Six minutes of Like a Rolling Stone rewrote the pop single
In 1965 Bob Dylan released a six-minute single that stretched what a hit song could be. Like a Rolling Stone sat beside albums that plugged folk into electric rock and unsettled fans who wanted him to stay acoustic. The move expanded both commercial form and lyrical ambition in popular music.
Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth and raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, he grew up in a small Jewish community after his father contracted polio. As a teen he blasted Little Richard covers until a principal cut the mic; on January 31, 1959, he saw Buddy Holly at the Duluth Armory four days before Holly's fatal crash. At the University of Minnesota he drifted from rock into folk, performing as Bob Dylan. He left college in May 1960 and reached New York in January 1961 to play and to visit Woody Guthrie in hospital, calling Guthrie the true voice of the American spirit he meant to follow.
A September 1961 New York Times review of Gerde's Folk City helped; John Hammond signed him to Columbia. The March 1962 debut sold five thousand copies its first year. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) changed the scale: "Blowin' in the Wind," partly drawn from "No More Auction Block," and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," built on "Lord Randall," mixed imagist lyrics with old ballad frames. George Harrison later said the Beatles wore the album out. Joan Baez amplified his songs on her stages. Electrically amplified albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and Blonde on Blonde (1966) sparked lasting argument about betrayal and progress.
Estimates put worldwide sales around one hundred twenty-five million. Accolades include an Oscar, ten Grammys, Kennedy Center Honors, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a 2008 Pulitzer special citation, and the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature for new poetic expressions within the American song tradition. After a 1966 motorcycle crash he stopped touring for seven years, later returning to a Never Ending Tour. The songwriter who once sold barely enough to break even had made literary density feel native to the radio.
Source: Bob Dylan
