. “It was ten pages long,” he told journalist Jules Siegel. “It wasn't called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end it wasn't hatred, it was telling someone something they didn't know, telling them they were lucky. Revenge, that's a better word. I had never thought of it as a song, until one day I was at the piano, and on the paper it was singing, ‘How does it feel?' in a slow motion pace… it was like swimming in lava. In your eyesight, you see your victim swimming in lava. Hanging by their arms from a birch tree. Skipping, kicking the tree, hitting a nail with your foot. Seeing someone in the pain they were bound to meet up with.”

Exactly who this “someone” was has long been a matter of conjecture. Joan Baez believes it is about Bobby Neuwirth, Dylan's partner in character-assassination; others suspect it refers to the recently-dumped Baez herself—and certainly, there are distinct parallels between the well-off, well-schooled, slumming princess pilloried in the song, and that most saintly of folk-singers. Yet another theory contends that the song could, like so many of Dylan's writings from this period, be self-referential—after all, Bob's mother's maiden name was Stone, and he had, by this time, certainly rolled some distance from home. “I don't dislike them or anything,” he said of his family around this time, “I just don't have any contact with them. They live in Minnesota, and there's nothing for me in Minnesota.” Later, in the same interview, he admitted he found it “easier to be disconnected than to be connected.”

Over the previous couple of years, Dylan's world view had altered drastically from the youthful socialist spirit that informed his early albums, to a position which could loosely be described as existentialist. ‘Like A Rolling Stone' reflects this new attitude, arguing that truly to know yourself and find fulfilment, you must face the world alone, mould your future and your philosophy from your own experiences, without relying on the comforts of favor or patronage; instead, one has to push off from shore, head out into uncharted waters with “no direction home.” Accordingly, the song's climactic assessment that “you're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal,” ostensibly a triumphalist sneer of
schadenfreude
, can be read as a positive breakthrough, applauding a revelatory moment of self-awareness.

Dylan wrote the song on an upright piano in the key of G sharp, using the riff from ‘La Bamba' as a jumping-off point, then transferred it to the key of C on guitar before recording it on June 15, 1965. “The chorus part came to me first,” Dylan said later in
Rolling Stone
magazine. “I'd sorta hum that over and over, then later figured out that the verses would start low and move on up.” The song's time signature wasn't figured out until he got to the studio; on the rehearsal fragment included in
The Bootleg Series Vols 1–3
, Dylan and Paul Griffin can be heard trying to work their way through a waltz-time setting of the song, before the hit single version crystallized later in the session.

Crucial to the session's success was the introduction of Al Kooper, a musician Dylan had never met before, on organ, an instrument Kooper had never played before. “I was very good friends with Tom Wilson, who invited me to the session to watch, because he knew I was a Bob fan,” Kooper explained to me. “But I was very ambitious then, and planned to play! The session was booked for two in the afternoon, so I got there early, about 1.20, with my guitar—because at the time I had been doing sessions as a guitar player—sat down, plugged in and warmed up, and at about a quarter to two, Dylan came in with Mike Bloomfield, who I didn't know. I heard Bloomfield warming up, packed up my guitar and went back into the control room. I'd never heard anybody play like
that
!”

Salvation came for Kooper's ambitions when, midway through the session, organist Paul Griffin was moved to piano. “I said to Tom, Why don't you let me play the organ, I've got a really good part for this,” continues Kooper. “He said, ‘Oh man, you're not an organ player!' But then he was called to the telephone before he could refuse, so I went out and sat at the organ. In fact, on the
Highway 61 Interactive
CD-ROM, they include some of the different takes of the song, with the between-takes chatter, and you
can hear Tom Wilson saying, ‘OK, this is Take 7, ‘Like A Rolling Stone'… hey, what are
you
doing out there?', and you can hear me laugh. At that moment, he could have pulled me out of there, but he didn't, and that was the moment I became an organ player!”

With Kooper's organ swathing Dylan's lines in brooding, exultant chords while Bloomfield's guitar arpeggios and Griffin's piano circled menacingly around each other, the song developed an animated, claustrophobic atmosphere which Dylan tried to recapture several times afterwards, though rarely with the same impact. “'Rolling Stone' is the best song I wrote,” he told journalist Ralph Gleason. “When I was writing it I knew I had to sing it with a band. I always sing when I write, even prose, and I heard it like that.”

“‘Like A Rolling Stone' changed it all,” he told Nat Hentoff around that time. “I didn't care anymore after that about writing books or poems or whatever. I mean it was something that I myself could dig.”

Despite the success of ‘Like A Rolling Stone', Dylan was dissatisfied with Tom Wilson as producer. For the rest of the album he was replaced by Bob Johnston, best known as a songwriter for some of Elvis Presley's movies. Al Kooper was unimpressed with his abilities, compared to Wilson's more hands-on style.

“Tom was musically inclined, and the only quality Bob Johnston really has as a producer,” Kooper claims, “is that he knows how to pat the artist on the back. He made that into an art form! He says things like, ‘Can you
believe
these songs? This is the
greatest
record that I ever made in my
life!'
, whatever record he's working on, and that pumps the artist up tremendously.” Then again, in the case of
Highway 61 Revisited
and the ensuing
Blonde On Blonde
, at least, Johnston's assessment would have been 100% accurate—though given that his previous greatest production success had involved the resuscitation of Patti Page's career, it needn't have been that great a record to exceed his personal best.

Whatever the reason for changing producers, there would be an hiatus of six weeks before the musicians gathered for the next session, on July 29, when three more tracks were recorded, including the thrilling ‘Tombstone Blues'. A fast blues shuffle with Chuck Berry's tire-tracks all over it, ‘Tombstone Blues' was the second song of Dylan's (after ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues') to parody the repetitive structure of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger's ‘Taking It Easy', updating lines like “Mom was in the kitchen/ preparing to eat” for its
chorus. In Dylan's song, the matriarch has been freed from the role of cook and housekeeper, but her emancipation is pyrrhic as she works in a factory, shoeless, while her husband hustles on the streets and the narrator is stuck with the eponymous Tombstone Blues—probably a reference to police. In the annotations to the
Biograph
box, Dylan recalls playing in a bar frequented by off-duty cops, whose salty, violent conversation he mimics here. “I think I wrote this either in that place or remembering some conversations,” he admits. “I don't know, I had it for a while before I recorded it.” Also included in the
Biograph
box is a 48-second fragment of the previously unreleased ‘Jet Pilot'—a throwaway boogie about a woman who “weighs more by the foot than she does by the inch” and who turns out to be a transvestite—which Dylan regarded as the original ‘Tombstone Blues'.

With considerable comic panache, the song uses a parade of historical characters—American hero Paul Revere's horse (reincarnated), vaudeville artiste Belle Starr, biblical temptresses Delilah and Jezebel (the latter now a nun), Jack The Ripper (now a successful businessman), John The Baptist (now a torturer), a Philistine king, Galileo, Cecil B. DeMille, and the intriguing musical double-act of blueswoman Ma Rainey and Beethoven (who share a sleeping bag)—to sketch an absurdist account of contemporary American ills. In these verses, church, state, college and commerce collude to squander both the country's history and its future, most notably in the lines where the Philistine king (surely President Lyndon Johnson) “Puts the pied pipers in prison and fattens the slaves/Then sends them out to the jungle”—a reference to the country's treatment of draft-dodgers and the inequitable proportion of black Americans sent to fight in Vietnam.

Written in paired four-line stanzas to the rhyme-scheme a/a/a/b, c/c/c/b, the song allows Dylan to indulge in some outrageous rhyming—never more so than in the opening couplet, where “endorse” follows “of course” in a daring leap from the demotic to the bureaucratic. This parallels Dylan's take on American society, in which ordinary folk are in constant struggle with the authorities' attempts to control them through their desires. After every second verse, the chorus rolls around to remind us that, whatever the high-falutin activity of the verses, with their star-studded cast of characters, life just goes on as normal for the scuffling ordinary Joes and Janes confined to life's chorus-line. In the official version included in Dylan's
Lyrics 1962–1985
, the variations in the chorus (“I'm in the kitchen…” and “I'm in trouble…”) have been flattened into the dull uniformity of “I'm in the streets…” which may give a more streetwise/underclass interpretation to the choruses, but don't sing anywhere near as colorfully.

After the sour recrimination of ‘Like A Rolling Stone', Dylan's delivery is delightfully offhand, with a wry comic nonchalance punctuated between verses by some of guitarist Mike Bloomfield's greatest work, which may have been decisive in choosing which take to release. “I know we cut a version with The Chambers Brothers singing on the chorus, almost like a gospel backing,” recalls Al Kooper. “I often wonder what happened to that version, and if it could be resurrected at all—I thought it was great. But I think the deciding criterion was that Mike Bloomfield was great on the take they used.”

On a couple of levels, ‘It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry' provides a succinct illustration of Dylan's creative processes in action. Firstly, it shows he was still keen on borrowing from old blues songs, the second verse being an adaptation of lines (“Don't the clouds look lonesome shining across the sea/Don't my gal look good when she's coming after me?”) from Brownie McGhee and Leroy Carr's ‘Solid Road' —which, as ‘Rocks And Gravel', had been one of the tracks Dylan recorded for
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
but pulled at the eleventh hour. (Ironically, Dylan's own song then went on to provide similar second-hand inspiration for Steely Dan, Dylan fans who borrowed the line “Can't buy a thrill” as the title of their debut album.)