About “Like a Rolling Stone”



About “Like a Rolling Stone”

“Like a Rolling Stone”

The song is a 1965 rock song by Bob Dylan. Its confrontational lyrics originate in an extended piece of verse Dylan wrote in June 1965, when he returned exhausted from a grueling tour of England.

Newport Folk Festival

Bob Dylan's 1963 and 1964 performances had made him popular with the Newport crowd, but on July 25, 1965 Dylan was booed by some fans when he played with backing from Mike Bloomfield on Guitar and others from an electric blues/rock and roll band known as The Paul Butterfield Blues Band while headlining the festival. It is usually said that the reason for the crowd's hostile reception was Dylan's 'abandoning' of the folk orthodoxy, or poor sound quality on the night (or a combination of the two). This incident, Dylan's first live 'plugged-in' set of his professional career, marked the shift in his artistic direction from folk to rock, and had wider implications for both styles of music.

Some Interpretations of “Like a Rolling Stone”

Unlike conventional chart hits of the time, the lyrics of "Like a Rolling Stone" were not about love, but expressed resentment and a yearning for revenge. Author Oliver Trager describes the lyrics as "Dylan's sneer at a woman who has fallen from grace and is reduced to fending for herself in a hostile, unfamiliar world." Until now, the song's target, Miss Lonely, has taken the easy way out, gone to the finest schools and had high-placed friends, but now that her situation has become difficult she has no meaningful experiences on which to base her character.

Dylan biographer Howard Sounes warned against reducing the song to the biography of one person, and suggested "it is more likely that the song was aimed generally at those Dylan perceived as being 'phony'."

Despite the vitriol, the song also depicts compassion for Miss Lonely, as well as joy in the freedom of losing everything. Jann Wenner has commented that "Everything has been stripped away. You're on your own, you're free now ... You're so helpless and now you've got nothing left. And you're invisible—you've got no secrets—that's so liberating. You've nothing to fear anymore."

Mike Marqusee has written at length on the conflicts in Dylan's life during this time, with its deepening alienation from his old folk-revival audience and clear-cut leftist causes. He suggests that the song is probably self-referential. "The song only attains full poignancy when one realises it is sung, at least in part, to the singer himself: he's the one 'with no direction home.'"[52] Dylan himself has noted that after his motorcycle accident in 1966 he realized that "when I used words like 'he' and 'it' and 'they,' and talking about other people, I was really talking about nobody but me."

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