Bob Dylan once named “the finest song I’ve ever written”
After popularising acoustic folk music in the mainstream, Bob Dylan traversed towards avant-garde lyricism and returned to his rock ‘n’ roll roots by “going electric”. This heady period in the 1960s crucially saw the young troubadour become acquainted with Beat Generation writer Allen Ginsberg. The legendary poet and his nonconformist troupe of literary mavericks violently shifted something in Dylan’s outlook. His days of straight-up protest songs were over, and born was the age of elusive poetry.
The pivotal moment could be traced back to when Dylan first met Ginsberg in 1963, introduced by New York Post journalist Al Aronowitz. “I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it was all pretty much connected,” Dylan reflected in an interview with The New Yorker in 1985. “It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti… I got in at the tail end of that, and it was magic… it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley.”
Dylan had been inspired by Beat literature since his late teens. After discovering Woody Guthrie and making his first foray into the folk scene, he applied this revolutionary wordplay to his early songwriting. However, after meeting Ginsberg in 1963, his work became increasingly abstract and progressive.
“I didn’t start writing poetry until I was out of high school,” Dylan recalled. “I was eighteen or so when I first discovered Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Frank O’Hara and those guys.”
Without a doubt, 1965 can be regarded as a critical turning point in Dylan’s career. Bringing It All Back Home, released in March, was a transitional hybrid with side one backed by an electric band and side two waving fare-thee-well to acoustic folk. This moment left a gaggle of Newport folk fanatics red in the chops, but for many, it was a sign of exciting things to come – namely, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.
The former of these two salient masterpieces was most famously home to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, one of Dylan’s most enduring hits and, of course, a lyrical landmark. During a 1966 interview with Playboy, Dylan revealed that he wrote the song at a time when he was somewhat disillusioned with his creative direction.
“Last spring, I guess I was going to quit singing,” he said. “I was very drained, and the way things were going, it was a very draggy situation … But ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ changed it all. I mean, it was something that I myself could dig. It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you.”
The lyrics eventually committed to record were cut from an extended poem of unremitting vitriol. “It wasn’t called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest,” Dylan later told journalist Jules Siegel. “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, following something.”
In an interview with CBC Radio in Montreal, Dylan remembered ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ as an eureka moment mined from a reel of literary “vomit”. “This long piece of vomit, 20 pages long, and out of it I took ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and made it as a single,” he said. “And I’d never written anything like that before, and it suddenly came to me that was what I should do … After writing that, I wasn’t interested in writing a novel or a play. I just had too much – I want to write songs.”
As we know, Dylan went on to release a further 34 studio albums over 55 years and may add to this tally yet. ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ helped the Nobel Prize winner fall back in love with music at a time when he pined for the silence of literature.
It, therefore, comes as no surprise that it’s one of Dylan’s very personal favourites. “‘Rolling Stone’ is the finest song I’ve ever written,” he once told journalist Ralph Gleason via Bob Dylan: The Stories Behind the Songs 1962-68.
Listen to one of the greatest songs ever written below.
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