Today, the song remains Dylan’s most successfully commercial release, remaining in the US charts for 12 weeks. From Dylan’s direct lyric, How does it feel?, to the many covers, “Like a Rolling Stone” has gone on to become a beloved piece of American art.Īt an auction, the lyrics for the song, which has since been covered by Jimi Hendrix, Green Day, and The Wailers, garnered some $2 million, a world record. While at first-like most revolutionary things-the song wasn’t praised by Columbia, the song has since gone on to be recognized as, perhaps, the most praised song of all time. Originally, Dylan wrote the song on an upright piano in the key of D flat, which he later changed to C major on the guitar in the recording studio. I just had too much, I want to write songs.”
And I’d never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that was what I should do … After writing that I wasn’t interested in writing a novel, or a play. In an interview with CBC radio in Montreal, Dylan called the manifestation of “Like a Rolling Stone” a “breakthrough.” He even said that writing it changed his understanding of where and how his career was going, could go.ĭylan told the radio station that he’d written “this long piece of vomit, 20 pages long, and out of it I took ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and made it as a single. Billboard charts and later became the global hit we know it as now. Soon after, “Like a Rolling Stone” hit No. Now, he was full-on rock ‘n’ roll, which then was not as viable for artists in the mainstream as was folk music.īut the song was, a few weeks later, leaked to a popular music club-Arthur-and the DJs there took to it, ushering in its life as a bona fide single. Dylan, until this point, was beloved for his folk, acoustic tracks, which often were heard as overt protest songs. The track took off in the studio thanks in large part to rookie session player Al Kooper, who improvised the Hammond B2 organ riff that ever since has become a signature flair on the song ( more on this below, see: Second Breakthrough).Īt first, Dylan’s record company was unhappy with the recording, both for its length and the electric feel. The track was then recorded as part of the sessions for Dylan’s then-forthcoming LP, Highway 61 Revisited.Īt first, upon trying to record the track, Dylan reportedly had trouble finding the true center of the song. To shorten the song for radio play, which even then balked at a six-minute tune, Dylan shortened the lyrics to four verses and a chorus. I had never thought of it as a song until one day I was at the piano, and on the paper, it was singing, ‘How does it feel?’ in a slow-motion pace, in the utmost of slow motion.” In the end, it wasn’t hatred, it was telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky. It wasn’t called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you.”ĭylan told journalist Jules Siegel of the song’s origins, “It was ten pages long. I mean it was something that I myself could dig.
I was very drained, and the way things were going, it was a very draggy situation … But ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ changed it all. He told Playboy in 1966, “Last spring, I guess I was going to quit singing. Dylan wrote many verses (many more than appeared on the six-minute song) for the track earlier that same year after he returned, worn out, from a long tour in the U.K.Īfter that tour, Dylan, upset with how people were receiving him post-acoustic identity, considered retiring from the music scene. It began, as many of Dylan’s songs did in the ’60s, with a typewriter and a bit of a vendetta. Dylan first released “Like a Rolling Stone” on J(with “Gates of Eden” as the B-side).
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