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I have loved this song from the moment I heard it back in 1965, being driven to work on the Lake Erie Road in Ohio. The original '45, clocking in at six minutes and eight seconds, is revolutionary radio. Bob Dylan is already famous, but for his political folk songs like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall." This is something else. It isn't like any love song you ever heard, yet it is sung to someone or something Dylan knows extremely intimately. It begins with an odd riverboat rhythm, with a fluttering banjo-like sound in it that puts me in mind of the pinwheel sound of a baseball card in a bicycle's spokes. My mental picture is of a large and very serious boat steaming its inevitable way upstream. Thirty five years later, I still can’t tell you what makes this sound. And then Dylan begins to sing, and it is one stinging accusation after another. Whoever he's singing to seems female: Beware doll, you’re bound to fall. You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely, but you know you only used to get juiced in it. The song is so hot. I can imagine someone being so angry, but what a feat it is sustaining that white hot hate in words, and simultaneously tempering it with those striking sympathetic lines: "Now you don’t talk so loud, now you don’t seem so proud, about having to be scrounging for your next meal" -- how did he do that? The answer is that Bob Dylan is not just the songwriter or poet of our postwar generation, but really our most prophetic personality, embodying so much of the tension, ambivalence, ego and disdain that is natural to us. And it occurs to me that that mighty boat slogging its way upstream is all of us, the America of our time, with its contradictory dreams and proclivities. And that "Like a Rolling Stone" is the song that "Blowin' in the Wind" was too weak to be. The earlier song hoped for a change of mind: "The answer is blowin' in the wind." But this new song is like a spotlight that bakes its subject in the heat of its own hypocrisy. And the hypocrisy is one that every member of my generation has carried around all his or her life: How can we be virtuous and decent as the people we see ourselves as in our best ideals, when our institutions and our culture and our own personal greed, cowardice and selfishness obliterate those good intentions time and time again? Miss Lonely isn't Joan Baez. More likely Miss Lonely is Lady Liberty in New York Harbor, pleased with the poem on her pedestal, but standing watch over the ripoff of every immigrant that stares up at her, the exploitation of the unwhite, the routine slaughter conducted in the name of democracy and freedom. Our manifest destiny isn't just to crisscross a continent, it is to be disgraced by our own jingoism, naked to the world. Here follows the text of the song, and a few foolish notes of my own. I read it, and I sound like a Bob Dylan nut, and an anti-American nut at that. What I like about my idea is that it rescues a song I love from being purely vindictive. If Dylan is accusing not just an individual who disappointed him, but an entire culture that is blind to its own lies, then he is not here the self-indulgent brat many take him for ("Positively 4th Street"), but the kind of Old Testament scold that his best work typifies. In his Christian phase, Dylan advised the world that, devil or God, "you gotta serve somebody," that there is no hiding from the moral choices we make as people. Here he is saying the same thing, only much more pointedly and personally. It is an anti-national anthem, calling us to atone as a people for our egotism and pride. And as such it ranks not just as a classic piece of beat poetry, but among the most stirring religious utterances ever. What an odd person he was, so ferociously proud himself, yet called, at a baby's age of 25 years, to admonish this grasping, material world for its self-congratulation and vanity. The question remains, can we regain the humility we require to be just? Or are we stuck this way forever, forever the object of such withering contempt? I'd like to know.
Copyright (c) 2001 by Michael Finley Like the essay? Click
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reader feedbackStumbled (Mike) onto or into your site and a sight for sore eyes (and feet) indeed it was. But then when I read the Dylan thing I thought to meself Lordy Lord like my English teacher! But that's ok too. What I got after looking at lyrics long and nearly forgot from the past is the joy, the German word (eludes me) for Ha! not you got yours and boy am I happy cuse your comeuppance give me an emotional erection and I am glad you are now down the old septic tank. But then what do I know. keep up the good work and go with god unless you can get hold of a Lexus. F.A. Great column; lots of memories... and I heard this week on the radio that Bob Dylan, now at age 60, has (are you ready???) taken up GOLF!! CS Song also stands on its own as a quite unmetaphorical story about any individual of diminished status. PG Dear Dylan Nut, What insight you have into the heart of corrupted America! Did Dylan really know how large his vision was? Have you sent your "insight" to him so he can see his works through your eyes? Yes, Mike, America is indeed a poor, lost bastard son whose only hope is God Himself. He and He only can cleanse the corporate heart of America from its greed and hypocrisy. Are we, as a people, of the stuff who will humble ourselves, like in the song, and become the nation he had in mind at our inception? "Give us your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door." Is this humble plea yet to be fulfilled? From one anti-corrupted American nut to another. Perhaps God sees the cry of the righteous hearts for the real America. Marie Thanks, Michael, I think you got it, and your read tonight was a true pleasure. I remember fiercely hearing Dylan's way long single as I struggled in high school in Iowa in '65, he rang my chimes. You've penned a wonderful view of what he may have been saying, and my chimes are ringing again. SC in LA Nice exegesis...thought you might like some more (although more generalized): http://www.expectingrain.com/ I guess I've seen Dylan perform live about 15-20 times over the years, as recently as last summer, but the most electrifying of those performances (ho ho) was the one in summer '65 at the old Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, NYC, the August between my freshman and sophomore years in college. This was four weeks after he'd unveiled his Rock Side at the Newport Folk Festival, but his lyrics were still definitely crypto-Rimbaud. Word that Dylan had sold his soul had gotten 'round The City, but this was pretty much foolishness, as "Bringing It All Back Home" had been on everybody's turntables for a good six months by then, I believe...so who could have been surprised? Things were pretty calm for the first half of the Forest Hills show as Dylan, solo, picked and strummed his way through what we now think of as the acoustic side of his repertoire. After the intermission, however, out came the band, and the crowd went wild. From the lawn-level seats, kids were throwing chairs up onto the stage. I thought the most creative heckling came from the stands, where a chant started up: "Get a surfboard!" One crazy mutha even got up on stage and had a hand on His Bobness' electric guitar, with Bob backing away, before he was tackled by a couple of bodyguard types and thrown (pre-mosh-pit) off the stage and into the arms of security folks. The music started right up with "Tombstone Blues" and went on nonstop, right through all the heckling and hooting (and cheering, in my section about 30 feet from stage right) and concluded close to an hour later with "Like a Rolling Stone." Mike, the first half was pretty good, too, but I'd already been playing that stuff in public myself in standard '60's-folkie-flattery-by-imitation mode...he included "She Belongs To Me," "Desolation Row," and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," and closed with "Mr. Tambourine Man." Just leading up to this, Mike: If you haven't heard it yet...the definitive version of "Like a Rolling Stone" is the one from Columbia's 1998 CD release, "Live 1966." The U.K. shows were the basis for all the bootlegs we started seeing that year and the next, but Columbia got it right, taping from the mikes. Here, the audience chant was "Judas," and Dylan directs his Hawks to "play it fuckin' loud!" ...enough to make you wonder if the song was written to be screamed or maybe spat, instead of merely sung. That's the way we got it at Forest Hills, too...hurled at us. Best for a fine summer! TJS
Marie
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I enjoyed serving this essay up for you, and I did it for free. But I am a few clients lighter right now than I need to be, and a bit of revenue never hurts. If you'd like to contribute to this site, consider dropping a $1 tip in the "Honor Box" here. Think of it as a voluntary subscription. Just click the CLICK TO PAY image here. Thanks! - Mike 
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You will laugh at me now, but I am here to suggest late on
this most beautiful Memorial Day afternoon, following the week of
