Somewhere in the mid-seventies, I was told to clean the garage (which seemed like torture but was actually just straightening a few things and sweeping the floor), and as I had recently discovered that chores went by much quicker when listening to music, I had the radio tuned to WFBQ in Indianapolis (thankfully it wasn't raining--early FM signals were weak unless you lived nearby and just a few clouds could make reception a warbled miasma) as I swept away. At some point this week's song blasted through our small radio and I was instantly smitten. I had really just begun to check out album-oriented rock, having previously been a burgeoning devotee of top 40 pop. It led me to seek out Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits and Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II...and a love affair was born.
The number of books and articles written about Bob Dylan is just south of the number of stars in the sky, and an amateur bozo like me isn't going to add much in a paragraph (note that I've featured a song and an album here on Friday Night Jukebox). For posterity, though, I will admit the older I've gotten the more I admire Dylan the artist and the less I admire the Dylan the man (a greedy bullshit artist pretty much sums it up). I also find his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature to be delusional--to think his sucking his fans dry with dozens of releases of shitty outtakes ranks with artists who spent careers creating actual art for pennies is ludicrous. Rant over!
"Like a Rolling Stone" was the first single released from his groundbreaking 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. The song would go on to be the highest charting single of Dylan's career, hitting #2 (with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100. The album reached #3 on the Billboard 200. [Side note: If you've never heard the album, make the time. It's easily one of the top ten albums ever made and well worth the listen.]
Fun Fact: There is much debate as to whether Dylan is raging against a specific person or at himself in the song. For what it's worth (probably not much), since very, very early in my listening experience I have thought his anger was directed at himself--even more so since I learned during my weekly half-assed research that when he wrote the polemic that would become "Like a Rolling Stone" he was tired of both his life and the direction his music was going.
People have literally written dissertations about "Like a Rolling Stone" and as noted above, a putz like me isn't going to have any earth-shattering discoveries about such a visionary work. Suffice is to say it's a stunning song that changed rock and roll forever.
Lyric Sheet: "You used to be so amused/At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used/Go to him now, he calls ya, ya can't refuse/When ya ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose/You're invisible now, ya got no secrets to conceal..."
Enjoy:
Republicans = Nazis
Peace,
emaycee
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