‘Like A Rolling Stone’: The song Bob Dylan has spent over nine days playing
For ageing rockstars, it must get exhausting. Imagine saying the same words over and over, then imagine that those words are from your diary back when you were 20 or so, decades before you stood up to play them for a baying crowd for the nth time. Surely, that’s what it feels like for artists still singing the same songs over again that they penned way back at the start of their careers. The minutes add up to hours, which add up to days, and all in all, Bob Dylan has spent approximately nine of them singing one song alone.
It’s the sort of thing that artists rarely think about at the time they write a song or even when it first comes out and feels shiny and new to them as they first take it out on tour. In 1975, Mick Jagger infamously said, “I’d rather be dead than sing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 45.” But now at 81, having performed the track 999 times – only one more gig until its millennium jubilee.
But for Bob Dylan, that feeling seemed to go in hyperspeed. By the mid-1960s, he was already sick to death of his older material. He was bored of playing ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ or his old classic folk number, which resulted in the electric Dylan scandal when he shocked crowds by switching out his acoustic for a Fender Stratocaster.
If there was one song picked to define this change in pace, written to mark a shift in his sound, it would be ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ as he called in a full classic rock backing band to help him out. It was a freeing moment for the artist creatively, but even the boldest of moves must get boring eventually.
By now, 60 years after the song’s release, Dylan has played it live around 2,075 times. Multiply that by the song’s six-minute duration, and the artist has spent around 207.5 hours playing the song, or approximately nine whole days.
However, he now hasn’t played the song for quite some time. The last time Dylan played ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ live was in 2019 during his show at Hyde Park in London. But anyone who has seen Dylan live lately can attest to the fact that even if he did play it, it wouldn’t be in the form fans are used to or sound anything at all like the original hit.
Dylan’s shows are a strange affair now. He doesn’t talk to the audience, everyone has their phones locked away, he rarely plays any of his biggest songs. Certain tracks have endured as part of his setlist, though, with ‘All Along The Watchtower’, ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ still getting outings at his shows. Who knows why those ones survived and others didn’t? Perhaps it merely comes down to whether or not the aged and changed register can handle the song, or maybe they’re his favourites from those early eras.
But either way, it’s understandable. Now 83, the star has certainly earned the right to do what he wants with his live shows. And after having put in a nine-year-long shift singing ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, it’s fair that maybe he’s simply sick of it now.
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