Credit: Far Out / Alamy

The classic Bob Dylan song Frank Zappa dismissed as “cowboy music”

Sat 3 January 2026 17:48, UK

The sardonic Frank Zappa always stands out as a gloriously strange sidestep in the journey of pop culture.

Like Bob Dylan before him, Zappa was an outsider standing on the outskirts of society, purveying its imperfections. In part, this began with Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Open any modern edition, and you’ll find Dylan’s testimony on the sleeve. “It changed my life,” it reads, “like it changed everyone else’s.” In turn, Dylan would have the same impact on Zappa himself.

Discounting the likes of avant-garde neo-classicalists like the Hungarian oddity Béla Bartók, Zappa was not a man who had many heroes. 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 past of their output. Zappa was all about pioneering the future, and he felt hero worship was a hurdle that got in the way of that task.

In fact, it was Dylan himself who once said, “A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.” Zappa figured art should be free of all fads and hang-ups, and he didn’t think many people were on the same page. Counterculture, as far as he could see, had become a “fad” more so than a movement.

However, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was another matter. In the song, Dylan crucifies the crux of counterculture’s exposed Achilles heel. And he does it with such disdain that the world would never truly be the same when his cutting intellect, stirring poetry and the brilliance of the soaring melody all mingled into one pop culture opus.

Bob Dylan - Musician - 1966 — Credit: Far Out / Alamy

As Bruce Springsteen put it, “The way Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind.” Speaking about the song, Paul McCartney said that it helped a generation of musicians see that “it was possible to go a little further”. The extent of its foresight meant that it wasn’t only hailed by mainstream names, but also the likes of Zappa, too. Here was an outsider holding a mirror to a crooked societal movement, “awakening” people in the process.

Zappa’s appraisal of the track pretty much follows that same line of thought. “When I heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’,” the ‘Bobby Brown Goes Down’ singer told the writer Clinton Heylin, “I wanted to quit the music business.” That is quite a statement considering that when it was released in July 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.” Sadly, this iconoclastic rally cry – now rightfully recognised as one of if not the greatest song of all time – somehow only wound up reaching 41 on the US Billboard end-of-year charts, a whole 40 places behind ‘Wooly Bully’ by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs somehow in first, and even beaten out by ‘Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte’ by Patti Page one spot ahead of it.

As Zappa wearily continued, “But it didn’t do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have.”

Zappa on the downfall of Dylan

So, when you put it to the masses with brutal perfection, and the point is still missed, Zappa thought, ‘Why not have fun with it and paint the same picture in an abstract, sideways manner’. The moustachioed maestro decided that if it was a losing battle, then at least he was going to have fun with his spearing of a troubled society. This was a level of individualism he was sworn to stay true to.

However, as for his former hero, he thought that Dylan was found wandering away from his responsibilities with the record that followed. “Highway 61 Revisited was really good,” Zappa said of Dylan’s pointed classic in a 1993 interview with Playboy. But he was nowhere near as fond of the country-inclined breakup album that came ten months later as Dylan released Bring It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, all within 15 months.

“Then we got Blonde on Blonde,” Zappa added, “And it started to sound like cowboy music. You know what I think of cowboy music.” And for those who perhaps don’t know, the fellow who was raised on modern experiments loathed country music pretty much more than any other. He found it to be traditionalist, dated and a million miles from the sort of anarchic freedom he was after.

That is a harsh appraisal of an album that is undoubtedly a worthy classic, but then again, Zappa was a harsh man with his own motives. As the writer and guitarist Nigey Lennon once said of her friend, “He had an instinctive hatred of almost everything America, especially cowboys.” In fact, he once introduced a drunken John Wayne, who had somehow stumbled into one of his Los Angeles shows, as a Nazi.

He found country music to be a stilted commercial appeasement of the people, and as he said, “Art is moving closer to commercialism. And never the twain shall meet.” While Blonde on Blonde doesn’t seem to be either commercial or country in the most part, and it is, in fact, statistically speaking Dylan’s most critically revered record, Zappa saw things the way he saw them, and that was that: ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ had sadly become a tumbling tumbleweed.

But maybe there was more to Zappa’s “cowboy” decree than just that. As is perfectly clear, the ‘I’m the Slime’ star didn’t go in for the whole hero worship thing, and he’s not alone in thinking that Dylan’s work is often blanketed as an uninterrupted mass of masterpieces and not properly dissected. Even Randy Newman, “Dylan knows he doesn’t write as he did on those first two records. The tremendous praise that the last two have gotten, I’m not so sure [that would have happened] if they didn’t have his name on it.” Maybe that’s a sentiment that Zappa was leaning into: you don’t have to be perfect to be a genius – peaks and troughs are all part of it.