Like a Rolling Stone Live

“Like a Rolling Stone”  is a 1965 song by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.  Its confrontational lyrics originated in an extended piece of verse Dylan wrote in June 1965, when he returned exhausted from a grueling tour of England.  During a difficult two-day pre-production, a breakthrough was made when it was tried in a rock music format, and rookie session musician Al Kooper improvised the organ riff for which the track is known.  It was only when a month later a copy was leaked to a new popular music club and heard by influential DJs that the song was put out as a single and became a worldwide hit.  Live performances of the song include one on Self Portrait (recorded August 31, 1969).  In 2004 and again in 2011, Rolling Stone placed the song at number one on its list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time”.  At an auction in 2014, Dylan’s handwritten lyrics to the song fetched $2 million, a world record for a popular music manuscript.  (More from Wikipedia)

 

To put these ratings in context, Self Portrait (1970) is the only Bob Dylan album to get just ** before Saved, other than some live albums (Allmusic shows low ratings for most of the Rolling Stones live albums also).  To this day, no one seems to understand Self Portrait – I certainly don’t.  The music seems as off-putting as the splashes of color in the cover art.  The first few times I played it, I really only enjoyed the live version of “Like a Rolling Stone”; I have heard several others since that I enjoy more.  Some years later, the opening track “All the Tired Horses” stood out, but probably only because I couldn’t discern a hint of Bob Dylan anywhere in the song. 

(August 2014)