The Bob Dylan song that nearly made Frank Zappa “quit” music
Frank Zappa was not a man who had many heroes. He made that much clear when he boldly aimed a blow at The Beatles, stating, “Everybody else thought they were God! I think that was not correct. They were just a good commercial group.”
He was wary of the ways of the world and had the wherewithal to view his peers for what they were rather than celebrating them like idols and sinking into the venerated past of their output. The moustachioed musician was all about pioneering the future, and he felt ‘hero worship’ was a hurdle that got in the way of that pursuit.
Nevertheless, he was only human, and some tracks seem so heaven-sent that it would be a sin not to praise the ground that their sound presides over. This is certainly the case when it comes to the defining American rock ‘n’ roll anthem—counterculture’s greatest work.
Dylan readily described his opus, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, as a “long piece of vomit”. It saw the original vagabond vent his spleen against the scene he had helped to stir up. It was exactly the sort of honest and clear-eyed dismay that Zappa had been espousing when he said things like youth culture engaging in politics was “as superficial as their music consciousness. It’s just another aspect of being involved in the actions of their peer group”.
‘Like a Rolling Stone’ didn’t say that exactly, but it did make the sincerity of the scene look about as robust as the health and safety measures at Woodstock. With barbed verse after barbed verse, Dylan tore at the folks in Andy Warhol’s Factory whose once proud virtues seemed to wane in tandem with their tattered fortunes. The minor celebrities, once surrounded by stars, were now sliding into the gutter of the common man and struggling to look up, steadfastly fixed on a plashy mire of despair as though they’d just dropped their last bag of pills down a drain. These folks drew the ire of Dylan and he called for change with his grittiest work.
Zappa’s appraisal of the track is pretty much that. “When I heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’,” the Mothers of Invention star told the writer Clinton Heylin, “I wanted to quit the music business.” That is quite a statement considering that when it was released in the summer of 1965, Zappa was yet to release an official studio album and he would go on to unleash 62 of his own.
He continued: “I felt [that] if this wins and it does what it’s supposed to do, I don’t need to do anything else.” The song heralded the same sort of iconoclasm and societal incision that Zappa would champion throughout his career, but much like the moustachioed guitar God, Dylan’s greatest feat is actually more cult than you might think.
While the track is revered as a masterpiece and is rightfully recognised as one of if not the greatest song of all time, it wound up only reaching 41 on the US Billboard end-of-year charts. Imagine that? In 1965, the US public figured there were 40 tracks more worthy of their attention than ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. Including stuff like ‘Wooly Bully’ by Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs, which actually, somehow, maddeningly, topped the list.
As Zappa wearily continued, “But it didn’t do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have.” It should have done away with pretence and pretending, bringing about a more purposeful and honest pursuit of the egalitarian ideals of counterculture. It should have reckoned with and remedied the way that rich folks might purport to be onside but yearn for the salvation of capital as soon as the first signs of another’s daily reality rears its ugly head.
While the brilliance of the anthem might not have been fully reflected in its reception, it has a legacy as rich as any that proves befitting of the masterpiece itself. Commercially, it might not have accrued great masses, and the revolution hidden in the welter of the words might not have fully materialised, but maybe it set a precedence that we’re still trying to scramble towards—as Paul McCartney once said, with the song Dylan “showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further.” That motif, at the very least, continues to abound—stirred up by ‘Like a Rolling Stones’ cold, hard wind.
In truth, there is an unrelated quote from another iconoclast named Serge Gainsbourg that helps to define the legacy of the grisly, thistle-grabbing anthem. “Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty,” he once said, “because it lasts.” ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is still yet to gather any moss as it blazes a trail of just what rock ‘n’ roll music can be. It might brought the hammer down quick enough to deprave the world of Zappa and his own subversive ways, but it’s so timeless and temeritous that there’s every chance Dylan’s greatest anthem is still on its upswing.
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