“Like a Rolling Stone” (Bob Dylan)

Rounding out this week of organ-heavy tunes, today’s classic organic song of the day is “Like a Rolling Stone” by the immortal Bob Dylan. Released as a single in July of 1965 by Columbia Records, this track shot to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the Cash Box Top 100.

“Like a Rolling Stone” was recorded just a month before it was released, on June 16, 1965, at Columbia’s 7th Avenue Studio A in New York City. The musicians included Mike Bloomfield on guitar, Paul Griffin on piano, Joe Macho Jr. on bass, Bobby Gregg on drums, and a very young Al Kooper on organ. Dylan himself played acoustic guitar and harmonica.

In addition to its brutally in-your-face lyrics, “Like a Rolling Stone” is known for its distinctive Hammond B2 organ riffs, played by 21 year-old Al Kooper. The funny thing is, Mr. Kooper wasn’t an organist; he was actually a guitarist who was hanging out in the studio that day, watching Mr. Dylan piece together those famous lyrics. He was hoping to be included in the session, but blues legend Mike Bloomfield was already on guitar, which intimidated the young Mr. Kooper to no end. After a few abortive takes of the song, Kooper approached producer Tom Wilson, saying he had an idea for a cool organ part. Wilson didn’t think much of Kooper’s keyboard skills, and told him so, but didn’t forbid him from sitting down behind the Hammond B2.

Mr. Kooper remembers how it went from there:

“Imagine this: There is no music to read. The song is over five minutes long, the band is so loud that I can’t even hear the organ, and I’m not familiar with the instrument to begin with. But the tape is rolling, and that is Bob-fucking-Dylan over there singing, so this had better be me sitting here playing something. The best I could manage was to play hesitantly by sight, feeling my way through the changes like a little kid fumbling for the light switch. After six minutes they’d gotten the first complete take of the day and everyone adjourned to the control room to hear it played back.

Mr. Kooper recalls what happened next:

“So at the end of the take they, Bob and Bloomfield, go into the control room to listen to it back. And Tom Wilson says, ‘If anybody wants to come listen, they’re going to play that back.’ So I said, ‘Okay. I’m anyone.’ So I go in the booth and I sit down, and they start playing it back. And after the second verse, Dylan leans over to Tom Wilson—and this is all where I could touch any of these people. Very small circle. And Dylan says, ‘Can you turn the organ up?’ And Tom Wilson laughed and he says, ‘That guy’s not an organ player.’ [Dylan] said, ‘I don’t care, could you make the organ louder?’ And so, [Wilson] says, ‘Yeah.’ And he turned up the organ, and that was the moment where I became an organ player.”

“Like a Rolling Stone” is Dylan sneering, vicious indictment of a woman of means who seems to have fallen from grace. Life is getting more difficult for this woman, as Dylan wrote:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People call say ‘beware doll, you’re bound to fall’
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone

The song started out with ten pages of lyrics that Dylan whittled down to four verses and a chorus. Here’s what Mr. Dylan had to say about the tune:

“It was ten pages long. 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, in the utmost of slow motion.”

“Like a Rolling Stone,” as well as the other tunes on the Highway 61 Revisited album, marked Dylan’s move away from acoustic guitar-driven folk music to his electric phase. Columbia’s marketing department didn’t like it because it was different and initially didn’t push the tune; it took DJ’s across the country playing the song incessantly for the record to become a hit.

It turns out that “Like a Rolling Stone” was one of those songs that not only defined the times but established a new era. Rolling Stone magazine named it the Greatest Song of All Time in 2010, as did Mojo magazine in 2005. The song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998.

And here’s your daily bonus video of the day, Bob Dylan and the Butterfield Blues Band, with Al Kooper on organ, performing “Like a Rolling Stone” at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. This was an extremely controversial performance, with Dylan going electric for the first time in front of a crowd accustomed to and expecting more traditional folk music. If you can believe it today, almost 60 years later, a not insignificant segment of the crowd booed the performer.

Joe Boyd, one of the sound guys for the Newport festival, describes the audience reaction this way:

“By today’s standards, the volume wasn’t particularly high, but in 1965 it was probably the loudest thing anyone in the audience had ever heard. A buzz of shock and amazement ran through the crowd. When the [first] song finished, there was a roar that contained many sounds. Certainly boos were included, but they weren’t in a majority. There were shouts of delight and triumph and also of derision and outrage. The musicians didn’t wait to interpret it, they just plunged straight into the second song.”

It was a groundbreaking performance, one of those “music before Newport, music after Newport” moments. And it’s here for you to watch today.