Listen to Bob Dylan’s isolated vocals on ‘Like A Rolling Stone’
Bob Dylan’s voice lent his songs something impossible to simulate: a distinctive sense of irony. Paul Simon identified this quality of Dylan’s singing in a now-famous interview with Mojo, during which he confessed that he’d never be able to live up to the singer-songwriter: “One of my deficiencies is my voice sounds sincere,” Simon explained. “I’ve tried to sound ironic. I don’t. I can’t. Dylan, everything he sings has two meanings. He’s telling you the truth and making fun of you at the same time.”
This isolated recording of Bob Dylan’s vocal track on ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is the perfect example of this trickery in action. The song was written for Dylan’s epoch-defining 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited and tells the story of a glamorous socialite who ends up losing everything and becoming an outcast. As Dylan points out, however, there’s a silver lining. After all, “when you got nothing you got nothing to lose.”
Dylan’s lyrics were in part inspired by the Hank Williams song ‘Lost Highway’, which contains the line, “I’m a rolling stone, all alone and lost.” It’s never quite clear whether Dylan is trying to paint a picture of poverty as a form of liberation, point out the fundamental instability of class, or make a joke out of the middle-class inclination to romanticise the down-and-outs of the world. As Paul Simon pointed out, Dylan’s voice only heightens the ambiguity, and the likelihood is it’s a combination of all three.
Rumour has it that Dylan wrote ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ about Edie Sedgwick, a rich kid-cum-New York debutante who became one of Andy Warhol’s Superstars only to die of a drug and alcohol overdose in 1971. Dylan draws attention to Warhol’s supposed exploitation of Sedgewick in the line: “Ain’t it hard when you discover that/ He really wasn’t where it’s at/ After he took from you everything he could steal.”
Warhol was certainly no gentleman. After adopting Sedgwick as one of his starlets and pushing her film career, he abandoned her completely – moving on to another girl as soon as her name stopped making headlines. All that being said, the lyrics of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ are vague enough that they can easily be interpreted as a dig at the burgeoning counterculture movement – one that saw thousands of rich middle-class kids adopt a somewhat paradoxical anti-materialist view of the world.
Make sure you check out Dylan’s wonderfully nasal isolated vocals for 1965’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ if you haven’t already.
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