The night The Rolling Stones finally decided to cover ‘Like a Rolling Stone’
It wasn’t until the 15th issue of Rolling Stone magazine, on August 10, 1968, that the editors put a member of The Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger, on the cover. The Beatles had already been given that honour three times by that point, and even Tiny Tim had done it once.
Maybe this was a minor insult, but then again, if you’re gonna start a rock and roll magazine and call it Rolling Stone, you’re not going to slap Mick and Keith on the cover right away, people will think it’s just a fan club rag. When you’re in the business of being cool, there’s no greater crime than being too on-the-nose.
This, in a roundabout way, also explains why Mick Jagger and Keith Richards let 30 years go by before they decided to make Bob Dylan’s classic ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ a part of their own live set; with a recorded version ultimately landing on the Stones’ 1995 live album, Stripped.
“It’s time has come,” Richards told Gannett News later that year. “We’ve been playing that song for years at rehearsals. We always wanted to play it for an audience, but it would have been gratuitous 10 or 15 years ago. Suddenly, it felt right.”
Dylan’s original—arguably the most mythologised and celebrated Boomer anthem of them all, was released on July 20th, 1965, a little over a week before the Stones put out their third studio album, Out of Our Heads. It certainly could have been a pure coincidence that Dylan, just back from a UK tour, would choose to use the old “rollin’ stone” lyrical analogy in his new tune, paying no mind to England’s second most famous band of the moment. Maybe he was merely picking from the same Muddy Waters vine that had inspired Brian Jones to suggest that band name in the first place. I guess.
In any case, neither the song nor the band were hindered in any way by the overlapping references. Decades later, Dylan would talk about the Stones in glowing terms as “the greatest rock and roll band in the world,” while the Stones would jam out to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ in their rehearsal space, biding their time before finally going “full-Stones” and doing an official cover.
When Jagger suggested they take the song to the stage during 1995’s Voodoo Lounge tour, the other guys “looked at me like I was slightly mad,” Mick said. But, despite any concerns of distorting the ‘60s classic into a sort of goofy theme song, the Stones played ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ at the Paradiso Club in Amsterdam on May 26th, 1995, with no ill effects.
“It went down so well that we kept it in the big stadium shows,” Jagger said, noting that one of those shows in Montpellier, France, included a special guest appearance by the songwriter himself.
If you watch a video of that train wreck of a duet, Dylan somehow looks even more clueless and uncomfortable than he does in the ‘We Are the World’ tapings. Nonetheless, Jagger, who often joked that Dylan had written ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ as a direct tribute to his favourite British rock band, diplomatically claimed that the performance had gone “great.”
“We were in the dressing room [beforehand], and Bob was worried about how to handle the choruses,” Richards added. “We laughed and Ronnie [Wood] told him, ‘Don’t worry, Bob, we let the audience handle that.”
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