Like a Rolling Stone, A Few Memories, Revisited

Notice anything unusual about this record sleeve? This was the 45 rpm of Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" which was released in the summer of 1965. Side One is Part 1 of the song and Side Two is Part 2.

If you weren't there in that time frame, when we were collecting 45s, you probably wouldn't have known about this unusual record that you had to turn over to hear the whole song. When you look on Wikipedia, they don't even show the first pressing of "Like a Rolling Stone," the single. Instead, you'll find a photo of another version of the 45, with this song on Side A and "Gates of Eden" on the B-side. 

The song has a legendary history. According to one Dylan interview, the song's reception by the public gave both the creator and his career a major boost. It also catapulted Al Kooper from being like a complete unknown to "that guy who created the memorable organ track on one of the great songs of history." Kooper was a 21-year-old guitar player who "just happened to be there." When the organ player was moved to piano, Kooper audaciously filled the empty seat at the organ. (Evidently "nature abhors a vacuum" even in a studio.)

It's no secret that Rolling Stone magazine took its name from the song and decades later named it #1 on its list of 500 Greatest Songs. (Fwiw, their most recent list bumped Dylan down to fourth with Aretha Franklin in the supreme slot.)

When I was in junior high school at Hillside School, Bridgewater, NJ, the school dances were held in the auditorium with a record player on the stage and a DJ making selections from stacks of 45s all laid out on a table. Every record was three minutes, and "Like a Rolling Stone" was six minutes. This meant you could slow dance for twice as long when this song played. Yes, this is kind of a strange song to dance to, but it was slow enough for a two-step, and who really cared what the lyrics were when we were 13. I would go ask Nancy Black if she would dance with me and it seemed like she always did. 

These were the days when teachers stood around the dance floor with rulers in their hands to make sure you were not closer than a foot apart. (They were probably used to measure hemlines as well, which were supposed to be no more than an inch above the knee, if I remember correctly.) For the record, I was too shy to talk to Nancy, either while dancing or while off the dance floor. 

The point of that story is this, though. It seems like I remember the DJ having to turn the record over to finish the song. And yet, according to Wikipedia, these 45s with two verses on the front and two on the back only circulated amongst radio disc jockeys, and the public got the pressing of a 45 with "Gates of Eden" on the back? Is my memory faulty? Can anyone definitively help me with that. 

Greil Marcus points out in his book about this song, subtitled Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, that Like a Rolling Stone was not the first record that took up two sides of a record. In 1959 In 1959 both Ray Charles ("What'd I Say") and the Isley Brothers ("Shout") released records that needed to be flipped. 

As for Nancy Black, if you see her, say hello. (She might be in Tangiers.)

* * *

The song became the opening track on one of the great albums of all time, Highway 61 Revisited. Dylan's mid-sixties albums opened whole new territory with regard to the possibilities of rock and roll. But that's another story. 

In 2014 the handwritten lyrics of this song sold for two million dollars. You can read more about that here:

 

Going Once, Going Twice, Sold! Two Million Dollars for Handwritten Draft of Dylan's Original Lyrics to Like a Rolling Stone

Tech Tuesday: How Can a Tweet Be Worth More Than the Handwritten Lyrics to Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone

In the summer of 2014 the handwritten lyrics to Bob Dylan's hit "Like a Rolling Stone" were sold for the staggering amount of $2.045 million dollars. That's a lotta cabbage, as they say. 

Naturally the event gave me an opportunity share my thoughts and observations as to why this song and its author were so significant. Some ask how the lyrics to a song could be so valuable. I dunno. I suppose it's all a matter of how you define value. Here's what I wrote at the time in defense of the value of this song and Dylan's prose.

Jack Dorsey's first Tweet

When I read the news today that a single Tweet fetched $2.5 million, the above story leapt to my mind. How could a Tweet be worth more than the lyrics of a Dylan song.

And yet, here it is. The times are a-changin'.  

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is selling his first ever tweet from 15 years ago this month, and there are buyers bidding it up. That's five words, currently worth $500,000 apiece. 

Compare that to four pages of Like a Rolling Stone, which amounts to a full page of words for a half million a piece. 

How does one "own" a piece of digital real estate? This is very strange to me. 

According to the article in my Stocktwits eNewsletter for March 9 (today) Mr. Dorsey will convert the winning auction proceeds to Bitcoin and then domat to his Give Directly Africa Response, an organization providing Covid relief to vulnerable families. (Big shout out to Dorsey.) 

The article includes a link to the auction in the event you wish to outbid the current high bidder. here’s the link

Here's the story at CNBC: Jack Dorsey’s first tweet is on track to sell for $2.5 million, and he says
the money will go to charity

* * *  

How high will the bidding go? Place your bets.

Inside the KUMD Studios with John Bushey Producing the Last Highway 61 Revisited Show of 2016

Saturday I had an opportunity to be in the studio as John Bushey recorded his Bob Dylan-themed show Highway 61 Revisited. I had briefly been a guest on the show a couple times in the past, but this was my first time being present for a full production.

As many of you know John has now been producing this show for more than 25 years. For many people the hour-long program is a highlight of the week. Because of streaming media, the show has a following all around the world. Some of these long-distance-listeners have even made the trek to the Northland for Duluth Dylan Fest and previously Dylan Days in Hibbing.

KUMD's studios are downstairs in the Humanities Building at UMD. This being December 31, we nearly had the parking lot to ourselves as we entered the building from the rear. John carried with him a plastic bag of CDs to draw upon for this night's show. Not only did he bring the new 36 CD box set of all live performances from 1966, he also had the full set of outtakes from studio recordings of 1965 and 1966 released as The Cutting Edge bootleg, the defining period in Dylan's career.

Regular listeners to the show know that the host usually open with a song selection followed by his reassuring, "Good evening and welcome to Highway 61 Revisited." When we as listeners hear this opening we know all is well with the world. "Tonight we opened the show with 'Temporary Like Achilles'..." which was recorded for Blonde On Blonde.

John used to record the show on 'dis DAT machine.

After a few remarks John plays a trio of songs beginning with a pair from a May 20, 1966 concert, "4th Time Around" and "Baby Let Me Follow You Down", then "Tell Me, Mama" from Sydney Australia.

While the songs are playing we talk about the show, the technology that is second nature to him, and most frequently, the common interest that brought us together, Dylan. He's brought The Cutting Edge set in order to mix things up a little, performing Dylan contrasted with studio Dylan. He chooses to spin Take 6 of "She's Your Lover Now" from The Cutting Edge.

Halfway through the show John looks for a finds a cut from the Paris, France performance of May '66 in which Dylan spends more than four minutes tuning his guitar. John's uncertain whether this bit would be going too far for his listeners. You  may recall that this entire year was pock-marked with heated displeasure being hurled at the band due to Dylan's transformation from folk to electric. The concerts featured an acoustic set followed by an electric set, split by an intermission.

Clint Heylin wrote the liner notes for this latest box set which features many of the negative headlines from the newspapers of that time. "Bob Dylan: Is He A Smashed Idol?" and "Uproar at Dylan Concert" and "Dylan View on the Big Boo." John thought it interesting how most albums and books feature the positive reviews. Naturally, this period was historic in part because of Dylan's near enthusiasm for getting blistered with boos.

I myself was most eager to hear the cut from France, and prodded a bit in case John was reticent. He proceeded with the track which stretched to an eight minute version of "Most Likely You Go Your Way" with Bob holding interest throughout his struggle to get that tuning right. "My guitar is broken. Anyone have a guitar I can borrow?" Twang twang twang twang.... strum, toing, twang, wong wong, twang...

Making notes helps keep the tracks and facts accurate.

John next selected "Like A Rolling Stone" from the May 5 Dublin concert and concluded the program with one of our other faves, "Desolation Row" for an outro. As the songs roll, we chat a bit about the lyrics and about how no one ever wrote songs like this before.

Upon completing the recording, he still needs to give attention to the length. What he's got is nearly two minutes over the limit so he looks for the places where lingering applause can be cut here and there, or a small space of dead air. Finally, he equalizes all the sound across the hour and locks it in place for his five o'clock time slot. With everything set, we check out and head on our way.

The show airs at 5:00 p.m. on Saturdays, and re-airs Mondays in the same time slot. I'd often thought it would be fun being a fly on the wall during the production of Highway 61 Revisited since I'm usually listening at the other end.

Meantime, life goes on all around you.... Tune in when you can.

Going Once, Going Twice, Sold! Two Million Dollars for Handwritten Draft of Dylan's Original Lyrics to Like a Rolling Stone

Greil Marcus devoted a whole book to it. Rolling Stone named itself after it. Tuesday it became the highest selling song manuscript in rock n roll history, surpassing John Lennon’s "A Day in the Life" by $800,000.

Earlier this spring I wrote that the lyrics might fetch a million or two, but close friends "in the know" said they would be surprised if it got eight hundred thousand. Well, it just goes to show you that sometimes even experts are wrong.

The Rolling Stone announcement today ended with mentioning that "Like a Rolling Stone" is ranked Number One on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. That's pretty high praise. And even though an argument can be made that the magazine has a built-in bias to most things Dylan, the argument still holds up for Dylan's significance and the significance of this song.

Newark, NJ, Nov. 2 1965 (Photo: Thom Cronin)

Before Dylan, rock ‘n roll was about making music you could dance to. When Dylan emerged from the constraints of folk, where he was unquestionably a star, he welded a new sensibility to this established music form. Here’s how Lee Marshall, in his book Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star, explains it: “Dylan is the foundational figure in rock culture. Dylan’s shift to electric music brought to the mainstream the political authority and communal links of his folk past while his song-writing skills offered the exemplar of what could be achieved artistically within the new form.”

And it wasn't "going electric" that was the significant thing in and of itself. Elvis, Chuck Berry and a host of others had been there for some time, obviously. What's different is that rock ‘n roll was previously something fun; Dylan brought to it a new seriousness, a new sensibility.

As Marshall explains: “Rock emerged in the mid-sixties as a way of stratifying mainstream musical consumption, as a means of creating higher and lower levels of popular music.... Rather than merely assuming a difference in quality between serious/classical music and light/popular music, rock functions to differentiate between serious, worthwhile popular music (rock) and trivial, lightweight popular music (pop).”

When Dylan went electric he served as catalyst for the formation of this new type of music.

53rd Grammy Awards, Staples Ctr., L.A. (Photo: Kevin Mazur) 

The natural rebuttal to this argument would be that it was the Beatles or the British Invasion that changed rock and roll. But what was it that transformed the Beatles from cheery-faced mop-top boppers into the young men who really did, for a while, rule the world? And when? When you lay their careers side by side in a timeline, Dylan's achievements in 1965 reverberated everywhere. Bringing It All Back Home was released in March. In June he wrote and recorded "Like a Rolling Stone". In July he plugged in and went electric at the Newport Folk Festival, and in August released Highway 61 Revisited. These latter events have been considered by some to be the pivot point of rock history.

In 1965 the Beatles were still making love songs and foot-tappers. Everything they did climbed the pop charts like monkeys. Even in late fall they were still churning out songs like “Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey”, “Boys” and “Roll Over Beethoven”. That year the movie Help, as a follow up to Hard Day's Night, placed them squarely in the center of a well-established Hollywood pattern to capitalize on youth heroes for commercial gain, as it had done previously with Elvis, who became only a pawn in their machine. The Fab Four were definitely a sensation, but in a manner wholly other than Dylan. The Beatles were commercially hot. Dylan was cool.  

Hence, Marshall declares, "My argument is that Dylan was the first real Rock Star. His razor-sharp hipness in 1965 and the strung out excesses of 1966 laid down the prototype for his new social role. Some of the substance of Dylan’s new star-image was rooted in his public persona developed as a folk star but his image in 1965-6 is a clearly different type of star-image."  A prototype of things to come.

There will likely come a time when other manuscripts obtain even more stellar prices at the auction house, but for now, "Like A Rolling Stone" has produced yet another milestone for the record books.

And for Dylan, who has already achieved so much in the past half century, it's probably just another day in the life. 

Now We Know Why People Were Sifting Dylan's Garbage: Original Like a Rolling Stone Lyrics May Fetch a Million or Two at Sotheby's

Johnny Carson once had a guest on his who who had been a bus boy at a high end restaurant where important people frequently ate, perhaps something on the order of Bohemian Grove. His novel obsessions, which began in the late 1950s, was the collection of partially eaten sandwiches by famous people. Johnny, of course, found this amusing and was certain his audience would as well.

When asked how this unusual passion got its start the man said he was clearing plates from Richard Nixon's table and noticed he'd not eaten part of his sandwich. Back in the kitchen he wrapped it, and later labelled it before placing it in cold storage in his freezer. Two decades later he had more than 500 such sandwich remnants.

This anecdote came to mind as when I simultaneously considered this week's news about the lyrics of Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" going up for auction this summer and the release of David Kinney's The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob. 

We live in a culture where proximity to celebrity imbues value to a thing. I do not know whether those sandwich parcels ever had serious value anywhere beyond the collector's freezer, but I do know that the manuscript for John Lennon's "A Day in the Life" garnered 1.2 million dollars, which is hardly chump change.

I remember reading how when Dylan lived in Woodstock people would sift through his garbage to find relics, or climb up on his roof to catch a glimpse of him as he came out of his house. To say that this would become annoying is an understatement, yet we see now that leftovers from a manuscript or discarded doodles may just happen to contain heritage that someone might indeed attach value to one day, evidence again that "one man's garbage is another man's treasure." I doubt any of these garbage sifters ever kept a half eaten sandwich with Dylan's DNA on it, but you never know.

To be clear I am not condoning celebrity garbage sifting, but I can imagine this kind of upscale dumpster diving might be comparable to investing in lottery tickets. You buy the numbers in conjunction with that fleeting sensation of hope. Naturally this why people like Dylan go to such lengths to maintain their privacy.

As for The Dylanologists, I will be getting a copy to read and review here. Supposedly it's a good read. I do hope, however, that Kinney differentiates between those who write about his music and paint pictures of the man and the fellow who assembles sandwich frags like a butterfly collection.

Some people collect seashells, others experiences. Some are passionate about travel. Some are passionate about Dylan. And some have travelled with Dylan. We all have our passions.

What do you think this Chelsea Hotel stationary with two doodles and the lyrics to "Simple Twist of Fate" will fetch me?

Meantime... life goes on all around you. 

A Critical Review of Greil Marcus's Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads

When I travel I like to load up my Kindle with the beginnings of lots of books, since it's free to download a portion to whet your appetite. On one recent trip I read the opening chapter of the Ian Fleming series of Bond books, most of which I last read in my mid-teens long ago. Another flight took me through Dave Barry's catalog. On my most recent trip I downloaded the early sections of a multitude of books about Bob Dylan. Dylan Days was approaching, and it seemed a suitable theme.

When I got home from my trip I went further this time. I found that many of these books are available used and at exceedingly reasonable prices. I order five for a total of less than ten dollars, with about twenty dollars shipping. (Ah, there's the rub.)

With my bedtime reading is lined up for the summer I began with Greil Marcus' biography of the song Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. Despite the negative reviews on Amazon.com, I went ahead because I was curious how anyone could write a whole book about a single song. And perhaps there was a measure of curiosity on my part as regards any backstory and additional meaning that could be gleaned.

As I've noted in another place, my first attraction to this song was in junior high school because it was the longest slow song in the playlist, which meant if you like slow dancing you could out there on the dance floor for over six minutes when it played. I don't think I ever heard the words at the time.

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
threw the bums a dime in your prime,
didn’t you?

Most Dylan junkies are already familiar with how Al Kooper became part of the recording session that laid down the tracks for this song. He claims that we was only supposed to watch, but he knew he wanted to be part of it, and found a way. Kooper’s keyboards seem to be a key component in the “sound” on this song which hit the airwaves in 1965, climbing up the charts to number 2. Kooper’s story is in here.

The book begins with Marcus setting the context for this song’s emergence. The opening chapter is The Day Kennedy Was Shot, an indicator of the turbulence America would be undergoing as it navigated the Sixties. The second chapter fills in details about the music scene, a “Top Forty Nation” in which pop radio ruled and every musician saw their ultimate value in relation to where their songs appeared on the charts. Numerous musicians were finding their way into the charts by doing covers of Bob Dylan’s songs, most notably the Byrds and Peter, Paul and Mary.

There’s a problem, however, with the way Greil Marcus tells the story of the song. I will illustrate it like this. You know how in a really good poem you trust the author’s judgment as regards what to leave in and what to leave out? You make assumptions as you read that the images connect somehow, that if you work at it an understanding will emerge. You trust the author there will be a payoff. Unfortunately, halfway through the book I began to lose my trust.

There are anecdotes a-plenty, but most tiresome are the Marcus assertions which one can also begin to question. He writes with authority, has assembled plenty of material that when thrown together has the appearance of a book, but once you lose your way it’s like wading in a swamp.

The book seems to have received plenty of accolades from such auspicious sources as the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, Variety and the Denver Post (to name a few) but reader comments at Amazon.com are far less effusive. One of these wrote: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. This was the book that cured me of my belief that you have to finish reading any book you start. You leap at the first chance to escape the drunken bore at a party, right? Putting this book back on the shelf? Same thing.

I can't say that this book is uninteresting. I just got tired at the point where it felt like Greil Marcus was that guy at the party you always avoid because he talks just to hear himself talk. You keep hoping it will add up to something and it never does.

Eleven Interesting Dylan-related Details

1. "That way lies madness," is a quote from Shakespeare's King Lear. It is from the same passage
 that the title of Dylan's most recent album was probably extracted.

2. Steve Jobs was asked in an interview, "If you were put on a desert island and had to choose between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones whose collection to have on your iPod, which would you choose." Jobs said that was an easy decision. He would choose the Fab Four. "But," he replied, "if you had asked me to choose between the Beatles and Dylan, that would not have been such an easy decision."

3.Blonde on Blonde is right up there as one of the all time great albums. The foundation throughout is the manner in which Dylan's lyric Bard-spirit has bee unleashed. Who but Dylan would write, "Jewels and binoculars hand from the head of the mule..."? Who but Dylan was writing lines like this: "The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face / Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place." Who, but Dylan?

4. Dylan recorded a cover of the song Blue Moon on his Self-Portrait album. The song must have meant something to him because he performed it live at least a dozen times, the first being in Wellington, New Zealand in 1986 and the last in 1999 at Charlotte, North Carolina.

5. Somewhere around 1990 I'd heard that Dylan was already the most re-recorded song writer of all time.

6. Bob Dylan's first album cost $402 to record. I just that today from an article titled 20 Things You Might Not Know About Bob Dylan's Debut Album that was posted on ExpectingRain.com.

7. When Like a Rolling Stone came out in 1965, it was the longest-playing 45 at our junior high school dances at Hillside School in Bridgewater. I always liked when the DJ played it because it was the longest slow song in the pile, so it gave me a chance to get close to Nancy Black who I never talked to in real life because I was too shy. But she said "Yes" when I asked her to dance with me. Go figure.

8. Tempest was released on 9/11, a nice birthday present (for me) to compensate for the 9/11 that rocked the world eleven years earlier.

9. The song Mississippi, which first appears on Dylan's album Love and Theft, is also recorded in a number of other versions, two of which appear on his Bootleg Album #8. Sheryl Crow later recorded the song in her Globe Sessions.

10. The album Desire, Dylan's 17th studio album, features virtuoso violin support from the talented Scarlet Rivera, who accompanied Dylan with a caravan carnival of musicians weaving in and out on his much-lauded Rolling Thunder Revue. Scarlet will be performing a benefit concert with Gene LaFond and the Wild Unknown here in Duluth in May.

11. Countless visual artists have found inspiration from Dylan and his music, I among them. 

Enjoy your weekend. And be sure to catch John Bushey tonight on KUMD's Highway 61 Revisited.

Port of New York

"Hey, do you want to make a deal?" ~Bob Dylan

One of the things that set Dylan apart when he emerged on the scene was his grittiness. At a time when the airwaves were alive with sweet little love ditties and cheery faced folk singers, Dylan approached subjects too nakedly and unsettling. This line, "Hey, do you want to make a deal," from Like a Rolling Stone has a context. It's cold. Like the scene in Ironweed where Streep, reduced to being a street tramp, has to produce a sexual favor to get a needed place to sleep out of the cold... in an abandoned car. It'ugly, but it is an indignity experienced by women on a near daily basis in this world.

Film noir was a style of Hollywood film in the 40's and 50's that sought to expose and exploit that dark side of life. Themes were ambiguous, often not pretty, and occasionally considered scandalous. I just finished watching Port of New York, a movie about smuggling drugs into the Big Apple. Yul Brynner stars as the lead bad guy, the top of the food chain. Ever smooth, careful, calculating and ruthless. He's even got hair.

An old fashioned black and white, the film opens with a narrative along the lines of the Dragnet television show, something akin to "This is the city." The narrator has that serious deadpan, no funny business approach, implying a serious topic is being discussed. In this instance, narcotics being smuggled into New York through its ports. It's a good B-movie for entertainment value, but what a contrast to films on this same theme to films of a more recent vintage. All good guys and bad guys are in suits and ties. You never see anything related to the effects of the drugs themselves. When the final sting occurs, what a small quantity of dope to be getting in such a lather about. The entire shipment was in a satchel.

French Connection with Gene Hackman broke new ground for earthiness and realism. Same theme, intensely different.

But today's drug trade films really bump it up. American Gangster with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe shows the whole drug scene with such vividness it blinds. Blow, with Johnny Depp, likewise shows a full panorama and puts the drug world into a perspective. Yes, there is glamour for some but at great expense in human suffering. Customers of the drug dealers are harrowingly desperate. One must have a cold ruthlessness in the heart to be a player in that game.

Which leads us to Anton Chigurh, the ultimate personification of evil, and relentless pursuer in No Country For Old Men. A brute? Not quite the right word. Disturbing? Definitely. He is a by-product of the times and someone you don't want to mess with. I've encountered his kind a few times, people with no conscious, dangerous and unpredictable. You meet these people when you're somewhere you don't belong. And they are out there.

For a "dark" movie, Port of New York was pretty clean and easy, a short, tight little package of 82 minutes. Like Scorcese's The Departed, the plot involves placing a cop in the inner circle of the gang that controls the ports. It's hard to get too emotionally entangled in the film because it is more about plot than character, unlike Gangster where you actually feel empathic toward both Crowe and Washington because you understand their motivations, understand where they were each coming from.

What's your favorite in the oldie from Hollywood's film noir school? Double Indemnity is a classic that still holds. I had a friend who liked D.O.A. What about you?