Frank Zappa’s favourite Bob Dylan song
Like a comic book villain, Frank Zappa didn’t have a lot of time for 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.
“Music is always a commentary on society,” Zappa once proclaimed. So, it makes perfect sense that the ultimate skewering of counterculture is lauded by the bearded guitar hero as a masterpiece. That song was, of course, Bob Dylan’s epic ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. Dylan set himself up as an outsider holding a mirror to the crooked side of a societal movement.
Zappa’s appraisal of the track is pretty much that. “When I heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’,” Zappa 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. As Zappa wearily continued, “But it didn’t do anything. It sold, but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have.”
So, with the public failing to fully grasp the opus, Zappa must have figured that he had heaped enough praise on Dylan for now. He thought that Dylan was found wandering away from his responsibilities, and he should’ve doubled-down on the message of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, but he didn’t. “Highway 61 Revisited was really good,” Zappa said of Dylan’s pointed classic in a 1993 Playboy interview.
But he wasn’t as fond of the country-inclined breakup album that followed. “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 if there was one thing Zappa hated, it was cowboy music. In fact, perhaps part of the reason that ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ ranked among his few measly favourites was because it was anti-American in many ways.
As he once said: ”We are culturally nothing. We mean nothing we’re only interested in the bottom line […] I think that a country that doesn’t do something to sustain its culture, whatever it is, doesn’t invest in it and doesn’t keep it happening, isn’t proud of it, well, maybe they just shouldn’t exist because it’s the culture and the beautiful things that a society produces that should survive for thousands of years, not the designer jeans.” Dylan’s track put that to the sword, but Zappa thinks he should’ve slain some more.
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