The mystery of the song that changed Rock'n'Roll

The mystery of the song that changed rock'n'roll - Reviews - Books: "Reviewer Michael Epis
July 31, 2005

Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads
By Greil Marcus
Faber & Faber, $29.95

"It is a strange thing to write a book about one song - but Greil Marcus is a strange writer and Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone is a strange song.
Not that Marcus could ever limit himself to writing about one thing at a time - just as the six-minute six-second song refuses to limit itself to any one meaning.

Marcus has been fossicking and ferreting his way into popular and not-so-popular culture for three decades and more, and his magpie bricolage continues here. So we learn that the Italian hip-hop cover - Come una Pietra Scalciatta by Articolo 31 - that Dylan includes in his curious 2003 film, Masked and Anonymous, is not so much a cover of the original as it is of another hip hip-hop version by the Mystery Tramps.
By means of the utter transformation the Italians wreak, Marcus glides to his conclusion: the song's true precursor is the Drifters' 1959 There Goes My Baby. Which is perhaps not as shocking as his contention that its successor is the Pet Shop Boys' cover of the Village People's Go West. The fun is in keeping up with Marcus' runaway trains.

Marcus details the recording sessions, which embrace six stabs at the song at Columbia's Studio A in New York on June 15, 1965. In none is the song played to the end. The next day there are 16 more attempts, most immediately sputtering out. Two went the distance - one was a total 'screw-up', one succeeded.

Like a Rolling Stone is a mystery song. Marcus tracks down the mystery - not so much "what does it mean?" (though there's a bit of that) but "how did it happen?".

In the end, it was, as inspiration is, a focused accident. Bobby Gregg whacked the snare drum just hard enough to announce the song, a micro-second of echoing silence follows, then "the fanfare opens, with small notes on the piano dancing like fairies over the low, steady pulse from an organ you hear but don't register".

The organ was played by guitarist Al Kooper, who had been invited to watch, but snuck his way onto the instrument when producer Tom Wilson asked Paul Griffen to try the piano. Dylan would not explain the song to the musicians - he delegated that to guitarist Michael Bloomfield.

Dylan famously played it at the Newport Folk Festival the day after its release, where it was outshone by two lesser lights. Six months later, at Berkeley University, it still sounds all wrong, but by London in May 1966 it was a tour de force - a claim on rock'n'roll that no one could match.

"The song was never the same after England, neither was Bob Dylan - and neither was his audience," writes Marcus. Dylan tried the song twice in the next eight years - and forgot the lyrics both times.

The song mystified Dylan. As he once said of it: it was like a ghost gave him the song, "then it goes away". And it scared others.

It has often been said the song broadened the realms of the possible in rock. It did the opposite too. Tin Pan Alley songwriter Gerry Goffin says of his reaction and that of his songwriting partner, Carole King (of Tapestry fame): "We took all the (demos of) songs that hadn't been placed . . . and smashed them in half." Tin Pan Alley was dead.

It is a song that even now has the capacity to blast its way into the consciousness of someone who has never heard it before. It has not dated, and by some mystery of spirit, it never evokes nostalgia.

The mystery is audible. No verse sounds like any another. Each chorus is different. Instruments appear and disappear. It teeters, Dylan stumbles, vocally and on harmonica.

And yet it gathers momentum, rises and falls, rises above itself, so that the sneer in "How does it feel?" resolves itself by the end into unbridled exhilaration.

What had seemed like a put-down of a poor little girl rich ends up something so much greater, an affirmation of the unknown. It is the sound of someone daring to be great.

The song stands alone. So does the book. In their own strange ways."