Remembering Cher’s cover of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ by Bob Dylan
Featured on Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is one of those songs that simply can’t be bettered by another artist. Rarely covered, the Dylan original features one of the singer-songwriter’s greatest vocal performances and includes some of Al Kooper’s finest organ work outside Blonde on Blonde.
At once sardonic, earnest, scathing and mellifluent, it is, in essence, the perfect Dylan recording. Such perfection, however, hasn’t stopped countless artists from releasing cover versions. Here we revisit one of the most memorable, Cher’s 1966 version, featured on her album The Sonny Side of Cher.
‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was by no means Cher’s first Dylan cover. In 1964, after signing to Liberty Record’s Imperial Imprint and releasing her first single ‘Dream Baby’, she joined forces with Sonny to record her second solo single, a cover of Bob’s ‘All I Really Want To Do’, which peaked at number 15 in the US in 1965. Following the success of the subsequent album, the then-timid performer teamed up with Sonny on a permanent basis and released ‘I Got You Babe’, winning overnight success for the duo.
Sonny & Cher’s success put Cher in competition with herself, leading to the 1966 solo venture The Sonny Side of Cher, which, like her first solo album, included an obligatory Dylan cover alongside renditions of ‘It’s Not Unusual’ by Tom Jones, ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ and Edif Piaf’s ‘Milord’. A fall-from-grace tale set to undulating rhythms and intoxicating organ lines, the track tells the story of a glamorous socialite – potentially Edie Sedgewick – who ends up losing everything and becoming an outcast.
Many of Dylan’s songs – ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’, ‘All Along The Watchtower’ – lack a certain something which is subsequently established in a later cover version. ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is different. Without Dylan’s unique intonation, the song becomes a completely different beast and usually a much less fearsome one too. This cover is a good example. Though the backing arrangment is a delightful twinkling affair, Cher’s vocal performance is almost too perfect.
In the original, 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 once observed, everything Dylan sings has “two meanings”. He’s “telling you the truth and making fun of you at the same time. Here Cher appears only to be telling the truth.
You can revisit the moment Cher covered Bob Dylan song ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.