Dylan's six-minute sneer rewired folk into rock stardom
Bob Dylan cut Like a Rolling Stone in June 1965 at Columbia Studio A—opening Highway 61 Revisited after distilling a ten-page verse draft. Columbia balked at length and electric sound; leaked copies forced release to number two Billboard amid DJ resistance.
Back from the draining English tour filmed for Dont Look Back, Dylan was tired of what audiences expected and thought about quitting. He told Playboy in 1966 that this song changed everything, because at last he had made something he himself could enjoy. It started as a long outpouring on paper, ten pages by one account and twenty by another, which he told Jules Siegel was aimed at someone he wanted to tell they were lucky; revenge, he decided, was the better word. He has never described writing any other major song that way.
In Woodstock he boiled the draft down to four verses and a chorus. The four-page manuscript, which sold at auction in 2014 for $2 million, a record for a pop lyric sheet, shows the full refrain only on the last page, a discarded line about a dog without a bone, a flirtation with rhyming on Al Capone and pencilled options such as raw deal. He wrote it on an upright piano in D flat and switched to C on guitar in the studio, and he warned blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield to skip any B.B. King licks.
Sessions ran at Columbia's Studio A on 15 and 16 June 1965 with producer Tom Wilson. The first day's five takes, a waltz with Dylan on piano, went nowhere, and he stopped, saying his voice was gone. Next day Al Kooper, a 21-year-old guest who was not supposed to play, slipped behind the Hammond organ while Wilson was out and invented the famous riff, and Dylan insisted it be pushed up in the mix. Of fifteen takes that day, now in straight rock time with Dylan on electric guitar, the fourth became the single. It was the last song Wilson produced for him.
Columbia hesitated over the six-minute length and electric sound until a copy leaked to a new music club a month later and influential DJs heard it. Released on 20 July 1965, it reached number two in Billboard and topped Cashbox even though many stations balked at its length. The lyric scorns Miss Lonely, a pampered woman now left to fend for herself, yet Jann Wenner heard liberation in having nothing left to lose. Warhol's circle suspected digs at him, others proposed Edie Sedgwick or Joan Baez, and Rolling Stone named it the greatest song of all time in 2004 and 2010.
Source: Like a Rolling Stone
