Like A Rolling Stone:
Bob Dylan At The Crossroads by Greil
Marcus. Illustrated. 286 pp. Public Affairs. $14.00 (paperback)Is one song a viable focus for a book almost 300 pages long? Yes, if the study is written by music and cultural historian Greil Marcus and if the song is Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone," listed by Rolling Stone Magazine as number 1 on their "500 Greatest Songs of All Time."
Marcus recounts how
the song was part of Dylan's penchant for defying expectations. "Like A
Rolling Stone" was composed during the period when he threw off the folk
purists by pioneering the folk rock sound, for which he was booed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, in
1966.
It wasn't just the
folkies who were upended by Dylan's compositions; it was also the pop music
teams of Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Jeff Barry
and Ellie Greenwich. Said Goffin, "I wish we had tried more to write some
songs that–really meant something... Dylan managed to do something that not one
of us was able to do: put poetry in rock 'n' roll, and just stand up there like
a mensch and sing it." Elvis Costello registered the song's impact:
"What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and
the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like A Rolling Stone.'
"
The shock of the song
brought with it various interpretations of this portrait of a spoiled young
woman who found herself on the streets, among the very people she once looked
upon with condescension. Some saw the song as self-righteous put-down,
"refusing women any middle ground between the pedestal and the
gutter" or "sneeringly and contemptuously sung to a spoiled rich
girl" with "the reactionary stagnation of the social
order...personified as female."
The song that promises
"no direction home" can also be viewed, however, as an anthem of
freedom, especially in the context of the 1960s. Rolling Stone Magazine founder
Jann Wenner offered this perspective: "So now you're without a home,
you're on your own, complete unknown, like a rolling stone. That's a liberating
thing. This is a song about liberation. About being liberated from your
own hangups, your old knowledge, and the fear, the frightening part of facing
that." On a broader level, Wenner applied the song to "a comfortable
society suddenly discovering what's going on in Vietnam–the society we're taught
about, and you realize, as you become aware, drug aware, socially aware, the
disaster of the commercial society." Marcus agrees with this perspective:
"Confused–and justified, exultant, free from history with a world to
win–is exactly where the song means to leave you."
Marcus's depictions of
the musical traditions and landscapes of America can rise to pure poetry.
"Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan's first folk music hero" is described as a
"troubadour of the dispossessed, poet of the Great Depression, ghost of
the American highway, a man blown by the wind and made out of dust."
Highway 61, which took Dylan to cities where he discovered folk music,
"...would have seemed to go to the ends of the earth, carrying the oldest
strains of American music along with businessmen and escaped cons, vacationers
and joy-riders blasting the radio–carrying runaway slaves north before the long
highway had a single name, and, not so much more than a century later, carrying
Freedom Riders south."
The descriptions of
the studio sessions leave an impression of the contingent nature of recordings.
The musicians were fumbling around with the song until they came upon the
single take that did it justice. Al Kooper was originally not even supposed to
be part of the ensemble, but he happened to be in the studio and sat down at
the organ. One also hears fresh elements of the song after reading the book:
blues guitarist Michael Bloomfield's leads that form a bridge between stanzas,
or the sound of the tambourine throughout. Forty-four years later, "Like A
Rolling Stone" can be discovered anew, as is always the case with great
art.
Suggestions for
further reading:
• "Mystery Train:
Images of America in Rock 'N' Roll Music" by Greil Marcus
• "Down The
Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan" by Howard Sounes
• "Positively
Fourth Street" by David Hadju
• "Chronicles: Volume One" by Bob Dylan
No comments:
Post a Comment