Like A Rolling Stone

It's one of the great rock music stories - almost like a founding myth: Dylan's astonishing transformation over a few short years in the mid-Sixties from nothing, via protest singer and voice-of-a-generation, to electric shaman making a kind of music that no one had ever heard before. Scorsese's "No Direction Home" reinforces the point. And nothing symbolises the key transformation better than the concerts where he played a first half acoustic, then came out in the second half with his band to boos and the infamous "Judas" cry, and blasted them all into silence. It was history in the making.

Not surprisingly, most of those who recalled the concerts on the BBC website have put themselves on the right side of history, and remember being bowled over by it all. Well, someone must have been doing the booing, but you can hardly blame people for the way their memories kind of play tricks. It'd be like admitting to condemning Picasso when he first started exhibiting all that Cubist stuff: of course you liked it, it just took a while to adjust to it, that's all.

Rock music fans, and rock critics especially, have always been highly sensitive to the idea of "getting it". Some people got Bowie when he first appeared; some didn't. Some people got the Pistols, or Devo, or the Cure, or whatever: others, the terminally unhip, didn't. Much of the dynamic of rock music has been driven by the need to carve out a new style where only the few understood, after the old styles became too popular. A familiar refrain about the music is that it's now dead because there just aren't the rebels out there any more, fire in their bellies, willing to trash the old and usher in the new. If you can't have permanent revolution in the streets, then at least you should be able to get it over the speakers. And then there's all this stuff about selling out, and authenticity. Funny how much of it goes back to Dylan - originally castigated as a sell-out, and then triumphantly turning the tables so that he comes to represent the original lone genius following his muse against the small-minded tyranny of expectation.

I can't help thinking that's part of the reason why "Like A Rolling Stone" is always voted Dylan's greatest song, and the no. 1 rock song of all time: because it's a blast at the unhip, at those who don't get it, at the inauthentic. Say you love "Like A Rolling Stone" and you're there, on the right side, laughing at those poor fools who don't understand.

And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it

Yeah, that's telling 'em! All of us rock music lovers, we know all about living on the streets! Don't we?

Personally Scorsese's film made me feel less sympathetic to Dylan-the-visionary, and more to his critics. I'm not belittling his achievement: I still think his albums "Bringing It All Back Home", "Highway 61 Revisited", and "Blonde on Blonde" are works of genius, but from the snatches of concert we saw when he was being booed for introducing this stuff, his singing was more like sneering. Not one live version, for me, came near to the recorded versions I'm familiar with. After acoustic stuff like Mr Tambourine Man or Desolation Row, I can understand why people might have been less than thrilled to listen to a full decibel Like A Rolling Stone where they couldn't understand a word he was singing but got the general feeling that he was mocking - and maybe it was them, the poor earnest saps in the audience, that his contempt was aimed at. The guy was on an amphetamine-fueled ego-trip. And that Newport Folk Festival business - well, it was a folk festival, wasn't it? It was fairly insensitive of him, to put it mildly, to turn up and play his new stuff at full volume. Of course a massive self-belief pulled him through and made him what he was, but to get there he had to be a bastard at times.

Still, a great way to spend a few hours. Some of the interviews were wonderful. Difficult not to warm to Dave Van Ronk (who died a couple of years back), and Al Kooper was great. Dylan himself though? I don't know. He didn't say all that much, but it was good to see him saying anything at all.

Comments

[Anthony]

My take watching Dylan under fire from the booers, was that he was standing up to them, and any sneering exhibited was a response to their jeers, rather than a cause of them.

[Mick H]

Well maybe, but having seen the footage I'm less inclined to believe that than I was. I mean, I don't think Dylan was entirely an innocent party, stunned by the hostile reception. He knew what he was doing.

[My characterisation of the tour as an amphetamine-fueled ego-trip is a bit over the top, though, I'll admit. Well, the ego-trip bit.]

[Clive Davis]

Really interesting points, Mick.
Heretical thought, I know, but I thought all the other influences (Guthrie, Odetta) seemed more interesting than BD himself. But then I'm not a fan!

[Mick H]

Odetta was astonishing, wasn't she?