The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh

7 LIKE A ROLLING STONE, Bob Dylan Produced by Tom Wilson; written by Bob Dylan Columbia 43346 1965 Billboard: #2

The pistol shot that opens "Like a Rolling Stone" is really a drum but it could hardly be more appropriate if it were the real thing. At the instant this record reached the Top 40, the rock and roll world exploded. Dylan is celebrated for his lyrics, especially these lyrics, but his greatest contribution to pop was his voice, which redefined the whole idea of singing. "Like A Rolling Stone" is the summation of that new definition. Nasal and nasty, raw as barbed wire, Dylan's voice recasts Muddy Waters's electric blues as a medium for expressing both aesthetic outrage and a lust that's as much intellectual as it is carnal. The beat is sodden with anger, and the biting accents contributed by Mike Bloomfield's guitar and Frank Owens' piano are acid-etched. Yet for all its sour strength, there is more compassion and bittersweet comedy in "Like a Rolling Stone" than shows up on paper -- something you have to hear to really understand, because it's Dylan's singing, not the unmitigated assault of his words, that establishes the song's emotional range. Well, that and Al Kooper's nervous two-finger organ playing. (Nervous because Kooper apparently had never before played the instrument, simply showed up for the session and angled his way into the empty organ chair because he recognized the chance to enter history.) Together, the singing and the organ keep "Like A Rolling Stone" from being just another icy hipster bitch session at the level of "Positively Fourth Street" (or worse -- say, "Masters of War"). This was more-or-less Dylan's last session with New York producer and engineer Tom Wilson. They'd worked together since 1964, on Another Side of Bob Dylan, where Dylan wrote his first rock songs but chickened out when it came time to arrange them that way, and Bringing It All Back Home, where his electric explorations were tentative, if not halfhearted. This time, everything gelled and the result was riotous rock and roll, as tough as the Rolling Stones and Beatles sides that inspired it. If it's music, more than language, that sustains "Like a Rolling Stone," that doesn't mean that the words aren't continually stunning. Dylan's language is more than just colloquial, it's an absolute expression of the vernacular. He's not just dropping g's, he's even recasting the subjunctive into a vulgar tongue: "People'd call, say 'Beware doll . . .'" Even now, it still seems strange that the record is so long because in real life, diatribes are never allowed to last this long: Somebody interrupts. Like a lot of other Dylan songs, "Like a Rolling Stone" is often misunderstood as advice or instruction, but it's really both a contemporary myth that actually has the nerve to begin "Once upon a time . . . ," and the narration of a tragedy. Despite the sharp-tongued surface, when Dylan sings "When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose," he comes as close to expressing heartbreak as he ever would. That's why he almost strangles on that next-to-last "Hey, to be on your own." But even that's a deceptive interpretation, or at least an incomplete one. When Dylan sang a radically altered version of "Like a Rolling Stone" on his 1974 "comeback" tour, a lot of people noticed that he.seemed to be singing to himself. Listening to the original, you've got to ask why it took so long to figure that out.

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