The cultural critic Greil Marcus has done more to establish Bob Dylan as an American folk hero than the reticent singer- songwriter has done himself.
In “Like a Rolling Stone,’ Marcus looks at the history and impact of Dylan’s greatest hit on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone’ was a 1965 Top-40 smash single that became the rock anthem of the 1960s and changed pop songwriting forever. The song also was the lead-off track of Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited’ album.
It was groundbreaking in its six-minute length, carnivalesque sound and surrealistically kaleidoscopic imagery. Earlier that year, Dylan had begun his tumultuous move from folk-protest singer to electrified rock ‘n’ roll star. This song not only marked his quick triumph, but also established him as a youth-culture prophet. The song, which became a kind of alluring yet scary compass for those disenchanted with American society in the 1960s, was about casting off the safety net to become a “complete unknown, like a rolling stone.”
This is Marcus’ second book specifically about Dylan; 1997’s “The Old, Weird America’ (originally published as “Invisible Republic’) preceded it and was enormously influential. And last year’s “The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad,’ which he co-edited with Sean Wilentz, seemed a project inspired by Dylan’s own interpretations of folk and blues ballads.
Marcus’ oeuvre is to dazzle the reader with his vocabulary and wildly imaginative connections – here he moves effortlessly from “Moby-Dick’ and Captain Ahab to Ray Stevens’ obscure, early-1960s novelty hit “Ahab the Arab’ in a sentence. When it works, it can make you giddy, like listening to an oldies station with great taste and a sense of surprise. It certainly works here, helped because Marcus doesn’t have to strain to prove his central point: “‘Like a Rolling Stone’ represents “that moment when the stakes of life are raised. People recognized that from the first.’ It’s inarguably true, which is why it continually turns up first on lists of rock’s greatest songs. (Most recently, atop Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs survey.) And that frees Marcus to concentrate on some often-thrillingly dramatic and outright emotional writing about the process by which the song was conceived and recorded, as well as how its success affected Dylan … and everybody else.
More than anything else, Marcus shows that the song was not hatched in isolation – artistic breakthroughs rarely are. Marcus tracks “Like a Rolling Stone’s’ various influences. He quotes an old interview in which Phil Spector observes its chord changes amounted to a rewrite of “La Bamba.’ Marcus himself views the song as a lyrical variation on the themes of Dylan’s earlier comic talking-blues composition, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.’ And that, Marcus points out, was influenced by Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, “Invisible Man.’ But he ultimately believes “Stone’ owes more to Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl’ than to any other source.
There is more to the song than the words – there is the sound of the production and the way Dylan drawlingly elongates his syllables at the end of each line of verse. Describing a recording session often is hard for writers. They get bogged down in technical jargon. But Marcus never succumbs. He studies the difficult birthing of the record during 15 takes. He looks at how Al Kooper, who plays the lilting, calliopelike organ part, was unexpectedly drafted into his job at the last minute. He describes the effect of Bobby Gregg’s snare drum crack that begins the record – an almost-literal “shot heard ’round the world.’ And he pays due regards to guitarist Mike Bloomfield.
He writes with vividness and wonderment about how, on just one of those often-chaotic, frustrating takes, they all it got it right. And on that take, Dylan was the greatest singer in the world:
“Bombs are going off everywhere, and every bomb is a word,’ he writes. “‘DIDN’T-STEAL-USED-INVISIBLE’: they are part of the story, but in the way they are sung – declaimed, hammered, thrown down from the mountain to shatter among the crowd at the foot – each word is also the story, itself. You are drawn into single words as if they are caves within the song.’
It is a clich to say the song’s impact changed everything. Rock groups and pop musicians already had had hits with Dylan’s material before “Like a Rolling Stone,’ which is one reason he was so eager to “go electric.’ But after the song, others wanted to make records that were grand and epochal, not just catchy.
Marcus briefly chronicles some: The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,’ Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.’ But one that he respects the most constitutes this book’s greatest surprise – the Pet Shop Boys’ 1993 version of the Village People’s gay-themed 1979 dance hit, “Go West.’
The Pet Shop Boys transformed it into an elegiac tribute to those who died of AIDS, Marcus believes. “As you listen, you hear history tearing the song to pieces – but the song will not surrender its body. At five minutes it seems to go on forever, and you want it to.’ That’s Marcus at his best – making unexpected connections.
Steven Rosen is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.
