Like A Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan at The Crossroads

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Like a Rolling Stone
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Also by Greil Marcus
Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music (1975)

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989)
Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991)
In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, i977-92 (t 993, originally
published as Ranters & Crowd Pleasers)
The Dustbin of History (1995)
The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (1997,
originally published as Invisible Republic)
Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley
in a Land of No Alternatives (2000)
'The Manchurian Candidate" (2002)
AS EDITOR:
Stranded (t 979 )
Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung, by Lester Bangs (1987)
The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty
in the American Ballad (2004, with Sean Wilentz)
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LIKE A ROLLING STONE
Bob Dylan at the Crossroads
GRElL MARCUS
PublicAffairs
New York
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Copyright © 2005 by Greil Marcus.
The lyrics to Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" © 1965. Renewed 1993 by Special Rider
Music. Used by permission.
The epigtaph is from Allen Ginsberg, "A Western Ballad" in Selected Poems 1947-1995 (New
York HarperCollins, 1996). Used by permission.
All of the photographs used in this book are from the "Like a Rolling Stone" sessions, 15
June 1965. Photos by Don Hunstein. Copyright © SONY/BMG Music Entertainment Inc.
Used by permission.
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a member of the Perseus Books Group.
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Book design by Mark McGarry

Set in Weiss
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

Marcus, Greil.
Like a Rolling Stone I Bob Dylan at the Crossroads.-l st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliogtaphical references and index.
ISBN 1-58648-254-8 (HB)
1. Dylan, Bob, 1941-Like a Rolling Stone. I. TItle
ML420.D98M1632005
782.421642004058583-dc22
2004060053
FIRST EDITION
10987654321
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To the radio
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.-------- - - - - - - - - - -
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Like a Rolling Stone
Once upon a time you dressed so fine

Threw the bums a dime, in your prime
Didn't yOU?
People call, say beware doll, you're bound to fall, you
thought they were all
A-kiddin' you
You used to
Laugh about
Everybody that was
Hangin' out
Now you don't
Talk so loud
Now you don't
Seem so proud
About havin' to be scrounging
Your next meal
How does it feel?

How does it feel
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viii Like a Rolling Stone
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?
Awyou've
Gone to the finest school alright Miss Lonely but you know
you only used to get
Juiced in it
Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street
And now you're gonna
Have to get
Used to it
You say you never
Compromise
With the mystery tramp but now you
Realize
He's not selling any
Alibis
As you stare into the vacuum
Of his eyes
And say
Do you want to
Make a deal?
How does it feel?

How does it fee!;)
To be on your own
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Like a Rolling Stone ix
With no direction home

A complete unknown
Like a rolling stone
Ah, you
Never turned around to see the frowns
On the jugglers and the clowns when they all did
Tricks for you
Never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't
Let other people
Get your
Kicks for you
You used to ride on a chrome horse with your
Diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a
Siamese cat
Ain't it hard
When you discover that
He really wasn't
Where it's at
After he took from you everything
He could steal?
How does it feel?

How does it feel
To have you on your own
x Like a Rolling Stone
No direction home
Ahhhhhhhh-
Princess on the steeple and all the
Pretty people they're all drinkin' thinkin' that they
Got it made
Exchanging all precious gifts
But you better
Take your diamond ring
You better pawn it, babe
You used to be
So amused
At Napoleon in rags
And the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse
When you ain't got nothin'
You got
Nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets
To conceal
How does it feel

Ah, how does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction
Like a Rolling Stone XI
Home
As sung by Bob Dylan, New York City, 16 June 1965. Six minutes and
six seconds. Produced by Tom Wilson. Engineered by Roy Halee, with
Pete Duryea, assistant engineer. Michael Bloomfield, guitar; Bob Dylan,
rhythm guitar and harmonica; Bobby Gregg, drums; Paul Griffin, piano;
Al Kooper, organ; Bruce Langhorne, tambourine; Joe Macho, Jr., bass
guitar. Released as Columbia 45 43346 on July 20. First entered Billboard
Hot 100 July 24. Highest chart position reached: number 2, September
4. Number one that week: the Beatles, "Help."
CONTENTS
Prologue
Part One
The Day Kennedy Was Shot 13
Top 40 Nation 35
The Man in the Phone Booth 47
Part Two
San Jose Idol 69
Once Upon a TIme 87
In the Air 93
Part Three
On the Air 135
Three Stages 153
xiv Contents
Democracy in America 165

Swinging London 177
One More TIme 185
Epilogue 203
Works Cited 227

Acknowledgments 259
Index 263
When I died, love, when I died
there was a war in the upper air;
All that happens, happens there
-Allen Ginsberg,
"A Western Ballad/' 1948
This and the following photographs from the first day of
sessions for "Like a Rolling Stone," t 5 June t 965, taken
by Don Hunstein, Columbia Records. Here: Bob Dylan
at the piano, with lyrics, page after page.
Prologue
In Columbia Records Studio A on 15 June 1965, the singer is

trying to find his way into his song, plinking notes on the
piano. There's a feeling of uplift, dashed as soon as he begins
to sing. His voice sounds as if it's just come back from the dry
cleaners three sizes too small. He forces a few random notes
out of his harmonica. The 3/4 beat is painful, weighing down
the already sway-backed melody until it falls flat on the
ground. The organist pushes his way into the music, like a
bystander at an accident determined to do something to
help, no matter how hopeless: Are you all right? The tune dries
up after a minute and a half. "The voice is gone, man," the
singer says. "You want to try it again?"
"It's a waltz, man," says the producer.
"It's not a waltz," the singer says.
"May I have this dance?"
2 Prologue
"Have you heard about the new Bob Dylan record?"

"No, what about it?"
"It's called 'Like a Rolling Stone.' Can you believe that?
Like a Rolling Stone. Like he wants to join the band. Like he's a
Rolling Stone."
"What does it sound like?"
"I don't know. It's not out yet. I read about it."
"You're kidding, right?"
"So who's the 'Napoleon in rags' the girl in the song used to
laugh at? The music is great, the words are a bunch of non-
sense. "
"It's obviously Dylan himself. The language that he used.'
It's like he's putting down someone who didn't like his songs."
"He's not that stupid. That can't be it."
"Yeah, so who is it if it's not him?"
"I don't know. Martin Luther King?"
Questioner: "What happens if they have to cut a song in half

like 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'?"
Bob Dylan: "They didn't have to cut that in half."
"They didn't have to but they did."
"No, they didn't."
"Yeah?"
"You're talking about 'Like a Rolling Stone.'"
Prologue 3
/lOh, yeah./I
/lThey cut it in half for the disc jockeys. Well, you see, it
didn't matter for the disc jockeys if they had it cut in half,
because the other side was just a continuation ... if anybody
was interested they could just turn it over and listen to what
really happens./I
-press conference, San Francisco, 3 December 1965
A drum beat like a pistol shot.

24 July 1965 was the day Bob Dylan's /lLike a Rolling
Stone/l went into the charts. It was on the radio all across the
U.S.A. and heading straight up. When drummer Bobby
Gregg brought his stick down for the opening noise of the
six-minute single, the sound-a kind of announcement, then
a void of silence, then a rising fanfare, then the song-fixed a
moment when all those caught up in modern music found
themselves engaged in a running battle for a prize no one
bothered to name: the greatest record ever made, perhaps, or
the greatest record that ever would be made. /lWhere are we
going? To the top?/I the Beatles would ask themselves in the
early 1960s, when no one but they knew. /ITo the toppermost
of the poppermost!/I they promised themselves, even before
their manager Brian Epstein began writing London record
companies on his provincial Liverpool stationary, promising
that his new group would someday be bigger than Elvis.
But by 1965 everyone, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob
4 Prologue
Dylan, and whoever else could catch a ride on the train were
topping each other month by month, as if carried by a flood.
Was it the flood of fear and possibility that had convulsed
much of the West since the assassination of President
Kennedy less than two years before, a kind of nihilist free-
dom, in which old certainties were swept away like trees and
cars? The utopian revolt of the Civil Rights Movement, or
the strange cultures appearing in college towns and cities
across the nation, in England, in Germany? No one heard the
music on the radio as part of a separate reality. Every new hit
seemed full of novelty, as if its goal was not only to top the
charts but to stop the world in its tracks and then start it up
again. What was the top? Fame and fortune, glamour and
style, or something else? A sound that you could leave
behind, to mark your presence on the earth, something that
would circulate in the ether of lost radio signals, somehow
received by generations to come, or apprehended even by
those who were already gone? The chance to make the times
speak in your own voice, or the chance to discover the voice
of the times?
Early in the year the Beatles had kicked off the race with
the shimmering thrill of the opening and closing chords of
"Eight Days a Week." No one could imagine a more joyous
sound. In March the Rolling Stones put out the deathly,
oddly quiet "Play with Fire," a single that seemed to call the
whole pop equation of happiness, speed, and excitement into
question: to undercut it with a refusal to be ashamed of one's
Prologue 5
own intelligence, to suspend the contest in a cul-de-sac of

doubt. Three months later they came back with "(1 Can't Get
No) Satisfaction." It erased the doubt, and the race was on
again.
Bob Dylan had not really come close with "Subterranean
Homesick Blues" in April, his first rock 'n' roll record after
four albums-four folk albums that had nevertheless redrawn
the pop map-and his first entry into the singles charts. The
Beatles would dominate the second half of the year with "Yes-
terday" (was a record with nothing but strings still rock 'n'
roll? "Of course it is," said a friend. 'John Lennon has to be
playing one of the violins"), and end it with the coolly subtle
Rubber Soul, the best album they would ever make. Barry
McGuire would reach number one with "Eve of Destruction,"
an imitation-Dylan big-beat protest song. The Dylan imita-
tion was the hook, what grabbed you-and the production
was so formulaic, so plainly a jump on a trend, that the for-
mula and the trend became hooks in themselves. In that sea-
son, to hear "Eve of Destruction" as a fake was also to
recognize that the world behind it, a world of racism, war,
greed, starvation, and lies, was real-and, as if apocalypse
was itself just another hook, actually deserved to be
destroyed. In the pop arena it seemed anything could hap-
pen; it seemed that month by month everything did. The
race was not only between the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the
Rolling Stones, and everyone else. The pop world was in a
race with the greater world, the world of wars and elections,
--------
6 Prologue
work and leisure, poverty and riches, white people and black
people, women and men-and in t 965 you could feel that
the pop world was winning.
When people first heard about it, even before they first
heard it, "Like a Rolling Stone" seemed less like a piece of
music than a stroke of upsmanship beyond pop ken. "Eight of
the Top Ten songs were Beatles songs," Bob Dylan would
remember years later, casting back to a day in Colorado, lis-
tening to John, Paul, George, and Ringo soon after their
arrival in the United States in t 964. "I knew they were point-
ing the direction where music had to go ... It seemed to me a
definite line was being drawn. This was something that had
never happened before." That was the moment that took Bob
Dylan out of his folk singer's clothes-and now here he was,
outflanking the Rolling Stones with a song about them. That
was the word.
The pop moment, in that season, really was that deliri-
ous. But when the song hit the radio, when people heard it,
when they discovered that it wasn't about a band, they real-
ized that the song did not explain itself at all, and that they
didn't care. In the wash of words and instruments, people
understood that the song was a rewrite of the world itself.
An old world was facing a dare it wasn't ready for; as the
song traced its long arc across the radio, a world that was
taking shape seemed altogether in flux. As the composer
Michael Pi sara wrote in 2004, "Like a Rolling Stone" might
be "a song that has as its backdrop some problems the guy
Prologue 7
narrating it is having with his girl." It might be even more, a

warning to someone for whom everything has always come
easily, in times that are about to get rough, "but I am unable
to hear it so simply: that is, that he (or the world) has done
her the favor of stripping away her illusions, and now she
can live honestly." Pisaro goes on, in a few words that are
like a launching pad:
His conviction, the dead certainty that he has a right to say exactly
this, is still exhilarating and bone-chilling. After all these years the
song has not been dulled by time and repetition.
In some ways it's also a difficult song to hear now, because it is a
vision of a time that never came to pass. I may be wrong about this,
since I was only four years old in t 965. But that time (or is it the
time created by the song?) seems to have been the last moment in
American history when the country might have changed, in a fun-
damental way, for the better. The song, even now, registers this
possibility, brings it to a point, focuses your attention on it, and
then forces you to decide what is to be done.
His voice tells you this (tells you everything): he's not really
talking to her-he's talking to you (and me; all of us). The voice is
infinitely nuanced-at times an almost authoritarian monotone
(not unlike Ginsberg reading "Howl"), at times compassionate,
tragic (the voice of Jacques-Louis David in his painting of
Marat)-but also angry, vengeful, gleeful, ironic, weary, spectral,
haranguing. And it would sound this way in Ancient Greek or con-
temporary Russian. There is so much desire and so much power in
8 Prologue
this voice, translated into a sensitivity that enables it to detect tiny
vibrations emanating from the earth. But like a Geiger counter
developing a will of its own, it wavers between trying to record the
coming quake and trying to make it happen. This is where the song
stakes its claim on eternity.
And then Pisaro is in the air, looking down as the song

continues to play and the landscape begins to convulse:
What is the nature of the decision Dylan is driving towards?

Whether you are going to forsake your past in the name of an
unknowable future, where nothing is certain, everything is up for
grabs, no food, no home, just a wagon barreling down the road. It
is not a sensible decision. Of course some at the time made
exactly this decision, but what strikes me about Dylan's song is
that he's not only asking you (and me) personally to make this
deciSion, he wants the whole country to do it: right now. As if a
country could shed its past like snakeskin. As if, if we could see
our situation with clarity, we would realize we are already there. I
have to hear this as a call for some kind of spontaneous revolution.
Not necessarily a violent one; but undoubtedly a very strange one.
What would a "Napoleon in rags" kind of country look like, act
like? Lots of poor folks wandering the land, making speeches and
barbeque?
Or, as reviewer Shirley Poston put it in The Beat, the

newsletter of the Los Angeles Top 40 station KRLA, after
Prologue 9
Dylan's performance of "like a Rolling Stone" at the Holly-

wood Bowl on 3 September 1965, only the third time he had
played the song in public, with the tune still finding its feet,
and with some in the crowd booing the once-humble folk
singer who had gone for the pop charts: "He knew the song
by heart. So did his audience."
People then understood everything Pisaro is saying now. But

then the sense of moment ruled. Few had any reason to imag-
ine that in "like a Rolling Stone" the pull of the past was as
strong as the pull of the future-and the pull of the future,
the future that first drum shot was announcing, the line it was
drawing, was very strong. There was no reason to wonder
how many dead or vanished voices the song contained, or to
realize that along with the song's own named characters-
"Miss Lonely," the "Mystery Tramp," the "Diplomat"-or Phil
Spector and the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost that Lovin'
Feeling," from only months before, or even Ritchie Valens's
"La Bamba," from 1958-present also were the likes of Son
House, of Mississippi, with "My Black Mama" from 1930,
Hank Williams with "Lost Highway" from 1949, or Muddy
Waters in 1950, with "Rollin' Stone." So the Rolling Stones
had named themselves-in the beginning, in London in
1962, they were the Rollin' Stones. Which is to say that in
the alchemy of pop the first word about "Like a Rolling
Stone" had been right after all. The song was about the
10 Prologue
Rolling Stones-if you follow the way the two words travel
and the picture they make, how nothing in American vernac-
ular music holds still, how every phrase and image, every riff
and chime, is always moving, state to state, decade to decade,
never at home with whoever might claim it, always seeking a
new body, a new song, a new voice.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
The Day Kennedy Was Shot
"Everyone remembers where they were when they heard that

Kennedy was shot. I wonder how many people remember
where they were when they first heard Bob Dylan's voice. It's
so unexpected." So said a friend a year or two ago; I started
thinking about how the world still seemed to be catching up
with Dylan's Time Out of Mind, which had appeared in 1997-
or how the world might even be falling behind it. Maybe
even Dylan himself, with his "Love and Theft" in 2001. It was a
collection of songs so well-shaped that up against the scat-
tered American nowheres of Time Out of Mind-with various
places named, Missouri, say, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans,
but all of them still floating free of any map, with the music
so ragged it seemed a new black hole opened up even before
you cleared the one before it-"Love and Theft" could feel like
a step back. A step off the battlefield, a step off the train.
:14 Greil Marcus
I remember very clearly where I was the first time I heard

Bob Dylan's voice. It was in 1963, in early August, in a field in
southern New Jersey. I was spending the summer in Philadel-
phia; I'd gone to see Joan Baez, a familiar face in Menlo Park,
California, my home town. The year before, I'd crossed the
street between my parents' house and the Quaker school
where I'd taken writing classes from Baez's mentor Ira Sand-
perl to find Baez and her sister Mimi entertaining a circle of
little kids with a version of the Marvelettes' "Playboy."
Mimi Baez was so pretty it was hard to look at her. Joan
Baez was hard to look at, too-because already, even in the
most casual setting, she could appear less as a person than a
myth. It was the music she wrapped around herself like
wings, like a shroud-a sense of the departed, the untouch-
able, the never-was brought forward as if it were the soon-to-
be-that removed her from the noise of the country at large.
Her music removed her from that noise even as she added
her voice to it, to the chorus of all those now calling for the
destruction of nuclear weapons, for the abolition of racial
segregation-all those calling, as Martin Luther King would
prophesy before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C,
only weeks after that day in the New Jersey field, ringing his
words like bells as Joan Baez like Bob Dylan looked on, for an
America where "ALL of God's children, black men and white
men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Cath-o-lics, will be able to
join hands, and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,
free at last, free at last, THANK GOD A-MIGHTY, we are free at
last!" If Baez told the same story in her music, it was in a dif-
ferent language.
"Fair young maid, all in a garden," began the probably
seventeenth-century ballad "John Riley" as it appeared in
1960 on Joan Baez, her first album. It's the quieting of the tale
as Baez moves it on, a little melodic pattern on her guitar flit-
ting by like a small bird as a hushed bass progression follows
it like a cat, even more than her voice-the voice of someone
already gone, but walking the earth to warn the living-that
told the listener then, and can tell a listener now, that he or
she has stumbled into a different country. For years, across
the South, civil rights workers had been jailed, beaten, killed,
their homes fire-bombed, the churches where they gathered
burned to the ground. Nine years before, in 1954, the
Supreme Court had ruled unanimously that the segregation
of public schools was unconstitutional, that it was an affront
to the nation as it had constituted itself, that it would have to
end; with Federal judges slowly ordering that the decision be
taken off the page and enforced where people actually lived,
district by district, year by year, black children attempting to
enter previously all-white schools were now pushed, spat
upon, and cursed by vicious mobs that would have killed
them if the National Guard had not been at their side. From a
letter written in July 1964 by an intern in the office of Repre-
sentative Phillip Burton, of San Francisco, who, with black
Americans throughout Mississippi denied the right to vote
under what was still called White Democracy, had taken it
16 Creil Marcus
upon himself to stand in Washington for those in Mississippi

who had no representative willing to speak for them:
Burton went down to Miss to look things over, and issued a lot of
statements. He was sure that the Mississippi delegation was going
to blast him on the floor of the House when Congress reconvened
(Monday). Therefore, I got the assignment of researching a com-
prehensive indictment of Miss while he went on a rest vacation. I
waded through six volumes of the 1961 US Civil Rights report, the
five hundred-page 1963 report, three special rights reports on Mis-
sissippi, and a few other things. I also read through the NY Times
from June 1 to July 16, which is a four-foot high stack. I did that to
find all the anti-Negro violence in Miss in that time. In that month
and a half I discovered seven murders of Negroes by whites, about
20 church burnings and bombings, innumerable beatings and
arrests. Also, there have been fourteen Negroes killed in Miss since
January that no one has ever been brought to trial for-all were
connected with CR. I also discovered that there were thirteen
counties in Mississippi that do not have even one Negro registered
to vote, although Negroes make up as much as 70 percent of the
population.
The nation was coming to a verge, where it would have

to make good on its promises of liberty and equality, or
admit, even to itself, that those promises were lies-and in
Baez's music, this social fact was at once affirmed and sus-
pended. At the time, for the high school and college students
--- --~-------------
who were buying Baez's albums as charms and trances, it was

like waking up as an adult, or nearly so, to discover that all
the fairy tales of your childhood were true-and that, if you
wished, instead of the career or the war awaiting you, you
could live them out. In a few old songs, making a drama of
hiding and escape, material defeat and spiritual conquest,
investing that drama with the passion of her voice and the
physical presence of the body that held it, she seemed to
guide you toward a crack in the invisible wall around your
city. What would it mean, people all across the country asked
the music they were hearing, as the music asked them, as
they pressed that music upon friends as both a talisman and a
test of affinities, to feel anything so deeply?
By 1963 Baez's face was familiar everywhere; she'd been
on the cover of Time. In New Jersey she was appearing under
an open-air tent, in the sort of theatre-in-the-round that had
become a flag of right-thinking sitting down. She sang, and
after a bit she said, "I want to introduce a friend of mine," and
out came a scruffy-looking guy with a guitar. He looked
dusty and indistinct; his shoulders were hunched and he
acted slightly embarrassed.
He sang a few songs in a rough but modest, self-effacing
voice, and then he sang one or two with Joan Baez. Then he
left and she finished her show-though in those days, the
high days of the folk movement, no one would have referred
to anything a folk singer did by so vulgar a term as show. It
was a concert, an invitation, a gathering, a celebration of val-
18 Greil Marcus
ues-values of tradition and fraternity, equality and con-

cord-a coming together of like-minded spirits, a ritual, and
that was the meaning of that round stage, meant to recall
plays and sings in medieval villages, after the harvest was
brought in. No one in front, no one in back, no privilege, no
shame.
I barely noticed the end of the show. I was transfixed. I
was confused-a reaction that people who've paid attention
to Bob Dylan's work across the course of his career know all
too well.
This person had stepped onto someone else's stage, and
while in some ways he seemed as ordinary as any of the peo-
ple under the tent or the dirt around it, something in his
demeanor dared you to pin him down, to sum him up and
write him off, and you couldn't do it. From the way he sang
and the way he moved, you couldn't tell where he was from,
where he'd been, or where he was going-though the way he
moved and sang made you want to know all of those things.
"Oh, my name it is nothing/ My age it means less," he sang
that day, beginning his song "With God on Our Side." "The
place that I come from/ Is called the Midwest."
As with other songs he would sing in the years to come,
this was one of those strange compositions, one of those
uncanny performances, in which the whole of what is hap-
pening comes through instantly and irrevocably. You hear
the song once, on a car radio, with the singer's voice only
inches from your face, or at a concert, the singer many rows
away but physically present-and you understand it com-

pletely. As with a face glimpsed on the street or an image in a
movie from the edge of the frame, enough of the song roots
itself in your memory that you can play it back to yourself at
any time. Good Nashville songs do this-Garth Brooks's
1992 "That Summer," Alan Jackson's 2001 "Where Were You
(When the World Stopped Turning)"-because they're built
like commercials, with cues that tell a listener what inevitably
follows from whatever she has just heard even before she has
registered that she has heard it. What the person singing that
afternoon was doing was somewhat different, or rather he
was doing the same thing on a stage so much greater that the
nature of the act was altogether changed. He was telling
those who were listening a story they already knew, but in a
manner that made the story new-that made the familiar
unstable, and the comforts of familiarity unsure.
In a simple song, the singer was retelling the story of all
American history, as he and his audience had learned it in the
public schools of the postwar 1940s and '50s: the common
schools, as they used to be called, where with history text-
books reassuringly worn by your older brothers and sisters,
even your parents, the children of the rich and the children
of the poor were together initiated into the great narrative,
that, war by war, had made the country a nation. Clumsily,
but with a deference toward the story he was retelling that
took the clumsiness away, starting with the Civil War the
singer left nothing out: the Indian wars, the First World War,
.------ -----------~-- ---------
20 Greil Marcus
the Second World War, even the Spanish-American War. His

audience had already learned the lesson, and it had also for-
gotten it; now the tale was brought back to consciousness,
but it was deformed. As the young man on the stage named
our wars, he did so to describe their significance, and their
significance was that regardless of the cause or the purpose of
the specific conflict in which the United States had engaged
itself, the nation was proved right. With God on its side it
could not be otherwise. The modesty of the recital lulled the
listener back into childhood, which was not as simple as you
might have been told it was. Even in the fourth or fifth grade,
reading your history textbook-by means of that act becom-
ing a citizen, and thus you as much as anyone embodying the
nation itself-you might have done so with a certain suspi-
cion that no one could be quite so blessed, or lucky, but by
not disputing the claim you would accept it anyway. Who
was there to argue with? Yourself?
Because the singer seemed to slightly infuse every familiar
image with doubt, the song came across like ice breaking. It
was someone on the edge of a crowd listening to a man run-
ning for office; someone who, as the speaker told the people
what he thought they wanted to hear, said quietly, but in
such a way that what was said ran through the crowd like a
rumor, with everyone quieting so that they could hear the
next word, that not a word the candidate was saying was
true. The result wasn't that the people in the crowd agreed; it
was that they began to think it over.
As a performer, with "God on Our Side" the singer had at

once addressed the audience and taken his place in it. He
created a drama in which you no longer knew quite where
you were even as you understood everything that was being
said. All at once he confirmed your identity and took it away.
It was an anonymous drama. The singer disappeared into
the old books he shared with the people listening, and the
drama paid off on the song's promise: as the person on the
stage sang, as if he had not only read about the wars he spoke
of but witnessed them, you couldn't tell his age. You could
imagine him a hundred years old, or older than that. Seeing
him plain, he might have been seventeen, he might have
been twenty-eight-and to an eighteen-year-old like me,
that was someone very old.
As on Time Out oj Mind, made of newly composed songs
that when one brings certain moods to them can sound older
than Bob Dylan or the person listening will ever be, Dylan
had announced himself under the same shape-shifting
shadow. On Bob Dylan, his first album, released in March
1962, he appeared as a tramp: not the Chaplin tramp he
often drew from onstage in those days, but someone who had
slept in hobo jungles, seen men drink themselves mad with
Sterno, and forgotten the names of people who for a night
had seemed like the best friends anyone could ever have.
Many of the songs are funny ("1 been around this whole
country," he says at the start of "Pretty Peggy-O" of the
place-name that in 1962 was a folk signpost, "but I never yet
22 Greil Marcus
found Fennario"); all in all the album was a collection of old

songs about death. They dare the singer-What makes you
think you can sing me? Blind Lemon Jefferson rises out of the
grave in Wortham, Texas, where he's slept since 1929, to ask
this middle-class Jewish kid, born Robert Zimmerman in
1941, what he thinks he's doing with his "See That My Grave
Is Kept Clean" on his lips-and the singer throws the dare
back: How can you deny me what is mine? In the early sixties, the
Cambridge folk singer Geoff Muldaur was so caught up by
Jefferson's plea that he told all his friends he was going to
travel to Jefferson's grave with a broom and sweep it off.
Dylan's performance of the song gave the lie to the conceit.
Why should I sweep his grave? I'm in it.
That first album appeared seven months before the
Cuban Missile Crisis, when-as then-Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara would tell the nation four decades later, in
the film The Fog of War, in a voice in which you could hear his
knowledge still struggling against his disbelief-the world
truly did come within inches and minutes of an actual nuclear
war. But it was a time when almost everyone assumed that
nuclear war would take place somewhere, sometime, if not
everywhere for all time. It was a time when black Americans,
and white Americans who joined with them, risked their
lives, and sometimes had them taken, whenever they raised
their voices. It was a time when such people risked their lives
when they walked forward when they were ordered to turn
back, when they took a step outside the country into which
they had been born and into a new country-and that new
country was nothing more than the country they and every-
one else had been promised nearly two centuries before: a
promise that, like a twenty-year-old from the mining town of
Hibbing, Minnesota, taking possession of the songs of dead
blues singers, they now understood they would have to keep
for themselves. Death is real, the person singing on Bob Dylan
said; knocking on a door perhaps built especially for that
purpose, the sound Dylan made-in moments hysterical, cal-
low, too cool-could have seemed ridiculous, but it didn't.
The singer wasn't ridiculous because he was right.
That day in New Jersey in 1963, Dylan's voice was
scraped and twisting, and not quite present, as if it were more
a suggestion he was making than a claim he was staking. It
was a voice that called up blocked roads and half-lit
labyrinths, full of hints and beckonings, all cut with a sly, dis-
tant humor, a sense of secrets too good to tell out loud. The
performance was unassuming, faceless, unique, perverse,
pleasurable, and scary all at the same time.
When the show was over I spotted the singer, whose
name I hadn't caught, crouching behind the tent-there was
no backstage, no guards, no protocols; this was, for an after-
noon, that medieval village, with people gathered around
Joan Baez, trying to remind her of a night they'd pulled her
car out of the snow or brought her mother candy-so I went
up to him. He was trying to light a cigarette. It was windy,
and his hands were shaking; he wasn't paying attention to
24 Greil Marcus
anything but the match. I was just dumbfounded enough to

open my mouth. "You were terrific," I said brightly. "I was
shit," he said, not looking up. "I was just shit." I didn't know
what to say to that, so I walked off, casting an eye at Baez's
gleaming black Jaguar XKE, in those days the sexiest car on
the road.
The reason I tell this ordinary story is that this first time I
heard Bob Dylan's voice was only the first first time.
"Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock /n/
roll. The voice of the promise of the sixties counterculture. The
guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned makeup in
the seventies and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who
emerged to find Jay-sus, who was written off as a has-been in the
late eighties-and who suddenly shifted gears, releasing some of
the strongest music of his career beginning in the late nineties.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Columbia Recording Artist,
Bob Dylan!"
That summation-boilerplate as it first appeared in the Buf-

falo News in 2001, noting an upcoming Bob Dylan concert in
nearby Hamburg, New York, but hilarious, telling, cutting and
true as, appropriated as Dylan/s official introduction, it came
out of the wings in Madison Square Garden in 2002-is as
good as any. As pure media shock, instantly producing the
displacement that occurs when the conventions of one form
replace the conventions of another, it cleared the territory.
Though throughout the years Bob Dylan has, as his stage

announcement suggests, performed as an employee in his
own touring factory who forgot to punch his own time clock;
as a man on a treadmill, each step forward leaving him not
even one step behind, which would at least be movement: as
someone trading on his name and his legend and offering
nothing more. He has also performed as if his name means
nothing and his age means less. Again and again he has come
onto a stage and thrown off all baggage of fame or respect,
familiarity and expectation, all the burdens and prizes that
come when a performer acts as if he knows exactly how little
he can get away with, or aims to please and does. Again and
again, he has refused to give an audience what it paid for.
Those moments of rejection, of Bob Dylan clearing his
decks or clearing his throat, occur all across his career. On
high school stages in Hibbing with his rock 'n' roll band the
Golden Chords, playing piano and singing the Hollywood
Flames' "Buzz-Buzz-Buzz"-and in coffeehouses in Min-
neapolis and Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, when in
his hands such folk-scene standards as "No More Auction
Block" or "Handsome Molly" became not references to a
flight from slavery or the allure of a faithless lover but the
thing itself, the past invading the Gaslight Cafe like a curse.
At the Newport Folk Festival on 25 July 1965, when "Uke a
Rolling Stone," which had entered the charts the day before,
was first performed, to boos, hysterics, cheers, shouts of
abuse, and silence, and in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester,
26 Greil Marcus
England, in May 1966, when Dylan and his band, an errant

rockabilly blues quintet from Toronto called the Hawks, con-
ducted a war with a crowd outraged over their mocking
betrayal of the eternal troubadour-a war that culminated
when a fan stood up before the six on the stage and shouted
"Judas!" a shout the six followed with more than seven min-
utes of "Like a Rolling Stone," played as if it were a ship fight-
ing its way out of a storm. Up in the Catskills in the summer
of 1967 with a regrouped Hawks, about to become the Band,
practicing alchemy on the old American folk language of
nonsensical warnings and absurdist tall tales-and through-
out a two-week evangelical crusade at the Warfield Theatre
in San Francisco in 1979. With a rehearsal for "Blind Willie
McTell" in 1983, a visionary song about a dead blues singer,
the doom his country is calling down upon itself, and the
route of the singer's escape-and with the traditional songs
Dylan began performing on stage in the late 1980s, as if
seeking comrades in the likes of "When First Unto This
Country" and "Eileen Aroon" as crowds barked and hollered,
ignoring every word he sang. From the versions of common-
place blues and folk tunes he recorded on bare, unproduced
albums in 1992 and 1993, each number turned into a kind of
detective story, now with the singer the private eye and the
song the case to be broken, then the other way around-to
the burnt ground and retreating images of homecoming in
Time Out of Mind. "1 got new eyes," he sang there in "High-
lands." "Everything looks far away." It was 1997: he was
singing a sixteen-minute song as if he were rewriting a single

floating blues fragment, best sung in 1940 by Lucious Curtis
in Natchez, Mississippi, in a jaunty style:
Babe I went
And I stood up
On some high old lonesome hill
Babe I went and I stood up on some
High old lonesome hill
And looked down on the house
Where I used to live
Coursing through these incidents and many more like

them-incidents in which folk music was found and suppos-
edly cast off like worn-out clothes; when a huge pop audi-
ence was confronted, challenged, and escaped; when the
oldest strains of American language and ritual were reclaimed
and reinvented; moments when religion replaced both
romance and everyday life, and then when a certain stoic,
Puritan piety became less an altar call than a way of judging
the worth of any new day-was an enormous, motley,
inescapable cast of characters, a whole world: Ma Rainey and
Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Brigitte Bardot, Charley
Patton and Bobby Vee, St. Augustine and the Fifth Daughter
on the Twelfth Night, Hattie Carroll and William
Zantzinger, Tom Paine and John Wesley Harding, Robert
Burns and Stagger Lee, Poor Howard and Georgia Sam, Lyn-
28 Greil Marcus
don B. Johnson and the frog that one day up and married a
mouse, the murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers, in a
song directly named for him, but also, hiding in a song that
featured T. S. Eliot, Albert Einstein, and the Phantom of the
Opera, the three black circus workers lynched in 1920 in
Duluth, Minnesota, where Bob Dylan was born.* And not
only their like. In that cast of characters, running alongside
the train of Bob Dylan's music as it runs through the
decades-people jumping on, people jumping off, perhaps
meeting it again the next time the train made a stop at what-
* In September 1918 in Duluth, near the end of the First World War, a group
calling itself the Knights of Liberty claimed responsibility for kidnapping and
then tarring and feathering an anti-war Finnish immigrant, Olli Kinkkonen, to
set an example for those who might avoid the draft; the report was not con-
firmed until two weeks later, when Kinkkonen's body was found hanging from
a tree outside of town, covered with tar and feathers. His death was ruled a
suicide. Then on 15 June 1920, six black workers with John Robinson's Circus,
passing through Duluth for a one-night performance, were arrested and
accused of raping a nineteen-year-old white woman who had attended the
show the night before. Between five and ten thousand citizens stormed the
Duluth jail and seized on Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie as
the guilty men, and despite the pleas of the Rev. William Powers of Sacred
Heart Cathedral hung them from a single light post. Afterwards members of
the crowd posed with the bodies for photographs; one was made into one of
the most widely circulated of the many lynching postcards that were popular
at the time as "Wish You Were Here" greetings and signs of home-town pride.
In 2002, the city of Duluth erected a memorial to the murdered men, three
seven-foot-high bronze sculptures designed by Carla Stetson; it was
denounced on the Web site V Dare as an attempt "to make whites ashamed of
their race." Dylan's paternal grandparents had settled in Duluth in 1907; on 15
June 1920 his father, Abraham Zimmerman, was eight. It is not known if he or
his parents attended the lynching.
ever place one called home-are more than forty years of lis-
teners, fans, musicians, the devoted and the curious, the
enthralled and the bored, the outraged and the confirmed,
with, as surely as night follows day, the confirmed finding
themselves outraged around the next turn.
In that sense, in a country that is settled, a country that
like an old and painted whore can still pretend to innocence,
Bob Dylan has moved from state to state and decade to
decade as if nothing was settled, as if everything remains up
for grabs. By doing so he raised the stakes of life all around
himself. As often as not he has done this with the affirmation
of an absolute lurking somewhere up ahead or far behind.
Depending on the song in which that affirmation appears or
on the way in which on a given night a song is performed, it
is an affirmation of all or nothing: an absolute that can make
it plain that the story Dylan takes the stage to tell is an
unwritten book, a story that remains to be made up out of
whole cloth by whoever has the nerve to do so, or that the
story is a closed book, locked and sealed, that the story was
finished and fixed long before it occurred to him to tell it,
and that as he stands on the stage nothing remains to him but
to take the stage down.
It's when a performer dramatizes such extremes that any
time can be the first time-and of all the first times Bob
Dylan has enacted, there is one in which he seemed both to
take the stage down and read from an unwritten book, all at
once. It was at the Grammy Awards show, on 20 February
L__________ _
30 Greil Marcus
1991. As television, it was a break from the round-the-clock

coverage of the seemingly magical bombing of Baghdad, an
evening falling square in the middle of the first Iraqi-Ameri-
can war, an evening of music and self-congratulation that for
all of its speeches and applause was drowned out by the
sound of an entire nation cheering for certain victory, cheer-
ing for itself. On this night, Bob Dylan was to receive a Life-
time Achievement Award, and so before the ceremonies he
came onstage with a four-man band to play one song.
They came onto the stage as if they were sneaking onto
it; as if, somehow, they might get on and off without being
noticed. The band members were dressed in dark suits, with
fedoras pulled down; they looked like supremely confident
small-time Chicago hipster gangsters who'd spent the last ten
years in the same bar waiting for the right deal to break and
finally said the hell with it. Who were these people? Bob
Dylan was there to pick up his award, yes, but now the whole
frame of reference was gone. What exactly he was doing
there, on that stage, in this stopped moment, was a complete
mystery.
The mystery was there to be deepened; with the first beat
the band turned off the lights. They roared into a song, with
Dylan slurring the words, breaking them down and smashing
them up until they functioned as pure force. Stray lines of
excitement, pleasure, and dread streamed out of the sound
like loose wires. As the song went on it picked up speed,
momentum; the sound was crude in the beginning and raw at
the end. Dylan chanted like a madman on the street, as if he
The Day Kennedy Was Shot 3:1
were speaking in tongues: was this a sermon, a curse, a juke-

joint stomp, a firefight? The Rev. J. M. Gates of Atlanta
preaching "The End of the World and Time Will Be No
More" on a Victor 78 in 19277 John Brown writing "the
crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with
Blood" in 1859, on the day of his execution? A highlight of
the forthcoming Columbia album Having a Rave Up with Bob
Dylan? It's fun to imagine that half of the millions who were
watching were wondering what the song was, and that the
rest were so lost in the music they didn't care-more likely,
anyone who did care was split in half. The song was hidden
in its own music; the surge of the music overrode the setting
and joined itself to the events taking place offstage. And
then, perhaps two minutes into the three and a half the per-
formance would take, the song began to reveal itself. It was
"Masters of War," Dylan's most unforgiving, damning anti-
war song, from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, his second album,
from 1963, but in 1963 it was slow, stolid, the very template
of the protest song, almost a speech, a funeral oration: "I'll
stand over your grave 'til I'm sure that you're dead."*
* In May 2004 Mojo magazine ranked "Masters of War" number one on a chart
of "The 100 Greatest Protest Songs." Directly behind were Pete Seeger's "We
Shall Overcome" (1963), James Brown's "Say it Loud-I'm Black and I'm
Proud" (1968), the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" (1977), and Billie Holi-
day's "Strange Fruit" (1939). Also included were Eddie Cochran's "Summertime
Blues" (1958), Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me" (1964), and Negativland's
"Christianity Is Stupid" (1987); inexplicably omitted were the Boomtown Rats'
"I Don't Like Mondays" (1980), Carl Perkins's "Blue Suede Shoes" (1956), Barry
McGuire's "Eve of Destruction," and at least a dozen other Bob Dylan songs.
------------------ --- - --
32 Greil Marcus
But now the song didn't merely say that-or rather in the
cacophony of the music it barely said it at all. The song made
it happen. It put you next to the grave site, dared you to
stand on it, all but handed you a shovel so that you might dig
up the grave and layout the corpse for dogs. And it didn't
matter if you didn't catch a word, if you didn't know the
song, if you didn't have a personal Western Union in your
head to deliver its message. In the hall where the Grammys
were being handed out that night, the performance said that
real life was elsewhere, that it was dangerous, that life was a
runaway train and you were on that train whether you'd
bought a ticket or not. You were fated to reach its final desti-
nation, regardless of where, when you rose that morning, you
might have flattered yourself to imagine you were going.
That night, a song Bob Dylan had recorded almost thirty
years before was performed for the first time, and in the same
way, that night, it was performed for the last time.
It was this sort of drama that "Like a Rolling Stone" set
loose in Bob Dylan's music-the reach for that moment when
the stakes of life are raised. People recognized that from the
first. "The first time I heard it was when we went to L.A. It
was number one in L.A. I'd never heard of the song and I'd
never heard of Bob Dylan. We were driving down Holly-
wood Boulevard or somewhere and the song comes out. We
were with a whole bunch of people and everybody started
screaming and I said, 'What's this all about' and they said turn
up the radio." So said Steve Cropper, guitarist for Booker T.
and the MG's, in 1965 the leading soul band in the country,
but for what he said he could have been anybody. The drama
was instantaneous, overwhelming, a story that sucked you in
and, for an escape, offered only a ride on a final blast from a
harmonica that was like a r~derless surfboard shooting off the
top of a wave. There was a kind of common epiphany, a
gathering of a collective unconscious: the song melted the
mask of what was beginning to be called youth culture, and
even more completely the mask of modern culture as such.
"Anybody can be specific and obvious/' Dylan said of the
song in early 1966, speaking to the jazz critic Nat Hentoff.
That's always been the easy way. The leaders of the world take the
easy way. It's not that it's so difficult to be unspecific and less obvi-
ous; it's just that there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific
and obvious about. My older songs, to say the least, were about
nothing. The newer ones are about the same nothing-only as
seen inside a bigger thing, perhaps called nowhere.
In "Like a Rolling Stone/' that nowhere was a rising tide.

Writing in 1985, the British critic Wilfred Mellers caught the
feeling: the music, he said, leaves "one agog for what comes
next." Not everyone; describing the song in 1967, at a lecture
at the University of California at Berkeley, the great Los
Angeles record producer Phil Spector argued that while "It's
always very satisfying to rewrite the chords to 'La Bamba/"
what "Like a Rolling Stone" needed was a bigger sound-by
- - - ------ ---
34 Greil Marcus
which Spector meant his own Wall of Sound. He drew a dis-

tinction between recordings that could be defined as "a
record" and those that could be defined as "an idea," noting in
a modest aside that a recording that was both a record and an
idea-his production of the Crystals' /IDa 000 Ron Ron," he
suggested-"can rule the world." "Like a Rolling Stone," he
said, was only an idea. *
If "Like a Rolling Stone" was not a wall of sound, it was a
river of sound in its verses, and a mountain of sound in its
refrain: river deep, mountain high. Across nearly forty years
of trying, I've never understood Phil Spector's theory (maybe
somewhere there's a tape of the lecture he gave that night;
maybe he explained), but I've always figured he knew some-
thing I didn't. Assume he was right; if "Like a Rolling Stone"
was not a record, it was an event: not the event of its com-
mercial release, or even the event made when it reached the
public at large, but event of the drama generated by the per-
formance itself. And it was as such an event that it jOined
with the other events that made its time.
* "His favorite song is "Like a Rolling Stone," Spector told Jann Wenner of
Rolling Stone in t 969, elaborating on what he'd said two years before, "and it
stands to reason because that's his grooviest song, as far as songs go. It may not
be his grooviest message. It may not be the greatest thing he ever wrote, but I
can see why he gets the most satisfaction out of it, because rewriting 'La
Bamba' chord changes is always a lot of fun and anytime you can make a Num-
ber One record and rewrite those changes, it is very satisfying." With George
Harrison on guitar and Charlie Daniels on bass, Dylan recorded a frat-house-
basement version of "Da 000 Ron Ron" in t 970: "I met her on a Monday ...
I saw her last Friday ... "
CHAPTER TWO
Top 40 Nation
When you made the charts in 1965, you became part of a

small but dynamic world. It changed every week, just like the
world of work and family life, politics and war. As in the
world of work, family, politics, and war, certain of the ele-
ments of the pop world-disc jockey patter and commer-
cials, the rituals of contests and pranks-barely changed at
all, and other elements changed so radically they hijacked
memory, to the point that whatever happened the week
before could seem to have happened years ago. This was Top
40 radio: city by city, from one end of the country to the
other, a true forum, in 1965 more open to anyone, known or
unknown, black or white, northerner or southerner, Ameri-
can or foreigner, male or female, than any other cultural
medium-never mind business, religion, or college.
36 Greil Marcus
The outside world, the apparent real world, changed very

quickly. There were 27,000 U.S. troops, including the first
combat troops on the ground, in Vietnam in March t 965,
just three months after Secretary of Defense Robert McNa-
mara told President Johnson that the war was "going to hell";
by the end of the year there would be t 70,000. Voting rights
marches in Selma, Alabama, in the first part of the year, met
with horrifying police violence, stilI allowed most Americans
to see the Negro problem as a southern problem, not an
American problem; with the riots in Watts in Los Angeles in
August, the black riot, the police riot, which left thirty-four
people dead and a sector of the city destroyed, the nation
woke up to the news that the country no longer had a map.
Riots in black ghettos in the big eastern Cities-that, white
Americans thought they understood. But what did Negroes
in Los Angeles have to complain about, aside from a police
force that from the beginning of the century was as racist and
as murderous as any in the country? "Even the poorest streets
had houses with lawns and running water to keep the grass
green," Walter Mosley had his Watts detective Easy Rawlins
remember in Little Scarlet, looking back in 2004 to the world as
it was thirty-nine years before. "There were palm trees on
almost every block and the residential sidewalks were lined
with private cars. Every house had electricity to see by and
natural gas to cook with. There were televisions, radios,
washing machines, and dryers in houses up and down the
street"-but as the critic Guy Debord wrote of Watts from
Top 40 Nation 37
Paris, "comfort will never be comfortable enough for those

who seek what is not on the market." Yes, it had all started
with a crowd gathering around a routine traffic stop on a hot
night, and then, as Easy Rawlins explained it to himself, "one
symptom of a disease that had silently infected the city; a
virus that made people suddenly unafraid of the conse-
quences of standing up for themselves." "It was not so much
that Negroes had finally had enough," the critic Stanley
Crouch, at nineteen on the streets in Watts in 1965, wrote in
2004; "they had always had enough." "Almost every black
man, woman, and child you meet feels that anger," Rawlins
says to a white woman. "But they've never let on, so you've
never known. This riot was sayin' it out loud for the first
time. That's all. Now it's said and nothing will ever be the
same. That's good for us, no matter what we lost. And it
could be good for white people too. But they have to under-
stand just what happened here."
Sometimes the country of the charts changed faster than
that. At its most intense it was not a reflection of the events
chronicled in the newspapers-or even those events left out
of the papers but talked about anyway-but a version of
them: the moronic, the cliched, and the vapid suddenly
blindsided by the beautiful, which for a moment was the
truth.
The first new number one hit of the year was Petula
Clark's "Downtown," a charming song about freedom that fit
right into commercials advertising the thrill of dressing
38 Greil Marcus
somewhat differently, wearing your hair slightly longer, or

taking a day off. You can't change your life, the song said, but
for a day or a night you can escape it. Everybody liked the
song, and nobody cared about it-at least until the song
went back on the air on the East Coast in September 2001,
the week after the terrorist attacks in downtown New York:
an act of defiance, an awful joke, or a computer programmed
the year before, nobody knew. With Petula Clark in his ear,
Bob Dylan was in the studio with a band, recording "Subter-
ranean Homesick Blues," "On the Road Again," "Outlaw
Blues," and "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," noisy rock 'n' roll
songs that along with others that were not noisy would in
March appear on the album Bringing It All Back Home.
On January 30, a week after "Downtown" hit the top-
and three weeks before gunmen from the Nation of Islam
assassinated the apostate Malcolm X, once the scary, unsatis-
fiable public face of the Black Muslims, then the traitor who
had discovered that founder Elijah Muhammad, like so many
American cult leaders before him, had gathered his flock less
as a community of believers than as a harem-Sam Cooke's
"A Change Is Conna Come" went into the charts. Like
"Downtown," it was a song about freedom. It was also about
racism, and like a call from the grave to the marchers in
Selma, who were, some of them, digging their own: a star in
white America but a hero in black America, Cooke had been
shot to death by a motel manager in Watts the month
before.
Top 40 Nation 39
Inspired by Bob Dylan's 1963 "Blowin' in the Wind," which

was itself inspired by the Civil Rights Movement ("Geez,"
Cooke said, "a white boy writing a song like that?")*, but an
infinitely better song, "A Change Is Gonna Come" was
recorded on New Year's Day, 1964, in Los Angeles, with the
great New Orleans drummer Earl Palmer, at the end of the
sessions for Cooke's Ain't That Good News. Early the next month
Cooke performed it on the Tonight Show. The orchestration
was pure Hollywood, a movie theme, maybe Cabin in the Sky or
Porgy and Bess, maybe the movie Randy Newman always said
his song "Sail Away" was meant to be: stirring, with strings
enacting an inevitable triumph, horns enacting conflict, a ket-
tle drum enacting doom, or a martyr's curse on his native land.
Singing in a voice as clear as water, rich and expansive-"It
was the tone of his voice," Rod Stewart once said. "Not the
phrasing or whatever: just the tone"-bending syllables like
staircases in a dream, disappearing under your feet as you
try to climb them, stretching out the word "long" until it
became what before it only signified, Cooke looked the coun-
try in the face.
* "A folk trio out of Greenwich Village was riding the charts with a song called
'Blowin' in the Wind' that caught and held Sam's attention," Daniel Wolff
wrote in 1995 in You Send Me: The Life & Times of Sam Cooke, speaking of 1963.
"Peter, Paul & Mary were a long way from rock & roll (which they disliked and
mocked) but it wasn't the group or the folk poetry of Bob Dylan's lyrics that
struck Cooke. It was the fact that a tune could address civil rights and go to #2
on the pop charts."
40 Greil Marcus
Then I go to my brother
And I say brother, he'p me please
But he winds up
Knockin'me
Back down on my knees
Ohhhhhhhhhh-
There been times, that I thought
I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able, to
Carry on
It's been a long
A long time comin', but I know
A change gone come
Oh yes it will
Never rising higher than number 31, the B side of the

number 7 "Shake," it was the greatest soul record ever made,
and everybody who heard it knew it. It wasn't a sentimental
judgment, because Cooke was dead; it wasn't a judgment at
all. It was a recognition. The music didn't make you sorry
Cooke was dead; it made you glad that he had lived, made
you feel privileged to have shared the earth with him. This
record wasn't the real world invading the phony little con-
struct of the pop world to remind it of the travails outside; it
was the pop world seizing something from the real world and
sending it back, transformed, the absolute of art negating the
Top 40 Nation 41
hesitations and demurrers of ordinary speech, or, for as long

as the record played, the limits of the real world itself.*
* On 28 March 2004, at Apollo at 70: A Hot Night in Harlem, an all·star benefit for
the Apollo Theater Foundation, Natalie Cole sang a song into the ground,
there was a tribute to Ray Charles, and then the actor and civil rights activist
Ossie Davis, in his eighties and speaking as if he had all the time in the world,
took the stage. "At the end of the fifties," he said, "the Civil Rights Movement
was growing very insistent-hot and heavy. My generation was involved,
challenging America's deep racial divide. We marched, we prayed, we
preached-and fought-for freedom. Music became a significant force in
bringing these issues to light, and bringing the people together." So, far, Davis
was simply mouthing awards-show blather; then he took a turn. "A young
singer by the name of Sam Cooke was dominating the charts," he said as
footage of Cooke performing with more than a dozen singers and dancers
appeared on the theater screen. "One day, Sam heard a song that asked, a
mighty important question." As the sound came up on the screen, you could
hear that Cooke was singing "Blowin' in the Wind": "Yes, and how many deaths
will it take till he knows/ That too many people have died?/ The answer, my
friend, is blowing in the wind"-and to hear Cooke's seamless voice inside
Dylan's "blowin'" was to hear the song as something new. "It prompted him,"
Davis said, "to write what is perhaps his most heartfelt and moving work: 'A
Change ... Is Gonna Come.' A song which became an anthem for the Civil
Rights Movement. To perform it for us tonight is someone I've had the pleas-
ure of introducing before"-and Davis filled up the word with weight, finally
hitting his rhetorical stride-"when we were together once, on that historic
day in Washington, D.C., in nineteen, sixty, three, when Dr. Martin Luther
King told us about the dream he wanted to share with all America. I'm
pleased-nay, happy-to reintroduce this artist again tonight. Ladies and gen-
tlemen, Bob Dylan."
With his band in darkness-hatted guitarist and stand-up bassist, hatless
guitarist and drummer-Dylan stood behind an electric piano and went right
into the song. The sound of his voice was the sound of shoe leather scraping a
sidewalk; the song was out of Dylan's vocal range, so he brought it into his
range as a comrade. At first, with a circular guitar pattern and taps on a wood-
block, the song came out soupy. Slowing the pace as radically as he could,
Dylan gave himself space to drag out certain words, to flatten the melody, and
--------------------------
42 Greil Marcus
"Downtown" was followed at the top of the charts by Phil

Spector's magnificent production of the Righteous Brothers'
"You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling," and then Gary Lewis and
the Playboys' 'This Diamond Ring," written by Al Kooper,
who four months later would sit down at a Hammond organ
to play on "Like a Rolling Stone." Years later, Kooper would
claim that he had written 'This Diamond Ring" as a serious
soul ballad, and even recorded a version to prove it; in 1965
it was the apotheosis of inanity. Gary Lewis's voice was
whiny, the sound was tinny, and to the millions who could
not stop themselves from singing along it was far more
embarrassing than anything Gary's father Jerry had ever
done, and he knew something about embarrassment. As
thousands of people from Selma, and all over the country,
and from beyond the country, marched out of the town and,
under the protection of the Federal government, walked the
fifty-four miles to the state capitol in Montgomery to
demand an end to disenfranchisement, a Constitutional
[continued] by the second verse-the singer in front of a movie theater, being

told he couldn't come in-you saw someone on a WPA stage from the thirties,
bare except perhaps for a backdrop of a setting sun. The performance was
made of dignity and authority-qualities that, as Dylan sang, were passed
from him to the song to Cooke and back again to him. The gorgeous, sophis-
ticated record Cooke had made four decades before was now rough, primitive;
where Cooke was a nightclub prophet, Dylan was a tramp on the street, a
prophet content to say his piece and disappear. That's how he sounded; in a
rakish, cutaway beige jacket, pink satin shirt, black string tie, and pencil mous-
tache, he looked like a card shark.
Top 40 Nation 43
crime that four months later would be ended by the Voting

Rights Act, passed by Congress and signed by Lyndon B.
Johnson as the greatest legacy of his presidency-one of the
marchers Joan Baez, one of them a one-legged man on
crutches, one of them a thirty-nine-year-old volunteer from
Detroit, Viola Luizzo, who would be shot to death that night
from a car full of Klansmen-the Supremes replaced the
shimmering smile of the Beatles' "Eight Days a Week" with
"Stop! In the Name of Love," their fourth number one record
in a row, and so passionate, so well crafted, it made the first
three seem like soft-drink jingles.
At the end of April, as Bob Dylan left for a tour of the
United Kingdom, where he would find that the songs he sang
every night had lost whatever it was that had made them
worth singing in the first place, the charts went soft. As hun-
dreds of people continued to be arrested in voting rights
demonstrations in the South, Johnson sent Marines into the
Dominican Republic to break a democratic revolution, and stu-
dents and professors speaking out in campus forums mounted
the first visible actions against the Vietnam War, with Junior
Walker and the All Stars' "Shotgun" and Roger Miller's "King of
the Road" floating in the ether, the winners were Herman's
Hermits' "Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter"; Wayne
Fontana and the Mindbenders' unmindbending "Game of
Love"; Freddie and the Dreamers' ''I'm Telling You Now," which
made "Game of Love" feel like "A Change Is Gonna Come," or
rather that "A Change Is Gonna Come" had never existed at
44 Greil Marcus
all. After that came the Beatles' "TIcket to Ride," a lament with
an odd beat, a song that actually registered emotional con-
tent-with Gary Lewis and the Playboys chasing the Beatles
with "Count Me In," Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs mocking
Lewis and everybody else on earth with "Wooly Bully," and
Elvis Presley trying to get everyone to calm down with "Cry_
ing in the Chapel." But by the end of June, with flUke a Rolling
Stone" recorded but not released, the pop world turned. As
Bob Dylan has never done, the Byrds reached number one
with an adaptation of his "Mr. Tambourine Man," a song
included on Bringing It All Back Home only a few months before.
It was a rich, thick, bottomless sound carrying what could have
been the Beach Boys singing, high and fey; in the cadence of
its opening the record was an announcement, a signal that it
might itself be a version of the change that was going to come.
Then the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," just
three spots above Herman's Hermits' affectionate cover of Sam
Cooke's "(What A) Wonderful World," in 1960 a perfect
record-and as a record, as opposed to the speech of a
prophet, as opposed to "A Change Is Gonna Come," Cooke's
best. The Rolling Stones ran the table; they held the top spot
on the charts for a month, and by August 10, when they sur-
rendered it to Herman's Hermits' "I'm Henry VIII, I Am," a
British music-hall ditty, flUke a Rolling Stone" was on the
radio, and Watts was one day from setting a fire that would be
seen from the other side of the globe.
Top 40 Nation 45
Whatever else you want to say about this, it was a field of

surprises. In a time of public terror and danger, unparalleled
courage and unspeakable venality, truth and lie, and business
as usual, in what amounted to a kind of running election
there was no definable limit on how little people were willing
to accept, or how much they could take. Top 40 radio was a
mystery; it was up to the artist to solve it.
--~~------
CHAPTER THREE
The Man in the Phone Booth
You can find all these people that play music onstage-they defi-
nitely have some kind of image, or something, that people came
there to see and do, whether it be Lawrence Welk, or Steve
McQueen, or Howdy Doody, President Johnson, really, they all
expect something-and usually they get what they expect, and
what they paid for.
I never promised anybody anything. I used to get up on the
stage when I first began playing concerts, and not even know what
I was going to do. I used to just walk in from the street. Anything
could happen.
Now it's different. Now I want to play the songs-because I
actually dig them myself. I was doing a lot of stuff before that I
didn't really dig . .. stuff which had reasons to be written, which
anybody worth anything could see through, which I could see
48 Greil Marcus
through, and-higher-up people couldn't, can see through, but just
wouldn't let on, 'cause there is a thing to playa game. So a lot of
people play games with me, and call me weird names, because I
wrote songs like "With God on Your Side," but-what it really
meant to write something like that and sing it on the stage has
never been brought out or expressed. I've never seen that written
anywhere.
-Bob Dylan to Allen Stone, WDTM, DetrOit, 24 October
1965
Once an identity is fixed in the public mind or the simple

memory of the media it can never be escaped. Just as Bill Clin-
ton's wire-service obituary will begin, "The first president
since Andrew Johnson to be impeached," Bob Dylan's will
head off with "Most renowned as a protest singer from the
1960s." "Blowin' in the Wind" will be his first song mentioned.
"Kinda ersatz," said a friend in late 1963, when we first
heard Dylan's own recording of the already famous protest
song. Despite the oddity of anything sounding remotely like
Bob Dylan's voice on the radio, he meant that the song
sounded as if it were written by the times, not by anyone in
particular. Maybe that was why the song, with a melody from
the slavery lament "No More Auction Block," as rendered by
the glossy folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary-two goateed gui-
tarists and a female singer with long, straight blonde hair (or
"two rabbis and a hooker," as the critic Ralph J. Gleason put
it)-was such a huge hit. The piece was perhaps not as obvi-
ous as it seemed. How long would there be war, it asked, how
long would there be racism? If the answer was blowing in the
wind, did that mean the answer was where anyone could
grasp it, or that the answer would always elude whoever
reached for it?
It didn't matter then and it doesn't matter now: the song
seemed obvious. And Bob Dylan will never escape it. As
with ads for one-hit wonders now reduced to playing local
bars you've never heard of, where the promoter always sticks
the title of the one hit beneath the name of the act, figuring
you might remember the song even if you've forgotten who
didit-
EVERY MOTHER'S SON

("COME ON DOWN TO MY BOAT")
Gino's
No cover
One Nite Only
-this notice appeared in City Pages in Minneapolis in 1997,

for a show at the Minnesota State Fair, no less:
Featuring ... IN PERSON

"Sensational"
BOB DYLAN
"Blowing in the Wind"
50 Greil Marcus
Never mind that it's "Blowin'," not "Blowing"; earlier in the

year, when the news broke that Dylan might be near death
from a heart condition ("1 really thought I'd be seeing Elvis,"
he said when he left the hospital), the newspaper cartoon
that would follow the event seemed preordained. You could
see a small group of people gathered on a bridge, a scattering
of ashes in the air, and the solemn caption: "Now, Bob Dylan
too is blowing in the wind."
As the decades went on, Dylan found a way to both give
people a song they wanted and bring it to a life it never had
when it was new-because in a way it was never new, with
the questions used clothes and the missing answer a song-
writer's sleight-of-hand. On a live recording Columbia
released in 2000-a fIfield recording," with a bootleg sound,
as if caught from somewhere in the crowd-"Blowin' in the
Wind" was a free-floating sign, pointing backwards. The song
itself was now blowing in the wind; it had long since blown
away from its author, and you can hear how people have
momentarily attached themselves to it, the author with no
more claim to the composition than the audience. He sings
as if the song is, somehow, unfamiliar, certainly not as if he
owns it. The confidence and condescension of a younger
man-Don't you get it?-has been replaced by the regret of an
older one; singing alongside Dylan, guitarists Charlie Sexton
and Larry Campbell take the tune to an aching higher regis-
ter, and suddenly the song is daring the future to shut it up.
Over seven minutes the song is a play-but obituaries don't
have room for plays, let alone for anything that, over a life-
time, plays out its string.
Thus Bob Dylan, fated to be called weird names even
after his death: names like "protest singer." In late 1965, at a
press conference in Los Angeles, when Dylan and the Hawks
were, as Marlon Brando put it, making the loudest noise he'd
ever heard short of a moving freight train, no one asked
Dylan about his new music. While friends snickered at his
side, one reporter after another asked what he was protest-
ing, did he mean what he said, how many protest singers
were there ("Forty-two," Dylan said), was it just a trend? "II est
un Vietnik," Jean-Pierre Leaud said to Chantal Goya in Jean-
Luc Godard's 1966 Mascu/in jeminin, explaining Bob Dylan: a
beatnik against the Vietnam War. The sleeve of a 1974 boot-
leg put its title above the kind of carnival booth that features
holes for a man and a woman to join their heads to bodies or
costumes painted on plywood-those of the couple from
Grant Wood's American Gothic, say:
EARLY 60's REVISITED

A Photo of You As You Were-Only $1
Under the empty hole for the woman's head is a braless

figure in a turtleneck, pedal pushers, and sandals, holding a
sign reading "We Shall Overcome"; a middle-aged Bob
Dylan, a look of unhappy acceptance on his face, his head in
the space over a figure with a guitar, dressed in jeans, boots,
---- -------- - - - - -
52 Greil Marcus
and a sheepskin jacket, waits alone, as if he gets the dollar if

you'll pose with him, or as if this is the only way he can still
get girls. Already in 1972, as if the sixties were not three
years but three decades in the past-or as if "Like a Rolling
Stone" had never been sung-the National Lampoon's Radio
Dinner album had opened with a late-night TV commercial:
Hi! I'm Bob Dylan. Remember those fabulous sixties? The marches,
the be-ins, the draft-card burnings, and best of all the music. Well,
now Apple House has collected the best of those songs on one
album called Golden Protest, performed by the original artists that
made them famous. You'll thrill to "Society's Child" by Janis Ian!
"Pleasant Valley Sunday" by the Monkees! "What Have They Done
to the Rain" by the Searchers! "In the Ghetto" by Elvis Presleyl
"Silent Night/Seven O'Clock News" by Simon and Garfunkel-and
who can ever forget that all-time classic, yes, it's Barry McGuire's
immortal "Eve of Destruction." And of course, my own "Masters of
War." All for the incredibly low price of $3.95. And, if you order
now ...
Behind all of this was a happy desire to acknowledge how

impOSSibly stupid extreme fashions look even months after
they go out of style, and a desperate, shamed attempt to pre-
tend that the ideals and convictions that had carried people
through the previous years-that had found them living with
an intensity and, for some, a creativity that a few years later
seemed impossibly fecund-were nothing more than extreme
fashions. Bob Dylan, it seemed, had said that wrongs should

be made right; if they had not been, if the war was still going
on and racism had merely changed shape, those who had
recognized themselves through the way Dylan said what he
said ("The sound of Bob Dylan's voice," the critic Robert Ray
once wrote, "changed more people's ideas about the world
than his political message did") could best save themselves by
painting him as a fool. And the Radio Dinner commercial,
done with a perfectly aged frog in Dylan's throat, its
cadences falling just where they should, was really funny.
Sometimes, as with 'The Times They Are A-Changin',"
with Dylan in his bard-of-the-people work shirt on the cover
of the 1963 album of the same name, his protest songs were
programmatic and automatically anthemic, even if unsingable
by crowds. More often they came with a cocked eye, with
ambiguity and doubt-and a sense of detail that put you in
the action. When in the 1990s Dylan sang "The Lonesome
Death of Hattie Carroll," from 1963, about the six-month
sentence received by a privileged white Marylander who beat
a black hotel worker to death with his cane, on occasion the
song seemed to slow down: you could almost feel the cane as
it moved through the air. Protest songs could be shuffling,
laconic stand-up comedy routines, as with the priceless
"Talking World War III Blues." The bomb has fallen; the
singer takes a Cadillac out of an abandoned dealership.
"Good car to drive," he says. "After a war."
Dylan tried to escape the label. "I've never written any
54 Greil Marcus
song that begins with the words 'I've gathered you here
tonight ... ", he said. Asked about his favorite protest singers,
he named lounge singer Eydie Gorme and Robert Goulet,
according to legend the artist who first inspired Elvis Presley
to shoot out a TV set. Asked for his political opinions, Dylan
acted shocked: "I'll bet Tony Bennett doesn't have to go
through this kind of thing." He feigned outrage: "Does
Smokey Robinson have to answer these questions?" He could
have meant that it was ridiculous to ask mere pop singers
about the state of the world, or that a black man from Detroit
might have more to say about the state of the world than a
bohemian from New York City. It didn't matter. He could
change his name; he could even change the world, as some
commentators insisted, but he couldn't change what he was
called.
In Don't Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker's documentary film of
Dylan's tour of the United Kingdom in the spring of 1965,
you see a reporter in a phone booth after a show, dictating a
story that could have been written before the show began, if
not the year before: "Sentence. He is not so much singing as
sermonizing. Colon. His tragedy, perhaps, is that the audience
is preoccupied with song. Paragraph. So the bearded boys and
the lank-haired girls, all eye-shadow and undertaker makeup,
applaud the song and miss the sermon. They are there; they
are 'with it.' Sentence: But how remote they really are from sit-
ins and strikes and scabs. Paragraph: The times they are a-
changin',' sings Dylan. They are when a poet fills a hall." It's
easy to laugh at the string of cliches-but what if those

cliches were being generated by Dylan himself? What if they
were true? What if it wasn't that the audience was missing the
sermon, but that Dylan himself was missing the song? On
that tour, every show began with 'The Times They Are A-
Changin'," at that moment in 1965 number 16 on the U.K.
charts, and every time it is a millstone: Pennebaker never
shows more than a few seconds, knowing that to put more of
the song on the screen would be to leave dead air in the film.
Dylan sings liThe Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll";
William Zantzinger's cane merely hits its target. Except for
the end of "Talking World War III Blues," with Dylan reciting
what Lincoln supposedly said about how you can't fool all of
the people all of the time-reciting the words very slowly,
deliberately, upside down and inside out, as if the idea is very
hard to get right, which it is-"Some of the people can be
half right part of the time ... All of the people can be part
right, some of the time ... Half the people can be part right all
of the time ... But all of the people can't be all right, all of the
time"-Dylan only comes to life off-stage. "I was singing a lot
of songs I didn't want to play," Dylan told Nat Hentoff in
1966, describing the tour. "I was singing words I didn't really
want to sing." The most damning words were the simplest:
whenever he played a song, Dylan said, "I knew what was
going to happen."
As Stan Ridgway sang in 2004 in "Classic Hollywood
Ending," liThe audience has learned to cheer." The fans knew
56 Greil Marcus
their roles; they expected the performer to know his. He did,

and he acted it out. It was a ritual of self-confirmation, and
the opposite of an event, which is the putting into play of
something new, something unpredictable, where anything
can happen, where the artist no less than a president subjects
himself or herself to what history is made of. "I claim not to
have controlled events," as Lincoln certainly wrote on 4 April
1864, "but confess plainly that events have controlled me."
Faced with an act-a performance-that breaks the nexus of
expectation and result, an audience might rush the stage and
attack the performer. The performer might leave the stage in
the middle of a song and never come back. The audience
might attempt to drive the performer off the stage with
denunciation and abuse-which, when Dylan returned to the
United Kingdom a year later with the Hawks, is precisely
what happened.
It's painful to watch, to see a song die in a singer's mouth,
to see people in a crowd cheer the death; it's unsettling to
hear the opposite take place, as it did the previous fall. It was
a Halloween concert at Philharmonic Hall in New York City.
The Vietnam War had not yet seeped into American life; the
Beatles had. In the world of folk music, Bob Dylan was now a
star; this time he brought Joan Baez onto his stage.
Much of what took place that night in 1964 was as ritual-
ized as any show Dylan played in the U.K. the following
spring. Two years before, in the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich
Village, as he sang an early version of "A Hard Rain's A-
Gonna Fall/' a visionary epic about, people said, the Cuban

Missile Crisis, some in the crowd came in solemnly behind
Dylan on the refrain, as if for a moment the ballad had turned
into a Gregorian chant. The effect was so ghostly it was as if
the Cuban Missile Crisis truly had led to the atomic war
many thought Kennedy thought he was ready for, and that
this, not the ramble of "Talking World War III Blues," was the
sound you heard, after the war. In Philharmonic Hall people
began cheering before Dylan finished the first line of "Who
Killed Davey Moore?" about a boxer beaten to death in the
ring-to show they knew what was coming next, to affirm
that the concert would give them what they expected, that it
would prove to them that they belonged. That same night,
though, Dylan played "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding),"
which he had never played in public before.
Over the years the number would become the most ritu-
alized of any Dylan ever wrote. The harsh, leaping, biting
strum on the guitar, the catalogue of the endless hypocrisies
of modern American life, of advertising, commuters, political
parties, censorship, sexual repression, organized religion,
country clubs, "propaganda all is phony"-all of it would
come to seem like a set up for a single line of the song. By
now, anyone who cares knows what will happen when Dylan
gets to the words "Sometimes even the president of the
United States must have to stand naked." People will stomp
and cheer to show which side they're on-or what messy
choices they're superior to.
58 Greil Marcus
The ritual is a trick that time played on the song, as soon
enough presidents did find themselves stripped naked, with
Lyndon Johnson driven from office, Richard Nixon and his
vice president both forced to resign, Jimmy Carter and then
George Bush humiliated in defeat, Bill Clinton's every sexual
foible exposed to the world, but it is also a trick that for forty
years Dylan's audience has played on itself. The song, after
all, has outlasted almost as many presidents as Fidel Castro,
and as the song is played now on any stage, in any city, you
can all but hear people waiting for the line to come up, wait-
ing for the chance to play the part that, by now, the song
demands. That is why it is so strange to hear the song as it
was played on that Halloween night, before it was a clue to
anything, when a twenty-three-year-old Bob Dylan sings
"Even the president of the United States sometimes has to
stand naked," and nothing happens. The line hangs in the air,
in a void it itself has called up, as if it's not obvious what it
says. It wasn't obvious: in a few days, almost everyone in
Philharmonic Hall old enough to vote would go to the polls
to cast their ballots for LBJ, running as the peace candidate
against Barry Goldwater, who had flirted with the notion of
using atomic weapons in Vietnam. Johnson had yet to be
demonized; Nixon, who would disgrace the presidency, had
not been elected. Ford had not replaced Nixon, or Carter
Ford, or Reagan Carter, or Bush Reagan, or Clinton Bush, or
Bush Clinton.
Sometimes, as in a performance in Santa Cruz in 2000,
Dylan was able to take the song back from the events that
had controlled it. Here the melody slowly creeps up from
silence, coming out of a fog like the memory of an old blue-
grass song-"Nine Pound Hammer," maybe. The music
bounces forward on a high-stepping beat, until very quickly
the syncopation is a finger reaching out of the past, beckon-
ing, and then a hand reaching out of an alley, grabbing your
arm. There are light drums, and finger-picking on two
acoustic guitars-it's a little folkie chamber orchestra, people
around a campfire, a setting rightfully too intimate for any-
one to intrude upon with a cheer for anything, though of
course when "Sometimes even the president ... " comes
around some do cheer. "Others say don't hate nothin' at all
'cept . " hay-tred," Dylan sings, the line sticking out of his
mouth like a cigar, so sly, so questioning of himself and the
people present, so "Did anybody here ever buy that slogan,
did anybody put it on a bumper sticker and slap it on their
cad' Every verse is thrown away at the end, not with resigna-
tion, or bitterness, but with experience, which is still taking
place. "What else can you show me?" is sung as if the singer
expects neither that there will be something or nothing. For a
few minutes at the end the guitars play the song out of itself,
as if it is, for this night anyway, no longer a carapace contain-
ing a single line, but a chance to find words and rhythms in
the song no one has ever heard before.
Soon after that night in the fall of 1964, the song would
be stopped cold by its own audience. There was no applause
60 Greil Marcus
dubbed onto the studio recording that appeared on Bringing It

All Back Home in March 1965, but "Sometimes even the presi-
dent ... " already implied it. One side of the album led off with
"Subterranean Homesick Blues," a two-minute-seventeen-sec-
ond Chuck Berry-styled comic rant against, among other
things, the entire American social system, its ''Too Much
Monkey Business" leaps disguising, as the music historian
David Hajdu seems to have been the first to notice, a lyric
rooted in an old Woody Guthrie-Pete Seeger number caIled
''Take It Easy." It was Bob Dylan's first single to reach the pop
charts-for one week, at number 39. It was foIlowed on the
album by "She Belongs to Me," "Maggie's Farm," "Love Minus
ZerolNo limit," "Outlaw Blues," "On the Road Again," and
"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," most of them scratchy, clanging,
written with flair, sung with glee, Dylan and his backing musi-
cians in moments thriIled at their own new clatter.
Supposedly made at the suggestion of Dylan's producer
Tom Wilson, who as an experiment clumsily dubbed timid,
effete electric instrumentation over Dylan's utterly depressed
1962 reading of "House of the Risin' Sun," perhaps the Bob
Dylan recording least likely to benefit from special effects,
and then presented Dylan with the results (as, later in 1965,
Wilson would do with an acoustic version of Simon and Gar-
funkel's ''The Sounds of Silence," which became an enormous
international hit), these were Dylan's first rock 'n' roIl record-
ings. He had recorded with a band in 1962, for songs that
were included on or omitted from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan,
!i
l
including a prancing cover of "Th at's All Right," Elvis Pres-

ley's first single; Dylan's first single, from the same year, the
unnoticed "Mixed Up Confusion," had guitars, bass, piano,
drums, and a beat. But this was jug-band music; it didn't
speak Chuck Berry's language, not to mention Little
Richard's. Dylan's new sound on Bringing It All Back Home was a
bid for Beatle territory, for pop success-and oddly, given
what was to happen a few months later, no alarms were
sounded. Despite a threatening jacket photo by Daniel
Kramer, a tableau vivant that invited whoever was looking
into a demimonde of expensive clothes and laudanum, where
Robert Johnson traded songs with Lotte Lenya, a forgotten
nineteenth-century politician gazed down from a mantel at
Lyndon Johnson on the cover of Time, and an elegant woman
in a red dress haughtily looked you in the eye as Dylan
clutched a small gray cat as if it were his Doppelganger, the
new songs sounded, as a fan told Dylan in England that
spring, "like you're just having a laugh."
The best laugh was the last song on the side. "Bob Dylan's
115th Dream" begins with a laugh, as a take opening with
Dylan strumming his acoustic guitar stops short, and Tom
Wilson breaks down in giggles, as if he's just pulled off a
great practical joke. They start again: a single milky note
from Bruce Langhorne's electric guitar tips the first words
into the drums. The song was a kind of answer record to
Chuck Berry's 1959 "Back in the U.S.A."-one of those rare
works of pop art where, as with Richard Hamilton's 1956 col-
62 Greil Marcus
lage Just what is it that makes todays homes so different, so appealing?

you get the feeling that whatever irony might have been
present as the artist began was burnt off by the fervor he or
she brought to the work by the time it was finished. In Berry's
case, he'd just returned from a tour of Australia. "Ooo-hah,"
chant the backing singers on the chorus, breathing real
American air and letting it out. Berry is singing about free-
ways, hamburgers, jukeboxes. "It was a real thrill to get into
my own Cadillac ... and drive myself sixty miles per hour up
I-55 to my own home," he wrote in his autobiography-not
of returning from Australia in 1959, but of returning from
Federal prison in 1963, where he'd been sent by a racist pros-
ecutor on a trumped-up charge. There is a keen sense of the
implacability and variety of American racism all through
Berry's book; there is no irony in "Back in the U.S.A." and
there was no irony in Bob Dylan's discovery of it.
The late San Francisco collage artist Jess once spoke of
"the hermetic critique lockt up in art." The critique locked up
in protest songs was not he~metic, and despite a rock 'n' roll
sound "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" was a protest song-
though it was a protest song that made "Maggie's Farm" feel
almost as sententious as "The TImes They Are A-Changin'." A
rewrite of the Bently Boys' 1929 pickin' -and-grinnin' share-
croppers' complaint "Down on Penny's Farm" and a precursor
of Johnny Paycheck's 1977 "Take This Job and Shove It,"
"Maggie's Farm" was a protest song about factories, sweat-
shops, offices, jobs, chores, classrooms, and despite word-
play that would keep it on fans' lips for years, Dylan sounded
bored as he sang it.
He didn't sound bored in "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream."
Unlike "Maggie's Farm," "Who Killed Davey Moore?" "Mas-
ters of War," "Only a Pawn in Their Game," and many more,
if this was a protest song it was not rhetorical. When the
singer asked a question, he did not assume the answer would
be as plain to his listeners as it was to him. He didn't pre-
sume it would be plain at all-perhaps because like "Back in
the U.S.A." this protest song was also a celebration: a cele-
bration of the failure of rational humanism in these United
States. Compared to the rock 'n' roll records Berry had made
ten years before, "Bob Dylan's 115 Dream" is primitive, all
trip stumble and fall, jangle and screech, with New York stu-
dio musicians, notably drummer Bobby Gregg and pianist
Paul Griffin, trying to keep up with Dylan, sometimes even
getting a step ahead, as in perfect dream logic a sailor casts
his eyes upon Fitzgerald's "fresh, green breast of the new
world."
He arrives on the Mayflower, which is also the Pequod:
"Boys, forget the whale," Captain Ahab shouts. For some rea-
son, the place looks and sounds just like the United States in
1965.
"1 think I'll call it America," the singer says as he kneels on
the beach. Captain Ahab-Dylan calls him "Ay-rab," no
doubt in tribute to Ray Stevens's 1962 hit "Ahab, the Arab,"
pronounced "Ay-rab"-is already writing deeds, planning to
64 Greil Marcus
1I
IIset up a fort and start buying the place with beads. Before
he can do that, a cop shows up and arrests the entire crew for
carrying harpoons.
The singer escapes-IiDon't even ask me how/' he says,
this is all moving very fast, inside the shiny sound the band
is making a dog is chasing its taiC the singer has a tale to tell
and he's barely three steps into it. You can't tell if what's
driving him forward is exasperation, amusement, disbelief,
or the momentum of someone pushed off a cliff. Everywhere
he goes, people turn him away, beat him up, steal his
clothes. He dashes into a government building; the bureau-
crat he encounters tells him to get lost. lIyou know, they
refused Jesus, too/' the singer says, as if the last thing he
expects is for the line to get him any help. IIYou're not him/'
the bureaucrat says reasonably. The singer goes back to the
street, which is now running backwards and upside down. IIA
pay phone was ringing/' he says, lIand it just about blew my
mind/ When I picked it up and said hello, this foot came
1I
through the line. He seems surprised; by this time, the lis-
tener isn't. Hey, you say to the sailor, it's a phone. What did
you expect?
Finally, the singer flees. He goes back to his ship, takes
the parking ticket off the mast, weighs anchor. For the first
time since the song began he lets a breath out easily. But the
story isn't quite over. The singer gets out of the U.S.A. but
the listener doesn't; the singer gets the last laugh. IIWhen I
was leavin' the bay/' he tells you,
I saw three ships a-sailin'

They were all heading my way
I asked the captain what his name was
And how come he didn't drive a truck
He said his name was Columbus
I just said, "Good luck"
Despite this-"All my songs end with 'good luck,'" Dylan

once said-the country in "Bob Dylan's t t 5th Dream" is at
once a horror movie and a utopia, phantasmagoric and imme-
diately recognizable, complete with protest marches, hot
dogs, undertakers, transvestites, con artists, pimps, and
Brotherhood crusades. It's supposed to sound crazy-or is it
supposed to sound what it sounds like now and what it
sounded like when it was made, which is completely realistic
and utterly glamorous? Fun? A great adventure?
It's a protest song about a country that is ridiculous before
it is anything else. It is, among other things, a rewrite of Ralph
Ellison's t 952 novel Invisible Man, a comic version of the story
Dylan would tell a few months later in "Like a Rolling Stone,"
and a picture of a life that hasn't changed-a common, mod-
ern story that doesn't make any more or less sense than it did
when it was first told. Heard today, the song can seem more
than anything a story about the modern market as a thing in
itself, a song so complete it's less a song than a movie-a
movie that could be shot in the center of any great city in the
world, right now, with people bouncing back and forth as ran-
66 Greil Marcus
domlyas pinballs, everybody talking on cell phones, checking

pagers, punching notebooks, some people talking into their
wrists, into the Dick Tracy wristphones that fifty years after
Chester Gould thought them up are finally on sale, everyone
talking, nobody noticing anybody else because nobody has
time, everybody trying desperately to use up time as fast as
they can, because time is money, and there's nothing more
thrilling to do with money than spend it. "Breathless," Dylan
could have called the song; you don't want it to end. And
that, for a protest song, is the best laugh of all. As with the
state of the nation, caught up in a crisis it had yet to truly
acknowledge, the arrival of the Beatles, and the call-and-
response of the Top 40, "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" was a
stage for "Like a Rolling Stone," a performance that would
take in all those things, and send them back transformed.
There was no laughter on the other side of the album.
There, except for "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "It's All Over
Now, Baby Blue," where single backing instruments were so
subtle they seemed more like emanations from the songs
than pieces added to them, this was Bob Dylan as he had
always been, alone, with his guitar and harmonica. The side
comprised four long songs, all of which promised they would
never get near Top 40 radio-and they were so self-evidently
full of meaning, so striking, so important, so elegant and so
beautiful that their quiet drowned out the noise of the songs
on the other side. Bob Dylan may have meant to draw a line,
but it was in a furrow already plowed, and flowers grew over
it. The faster he moved, the more his trap held.
PART TWO
CHAPTER FOUR
San Jose Idol
Speaking with Bob Dylan-do you say "Dillon" or "Die-Ian"?

Oh, I say "Dillon" ... "Die-Ian" ... I say anything you say,
really.
Did you take it from the Welsh poet?
No-that's, I guess we could say, a rumor, made up by people
who like to simplify things ...
What particular song do you remember as being a breakthrough for you?
Was it "Blowing in the Wind"?
No, no, it was-do you mean the most honest and straight
thing which I thought I ever put across? That reached popularity,
you mean. There's been a few-there's been a few. "Blowin' in the
Wind" was to a degree, but I was just a kid. I didn't know anything
about anything, at that point. I just wrote that, and-that was it,
really. Ah-"Mr. Tambourine Man." I was very close to that song. I
70 Greil Marcus
kept if off my third album, just because I felt too close to it, to put
it on.
If you're talking about what breakthrough is for me, I would
have to say, speaking totally, "Like a Rolling Stone."
I wrote that after I had quit. I'd literally quit, singing and play-
ing-I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of
vomit, twenty pages long, and out of it I took "Like a Rolling Stone"
and made it as a single. And I'd never written anything like that
before and it suddenly came to me that this is what I should do.
Nobody had ever done that before. A lot of people- Anybody
can write ... a lot of the things I used to write, I just wrote 'em first
because nobody else could think of writing them. But that's only
because I was hungry. But I've never met anybody, or heard any-
thing-I hear a lot-I'm not saying it's better than anything else, I'm
saying that I think-I think "Like a Rolling Stone" is definitely the
thing which I do. After writing that I wasn't interested in writing a
novel, or a play. I just had too much, I want to write songs. Because
it was a whole new category. I mean, nobody's ever really written
songs before, really.
-Bob Dylan interviewed by Marvin Bronstein, CCBC, Mon-
treal, 20 February 1966
That night, every time he named the song he pressed down

just slightly on the second-to-Iast word, so that it almost
came out "like a Rolling Stone." And it wasn't the song, it was
the sound.
-- - ---------------
San Jose Idol 71
In 1884, Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester, the recently widowed

wife of Oliver Winchester, the inventor of the Winchester
Repeating Rifle-"The Gun that Won the West," as the 1873
model was called, though Bill Cody simply named his "The
Boss"-was told by a spiritualist that as long as she continued
building her house in San Jose, California, she would never
die. Crews of carpenters, plumbers, masons, and painters
were on the property the next day. For the next thirty-eight
years, as the Winchester mansion expanded to 160 rooms,
with stairways that led to ceilings and windows opening onto
walls, they worked without cease-until 1922, when the
wrong person must have taken a break at the wrong time.
Eighty-one years after Mrs. Winchester's death, in June
2003, the San Francisco Classic Rock station KFOG set up a
broadcast in Mrs. Winchester's house-by then the Winches-
ter Mystery House, where, it used to be said, the ghosts of
dead Indians hung in the air. The station was there to host a
local version of the hit television show American Idol: "San Jose
Idol," in which members of the studio audience would sing
Bob Dylan songs in the hopes of winning tickets to his
upcoming show at Konocti Harbor, a California resort featur-
ing performers who appeal to a redundant demographic-as
opposed to the contestants on American Idol itself, who sing
florid power ballads and Mariah Carey "Endless Love" imita-
tions in hopes of winning a record contract and sales to the
millions who, the idea is, will in turn copy the contestants'
received inflections and grimaces in hopes of someday
72 Greil Marcus
becoming winners themselves. Thus in San Jose men and

women were stepping up to the microphone to essay the most
lugubrious versions imaginable of the likes of "All Along the
Watchtower" or "Just Like a Woman"-moronically drawing
out the vowels, of course. "That's the most beautiful thing I've
ever heard!" cooed the Paula Abdul stand-in judge. "That's
horrible and you're too fat!" barked the Simon Cowell.
You listen and you think, here's the real Bob Dylan, alive
in the public imagination: the world's most beloved cliche, or
anyway the most obvious. Were the winners of this contest
really going to keep the tickets they won? If this is who Bob
Dylan is to the people on this show, why would they want to
see him? Why would anyone?
This is the premise of Masked and Anonymous, a movie
released that same summer, directed by Larry Charles, writ-
ten by Bob Dylan, and starring Dylan as Jack Fate, a semi-
legendary, all-but-forgotten singer: people remember they're
supposed to remember him, but they don't remember why.
They are citizens of a country that barely remembers itself:
the U.S.A. here reduced to a rotting Los Angeles. Most of
the people who used to run the country, or own it-that is,
white people-have fled or disappeared. Those who remain
still speak and move as if they expect others to respect what
they say or get out of the way, but nobody does. There are
no more Americans. The Third World-Jamaicans, Africans,
Mexicans, Arabs, Chechens, Serbs, refugees, thugs, killers,
and extortionists of every kind-has colonized the First.
San Jose Idol 73
These are not the Statue of Liberty's huddled masses, yearn-

ing to breathe free; they're looters.
In a nation that is breaking up in a civil war between
"rebels," "counterrevolutionaries," and a government that
seems to consist principally of posters of a dying president
(in his smudgy white and gold military uniform, a cross
between Saddam Hussein and Juan Peron), Jack Fate has
been released from prison to playa "benefit concert," because
Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Paul McCartney
have already said no. It's a scam for the promoter, Sweet-
heart, played by John Goodman in an ugly beard and a grimy
blue tuxedo jacket, who plans to skim the money, and a
board of gangsters who claim to represent the president and
want to "aid the true victims of the revolution." Or skim the
money.
The film moves to pick up Jack Fate from the prison
where he's been held for years on charges that are never
described-and as it does so it swiftly carries the viewer
through an America that has been boiled down to greed and
violent death, a montage of urban massacres and broken
streets crowded with human wreckage. The characters who
emerge or merely appear to disappear-Val Kilmer as a shep-
herd in a parking lot, a blowsy Jessica Lange as an even more
cynical version of Goodman's promoter, clean-cut Luke
Wilson as an old Jack Fate sidekick, or bodyguard-together
make up a caricature of Bob Dylan's, or Jack Fate's, original
audience: washed-up, self-loathing, culturally narcissistic
------------------------------------,
74 Greil Marcus
middle-aged white people trying to find something better to

do than sing Townes van Zandt's "Waiting Around to Die," or
talk about how Townes van Zandt died.
Throughout the film, all of the music, save for the ver-
sions of ''Dixie'' and the folk song "Diamond Joe" that Fate
plays with Simple Twist of Fate-announced by Sweetheart
as "the best and only Jack Fate tribute band!"-is Dylan's: his
own original recordings, deeply empathetic transformations
of his songs by others ("My Back Pages" by the Magokoro
Brothers, in Japanese, "Most of the TIme" by the Swedish
singer Sophie Zelmani, "If You See Her, Say Hello" by
Francesco de Gregori, in Italian), and performances that
occur as part of the action, most stunningly when, during a
Jack Fate rehearsal for the big concert, a white woman with a
cast on her arm and a tattoo on her leg is brought in with her
daughter, a black girl of about eight or nine. "Mrs. Brown,
you've got a lovely daughter," someone says, and explains to
Fate that, out of a devotion that has crossed from the mere
schizophrenia of fandom to outright child abuse, the woman
has taught, or forced, the girl to memorize everyone of his
songs. She is commanded to sing-and produces a lovely,
too-perfect, word-for-word a cappella rendition of "The
TImes They Are A-Changin'." The girl plainly has no idea
what she is singing or why; in her own English she is singing
in a foreign language.
The song summons a far-off, forgotten time that no
longer makes sense. It's a call to action in a country that no
San Jose Idol 75
longer exists. "Senators, Congressmen, please heed the calli

Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall," the girl
sings, as Jack Fate, or Bob Dylan, sang in 1963, but there is
no longer any Senate or House of Representatives: hustlers
run three-card monte games in the Capitol doorways, crack
fiends sleep in the halls. It's a chilling moment, as Jack Fate
listens and turns away and the girl and her mother are
escorted out without even a thank you or a smile, as if this is
the last thing Jack Fate wants to be reminded of-that once
he wrote such things, that once people believed them, that
he believed them, or that he once pretended to believe them.
As a fantasy of Bob Dylan, Jack Fate-walking carefully,
as if his boots are stilts, a thin man who looks like Vincent
Price, wears a Little Richard moustache, dresses like Hank
Williams, and squints like Clint Eastwood-talks to the ghost
of a long-dead blackface minstrel, played by an unrecogniz-
able Ed Harris with huge white lips painted onto his burnt-
cork face. On a bus, he listens to a crazed ex-revolutionary
played by Giovanni Ribisi, who after explaining who's on
what side and which side is which runs out of the bus to try
to stop guerrilla fighters who blow him to pieces. He does
not talk or listen to Tom Friend, played by Jeff Bridges as a
fantasy of every journalist of the last forty years who tried to
get an interview with Bob Dylan. Dispatched by a muckrak-
ing editor to dig up the story behind the phony benefit con-
cert, Bridges has a list of questions-and he's so convulsed by
his own theories of what it all means, the hope of the sixties,
76 Greil Marcus
the corruption of the present, the possibility that maybe the

concert will save the world, his obsession with Fate's career,
his own career, or simply the sound of his own voice (he's the
real Jack Fate, he seems to be saying, or would be if there
were any justice in this world) that Fate couldn't get a word
in even if he wanted to.
In the early nineties, I was sent a proposal and a pilot
video for a TV series on great rock festivals. The premise was
almost scary in its insistence on the eternal primacy of those
born after World War II and before Vietnam: the show would
start with the greatest concert of all time-Woodstock, the
instantly storied 1969 "Gathering of the Tribes"-and then
move on through a series of only slightly less storied gather-
ings, most involving at least one dead hero those not dead
could talk about ("He was the nicest person you could ever
meet" "She had her demons, but she was the nicest person
you could ever meet"). Each segment would end with its
host, a current movie or music star, speaking the same line,
the catchphrase of the whole series: "You shoulda been there,
man." The whole point was to stress that the world is made
up of two different kinds of people, those who'd been there,
and those who hadn't-and the host for the Woodstock
episode, standing under a bright sun in the field where the
stage once was, saying "You shoulda been there, man" with
cheerleader condescension, was Jeff Bridges.
Thus here he is again in Masked and Anonymous, shaggier,
heavier, looking as if he hasn't slept for the ten years between
San Jose Idol 77
the day he shot the pilot and the reemergence of Jack Fate
but with exactly the same attitude, now pumped up as pure
mania. He's following Fate as they walk through the old
vaudeville theater where the benefit concert is going to take
place. (Is that how the movie will end? Cheers, calls for an
encore that never comes, "Jack Fate has left the building," and
then a cut to Tom Friend, on the late news, summing it all up,
"You shoulda been there, man"?) The hulking Friend looms
over Fate like a thunderhead, and he goes off.
What about the Mothers of Invention, Jack-Zappa. Now there's a

guy, he wouldn't take no for an answer. He did that whole movie,
Uncle Meat, sixteen hours long, unedited. He let it all hang out,
didn't he? What about you? Do you ever let it all hang out? You
know the singer in the group the Bee Gees, he sounds a lot like, ah,
Gene Pitney! Doesn't he? ''Town without Pity." You remember that,
Jack? That place where they'd lock you up for something you
haven't even thought about doing yet? It's a pretty lonesome world
... What about Hendrix? Remember Hendrix at Woodstock? I'm
just curious, you weren't there, were you? You weren't at Wood-
stock, weren't up there with Hendrix. Why? Where were you? You
shoulda seen Hendrix, man. He was-all business. Didn't mix busi-
ness with pleasure. And playing liThe Star-Spangled Banner,"
through two lousy speakers to half a million people in the mud?
Oooo! What a cry that was! Cry forlorn. Man, it was a desperate
cry of freedom up there with that screaming guitar. What was he
sayin', Jack? That "Star-Spangled Banner" trip. Now, what was that
78 Greil Marcus
all about, huh? Revolution? I don't think so. You could hear-tears,
in every note he played, sayin', love me. Love me. I'm not a traitor-
I'm a native son! He took the-glorious anthem, he dropped drug
bombs on it. You could hear that cry around the world, saying,
Hey! I'm an American citizen! He was calling out to his forefathers, the
Pilgrims, the Pilgrims! They didn't need any stinking passports, did
they? Hmmm? Hendrix, Jack, well-he was the last man standing.
Pride and honor, right? That's what it's all about. But they didn't
hear him. One sad cry of pain. In a town without pity.
Jack Fate listens stonefaced and turns away. But what Jimi
Hendrix did with the National Anthem at Woodstock-in
just under four minutes twisting and shredding it with feed-
back, scattering the pieces all over the stage and then draw-
ing them back, reassembling them into a Frankenstein
monster of a nation, then finally letting the song emerge in
its whole body, the hateful noise and furious love of Hen-
drix's music now draped over the song like a wedding suit
covered in dirt-is what is happening with Fate's own music,
Bob Dylan's music, everywhere in the film. It's a music of
transformations, gathering its greatest force with "Come una
Pietra Scalciata," a 1998 recording by Articolo 31, an Italian
hip-hop group made up of J. Ax and OJ Jad: that is, with
"Like a Rolling Stone."
This strange, utterly displacing performance is reaching
back to "Like a Rolling Stone" as it appeared in 1965, reach-
ing back through the confusion of events that has by the
near-future of the film negated the first shape of the song,
San Jose Idol 79
back through the time that has dimmed it, the thousands of
other songs that took its place on the charts, the world it
changed, the world that changed around it, that left it behind
at a fork in the road-maybe that fabled fork in the American
road with two signs, "THIS WAY TO TEXAS," "THIS WAY TO
ARKANSAS," with, as the story goes, everyone who could read
proceeding to Texas, and everyone else ending up in
Arkansas. So the song goes to Arkansas, in the folk iconogra-
phy of the story of the signs to nowhere. For the Italians who
are now claiming the song as if it were itself a forefather, a
founding father, a Jefferson, a Garibaldi, nothing remains but
a distant, inherited memory of what the song once meant.
But they don't play it as a memory. What their performance
affirms, what it seizes as a birthright that passes the song
from the one who once sang it to the people speaking it now,
is precisely that confusion of events, less "Like a Rolling
Stone" as it was found than "Like a Rolling Stone" as it was
lost.
With "Come una Pietra Scalciata," even Dylan himself is a
kind of haunt. The record is in fact a cover of a cover-a
cover of the 1993 cover of "Like a Rolling Stone" by the enig-
matic white hip-hop group the Mystery Tramps.*
* Their fourth Google entry turns up not the band but 'The thesis of Coup d'E-
tat in America suggested that Watergate conspirator and longtime CIA spook E.
Howard Hunt was one of the three mystery tramps renowned in Kennedy
assassination lore." Given that the tramps, "photographed in the vicinity of the
grassy knoll," were "picked up by the Dallas police and then released without
any record of arrest," maybe they are the band.
80 Greil Marcus
In both the four-minute-thirty-second "Radio Mix" and

the six-minute-twenty-six-second 11-800-Mix," the Mystery
Tramps open with a sample of the original fanfare: distant,
thin, and undeniable, like the vision of Shangri-La Ronald
Colman can't get out of his head. Over a conventional hip-
hop drum and bass track, there's a thick, crass, tiresomely
knowing male lead singer, instantly answered by an auto-
matic female chorus. There's scratching, and then a sample
of Bob Dylan: "How does it feel?" "Check it out," says the
leader, sounding as if he wants to sell you dope. "This a story
about a girl who goes from riches to rags, and it's a drag, so
check it ouuuuuut." It's the most reductive story in the song:
"a put-down," as Jon Landau described it in 1968, full of
"self-righteousness, its willingness to judge others without
judging oneself"; an example of "sixties songwriters" refusing
"women any middle ground between the pedestal and the
gutter, as Charles Shaar Murray wrote in 1989, a song
II
"sneeringly and contemptuously sung to a spoiled rich girl,"

with lithe reactionary stagnation of the social order ... per-
sonified as female"; "a view of the Socialite life of the Big
Apple," as C. P. Lee wrote in 1998, if not "another song
about" the Warhol actress Edie Sedgwick. "Even now," Dave
Marsh wrote in 1989, "it still seems strange that the record is
so long because in real life, diatribes are never allowed to
last this long: somebody interrupts." The Mystery Tramp
singer can't wait to push the buttons. "How does it feel? I
really want to know," he says, but he already knows. There's
San Jose Idol 81
only one real hint of the bad news the leader insists the song
is about but never offers: when he chants "Nobody ever
taught you how to live out on the street," you hear a car
honk. Something in the timing of the way it comes in, the
abruptness of the horn, as if the driver is both angry and
shocked, lets you see who he's honking at: someone wan-
dering in traffic, oblivious, confused, someone who has
given up.
Right at the beginning of the first chorus, there's a cut-in
of a girl in the bloom of youth: "Spare change?" she says.
"Spare change, anybody?" Her voice is so clear and untrou-
bled, so much the girl in the first panel of Mick Brownfield's
comic strip version of the song, that you don't believe her for
a moment. When the singer gets to the third verse, which for
the Mystery Tramps is also the last verse, to "After he took
from you everything that he could steal," the girl is back, as if
from a sitcom: "Hey! Where's my stuff?" The recurrent Dylan
sample, "How does it feel?" is plaintive and small, Midwest-
ern, heard as if from across the country, and, along with the
girl on the street, the only source of soul in the piece. You
hear Dylan calling out to her-he's the one who really wants
to know.
The shorter version ends with the girl buried in a fade,
barely audible: "What is this? Can you help me?" That will be
the heart of the long mix. There's that fanfare again, but
speeded up and tinny, with a heavier rhythm on top of it, and
then a second male voice, a more secretive voice: "Yeah, can
82 Greil Marcus
you dig iti' It's a hipster's tone, an old man's gravel in the
throat: the Mystery Tramp. And then the girl whose last
words were almost lost at the end of the first version comes
through all too clearly, in a panic: "What is this? Can you
help me out? Where am I, what's going on- This isn't cool."
She is trapped in the song as if she were locked in a closet.
"Heh, heh, heh," says the Mystery Tramp.
The sneer Charles Shaar Murray heard when Bob Dylan
sang the song, that the Mystery Tramps heard, is altogether
gone when Articolo 31 takes up the Mystery Tramps'
arrangement five years later.
There is a distorted, nasal, Dylan-like voice: "! got, I got
something to tell you," and instantly you are plunged into
darkness. Like the girl in the Mystery Tramps' "1-800" ver-
sion, you don't know where you are. There is the original
fanfare, sounding like the trumpets of Jubilee-and then a
harsh but leveled rap, relentlessly chasing what seem like
thousands of words.
Articolo 31's "Come una Pietra Scalciata" is a rewrite of
"Like a Rolling Stone," following Dylan's themes, only three
verses in four and a half minutes, but in terms of its Italian
word count at least four and a half times as long as Dylan's
long song. It's a flood of words, with the first verse run over a
chopped, pulled-back sample of the original fanfare behind a
slow hip-hop rhythm track, then a new organ track. A
repeated sample of the lilting piano from Dylan's original
recording is the dominant instrumental sound, all loose
San Jose Idol 83
notes, like pieces flying off a machine in motion. The song is

shattered, but it never loses its body, reconstituting itself as if
each fragment carries a genetic code. And then Dylan, with
the same faraway sample of "How does it feel?" that the Mys-
tery Tramps used, but this time the female singers for the
chorus are warm, present, full of desire. They are actors, not
a sound effect; as Dylan calls out they answer him. This is
how it feels-complete, knowledgeable, strong, and Dylan
continues as they do, the spectral singer and the flesh-and-
blood women now answering each other line by line, neither
side surrendering anything.
Both ride the chorus like a horse. As the women throw
every line that comes from Dylan in English back to him in
Italian, as if there's nothing he can tell them they don't
already know, you can hear him singing directly to them, as
if they were always the subject of the song, the audience it
sought. It's as if he means to tell them, with more passion
than his voice, heard as it was recorded in 1965, has ever car-
ried before, that there is something they don't know, some-
thing they cannot know, because like the language in which
he made the song it has been forgotten. The feeling gener-
ated by "Come una Pietra Scalciata" is finally that the Dylan
captured in the recording is not asking how it feels but what
it means-and you can hear the women singing directly to
him, as if the song is now as much theirs as his. He is ques-
tioning; they are deliberate. For them the chorus is a staircase
and each word is a stair.
84 Greil Marcus
How does it feel?

Dimmi comme ci sente
To be on your own?
A stare sempre da sola
With no direction home?
Ne direzione ne casa
A second rapper comes in for the second verse, moving

faster than the first, over a more cut-up, stop-and-start sam-
ple from the original, moving faster over the slower, jerking
rhythm. Then the chorus returns-with familiarity, with rep-
etition, even more powerful, even more alive-and then the
first rapper, back to take the third and last verse, as if he can't
believe how many words there are left, as if this is a chance
to say everything he's ever wanted to say, and have it vali-
dated by the way Bob Dylan will answer him-"How does it
feeli'-and the way he will answer back: "e dimmi come ci si sente
ora che devi sudarti i beni materiali vedi che hai poco spazio per i problemi
esistenziali ... "
All sense of a put-down, of a sneer, has been erased as if it
never was-if it ever was. ("Why does everybody say of
something like 'Like a Rolling Stone,'" Dylan asked Robert
Shelton in 1965, '''That Dylan ... is that all he can do, put
down people? I've never put anybody down in a song, man."')
In the few moments of the song that play on the soundtrack
of Dylan's film-the fanfare, the first rap, the first chorus-it
comes through whole, moving across the scenes of social col-
San Jose Idol 85
lapse, of America as a plague, like a call to arms. It's thrilling;

it's confusing. In this blasted version of the U.s.A. as what
you see and what you hear refuse to come together, the song
asks not how a new life feels, but why what is now so plainly
an affirmation of freedom, of a world to win, has persisted in
any form at all. It's as if you're hearing a distorted radio signal
from a station that went out of business years ago, or-with
the body of the song now cut up and reassembled with pieces
of bodies of people not born when the song was first heard-
as if the true precursor of "Like a Rolling Stone" is not Ritchie
Valens's "La Bamba" but the Drifters' 'There Goes My Baby/'
from 1959, with its sound of two or three or four different
stations cutting in and out of the same band, the classical sta-
tion, the R&B station, the Top 40 station, the ether, a mistake
that will leave your life forever incomplete, because you will
never hear it again, because you will never be sure you heard
it at all.
------------------------
CHAPTER FIVE
Once Upon a TIme
The song is a sound, but before that it is a story. But it's not
one story. "1 have the audacity to play 'Like a Rolling Stone' in
my show, just about every night," the country singer Rodney
Crowell said in 2004. "1 did it as a lark, to show off to some
of the guys in my band that I knew all the words. But I was
immediately struck by the audience response to the song.
From six-year-olds to seventy-year-olds-they all know the cho-
rus to that song. I couldn't put it awaYi every night, it's a unify-
ing thing. I think it's somehow part of the fabric of our
culture."
"This is about growing up, this is about discovering what's
going on around you, realizing that life isn't all you've been
told," Jann Wenner said that same yeari thirty-seven years
before, in 1967, he had named his magazine Rolling Stone
88 Greil Marcus
because, as he explained in the first issue, "Muddy Waters
took the name for a song he wrote; the Rolling Stones took
their name from Muddy's song, and 'Like a Rolling Stone' was
the title of Bob Dylan's first rock and roll record."
He's throwing it at you in the verse: here's your problem. Here's

what's happened. So now you're without a home, you're on your
own, complete unknown, like a rolling stone. That's a liberating
thing. This is a song about liberation. About being liberated from
your old hang-ups, and your old knowledge, and the fear, the
frightening part of facing that, particularly when he gets to
scrounging for your next meal-the worst thing that happens to
you. Or, "Do you want to make a deal"-there's a lot of fear in that, in
the line, in the lyric, in the melody.
"Once upon a time you dressed so fine"-I don't see it as being
about a rich person who falls apart, I see it as being about a comfort-
able individual, or a comfortable society, suddenly discovering
what's going on. Vietnam-the society we're taught about, and you
realize, as you become aware, drug aware, socially aware, the disas-
ter of the commercial society.
The key line is, "You've got no secrets to concea!." Everything
has been stripped away. You're on your own, you're free now.
You've gone through all these levels of experience-you fell, some-
one you believed in robbed you blind, took everything he could
steal, and finally, it's all been taken away. You're so helpless, and
now you've got nothing left. And you're invisible-you've got no
secrets-that's so liberating. You've nothing to fear anymore. It's
Once Upon a Time 89
useless to hide any of that shit. You're a free man. That to me is the
message. You know: "Songs of Innocence and Experience."
I always thought it was my story, in a certain sense. I used to go
to the finest schools. Nobody ever taught you how to live out on
the street. So, to me, coming from private schools, and my back-
ground, being a preppy, ending up at Berkeley, and all of a sudden,
taking drugs, things change, you're no longer in a private school,
all of a sudden you're running around with Ken Kesey, Hell's
Angels, and drug dealers-and one of them's the Mystery Tramp. At
some Acid Test, and some weirdo comes up to you, with a beard, a
top hat-you stare into the vacuum of his eyes, and ask him, do
you want to make a deal. That happened to me. Too many times.
In 1978, in Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child of the Aquarian Age,

David Henderson made it Jimi Hendrix's story. The finest
writing there is on "Like a Rolling Stone" is Henderson on
the performance of the song at the Monterey Pop Festival in
1967 by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Hendrix's first band. It
was a great stomp, as much a fan's tribute as a master's appro-
priation: "Yes, I know I missed a verse, don't worry," Hendrix
says after skipping from the second to the fourth. Huge
chords ride over the beginning of each verse like rain clouds;
the tune is taken very slowly, with Hendrix's thick, street-talk
drawl sounding nothing at all like Dylan's Midwestern dust
storm. Laughter erupts all over the song: "Hey, baby-would
you like to, ah, ah, make a deeealllllll?" But for the six minutes
Hendrix is playing, across five pages Henderson all but leaves
90 Greil Marcus
the song on the stage and enters Hendrix's mind as he plays.
Now "Like a Rolling Stone" is about Hendrix's childhood in
Seattle, where as a schoolboy he attended an Elvis Presley
show at the Rainiers minor-league baseball park, when Elvis
asked all present to rise for the National Anthem and then
plunged into "Hound Dog"; his years as a journeyman on the
Chitlin' Circuit; his tours with Joey Dee and the Starlighters
of "Peppermint Twist" fame; his life in Harlem-an odyssey.
Henderson turns himself into Hendrix's shade, as if in these
pages of fiction he was watching from across the street, writ-
ing it down as it happened.
"Once upon a time you dressed so fine ... " Right there in that
moment Jimi saw himself as he had lived in America. Yeah, he had
been the fine-dressing R&B entertainer, and then suffered what
many of his friends at the time thought was a great fall. Hanging
out in the Village with all those beatniks and hippies. Taking all
that speed for energy and to fend off starvation. The slick veneer
front of the R&B musician destroyed for him in the Village. Disdain
from his friends "uptown"-"he's looking scruffy and acting crazy."
He saw himself walking MacDougal Street hearing the song,
and every time always so amazed at how it hit so close to home.
"Like a Rolling Stone" seemed to come forth from every window,
every bar. Once he had walked clear across the Village to the East
Village, and stopped in a bar called The Annex on Tenth Street and
Avenue B. Out of the sodden, snow-encrusted streets, dark and
severe and utterly desolate, he walked into the slit-windowed one-
room Annex where a great swell of music greeted him, and the
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Once Upon a Time 91
entire bar was singing along. The jukebox was turned up to full vol-
ume. The place was dark but packed, and they were all singing
"... Rolling Stone" jubilantly, as if it were the National Anthem.
And then Henderson takes Hendrix deeper into a new

life, into his first hesitant performances in tiny clubs, as he
found his way to "the odd folk and blues records so treasured
by so many in the Village," as his attempts to play Bob Dylan
records for his Harlem friends were met with scorn and dis-
gust, as he stood with the other hustlers on Forty-second
Street, "waiting for some stranger to give them a nod." As
Hendrix plays the song, Henderson as Hendrix reverses its
perspective, taking it away from Dylan's subject, the you who
"used to laugh about/ Everybody that was hanging out," and
giving the song over to the nameless people hiding in the
song's alleys and doorways, people like Hendrix, scuffling
downtown: "They had laughed at him." "It was a song that
only Dylan could sing-until now," Henderson writes, but it's
he who is singing it. It's he who has passed it on. As Hender-
son tells it, "Like a Rolling Stone" is not a story of liberation,
it is an epic.*
* "1 think Jimi's gonna be remembered for centuries, just like people like Lead-
belly and Lightnin' Hopkins," the late John Phillips, one of the organizers of
the Monterey Pop Festival, said in 1992, then placing Hendrix in an America
so alluring and mysterious that it changed Hendrix's story once again, recast-
ing his whole brief career as a dare, or a race against an opponent Phillips
didn't name, opening up a tale yet to be told: "He's really a folk hero, another
John Henry."
I
I
L
-- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
CHAPTER SIX
In the Air
As songwriting, what's different about IIUke a Rolling Stone"

is all in its first four words. There may not be another pop
song or a folk song that begins with "Once upon a time
... "-that in a stroke takes the listener into a fairy tale, off
the radio you're listening to in your car or on the record
player in your house, suddenly demanding that all the paltry
incidents in the song and all the impoverished incidents in
your own life that the song reveals as you listen now be
understood as a part of a myth: part of a story far greater than
the person singing or the person listening, a story that was
present before they were and that will remain when they're
gone. But the entry into the realm of fairy tale, of dragons
and sorcerers, knights and maidens, of princes traveling the
kingdom disguised as peasants and girls banished from their
-------------------------
94 Greil Marcus
homes roaming the land disguised as boys, would mean noth-

ing if the singer's feet were on the ground.
There is that stick coming down hard on the drum and
the foot hitting the kick drum at the same time, this particu-
lar rifle going off not in the third act but as the curtain goes
up. 'The first time I heard Bob Dylan," Bruce Springsteen said
in t 989, inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame, "I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA,
and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd
kicked open the door to your mind." Many other recordings
have opened with the same formal device, a single drum
beat-"From a Buick 6," on Highway 61 Revisited, the album
"Like a Rolling Stone" leads off, is one-but on no other
record does the sound, or the act, so call attention to itself, as
an absolute announcement that something new has begun. *
Then for an expanding instant there is nothing. The first
sound is so stark and surprising, every time you hear it, that
the empty split-second that follows calls up the image of a
* As a way to start a song, this has always struck me as completely singular-

not, it's plain, because it is singular, but because the drama created by the iso-
lation of the sound for "Like a Rolling Stone," perhaps the echo that surrounds
it, for me erased all analogues. "Do you remember how that came about?" I
asked AI Kooper. "It's a very common situation," he said. "Somebody counts
off, and somebody plays a lead-in. It's a very common thing to playa drum fill
on one of the first bars. He [drummer Bobby Gregg] could have gone, one, two,
three--chickaboom; there's a million things you could do. He just chose to do
that. It's the four of the bar before it starts. One, two, three, FOUR/ And there you
go." Kooper then offered a list of thirty records that begin the same way,
including the Impressions' 1963 "It's All Right," Richard Thompson's 1985
In the Air 95
house tumbling over a cliff; it calls up a void. Even before

"Once upon a time/' it's the first suggestion of what Dylan
meant when, on that night in Montreal when he was plainly
too tired to bait an interviewer so uninterested in his assign-
ment he hadn't even bothered to learn how to pronounce his
subject's name, he cared enough about "Like a Rolling Stone"
to seriously insist that no one had written songs before-that
no one had ever tried to make as much of a song, to alto-
gether open the territory it might claim, to make a song a
story, and a sound, but also the Oklahoma Land Rush.
That first shot will be repeated throughout the perform-
ance, on Dylan's own electric rhythm guitar, as for every
other measure a hard, percussive snap seals a phrase, cuts off
one line of the story and challenges the moment to produce
another. That first announcement is brought inside the
sound, so that it becomes a signpost, reappearing every other
step of the way: a mark of how far the story has gone, which
is to say a mark of how much ground that can never be
[continued] "When the Spell Is Broken," the Dixie Chicks' 2000 "Goodbye
Earl," the Beach Boys' kabbalistically obscure 1964 "Porn Porn Playgirl," and
the Ronettes' 1963 "Sleigh Ride." Jon Langford, of the Mekons, noted the
Mekons' own 1986 cover of Patsy Cline's "Sweet Dreams," where the effect is
so similar it qualifies as a cover of "Like a Rolling Stone." Dave Marsh offered
the Beatles' 1964 "Any Time at A1l": "It has the drum beat opening, and it is
very close in effect; in fact, Ringo does the drum beat opening at the top of
the record and at the top of every chorus. It's got that gunshot effect-not
quick and sharp as on 'Like a Rolling Stone,' more duration, like a real gun-
shot." I am sticking to my guns. There is nothing like it.
96 Greil Marcus
recovered has been left behind. The silence, too, is repeated,

in breaks in the sound too brief to measure but that in their
affective force can seem enormous: the entire ensemble rising
up and then stopping at the top of a surge, just after the first
"How does it feel" of the final chorus, as if the song itself has
to pause to catch its breath for the final chase; Dylan himself,
in the time it takes the last word of the song to leave his
mouth and his mouth to reach the harmonica on the rack on
his chest for the slashing phrase that seals the end of the
song as fiercely as the stick on the snare opened it. In these
moments of suspension there is a kind of ghost, the phantom
of a comforting past, where everything remains the same. In
the maelstrom of the performance itself, in each step forward
on the fairy-tale road, where when you look forward you see
mountains too high to climb and when you look back you
see nothing, it is the sense that you could take it all back,
that you could retrace your steps, that you could go home,
that it's not too late.
As a sound the record is like a cave. You enter it in the
dark; what light there is flickers off the walls in patterns that,
as you watch, seem almost in rhythm. You begin to feel that
you can tell just what flash will follow from the one before it.
But the longer you look, the more you see, and the less fixed
anything is. The flickers turn into shadows, and the move-
ment the shadows make can never be anticipated. Suddenly
the dark, the light, and the shadows are all speaking to you,
each demanding your attention. You can't look in all direc-
In the Air 97
tions at once but you feel you must. The room begins to
whirl; you try to focus on a single element, to make it repeat
itself, to follow it, but you are instantly distracted by some-
thing else.
This is what happens in "Uke a Rolling Stone." The sound
is so rich the song never plays the same way twice. You can
know that, for you, a certain word, a certain partial sound
deep within the whole sound, is what you want; you can steel
yourself to push everything else in the song away in anticipa-
tion of that part of the song you want. It never works. You lie
in wait, to ambush the moment; you find that as you do
another moment has sneaked up behind you and ambushed
you instead. Without a chorus the song would truly be a
flood, not the flood of words of "Come una Pietra Scalciata"
but a flood that sweeps up everything before it-and yet as
the song is actually sung and played, the chorus, formally the
most determined, repeating element in the song, is the most
unstable element of all.
There are drums, piano, organ, bass guitar, rhythm guitar,
lead guitar, tambourine, and a voice. Though one instrument
may catch you up, and you may decide to follow it, to attend
only to the story it tells-the organ is pursuing the story of a
road that forks every time you turn your head, the guitar is
offering a fable about a seeker who only moves in circles, the
singer is embellishing his fairy tale about the child lost in the
forest-every instrument shoo"ts out a line that leads to
another instrument, the organ to the guitar, the guitar to the
98 Greil Marcus
voice, the voice to the drums, until nothing is discrete and

each instrument is a passageway. You cannot make anything
hold still.
Because the song never plays the same way twice-
because whenever you hear the song you are not quite hear-
ing a song you have heard before-it cannot carry nostalgia.
Unlike any other Bob Dylan recording that might be
included on Golden Protest, the next time you hear "Like a
Rolling Stone" is also the first time. That first drum shot is
what seals it: when the stick hits the skin, even as a house
tumbles forward, the past is jettisoned like a missile dumping
its first stage. In that moment there is no past to refer to-
especially the past you yourself might mean to bring to the
song.
I saw this happen once, as if it were a play. It was about
eleven in the morning in Lahaina, on Maui, in 1981, in a
place called Longhi's, a restaurant made of blonde wood and
ceiling fans. There were ferns. People were talking quietly;
even small children were lolling in the heat. Everything
seemed to move very slowly. There was a radio playing tunes
from a local FM station, but it was almost impossible to focus
on what they were. Then "Like a Rolling Stone" came on, and
once again, as in the summer of 1965, sixteen years gone,
with "Like a Rolling Stone" supposedly safely filed away in
everyone's memory, the song interrupted what was going on:
in this case, nothing. As if a note were being passed from one
table to another, people raised their heads from their pineap-
In the Air 99
pIe and Bloody Mary breakfasts; conversations fell away.

People were moving their feet, and looking toward the radio
as if it might get up and walk. It was a stunning moment:
proof that "Like a Rolling Stone" cannot be used as Muzak.
When the song was over, it was like the air had gone out of
the room.
In early rock 'n' roll-in the Drifters' 1953 "Money
Honey," Elvis Presley's 1956 "Hound Dog," Chuck Berry's
"Johnny B. Goode" and Dion and the Belmonts' "I Wonder
Why," both from 1958-you can hear the reach for the total
sound that hovers in IlLike a Rolling Stone. 1I Sometimes the
reach almost is the sound, as with the insensate, nearly a cap-
pella last verse of Little Richard's 1956 "Ready Teddy," where
he seems less a singer than a medium for some nameless god.
Or in the preternaturally fast, perfectly balanced leaps that
kick off IIJohnny B. Goodell and "I Wonder Why.1I In the first
it's six seconds of a guitar answered by a single downbeat
combination on the drums, in the second it's a downpour of
doo-wops, bassman Carlo Mastrangelo's did-did did-it did-did-
da-did-its before the leader comes in, for thirteen seconds a
field for the other Belmonts to turn backflips into eternity.
But "Money Honey" is probably the template. Of all the
many first rock 'n' roll records it is the most unfettered, and it
wasn't just a reach. At least for an instant you can feel the
prize in its grasp.
The Drifters came about when in the spring of 1953 lead
singer Clyde McPhatter was kicked out of the Dominoes, a
100 Greil Marcus
hit rhythm and blues vocal group. Ahmet Ertegun of the

young Atlantic label put McPhatter together with the four-
man Thrasher Wonders.and gave them all a new name. With
the Dominoes, on angelic performances of "Close the Door,"
"When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano," and "Don't
Leave Me This Way," McPhatter's high tenor was the voice of
the ineffable, tugging at your sleeve. As a Drifter he was a
dynamo unlike anything pop music had seen before, but it
was all over by 1954, when McPhatter received his draft
notice. When he returned he never really found his music
again. He died a forgotten drunk in 1972; he was thirty-nine.
But in his one year of greatness he came out of himself. He
ran wild with his own songs, with songs by Atlantic's musical
director Jesse Stone-or for that matter Irving Berlin. As you
listen now, a new man appears before you when McPhatter
sings "Honey Love," "Such a Night," or "Let the Boogie Woo-
gie Roll"; a story tells itself. The sly smile in the music com-
municates the notion that the singer is getting away with the
best prank imaginable while the whole world watches, with
the whole world asking, "Who was that masked man?" when
the record ends, the world then playing the record again and
again as if by doing so the world could find out. The man
before you is young and beautiful, charming, urbane, utterly
cool, yet at any moment a sense of weightlessness, of pure
fun, can break out and engulf the entirety of his performance.
The man is a trickster. For "White Christmas," the other
Drifters begin respectfully. They finish a verse-and then the
In the Air :101.
Imp of the Perverse arrives, McPhatter singing like Rumpel-

stiltskin promising to spin straw into gold, leaving the nation
dumbfounded with his whirling falsetto, open-mouthed in
the face of a reversal of the country's shared cultural symbol-
ism that in pop music would not be matched until Jimi Hen-
drix used "The Star-Spangled Banner" to speak to the
Founding Fathers.
"Money Honey" is a comic song, but in McPhatter's per-
formance the humor is all in the bottled-up urgency he gives
Jesse Stone's lyrics, and the humor is real life. "Without love
there is nothing," McPhatter would sing softly in one of his
solo hits; the message of "Money Honey" is that without
money there's no love. Still, there's the thrill of the chase.
Part of the delight of "Money Honey" is waiting to hear if the
next verse can top the one before it, tell a better story, and
from the landlord at the door to the realization that the
singer needs a new girlfriend-and the girlfriend a new
boyfriend-it always does. But the overriding shock is that as
all parts of the music come together, you are present at a cre-
ation-the creation or the discovery of rock 'n' roll. The spe-
cial energy that only comes when people sense they are
putting something new into the world, something that will
leave the world not quite as it was, rises up. "Ah-ooooom,"
begin tenors Bill Pinkney and Andrew Thrasher, bass Willie
Ferbie, and baritone Gerhart Thrasher, low and ominous, and
then McPhatter begins the quest that will occupy him for the
rest of the song: the quest for his rent. He takes the first verse
102 Greil Marcus
full of enthusiasm; there's a stumble on the drums as there

will be on every verse, but he leaps over it. The second verse
is congenial-he's trying to get his dearly beloved to open
her purse-but on the third verse it's her words that are com-
ing out of his mouth: We're through. McPhatter bears down,
almost scared, and everything in the music tightens, goes
hard and mean. McPhatter shouts for the instrumental break,
saxophonist Sam "The Man" Taylor comes in for his solo-
and he burns it, rocketing the music out of anything it's pre-
pared you for, the beat now rushing upstream too fast to
track, and then McPhatter screams.
There is nothing like this scream-not in McPhatter's
own music, or in any of the music to follow his, as Elvis Pres-
ley and Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke tried to wrap their
voices around their memories of McPhatter's, as something of
his drive and flair filtered down over the years to the count-
less singers who wouldn't recognize his name. It's a scream of
surprise-it's the scream of a man watching a door blowout,
a man who's made it to the other side and is ready now to
reach back and pull everyone over. The record ends conven-
tionally, and you wonder: did that happen?
As if from the other side of the earth, you can hear some-
thing similar in Robert Johnson. Though the recordings Son
House made in 1930 can seem like the summation of all the
knowledge amassed by the divines of the School of the Mis-
sissippi Delta Blues, in comparison with the recordings
Johnson made in 1936 and 1937, when he was in his mid-
In the Air 103
twenties-"eome on in My Kitchen," "Traveling Riverside

Blues," "Hellhound on My Trail"-most of the masters who
preceded him sing and playas men who have accepted the
world as they found it. They speak the language of what is
knowni playing and singing with more force and more deli-
cacy, with lines that are like staircases to ceilings and windows
opening onto walls-ceilings and walls that the music opens
as if they were doors, and which in the same way the music
then closes behind itself-Johnson speaks the language of
what isn't. That isn't why most of those who came before him
lived on long after Johnson's murder at a Mississippi juke joint
in 1938 i it does make his music a kind of witness to his death.
Inside the figures he made on the guitar and the shadings of
his voice there are always possibilities other than those that
are stated. At the highest pitch of his music each note that is
played implies another that isn\ each emotion that is
expressed hints at what can't be said. For all of its elegance
and craft the music is unstable at its core-each song is at
once an attempt to escape from the world as everyone around
the singer believes it to be, and a dream that that world is not
a prison but a homecoming. Like the Drifters or Dion and the
Belmonts, Johnson is momentarily in the air, flying just as one
does in a dream, looking down in wonder at where you are,
then soaring as if it's the most natural thing in the world.
Before "Like a Rolling Stone," Johnson and the Drifters
may have come closer to the total sound than anyone else.
The desire could be defined even if its realization was impos-
---------------------------------- ----------
104 Greil Marcus
sible-maybe it could be defined because its realization was

impossible. The total sound would be all-encompassing, all-
consuming. For as long as it lasted that sound would be the
world itself-and who knew what would happen when you
left that world and returned to the world that, before you
heard the sound, seemed complete and finished?
"Like a Rolling Stone" stays in the air. That's its challenge
to itself: to stay up for six full minutes, never looking down.
When the song ends it disappears into the air, leaving the
earth to all the men and women scurrying through the tun-
nels and traps of the rest of the country mapped on Highway
61 Revisited, the set of songs it would begin.
As AI Kooper has always told the story, he was just supposed

to watch. On June 16, the day after the first, abortive stabs at
the song, for which he wasn't present, he showed up at
Columbia's Studio A as a guest of the producer, Tom Wilson.
Born in 1931, dead of a heart attack in 1978, Wilson was a
Harvard graduate in economics; in the late 1950s and early
1960s he produced records by John Coltrane and Cecil Tay-
lor. In 1965 he was one of the few black producers at a major
label, but after the sessions for "Like a Rolling Stone" he was
replaced as Dylan's producer and cut out of producing Simon
and Garfunkel, who would prove to be a far more lucrative
act. He went on to MGM/Verve, where he put his name on
Freak Out, by Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, their 1967
Playback: from left to right, Roy Halee, Pete Duryea (at rear), Tom Wilson,
Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan, Vinnie Fusco (at rear), Sandy Speiser (fore-
ground), Danny Kalb
--------------------
106 Greil Marcus
"America Drinks and Goes Home" marathon Absolutely Free,

and the Velvet Underground's 1968 White Light/White Heat,
which at its most relentless sounded as if it had been
recorded in a cardboard box. Wilson had an open mind and
open ears. He was a formidable character, but he wasn't there
when Kooper arrived, and Kooper, at twenty-one a longtime
veteran of the music business-teenage guitarist for the
Royal Teens (after their one hit, "Short Shorts," number 3 in
1958), songwriter, song-hustler, recording artist ("Sick
Manny's Gym" with Leo De Lyon and the Musclemen in
1960, "Parchman Farm" under his own name in 1963), New
York session guitarist-had no intention of kibitzing in the
control booth. He sat down with the other musicians Wilson
had called for the session, most of them people he already
knew: drummer Bobby Gregg, organist Paul Griffin, bassist
Joe Macho, Jr., and Bruce Langhorne, guitarist on "Bob
Dylan's 115th Dream," but this day holding his treasured
giant Turkish tambourine. Then Dylan arrived with Michael
Bloomfield.
I was playing in a club in Chicago, I guess it was about 1956, or

nineteen-sixty. And I was sittin' there, I was sittin' in a restaurant, I
think it was, probably across the street, or maybe it was even part
of the club, I'm not sure-but a guy came down and said that he
played guitar. So he had his guitar with him, and he begin to play, I
said, "Well, what can you play?" and he played all kinds of things, I
don't know if you've ever heard of a man, does Big Bill Broonzy ring
In the Air 107
a bell? Or, ah, Sonny Boy Williamson, that type of thing? He just
played circles, around anything I could play, and I always remem-
bered that.
Anyway, we were back in New York, think it was about 1963 or
1964, and I needed a guitar player on a session I was doin', and I
called up-I didn't, I even remembered his name-and he came in
and recorded an album at that time; he was working in the Paul
Butterfield Blues Band. He played with me on the record, and I
think we played some other dates. I haven't seen him too much since
then. He played on "Like a Rollin' Stone." And he's here tonight,
give him a hand, Michael Bloomfield!
-Bob Dylan, introducing Michael Bloomfield as a guest gui-
tarist on "Like a Rolling Stone," Warfield Theatre, San Francisco,
15 November 1980
Bloomfield was born in Chicago in 1943; as a barely teenage

guitarist he grew up on the radio and in dance bands. He tried
to play like Scotty Moore played with Elvis, and mastered
Chuck Berry; he followed Cliff Gallup, guitarist for Gene Vin-
cent, andJames Burton, whose attack on Dale Hawkins's 1957
"Susie-Q"-like a mugging-made the record a password. He
moved through folk music and country blues, and then into
the blues world of his own city. He ran a blues club; when he
was eighteen he played piano in a band behind blues singer
Big Joe Williams, and then he played with everybody else.
"You had to be as good as Otis Rush, you had to be as good as
Buddy Guy, as good as Freddie King, whatever instrument
108 Greil Marcus
you played at the time, you had to be as good as they were,"

he once said. "And who wanted to be bad on the South Side?
Man, you were exposed all over. Right in that city where you
lived, in one night you could hear Muddy Waters, Howlin'
Wolf ... Big Walter, Little Walter, junior Wells, Lloydjones,
just dozens of different blues singers, some famous, some not
so famous. They were all part of the blues, and you could
work with them if you were good enough." He found his own
sound: "I play sweet blues," he said in 1968. "I can't explain it.
I want to be singing. I want to be sweet." "If I could be any-
thing in the world," a friend said that year, "it would be to be
Mike Bloomfield's notes."
But as Bloomfield found his sound he couldn't keep it. In
1967 he left Paul Butterfield, as he had left Dylan after a single
show, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, and formed the
enormously publicized Electric Flag, which debuted at the
Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, where the band's confused
blues pastiches and soul tributes were upstaged by jimi Hen-
drix, who after singing "Like a Rolling Stone" lit his guitar on
fire and prayed to it, the Who, who before smashing their
instruments swirled the crowd with eight minutes of their little
operetta "A Quick One While He's Away" ("You're forgiven!"
Pete Townshend shouted at the audience of music business
insiders), and, especially, Big Brother and the Holding Com-
pany's version of Willie Mae Thornton's "Ball and Chain," the
performance that made janis Joplin an international star.
Bloomfield's band broke up after a single album. He made
In the Air 1.09
"Supersession" LPs with Al Kooper and Stephen Stills, late of

Buffalo Springfield, all of them trading on glories just past
("Lousy show," a story from the time had someone saying to
one of the three. "Yeah, but we got a couple of albums out of
it," was supposedly the reply); he made solo records, played
again with Butterfield and Muddy Waters, but fewer were lis-
tening with each release, and there was less and less reason to.
He sank into heroin and alcoholism, and pulled himself out.
He taught guitar classes; he did soundtrack work for Mitchell
Brothers porn movies. In 1981 he was found in his car, dead of
an overdose, near his house in San Francisco; he was thirty-
seven. Without his presence in "Like a Rolling Stone" his name
might be forgotten today. Because of it he is still on the air.
I first met Bob at a Chicago club called "The Bear," where he was
performing. I went down there because I had read the liner notes
on one of his albums that described him as a "hot-shot folk guitar
player, bluesy, blah-blah-whee, Merle Travis picking, this and that."
The music on his album was really lame, I thought. He couldn't
sing, he couldn't play.
I went down to the Bear to cut him with my guitar. I wanted to
show him how to play music, and when I got there I couldn't
believe it. His personality. He was so nice. I went there with my
wife and we just talked. He was the coolest, nicest cat. We talked
about Sleepy John Estes and Elvis' first records and rock and roll ...
He was a nervous, crazy guy.
- - - - - -------
110 Greil Marcus
When Dylan called, Bloomfield said, "1 bought a Fender, a

really good guitar for the first time in my life, without a case.
A Telecaster."
I went to his house first to hear the tunes. The first thing I heard
was "Like a Rolling Stone." He wanted me to get the concept of it,
how to play it. I figured he wanted blues, string bending, because
that's what I do. He said, "Hey, man, I don't want any of that B. B.
King stuff." So, OK, I really fell apart. What the heck does he
want? We messed around with the song. I played the way that he
dug and he said it was groovy.
Then we went to the session. Bob told me, "You talk to the
musicians, man, I don't want to tell them anything." So we get to
the session. I didn't know anything about it. All these studio cats
are standing around. I come in like a dumb punk with my guitar
over my back, no case, and I'm telling people about this and that,
and this is the arrangement, and do this on the bridge. These are
like the heaviest studio musicians in New York. They looked at me
like I was crazy.
-Michael Bloomfield, "Impressions of Bob Dylan," Hit Parader,
June 1968
Tom Wilson was still missing. "It was already inappropri-

ate that I had gone and sat there with a guitar," Kooper says.
"And then Bloomfield cured me of that. Tom Wilson never
saw me out there with a guitar. That was a very lucky part of
the day-not being caught by Tom Wilson, and not being
In the Air 111
stuck having to play guitar next to Mike Bloomfield. He was

way over my head. I never heard a white person play like that
in my life. Until that moment."
Wilson returned; Kooper was already back in the control
room, out of the game. The players worked toward a sound,
but it was off; Wilson moved Paul Griffin from the Ham-
mond organ to the piano, looking for a brighter feeling. "I
walked over to Tom Wilson and said, 'Hey, I got a really
good part for this on the organ,'" Kooper says. "He just sort
of scoffed at me: 'Ah, man, you're not an organ player. You're
a guitar player.' Then he got called to the phone. And my
reasoning said, 'He didn't say no'-so I went out there." "It
was a terror tactic," Kooper says. "There's a moment, it's actu-
ally recorded, where [Wilson] says, 'OK, this is take number
whateveritis,' and he goes, 'Heyyyy-what're you doin' out
there?' I just start laughing-and he goes, 'Awright, awright,
here we go, this is take something, "Like a Rolling Stone.'" So
there was that moment when he could have yanked me out
of there. I thanked God that he didn't. It would have been so
embarrassing." So the ensemble was set.
The song they were about to record was not a natural
song. As a set of words to sing it was what Dylan always said
it was, something pulled out of something else, a story made
out of an impulse: "Telling someone something they didn't
know, telling them they were lucky." One line didn't neces-
sarily pull the next one after it; sometimes a phrase fell back
on the one coming up behind it. Compared only to the
112 Greil Marcus
songs that on Highway 61 Revisited would sail in its wake,
"Like a Rolling Stone" lacks the balance of the title song,
with lines and images whipping back at each other at full
speed:
Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night

Told the first father that things weren't right
It doesn't approach the visionary momentum of "Desolation

Row," where a whole new world is built out of the debris of
the old and every character in the song, from Einstein to T. S.
Eliot, the Blind Commissioner to Cinderella, seems capable
of changing into every other. As words on paper, it falls short
of "Ballad of a Thin Man" in vehemence. There is nothing
careful about the language. Dylan usually had the instincts,
or the studied judgment, to avoid the momentary slang and
contrived neologisms that would date his songs, box them up
and turn them into artifacts. Perhaps because of his scholar's
sense of how folk ballads and early blues came together in
the fifty years after the Civil War-sharing countless author-
less phrases so alive to their objects ("forty dollars won't pay
my fine," anybody could say that, and everybody did) that
even when the phrases passed out of common usage they
could communicate as poetry ("drink up your blood like
wine," not too many could get away with that, and not too
many tried)-Dylan had a feel for making phrases of his own
that no matter how unlikely
In the Air 113
I got forty red white and blue shoestrings

And a thousand telephones that don't ring
could seem not made but found. His sense of time, or time-
lessness, only rarely failed him; usually the momentum in his
music passed over moments of laziness, when it was easier to
plug in words of the day than to find the words that were
right. "Just about blew my mind" flies by without damage in
"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," and "Blows the mind most bit-
terly" is carried off by the rhythm in "It's Alright, Ma (l'm
Only Bleeding)." But street talk can change by the week, and
by 1965, "Where it's at" had lost the charge of real speech it
carried in Sam Cooke's "That's Where It's At" just a year
before. The words stuck out in "Like a Rolling Stone," with
the expression now less a phrase than a catchphrase, less
words you used to say something than an advertising slogan
you repeated in spite of yourself. It sounds cheap, broken, as
if the writer was in too much of a hurry to get it right, or
didn't care, and the song trips over it, momentarily goes
blank as the words are sung. And then the next line is sung.
Something big is about to happen. At the heart of the song,

the prince who after years of wandering the land as a
vagabond is ready to tell what he has learned; at a fair he
gathers twos and threes to hear his promise that he is about to
reveal the secret of the kingdom, and soon there is a crowd.
114 Greil Marcus
In the studio in New York City, the fanfare opens, with

small notes on the piano dancing like fairies over the low,
steady pulse from an organ you hear but don't register. There
is a false sense that you can still wait for whatever it is that is
about to happen to happen. But when you emerge from the
reverie of the song as it begins-in that rising sun of a fanfare
there is an invitation to look over your shoulder at a reced-
ing, familiar landscape, as if the story that is about to begin is
a story you have heard a thousand times ("It's such an old
story," Bloomfield said)-the train has already left the station.
"Once upon a time," and you are not the child falling asleep
as someone reads from Grimm's Fairy Tales, the violence and
gore removed, the illustrations glowing with blonde hair and
blue eyes. You're in the story, about to be cooked, eaten, dis-
membered, left behind, and as in an early Disney animation
the trees in the forest are reaching out their branches like
hands and tearing at your clothes. That is what the singer is
saying as the music blows all around you, but this isn't a
nightmare, and if it were you wouldn't want to wake up. This
is a great adventure. As if keeping a secret from yourself-the
secret of how bad the story sounds and how good it feels-
you cover your eyes with your hands and peek through your
fingers at the screen.
Bombs are going off everywhere, and every bomb is a
word. "DIDN'T"-"STEAL-"USED"-"INVISIBLE": they are
part of the story, but in the way they are sung-declaimed,
hammered, thrown down from the mountain to shatter
among the crowd at the foot-each word is also the story
In the Air 115
itself. You are drawn into single words as if they are caves
within the song. Why one word is bigger than another-or
more threatening, or more seductive-makes no obvious nar-
rative sense. The words aren't merely bombs, they're land
mines. They have been planted in the song for you to find,
which is to say planted that they might find you. Each word
lies flat on a stone in the field, spelled out, "YOU,"
"ALRIGHT," "ALIBIS," "KICKS," "THAT," "BE," "NEVER," but
there is no way at all to know which one will blow up when
you step on it.
Like a waterway opening, the organ comes in to stake its
claim on the song halfway through the first verse, just after
Dylan finishes setting up the story and begins to bear down
hard; just before "You used tol Laugh about-" The song is
under way, the ship is already pitching, and the high, keen-
ing sound Kooper is making, pressing down on a chord as it
streams into the song, is something to hold onto. This side of
the story is just beginning, a step behind the story you are
already being told; this sound within the sound tells you the
story can't end soon, and that it won't be rushed. The sound
the organ traces is determined, immune, almost part of
another song. "I couldn't hear the organ, because the speaker
was on the other side of the room covered with blankets,"
Kooper says, speaking as someone caught up in the uncer-
tainty, the blind leading the blind over a cliff. "I'm used to
there being a music director. Having grown up in the studio,
there was always someone in charge, whether it was the
arranger, the artist, or the producer. There was no one in
116 Greil Marcus
charge at that session-in charge of the general chaos.

didn't completely know the song yet. I do have big ears-
that was my biggest advantage. In the verses, I waited an
eighth note before I hit the chord. The band would play the
chord and I would play after that./I But as the song goes on,
the organ becomes the conductor of its own drama. For the
song it is the shaping hand.
Bloomfield has entered the verse rolling a golden wheel.
There is a great glow in the circular patterns he is tracing, but
even as the glow warms the listener it is fading into a kind of
undertow, now pulling against anything in the music that is
still prophesying an open road. Now there is a deep, implaca-
ble hum coming from Bloomfield's guitar, a sound seemingly
independent of the musician himself, a loose wire or a frayed
connection playing its own version of the song.
No sound holds in the cataclysm the song is becoming;
its general chaos is its portrait of everyday life. There is noth-
ing remarkable in the words Dylan is singing so far, no oddly
named characters, just someone who once tossed money at
people who had none and is now wondering how far she's
willing to go to get some of her own. But as the first verse
tilts toward its last line Bloomfield is shooting out of the
verse, playing louder than before, hurry and triumph in his
fingers. You can feel the song turning, but there is no sense
yet of what's around the turn.
What is around the turn is a clearing, where the musicians
charging around the bend find themselves in Enfield, Con-
In the Air :/17
necticut, in 1741, with the singer already there to meet them

for the chorus-the singer in the form of Jonathan Edwards
pronouncing his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God" to parishioners who are tearing at their hair and beg-
ging him to stop, and the musicians are immediately alive to
the drama. "1 tried to stay out of Bloomfield's way," Kooper
says, "because he was playing great stuff. 'Your next meeeeeal'-
on the five chord just before the chorus, where he does that
'diddle-oo da diddle-oo,' that was a great lick. I didn't want to
step on that. And then he would play that coming out of the
chorus, too. The other places, I had room to play, because
Michael was not playing lead in those places: in the chorus."
Kooper is still following his own road, but now it comes into
full relief; each single line he offers is so clear, moving for-
ward so deliberately, that you can see the track his notes are
cutting. The singer is raging and thundering in the air above,
paying no mind to anything anyone else has to say but his
body absorbing it all, and everything his body absorbs goes
into his voice, which grows bigger with every word. Bloom-
field's golden wheel, now bigger than before and even
brighter, and more dangerous, a wheel that as its light blinds
you will roll right over you, carries the singer out of the
clearing and into the next verse. In a minute and a half, a
verse and a chorus, more has already happened than in any
other song the year has produced.
The feeling in the music in the second verse is more tri-
umphant. Bloomfield's lines are longer, more like a hawk in
118 Greil Marcus
the sky than deer leaping a ravine. The rest follow a steady
march, and the story seems headed to a conclusion; near the
end of the verse is perhaps the most astonishing moment of
all, when, out of instinct, out of desire, out of a smile some-
where in his memory, Bloomfield finds the sound of a great
whoosh, and for an instant a rising wind blows right through
the rest of the music as if the song is a shotgun shack. Is that
what allows the singer to whirl in the air, striking out in all
directions? There's a desperation, something close to fear, in
the way Dylan throws out "used to it"-the words seem to pull
the person in the song off her feet, leaving her in the gutter,
stunned, filth running over her, the singer's reach to pull her
out falling short, but there's no time to go back: the chorus
has arrived again. With its first line, those four simple words,
how does it feel, an innocuous question, really, you feel that
this time the singer is demanding more from the words, more
from the person to whom they are addressed. In the verses he
has chased her, harried her, but the arrival of the chorus
vaults him in front of her; as she flees him he appears before
her, pointing, shouting-and the person to whom all this is
addressed is no longer merely the girl named by the song.
That person is now at once that girl and whoever is listening.
The song has put the listener on the spot.
You are listening to the song on the radio, in 1965 or
forty years later. "Like a Rolling Stone" is not on the radio
forty years after its release as often as it was in the second
half of 1965-but you might be able to count on hearing it
In the Air 119
more frequently in 2005 than you did in 1966, when it was

last year's hit. On the radio, where the tambourine is inaudi-
ble, the piano seems like an echo of the guitar, and the organ
could be playing to the drums, you can hear Dylan's up-and-
down rhythm guitar and Joe Macho's bass as a single instru-
ment. Dylan and Macho have heard each other, and they
have locked into a single pattern, the bass supporting the
guitar, the guitar extending the bass. This is the spine of the
song, you realize, or its heartbeat, banging against the spine.
It's the simplest thing in the world: "very punky," as Kooper
hears it. "Ragged and filthy." But the song must be almost
over-the second verse has passed, and the chorus has
nearly run out its string. The song has already demanded
more from you than anything else you've ever heard. You
want more, but that's what a fade at the end of a record is
for, isn't it, the sound disappearing into silence, to leave you
wanting more?
Even now, when it is no shock that there is more, as there
was when the record first appeared on the radio in 1965, no
surprise that the disc jockey is actually going to turn the
record over to see what happens, to play the whole thing, as
in the first week or so of the song's release many disc jockeys
did not, it is still a shock. The arrival of the third verse, the
announcement that the story is not over, is like Roosevelt
announcing for a third term.
"Like a Rolling Stone" wasn't the first six-minute Top 40
hit, or the first to be cut in half and pressed onto two sides of
120 Greil Marcus
a 45. In 1959 both Ray Charles's "What'd I Say," which was

longer than six minutes, and the Isley Brothers' "Shout,"
which was shorter, but more dramatically flipped from side A
to side B ("Now, waaaaiiiiit a minute," cried the leader as the
first side reached the out groove), were hits, and "What'd I
Say" was enormous, inescapable. But these were dance
records, not story-telling records. They swept the listener up
and carried the listener along, but they did not implicate the
listener; they did not suggest that the song had anything to
do with the moral failings of the people listening, or that its
story was their story, whether they liked it or not. All "Uke a
Rolling Stone" shared with "What'd I Say" and "Shout" was
their length and their delirium.
In Don't Look Back, in England in the spring of 1965, the
film teases the viewer with the notion that you can see "Uke
a Rolling Stone" first take shape in the film itself. Dylan and
Baez and Dylan's sidekick Bob Neuwirth are in a hotel room;
Dylan is singing Hank Williams's "Lost Highway/' from 1949.
It was a rare Williams song that he didn't write. "Once he was
in California hitchhiking to Alba, Texas, to visit his sick
mother," Myrtie Payne, the widow of Leon Payne, the song's
composer, told the country music historian Dorothy
Horstman. "He was unable to get a ride and finally got help
from the Salvation Army. It was while he was waiting for help
that he wrote this song." With Baez singing harmony, it's the
first time in the film that Dylan seems engaged by a song. "1
was just a lad, nearly twenty-two," he sings, as if the words
In the Air 121
are his, with a Hank Williams whine that somehow doesn't

seem fake. "Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you." "No,
no," says Neuwirth. "There's another verse, 'I'm a rolling
stone.'" Dylan picks it up, and it's odd that he left it out,
because it is the first verse: "I'm a rolling stone, all alone and
lost/ For a life of sin, I have paid the cost ... " But the words
"rolling stone" are swallowed up in the tune-"stone" almost
fades away as it is sung, wearing down to a pebble as it
rolls-and all the words speak for is someone with no will,
no desire. Yes, it's a song of freedom: freedom from family,
authority, government, work, religion, but most of all from
yourself. It's a wastrel's song; not "rolling stone" but "lost
highway" is the ruling image, promising that the singer's
grave will likely be a ditch on the side of the road.
In "Like a Rolling Stone" you can't hear "Lost Highway"
any more readily than you can hear Muddy Waters's 1950
"Rollin' Stone." Cut in Chicago, with Waters playing a big-
city electric guitar, the piece was pure Mississippi in its tone,
its menace, affirming a tension coiled so tightly in the music
that when in a brief guitar solo Waters turns over a single,
vibrating note, it seems to bite itself. "Gonna be a rollin'
stone/ Sho' nuff be the rollin' stone," the pregnant woman in
the first verse chants to herself of the child she's carrying,
snapping off the last word again and again with the feeling of
a knife quivering in a wall-unless it's the child inside her
banging on the door, whispering he'll kill her if she doesn't
let him out. Here the rollin' stone gets up and walks like a
122 Greil Marcus
man, and that's what you hear in Waters's guitar solo, more
even than in the way he slides his voice over the words. You
hear someone free from values and limits, never mind moth-
ers, fathers, jobs, church, or the county courthouse. He never
raises his voice. You get the idea that if he did-
In folk terms it's fables like "Lost Highway" and "Rollin'
Stone" that Dylan's image comes from, but if the image of the
rolling stone is what seals his song's own fable, that image is
not what drives the song. As a song, a performance, a threat,
or a gesture, "like a Rolling Stone" is closer to Dylan's own
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," from 1963, Elvis Presley's 1961
"Can't Help Falling in Love," the Animals' 1964 "House of the
lll
Rising Sun," Sonny Boy Williamson's "Don't Start Me Talkin
and Elvis's "Mystery Train," both from 1955, the Stanley
Brothers' 1947 "little Maggie," or Noah Lewis's 1930 "New
Minglewood Blues." ("I was born in the desert, raised up in
the lion's den," Lewis sang coolly, as if he were presenting
himself as the new sheriff in town. "My number one occupa-
tion, is stealing womens from their men.")* "like a Rolling
* Sometimes it's in Dylan's own performances of these songs that you can hear
"Like a Rolling Stone," though not always: his desultory 1970 recording of
"Can't Help Falling in Love," omitted from the already thrown-together Self
Portrait and included on the bottom-of-the-barrel release Dylan in 1973 (Dylan
had temporarily jumped to another label and Columbia was attempting to
embarrass him by releasing the worst stuff they could find), said nothing about
anything. His 1992 "Little Maggie" was stark, syncopated, and deathly, but it
owed nothing to the Stanley Brothers; if Dylan drew on their performance for
"Like a Rolling Stone," it was for its structure, its melody, and most of all its
In the Air 123
Stone" is closer to Will Bennett's irresistibly distracted 1929

"Railroad Bill," which is fifteen combinations of two-line
verses and a one-line refrain in under three minutes, includ-
ing sets about weaponry ("Buy me a gun, just as long as my
arm/ Kill everybody, ever done me wrong"), throwing every-
thing away and heading west, drinking, domesticity, and the
outlaw Railroad Bill himself, who never worked and never
will. In its headlong drive into the street, its insistence on
saying everything because tomorrow it will be too late-to
speak as a prophet, someone who, burdened with knowledge
he didn't want but, having received it, is forced to pass on-
"like a Rolling Stone" probably owes more to Allen Gins-
berg's 1955 "Howl" than to any song.
If any or all of these things is a source of "Like a Rolling
Stone," or an inspiration, like "Lost Highway" or "Rollin' Stone"
they say little about why the song is what it is. If there is a
[continued] lift, a sense of triumph. The Animals' "House of the Rising Sun," at
four and a half minutes in its full-length version, was taken from the broken
reading Dylan gave the song on Bob Dylan two years before; with the kind of
reach beyond a song's past or even its future that would power "Like a Rolling
Stone," a five-man British blues band from Newcastle transformed an Ameri-
can folk ballad about a New Orleans whorehouse into an international hit that
more than forty years later still circles the globe. But when Dylan sang "Don't
Start Me Talkin'" on The Late Show with David Letterman in 1984 he was plainly
possessed by the song, by the chance it gave him to run over everyone in
town ("I'll tell EVERYTHING I know!" he shouted with superhuman glee);
when he threw "New Minglewood Blues" off his stages in the 1990s, his band
crashing down on "born" and "den" as he ripped the words away from them,
every line built on the last until you couldn't see the top of their staircase.
124 Greil Marcus
model for "Like a Rolling Stone," it may be in the long, dra-

matic story-songs made by Mississippi blues players Son House
and Garfield Akers-music that, as collected in 1962 on Really!
The Country Blues, an obscure, hard-to-find album on the fanati-
cal country blues label Origin Jazz Library, Dylan knew well.
On House's 1930 "My Black Mama," more than six minutes
and twenty seconds on both sides of a Paramount 78, and
Akers's 1929 "Cotton field Blues," exactly six minutes on the
two sides of his Vocalion ten-inch, the songs begin almost
identically. "Oh, hey, black mama, what's the matter with you?"
says House. "I said, looky here, mama, well just what are you
trying to do?" says Akers. Both songs end almost mystically. In
"My Black Mama," the woman who was trouble in Part 1 is
dead in Part 2. The singer is summoned: "I looked down in her
face," he says; you can feel her face already rotting. When he
sings, in his last verse, his deep voice seemingly deepening
with every syllable, "I fold my arms and I walked away," you
can feel him walk off the earth. In "Cotton field Blues" the
woman who was trouble in Part 1 is gone in Part 2; as Akers
sings commonplace lines in his high, thin voice, he makes you
feel that they have never been sung before. He stretches his
words across their vowels so naturally, so inevitably, somehow,
that you picture the singer on a mountaintop, singing across a
valley, making his own echo, but when the song hits home
I'm gonna write you a letter, I'm gonna mail it in the air
I'm gonna write you a letter, I'm gonna mail it in the air
In the Air 125
Says I know you will catch itl babel in this world somewhere
Says I know you'll catch itl mama l in the world somewhere
you see that Akers is the letter and that he is in the air travel-
l
ing somewhere out of reach of the U.S. Mail.

liMy Black Mama is slow, all of its drama bottled up; as it
ll
moves forward the pressure is never released. Akers jumps

ll
IICottonfield Blues on his guitar, his technique so primitive
that for all he has to tell you about Mississippi in 1929 he
l
could be playing in Manchester in 1977 on the Buzzcocks
IIBoredom,1I their punk theses-nailed-to-the-nightclub-door.
Akers pushes his story so fast you can feel he's afraid of it, and
House makes no effort to hide the fact that he is afraid of his.
Each is such an old story-and each is utterly singular. Each
man says the same thing: to tell a story, you must take as
ll
much time as you need. The length of liMy Black Mama and
ll
IICottonfield Blues is the axis of their art; when you reach the
end of either, you have been taken all the way through a crisis
in a certain person's life. Because the artist, speaking in the
first person, has shaped that crisis so that his response to it
becomes an argument about a whole way of being in the
world, you have not only been through a crisis. Taken to its
essence, the artist has described his life as such, guided you
through the strange and foreign country of his birth, educa-
tion, deeds, and failures, right up to the point of death.
ll
With IIUke a Rolling Stone too, its six minutes-six min-
utes to break the limits of what could go on the radio, of
126 Greil Marcus
what kind of story the radio could tell; at first the label on
the 45 read 5.59, as if that would be less intimidating-is the
beginning and the end of what the record is about and what
it is for. When the record is over, when it disappears into the
clamor of its own fade to silence, or the next commercial,
you feel as if you have been on a journey, as if you have tra-
versed the whole of a country that is neither strange nor for-
eign, because it is self-evidently your own-even if, in the
first three minutes, the journey only went as far as your own
city limits. The pace is about to pick up.
When "Like a Rolling Stone" smashes into its third verse
everything is changed. The mystery tramp who appeared out
of nowhere at the end of the second verse has left his cousins
all over this one. Everyone has a strange name, everyone is a
riddle, there's nobody you recognize, but everybody seems to
know who you are. "Ah, you-" Dylan shouts, riding over the
hump of the second chorus and into the third verse; the
increase in vehemence caused by something so tiny as the
adding of a syllable of frustration to the already accusing
"you" is proof of how much pressure has built up. The sound
Bloomfield makes is like Daisy's voice-"the sound of
money"-and like Gatsby Bloomfield is reaching for it, but as
soon as it is in the air he steps back from it, counting off the
beat as if he is just James Gatz, counting his pennies. He is
banging the gong of the rhythm as if he is hypnotized by it,
each glorious note bending back toward the one before it. As
the band seems to play more slowly, as if recognizing the
In the Air 127
story in the song for the first time-a congress of delegates

drawn from all over the land, all speaking at once and all giv-
ing a version of the same speech-the singer moves faster, as
if he knows what's coming and has to stop it. He reaches the
last line of the verse, holds the last word as long as he can
hold his breath, and then as the song tips into the third cho-
rus everything shatters.
The intensity of the first words out of Dylan's mouth
make it seem as if a pause has preceded them, as if he has
gathered up every bit of energy in his being and concen-
trated it on a single spot, and as if you can hear him draw
that breath. "How does it feel" doesn't come out of his
mouth; each word explodes in it. And here you understand
what Dylan meant when he said, in 1966, speaking of the
pages of noise he'd scribbled, "I had never thought of it as a
song, until one day I was at the piano, and on the paper it
was singing, 'How does it feel?'" Dylan may sing the verses;
the chorus sings him.
With this moment every element in the song doubles in
size. It doubles in weight. There is twice as much song as
there was before. An avenger the first time "How does it feel"
takes him over here, the second time the line sounds Dylan is
despairing, bereft and sorrowful, but by now, moments after
he himself has blown the song to pieces, the song has gotten
away from him. Kooper's simple, straight, elegant lines are
breaking up, shooting out in all directions, as if Dylan's first
"How does it feel" was the song's Big Bang and Kooper is
128 Greil Marcus
determined to catch every fragment of the song as it flies

away. As the chorus begins to climb a mountain that wasn't in
the chorus before, Kooper finds himself in the year before, in
the middle of Alan Price's organ solo in the Animals' "House
of the Rising Sun," a record that to this day has lost none of
its grime and none of its grandeur. Price's solo was frenzied,
its tones thick and dark; it was a deep dive into a whirlpool
Price himself had made, and Kooper is playing from inside
the vortex, each line rushing up and out, nailing the flag of
the song to its mast.
Nothing could follow this. In the fourth verse, everyone's
timing is gone. The "Ah" that swung the first line of the third
verse is here a long "Ahhhhhh" that flattens its own first line.
Bobby Gregg, whose drum patterns in the first verse had
given the song shape before the musicians found the shape
within the song, fumbles as if he has accidentally kicked over
his kit. Everyone is fighting to get the song back-and it's the
words that rescue it, that for the first time take the song away
from its sound. The words are slogans, but they are arresting,
and if "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose"
sounds like something you might read on a Greenwich Vil-
lage sampler, a bohemian version of "Home Sweet Home,"
"You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal" is not
obvious, it is confusing.
Confused-and justified, exultant, free from history with
a world to win-is exactly where the song means to leave
you. There is a last chorus, like the last verse spinning off its
With Michael Bloomfield
130 Greil Marcus
axis, and then Dylan's dive for his harmonica, and then a
crazy-quilt of high notes that light out for the territory the
song itself has opened up.
Fifteen years later, when Dylan invited Bloomfield onto the

stage at the Warfield Theatre to play the song again, Dylan
was filled with Jesus, and Bloomfield was just a Jew, washed-
up, a junkie whose words were as empty as his eyes, a pariah.
Bob Johnston, the producer who would replace Tom Wilson
after "Like a Rolling Stone," was there for the show. Bloom-
field approached him. "Can you help me?" he said. "No one
will talk to me." Bloomfield promised he was off drugs, that he
wasn't drinking, that he had gotten his life back, but Johnston
had already heard him play. After each phrase from Dylan,
Bloomfield fingered his rolling notes, but he couldn't play the
song. In the way that he could only play the record-in the
way that he couldn't hear the music, couldn't respond to the
other musicians, or to Dylan, or to the three-woman gospel
chorus, in the way that, like so many Dylan guitarists who
over the years, in city after city, have copied Bloomfield's
notes as blankly as Bloomfield was doing this night, he could
only copy himself-he was lost, and then he was incoherent,
a ruin. But as he so rarely would after the first year he toured
with "Like a Rolling Stone," this night Dylan is flying with the
song, energized by the story. As it goes on he hits everything
harder:
l
In the Air :131
He's not selling anyal-i-bis

As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say, do you want to, ha ha, make a deeeeaaaallli
He opens the second chorus as if he is unfurling the flag

that Tashtego, or Al Kooper, nailed to the sinking mast of the
Pequod at the end of Moby-Dick, and as it did in 1965, fresh
wind blows through the music. It almost seems as if Dylan is
defending the song from Bloomfield-trying to rescue the
song Bloomfield must have still carried somewhere inside
himself from the broken man who could no longer really play
it; defending the song or, from his own side, trying to give it
back. "In them you can hear a young man, with an amazing
amount of young man's energy, the kind of thing you would
find in the early Pete Townshend or the early Elvis," Bloom-
field said two days before his death, speaking to the radio
producer Tom Yates, talking about the songs Robert Johnson
cut more than forty years before. "You can hear this in
Robert's records; it just leaps off at you from the turntable."
, Was he asking his interviewer to say to him, "Yes, but you
played like that, too"? Could it be that in the unfinished fable
of the record they made together in 1965, Michael Bloom-
field played out the fable of self-destruction in "Lost High-
way," and Bob Dylan the fable of mastery in "Rollin' Stone"?
"Michael Bloomfield!" Dylan said as the song ended that
night at the Warfield. "Y'all go see him if he's playing around
town."
PART THREE
CHAPTER SEVEN
On the Air
Soon after "Like a Rolling Stone" was recorded Tom Wilson

was fired as Bob Dylan's producer; determining why and by
whom is not much easier than solving the mystery of who
replaced Beatles drummer Pete Best with Ringo Starr. Albert
Grossman, Dylan's manager at the time, isn't talking; he died
in 1986. Wilson never spoke about it; neither has Clive
Davis, the corporate attorney who in June of 1965 became
administrative vice-president of Columbia Records and
immediately moved to take over everything that wasn't regis-
tered, copyrighted, or locked in a safe; he famously became
president of the company in 1967, was even more famously
fired in 1973 and, through his label Arista and his work with
performers from Whitney Houston to Patti Smith, has been
an untouchable music-business god ever since. Dylan joined
136 Greil Marcus
the Know-Nothing Party: "All I know," he has always said, "is

that I was out recording one day, and Tom had always been
there-I had no reason to think he wasn't going to be
there-and I looked up one day and Bob was there."
"I never had a cross word with Dylan," says Bob Johnston,
who after taking over the sessions that would result in High-
way 61 Revisited produced Dylan's 1966 Blonde on Blonde, and
after that John Wesley Harding in 1967, Nashville Skyline in 1969,
and Self Portrait and New Morning in 1970-as well as hugely
popular generational balm from Simon and Garfunkel (inher-
iting the version of liThe Sounds of Silence" that Wilson had
overdubbed with drums and electric instrumentation) and
cult noir by the brooding Canadian wise man Leonard
Cohen. "I never had a Fuckyou, you do this. There was never
any of that with any artist I ever had, I guess because they
knew I hated the fucking company and I hated the goddamn
people at the company-they were fucking all the artists,
always, out of their money. And-Clive Davis saying, 'Take
the drum off "Sounds of Silence."' He said that at a goddamn
meeting. Said, 'That drum has got to come off there.' I stood
up and said, 'You're right.' And I left the meeting. I went and
made a copy, and turned the drum off. And then I made a
copy and put two drums on it. And I played them the one
without the drums, and they all applauded, and said, 'Oh,
man, that's just beautiful!' And I released the other one."
Johnston was a canny, ambitious producer with a disarm-
ing drawl. He was born in Hillsboro, Texas, in 1932, and
On the Air 137
grew up in Fort Worth; he started in the music business after

service in the Korean War. His grandmother Mamie Jo
Adams was a songwriter; his mother, Diane Johnston, com-
poser of "Miles and Miles of Texas," wrote for cowboy and
western singers, at the top: Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and
Eddy Arnold. Johnston started out as a writer; after hustling
songs in the south and singing with a black trio called the
Click Clacks, he moved into the New York song factory at
1650 Broadway, where AI Kooper learned the trade ("That's
where I went to church, and college-1650 was where I went
to college. I had many classes in that building"), and which
housed the storied Aldon Music teams of Carole King and
Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Jeff Barry
and Ellie Greenwich.* Johnston was at the bottom, churning
* "They were doing something in their own right that was just as major as
what Dylan was doing," Kooper says of the Aldon writers, whose work for the
Drifters ("Up on the Roof"), the Chiffons ("One Fine Day"), the Shirelles
("Will You Love Me Tomorrow"), the Righteous Brothers ("You've Lost that
Lovin' Feeling"), and many more of the finest artists of early 1960s rock 'n' roll
stands as one of the truest achievements of postwar pop music. Dylan more
than anyone ended their careers as songwriters. "You were watching silent
movies," Kooper says, speaking of the way Dylan changed what a pop song
could be, of how his use of language changed the language of the song. "And
all of a sudden there was sound in them. Ohhhh-and that put a lot of people
out of work. These handsome people, that talk like this. They were out of work,
Jack." They knew it, too: there is no overstating how terrified these great writ-
ers were of Bob Dylan. Years before "Like a Rolling Stone," he had all but chal-
lenged them to a duel. "Unlike most of the songs nowadays being written
uptown in Ttn Pan Alley, that's where most of the folk songs come from nowa-
days," he said on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in 1963, introducing "Bob Dylan's
Blues," "this wasn't written up there-this was written somewhere down in the
138 Greil Marcus
out nearly identical follow-ups to whatever someone had hit
with. He recorded himself, for Algonquin, Chic, and Dot
(with his own rocker "I'm Hypnotised"). "Flat Tire" was a
small hit in southern California in 1961, and also Johnston's
last record: a television appearance on the Wink Martindale
show in Los Angeles, where Johnston found himself on the
same bill with Tommy Sands and Ricky Nelson, convinced
him he was too old to be a teenage idol. He moved to
Nashville and went back to writing; in 1964 Elvis Presley
recorded his lilt Hurts Me/I and after that Johnston wrote
songs for Elvis movies. He became a song-plugger. In
Nashville, that led to producing demos, but Johnston's were
[continued] United States." You'refakes, heard Goffin and King, nightclub prince
Bobby Darin, star singer Dion, and so many others: You're fakes, and this is real. In
2001, for The Hitmakers, an A&E documentary on 1650 Broadway, Goffin spoke
in broken, couIda-been-a-contender cadences, sounding beaten down, used
up, passed by: "I wish we had tried more to write some songs that-really
meant something ... Dylan managed to do something that not one of us was
able to do: put poetry in rock 'n' roll, and just stand up there like a mensch and
sing it. And Carole felt the same way too, and so we had to do something dra-
matic, so we took all the [demos of] songs that hadn't been placed, not the
songs there had been records on, and smashed them in half. We said, we gotta
grow up, we gotta start writing better songs now." 'There was a cultural phe-
nomenon around us that had nothing to do with songwriting," King said on
the same show, sitting around a table with Goffin, Weil, and Mann, a hint of
contempt for the rest of them in her voice. "So it was: Wait a minute! Whats hap-
pening, whats going on? Things are changing. How do we write this stuff? How do we fit in?"
In other words, they were hearing all the questions Dylan was asking in "Like
a Rolling Stone," and beginning to answer them. That they had to devalue
their own work to do it is a testament to how scary the song can be, or how
dangerous.
On the Air 139
productions, not sketches: if the song needed it, he'd hire a

thirty-voice choir from Fisk University. Columbia brought
him to New York in t 964, where he made his name by resur-
recting the career of Patti Page. John Hammond, the leg-
endary record man who had written about Robert Johnson
for The New Masses in t 937 and as a Columbia executive
brought Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Bob
Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen to the label, was Johnston's
mentor and protector; in t 965 all Johnston needed as a pro-
ducer was something he himself actually wanted to hear.
"They were trying to get rid of him," Johnston says of
Tom Wilson. "Grossman hated him. I have no idea why. He
was a nice man. Maybe Grossman didn't like ethnic groups or
something-I never thought about it." Bill Gallagher was in
charge of production; he told Johnston that Wilson was on
his way out. "He called me in and said"-Johnston, a fast
talker, drops into a heavy, sententious voice-III We're going
to get rid of Tom.' I said, 'I want Dylan, and Simon.' 'Don't
say anything to Tom Wilson,lII Gallagher said. IIIAbsolutely
not,'" Johnston said, as he described the day to Patrick
Thomas, a longtime chronicler of his career. "So when I left
his office, I went to Wilson and I said, 'Bill Gallagher just
called me in and said they're going to get rid of you and that
Grossman hates you and they all hate you.' And he said,
'Hell, I knew that anyway.' I said, 'Well, I've got a chance to
take over, and I wanted to tell you before I start lobbying.'
He said, 'Man, be my guest, because I am out of here any-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
140 Greil Ma reus
way.'" There was lobbying to do; Johnston had Gallagher,

Hammond, and Artists and Repertoire head Bob Mersey ("He
produced and arranged Barbra Streisand, Andy Williams, all
those people") behind him, but neither Dylan nor anyone
around him knew Johnston's name. There was talk of Terry
Melcher, the producer of the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tam-
bourine Man"-number one for Columbia the week after
"Uke a Rolling Stone" was cut-and the quintessential Los
Angeles golden boy, at least until 1969, when Charles Man-
son sent his fiends to kill everyone in Melcher's house,
according to one theory of the Manson case because Melcher
had refused to produce him. According to one theory of the
Wilson case, Dylan himself supposedly mentioned Phil Spec-
tor, who had dominated the charts for the previous three
years with the most luminous records of the day, from the
Crystals' "He's Sure the Boy I Love" to Darlene Love's "(To day
I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry" to the Ronettes' "Be My
Baby" to "You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling"-which sold eight
million copies. *
* ''I'd do a Dylan opera with him," Spector said in 1969. "I'd produce him. You
see he's never been produced. He's always gone into the studio on the strength
of his lyrics and they have sold enough records to cover everything up ... He
doesn't really have the time nor do any of his producers necessarily have the
ambition or the talent to really overrule him and debate with him. I would
imagine with Albert Grossman there is a situation of business control just like
it would be with Elvis Presley and Colonel Parker. Maybe nobody has the
guts, balls, or ambition to get in there, but there is no reason unless Dylan
didn't want it. But he could be made to want it."
On the Air :14:1
There was a record made and no one to take responsibil-

ity for its release; Johnston stepped into the vacuum and
ll
IIUke a Rolling Stone fell in his lap. One executive
demanded that he rerecord Dylan's vocal: lilt's incomprehen-
sible." To Dylan, IIUke a Rolling Stone" was a single the
minute he walked out of the studio, if not before he walked
into it. At Columbia, as Johnston remembers it, even as
something that could run from one side of a 45 to the other,
the answer was no: "'Never put it out.' They said they would
never put it out. 'Nobody ever had a six-minute single.'"
Johnston knew IIWhat'd I Say," even if Clive Davis or his like
didn't; that, he says, wasn't exactly the point. The point was
the same as it had been with Abel Cance's 1927 Napoleon, six
hours long as it played in France, and released in the United
States by MCM with its time cut by more than half, its
screen squeezed, its climactic color triptychs chopped and
bleached, all to ensure that no one in Hollywood would want
to follow suit: IIINobody ever had a six-minute single'-and
nobody ever would." "We just went ahead and pressed it," John-
ston says. IIDid the whole fucking thing."*
* "John Hammond told me once that I should take over Columbia Records,"
Johnston says, as if telling the story of a broken treaty, of how his Apache
ancestors were driven from their land. "And so I said, 'Well, how do you do it?'
I went up and met with Paley and Stanton [William S. Paley, the legendary
capitalist buccaneer who bought the tiny Columbia Broadcasting System
in t 928, was chairman of the board of CBS; Frank Stanton had been president
of the company since 1946J and those people up there, and they said,
'What would you do if you came into this?' And I says, 'Well, you're not
142 Greil Marcus
That has never sounded like the whole story to me. Tom
Wilson's characteristic sound is not at bottom a rock 'n' roll
sound; it's too clean, too discrete. Outside of "Uke a Rolling
Stone" there is no feel toward a total sound in the records he
made with Dylan; just the opposite. The instruments stand
out separately. There is no whole sound. There's a harsh
edge-the acrid tone that was everywhere in 1965, the sound
of the time, if not the times.
When the first copies of Highway 61. Revisited arrived from
the factory, Tom Wilson's name was missing from "Uke a
Rolling Stone," the lead track; Johnston insisted the run be
started over, with Wilson's name restored. But on everything
else on Highway 61 Revisited, and even more so on Blonde on
Blonde, Johnston's sound is nearly the opposite of Wilson's;
the metal-an-metal screech of "Maggie's Farm" is the farthest
thing from "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry"
or "Ballad of a Thin Man." Johnson's sound is not merely
[continued] gonna like it, and you won't do it, but I think the first thing is, you
should get your shit together. And by that, you should have the tenth floor, of
attorneys. And the eleventh floor, of accountants. And the twelfth floor, of
music. And they should never be allowed, to pass one another. Whatever you
want to do, however you want to cheat, and fuck these artists around, is your
opinion-but at least give them the opportunity of doing something, without
people who tap their foot and whistle out of tune, and judge what's being
made according to what somebody did last week, to keep their job six months
longer.' And I said, 'If you do that, the music will always be the music, and
those son-of-a-bitches will never have any chance at it, you can make all the
money you want to, but they can't fuck with the music.' Paley said, That's very
interesting.' John walked out and said, 'You didn't want the job, did you?'''
On the Air 1.43
whole; song by song the sound is not the same, but it is

always a thing in itself. There is a glow that seems to come
from inside the music. It's what Johnston called "that moun-
tainside sound," and nothing explains that phrase as well as
the final sound of "Like a Rolling Stone." As a single or on
Highway 61. Revisited, mono or stereo, it has always sounded
like Johnston to me.
"I don't remember, I don't remember," Johnston said when
I asked him about the state of the master tape of "Like a
Rolling Stone" when he took over Bob Dylan's recordings. "I
got in there," he said after a while. "I would do anything I
wanted to do and I never told anybody about anything. I
never tried to jack anybody around-I would just go, and
play, and say, 'Is this oki And that's how it happened. But as
far as credit, as far as what I did with it, I really couldn't tell
you."
I have always admired people who know how to inter-
view. The key is not to want to be liked. The key is to be an
irritant, a smart-aleck, a fool, a creep. "I heard your mother is
a donkey," you might say, expecting the subject to spit in
your face and walk out of the room. "Oh, no," the person will
say. "How did you ever get that idea? Let me tell you the real
story. My mother is a dolphin. And how that happened, I've
never told anyone ... " One interviewer I know has a terrible
stutter. People will say anything, will talk endlessly about
their private lives, just to keep him from asking another ques-
tion. The best I have ever been able to manage is silence.
1.44 Greil Marcus
"I think you spotted what it is," Johnston said finally. "I
may have got in there and mixed that thing. I may have
added to it. The thing that I tried to do-the first time I
walked in with Dylan"-starting on 29 July 1965, for the first
sessions for Highway 6i Revisited after "Like a Rolling Stone,"
cut more than a month earlier-"I said, 'Your voice has to
come up.' He said, 'I don't like my voice, my voice is too god-
damn loud.' And I'd say ok, and I'd turn it up a little bit, and
he'd say"-and Johnston affects a clipped, effete voice-'"My
voice is too loud.' Finally he quit saying that. My guess is he
didn't want to fuck with me anymore, but that's what I wanted."
"People were fucking with him. Wilson would fuck with
him, Do this, we gotta do that, this didn't come out. Everything was
wild and scattered, open, until I settled down on it, but that's
the way that was."
Forty years after, anyone can be self-serving; anyone can
gainsay the dead. But one sound can't gainsay another; you
hear what you hear.
After "Like a Rolling Stone" was recorded Dylan took an
acetate of the performance to Albert Grossman's house. Calls
were made; people began to come by to hear the new sound.
In the stories told of that night, you can almost smell the
incense burning; there's something of the end of Rosemary's
Baby in the scene, with the believers all gathered around
Satan's bassinet and Ruth Gordon cooing, liThe Child, Come
see the Child!" The late Paul Rothchild had already produced
the first recordings by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and
On the Air 145
less than two years later would produce the Doors' seven-
minute "Light My Fire"; of all the stories emanating from that
night, his may have aged the best. "I had them play the fuck-
ing thing five times straight before I could say anything," he
told the Dylan biographer Bob Spitz. "What I realized while I
was sitting there was that one of US-one of the so-called
Village hipsters-was making music that could compete with
THEM-the Beatles and the Stones and the Dave Clark
Five-without sacrificing any of the integrity of folk music or
the power of rock 'n' roll. As a producer, this was an awesome
revelation for me. I knew the song was a smash, and yet I was
consumed with envy because it was the best thing I'd heard
any of our crowd do and I knew it was going to turn the
tables on our nice, comfortable lives."
When the single was released, on 20 July 1965, copies
serviced to radio stations cut the song in half and spread it
over both sides of a red vinyl 45, giving them the option of
airing only the first three minutes, thus preserving their nor-
mal song-to-commercial ratios. Dylan demanded that "Like a
Rolling Stone" play through on its own side, and soon a new
pressing replaced the first-but when the song first appeared
on the radio, three minutes was all you heard, with the fade
sounding fake, as if something was missing. When the word
spread that something was, stations were hammered by
callers demanding all six minutes, and six minutes was what
they got. And then, it seemed, that was all your station
played. If society did not raise itself as a single brave, terrified
146 Greil Marcus
soul and leave itself behind, sometimes, listening to Dylan's

voice as everything around him dropped away, as the
demonic, despairing figure in the song threw off everything
around itself, you could imagine that society had done just
that. If people did not leave their homes to travel the roads
making speeches and barbeque-though many did, and
many already had-you could hear intimations of that, too.
Or you could hear that event in its absence, as if, in its failure
to instantly change the world, unlike any recording before it
"Like a Rolling Stone" had proven that that was precisely
what a work of art was supposed to do, and the standard by
which a work of art should be judged. "When I heard 'Like a
Rolling Stone,'" said Frank Zappa, in 1965 a twenty-four-
year-old Los Angeles satirist who considered himself an
anti-hippie, high-art, Edgard Varese-meets-the-Penguins
revolutionary, convinced that America was heading toward
disaster if it wasn't already there, "I wanted to quit the music
business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's sup-
posed to do, I don't need to do anything else' ... But it didn't
do anything. It sold, but nobody responded to it the way that
they should have." Younger people heard that their world
was not quite as predictable as they might have thought.
"What a shocking thing," said Elvis Costello, who as Declan
MacManus turned eleven that summer, "to live in a world
where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and
Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like a Rolling
Stone.'"
On the Air 147
In a season where a Dylan composition was as close to a

straight shot at the Top Ten as anything short of the next Bea-
tles record-following the Byrds, whose first album contained
three Dylan songs besides "Mr. Tambourine Man" and fea-
tured a photo of Dylan fronting the band (which already
looked ridiculous in matching turtlenecks), the Turtles threat-
ened to turn the enterprise into instant kitsch with Dylan's "It
Ain't Me Babe"-there were cover versions of "Like a Rolling
Stone." The Turtles, on their 1965 debut album, gave up after
two verses. The Young Rascals, who despite their short pants
and ruffles were at their best a devastating punk R&B band,
put a full-length version on their own first album in 1966,
with embarrassingly affected Dylanish vocals soon enough
leavened by the singer's obvious fascination with the lyrics,
great shouts of "Cmon!" to lead off the choruses, and an organ
player who, following Al Kooper's extended chords, estab-
lished that he could hold down a single key for the length of
an entire verse. * "That's what happens when you ain't got no
more money, baby," one of the Rascals announced at the end.
"Beat it!" said another. The Beverly Hills combo Dino (son of
Dean Martin), Desi (son of Desi Arnaz) and Billy (nobody
* "After the release of Highway 61, and the success of it," Kooper says, "there
were times when Bob and I would go to a record store and buy the imitation
records of it, and then go back to his place and listen and sit there and laugh. I
was particularly amused by the fact that really great musicians were imitating
my ignorance. I really had devoted my time to being a guitar player, and I was
now just starting to play keyboards, for a living. I had so much to learn."
148 Greil Marcus
famous) did a preteen version-not to mention "Como una

Piedra Rodante" for the Mexican market. No one noticed in
the U.S.A., but in 1966 in Kingston, Jamaica, a rock-steady
trio called the Wailers-Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny
Wailer-rewrote the song as "Rolling Stone" and resang it in
the tone of an elder reading a child to sleep with a fable about
the wages of sin. The chorus, led by Marley, was the same,
but the single repeated verse put new blood on the song.
"Nobody told you was to roam on the street," Bunny Wailer
crooned sadly. "But that's what happens when you lie and
cheat/ You have no nights and you have no mornings/ Time
like scorpion stings without warning."
There were other covers. But more than anything there
was talk, arguments over the words, people trying to learn
the song on their own instruments, or their own voices, to
find their own stories in the song and tell them: people
singing along, in every way imaginable. One of them was the
comedian and Homicide/Special Victims Unit detective Richard
Belzer, who turned twenty-one the summer of 1965. "I think
the very first time I saw you perform was on Saturday Night
Live, and you were doing your impression of Bob Dylan in a
retirement center, singing in a Yiddish accent," the inter-
viewer Terry Gross said to Belzer twenty-two years later.
"Right," Belzer said, "the eighty-six-year-old Bob Dylan." "I
hate to ask questions like this, 'How did that idea come to
YOU,III Gross said, "but really, how did that idea come to you?"
"Well," Belzer said, "when I was a kid . .. "
On the Air 149
I hate to say that Bob is that much older than me, but when I was a
teenager, and was first getting into Bob Dylan, then we found out his
real name is Zimmerman, and he's a Jew, from Minnesohtaa, and this
was like a revelation, to have a hero that's a Jew- So I said, if his
name's Zimmerman, he must have had a bar mitzvah. So I fanta-
sized what Bob Dylan's bar mitzvah must have been like. [In a
clogged nasal voice] "Ah, Baruh Atah Adonoi Elohenu Meleh ha-
olam, asher kidshanu b'mitzvo-tah-" And then he gets older: "Oy!
Oyl" [In an especially cranky, clogged nasal voice] "Vonce upon a
tame, ya dreshed so fine, ya t'rew da bums a dime in ya prime-
[and then in a triumphantly I-told-you-so clogged nasal voice]
DIDN'T YA! People call, shed b'ware doll ya bound ta fall, you
t'ought dey was all, KIDDIN' YA!"
It's a great thing, when a song defines a summer, and like

the jamies' "Summertime, Summertime" in 1958 or Martha
and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" in 1964-which,
as a theme song for the Watts riots, came back even more
strongly after 11 August 1965-that was the first thing "Like
a Rolling Stone" did. When school is out, when people are
on vacation, when restraints are looser, when the weather is
warm and people are living their lives in the open air, possi-
bilities seem fuller, closer, and the possibilities lined out in
"Like a Rolling Stone" were endless. Like a preacher, Dylan
sang doom through the song; while no one missed the threat,
the freedom the song defined as specifically as the Declara-
tion of Independence, with nearly as strong an ear for
.----------------------------
150 Greil Marcus
cadence, overrode everything else. You could sing along, "No

direction home," just like you sang along to "Satisfaction," or
you could sing along like Richard Belzer or the Wailers,
rewriting the song because, you knew, it was something more
than a song, or anyway something else.
It was an event. It defined the summer, but like the Watts
riots the performance also interrupted it-as, ever since, the
song has interrupted whatever might be taking place around
it as it plays.* It was an incident that took place in a record-
* "There's a very odd way to hear the song for the first time, I think," Paula
Radice, an elementary school teacher in Hastings, England, said in 2004 in a
modest, soft-spoken voice; she was one of several people interviewed for a
BBe radio documentary on "Like a Rolling Stone," produced for the Birming-
ham series "Soul Music." "Because I came to Dylan late, and only encountered
him in the 1980s, as opposed to all these people who've known the song since
the sixties, it came to me completely fresh and completely new. I was sitting in
a pub in Durham, in 1984, at about the time of the miners' strike, and Durham
was a rather downbeat place at the time-people were out collecting in tins. It
was a strange time to be at a fairly well-off university, in a very unhappy part
of the world. And I was sitting in this pub, very old-fashioned type, non-
studenty pub, so traditional in fact that I don't think they even served women
at the bar. There was just a general hubbub of conversation. The jukebox was
playing, and suddenly this song started. I didn't know what it was-I was
probably the only person in the pub that didn't recognize it. But everything
stopped. Everybody's conversation stopped, and everybody started singing.
And I thought, what on earth is going on, I've never heard this song before,
how come everybody else knows it? And not only did everybody else know it,
they obviously loved it, and relished it, and were throwing their heads back
singing the chorus, 'How does it feel,' really sort of howling it out. Looking
back on it, it seems to me highly emblematic of what was going on in Durham
at the time. There was a sort of vituperative elation in the song that they cot-
toned on to. At the end of the song, as if nothing had happened, everybody
went back to drinking and talking."
-----------------------------------------------
On the Air 151
ing studio and was then sent out into the world with the
intention of leaving the world not quite the same. This is not
the same as changing the world, which implies a way in
which one might want the world to be changed. This is more
like drawing a line, to see what would happen: to see who the
song revealed to be on which side of the line, and who might
cross it, from either side. In that way, the song as an event
transformed its listeners into witnesses. It was up to the lis-
teners-as-witnesses to make sense of what they saw and heard
in the song, to tell the story to others, as Belzer did; to carry
the event with them or to seek to leave it behind, as they
wished, or as they could, because one's response to an event
is not something anyone can entirely choose.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Three Stages
T hat event was taken to the country at large-the factual

country, as it was in that noisy, murderous, idyllic summer of
1965, and the imagined country, as Dylan would map it on
Highway 61 Revisited, which was released on August 30, just in
time for everyone to go back to real life.
The first step was Dylan's performance at the Newport
Folk Festival, where over the previous two years, surrounded
by contemporary hit-makers like Joan Baez and Peter, Paul &
Mary, legendary names from the founding blues and country
records of the 1920s and '30s, among them Son House,
Mother Maybelle Carter, Skip James, Roscoe Holcomb,
Clarence Ashley, Mississippi John Hurt, and Dock Boggs,
and such guardians of the tradition as the songster and ban-
joist Pete Seeger and the folklorist Alan Lomax, he had
154 Greil Marcus
emerged as the biggest draw and the most mystical presence.

Dylan's friend Paul Nelson was at the time a critic for his own
Little Sandy Review in Minneapolis and for Sing Out! the house
organ of the folk movement; as he put it in 1975, posing as a
private eye for the Watchtower Detective Agency and run-
ning down Dylan's biography for prospective clients "Iooking
for a hero" to promote, "In the mid-Sixties Dylan's talent
evoked such an intense degree of personal participation from
both his admirers and detractors that he could not be permit-
ted so much as a random action. Hungry for a sign, the world
used to follow him around, just waiting for him to drop a cig-
arette butt. When he did they'd sift through the remains,
looking for Significance. The scary part is they'd find it."
Also at Newport in 1965 was the Paul Butterfield Blues
Band, whose appearance as a white-led electric blues band
led to a fight between Albert Grossman, who was managing
them as well as Dylan and Peter, Paul & Mary, and Alan
Lomax, who had introduced Butterfield's group on its own
stage as a fraud and a joke. "1 was cheering," Michael Bloom-
field wrote in 1977. "1 said, 'Kick that ass, Albert.'" Dylan
asked Bloomfield to find him a band, and along with AI
Kooper Bloomfield recruited drummer Sam Lay and bassist
Jerome Arnold from the Butterfield band, and pianist Barry
Goldberg. They rehearsed overnight; the next evening, on
July 25, they took the stage. "1 was wearing Levi's, a button-
down shirt and a sports coat," Bloomfield said. "The black
guys from the Butterfield Band were wearing gold shoes and
Three Stages 155
had processes. Dylan wore rock and roll clothes: black

leather jacket, yellow pin shirt without the tie. And he had a
Fender Stratocaster. He looked like someone from West Side
Story."
"The audience [was] booing and yelling 'get rid of the
electric guitar,'" Nelson reported at the time. There were cat-
calls and screams and shouts and cheers. The band played a
fierce "Maggie's Farm," with Bloomfield leading the way, and
a clattering "Phantom Engineer," a song that would turn up
under another title and in an entirely different mode on High-
way 61 Revisited; in between was "Like a Rolling Stone,"
already all over the radio, which escaped from its creators.
They couldn't find the song; it lumbered and groaned, until
finally it fell back into its beginnings as a waltz and Dylan
gave up singing the song and began declaiming it, as if it
were a speech. As music it was a non-event; after Elvis Pres-
ley's third, above-the-waist appearance on the Ed Sullivan
show, in 1957, and the Beatles' debut there in 1964, as a per-
formance it has grown into perhaps the most storied event in
the history of modern popular music.
It has since become weirdly fashionable to claim that
there was no bOOing-or, if one admits that there was less-
than-pleasant noise coming from the audience during and
between the songs, at least no condemnation of Dylan's new
music in that form. The sound was too loud, some say, and
people, especially the elite of the folk movement, seated up
front, who, the argument goes, were inexplicably familiar
156 Greil Marcus
with the technical side of amplified music, were simply call-

ing for a better mix. Or the sound was not loud enough. Or
people in the back, misunderstanding the constructive criti-
cism offered by the people in the front, and not wanting to
appear uninformed, imitated what they mistakenly took to be
boos and thus drowned out the helpful suggestions. Or peo-
ple were booing because Dylan only played three songs,
which is imaginable, though that doesn't account for people
booing before the band finished and left. Or, as Geoff Mul-
daur has recently argued, people in the folk movement were
booing because Bob Dylan was playing bad rock 'n' roll, and
they knew good rock 'n' roll from bad and appreciated the
former. Or, as David Hajdu implied in 2001 in his hagiogra-
phy of the sixties novelist, Don Juan, and Dylan imitator
Richard Farina, the whole thing was a fraud cooked up after
the fact by Dylan and his sycophants as a publicity stunt.
There was no controversy at the time as to whether or
not the crowd booed Bob Dylan. The only controversy was
over the music itself, and the controversy was not about
whether it was good rock 'n' roll or bad rock 'n' roll. The
music was the cigarette butt, and people made up their minds
about its significance on the spot.
lt was the first time the singer known for his vagabond's
guitar and hobo harmonica had performed with a rock 'n' roll
band since high school. One of his first original songs, writ-
ten in Hibbing in 1958, was "Hey Little Richard," which can
. be heard in James Marsh's 1993 television documentary Tales
Three Stages 157
of Rock 'N' Roll: Highway 61 Revisited, with a scratchy home tape

of the tune running under an outside shot of what in 1958
was Dylan's second-floor room in the Zimmerman house, so
that the song appears to be coming right out of the window.
"Little Richard, 000000, Little Richard," Dylan shouts, ham-
mering a piano. "Little Richard gonna find it out-Little
Richard." But Little Richard was not Woody Guthrie, Bob
Dylan's first folk music hero, troubadour of the dispossessed,
poet of the Great Depression, ghost of the American high-
way, a man blown by the wind and made out of dust. Little
Richard, though he was for a time someone millions of peo-
ple actually wanted to hear, was not Of the People; Little
Richard was a freak, a foot of pomade, a pound of makeup,
and purple clothes. Little Richard was rock 'n' roll, and in
1961, when Bob Dylan would offer the scenemakers in Vil-
lage folk clubs sneering parodies of doo-wop and teenage
laments ("I'm gonna kill my parents," he burbled in "Acne," as
Ramblin' Jack Elliott supplied backing doo-wahs, "because
they don't understand")-or in 1964, when at his Halloween
concert at Philharmonic Hall Dylan pretended he didn't
know "Leader of the Pack" was by the Shangri-Las and not
the Marvelettes, since obviously anything in the Top 40 was
interchangeable with anything else-or in 1965, to some of
the people in the crowd at Newport, rock 'n' roll was pander-
ing to the crowd, cheapening everything that was good in
yourself by selling yourself to the highest bidder, putting
advertising slogans on your back if that's what it took. "To
158 Greil Marcus
the folk community," said Bloomfield, who had been part of

it, "rock 'n' roll was greasers, heads, dancers, people who got
drunk and boogied. Lightnin' Hopkins had made electric
records for twelve years, but he didn't bring his electric band
from Texas. No, sir, he came out at Newport like they had
just taken him out of the fields, like the tar baby."
Promising an acoustic guitar, and nobody else, Peter
Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary got the audience to call Dylan
back to the stage. He sang "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "It's All
Over Now, Baby Blue"-"a song," Nelson wrote, "that I took
to be his farewell to Newport," and in fact Bob Dylan would
not appear there again for thirty-seven years.* "In penance-
in penance!-Dylan put on his old Martin and played,"
Bloomfield said in 1977, his disgust as full as it was twelve
years before. 'Dylan should have just given them the finger."
* 'The thing that was most apparent to me was how ghostly it was," the histo-
rian Sean Wilentz wrote me about the festival in 2002, "-because they're all
dead. All the people the young folk artists were drawn to in 1965 or before.
Mississippi John Hurt is dead. Son House is dead ... There were a lot of
ghosts around. At the same time it was a very conscious passing on of that tra-
dition to something new-on the part of the older folks. Dylan did that very
intentionally. Songs that he was singing in 1965, and songs that recalled that
tradition.
"There was a roots stage-but given the explosion of interest in old-time
music, there was too little of it. Most of the music was personal song-stories.
What with 0 Brother, Where Art ThOU? Alison Krauss, the festival seemed to be
out of step with where folk music now is. It was largely virtuoso self-indulgent
adolescent angst. It was Shawn Colvin.
"Dylan walked out on stage with Jewish earlocks-and a ponytail, and a
fake beard. He looked like a guy who was on the bus to [the Hasidic Brooklyn
Three Stages 159
Five days later, on July 29, Dylan returned to the studio;

with Russ Savakus and Al Kooper's friend Harvey Goldstein
(later Harvey Brooks) replacing Joe Macho, Jr., on bass, and
Bob Johnston producing, over the next few days Dylan
recorded the rest of Highway 61 Revisited, including the eleven-
minute "Desolation Row"-which Johnston took as Dylan's
reply to his enemies at Newport-and his next single, "Posi-
tively 4th Street," which nearly everybody took to be his
response to his enemies at Newport, especially Greenwich
Village flatterers and hypocrites who, the singer said pity-
ingly, "just want to be on the side that's winning," though
people in Minnesota have always believed it was about 4th
Street in Minneapolis.
Newport forced people to take sides-or allowed them
the thrill of taking sides. What you hear from the crowd at
Dylan's next show, at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium on Long
Island-his first full-scale debut of his new music-are people
who have come together to fight a cultural war.
[continued] neighborhood] Crown Heights and got lost. From another angle,
not really seeing the beard, he could have been in the Shangri-Las. Then he
looked like Jesus Christ. He was putting on a show, and he was donning a
mask-because he's a minstrel. A Jewish minstrel. An American minstrel.
'There came a point when he could have said something [about what had
happened in 1965]-when he was introducing the band. I looked at him very
closely then-but he just sort of smiled. He twitched. And then he went into
the last song, 'Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat.' Then he does a sizzling Buddy
Holly, 'Not Fade Away.' Again it was ghosts. He was the whole fucking tradi-
tion. He was a one-man festival."
160 Greil Marcus
Dylan had put together a new band; in addition to Gold-

stein on bass and Kooper on electric piano, there was Robbie
Robertson on guitar and Levon Helm on drums, the latter
two from Levon and the Hawks, the barnstorming bar band
from Toronto. The ensemble would accompany Dylan for
one more show, at the Hollywood Bowl on September 3.
After that the rest of the Hawks-pianist Richard ManueC
organist Garth Hudson, and bassist Rick Danko-joined
Robertson and Helm, and with them around him Dylan set
out across the country. In the fall Helm left in despair over
the rancor the band encountered, over audiences enraged by
the turn of a folk singer whose words you could understand
toward a sound so big it demanded you surrender one kind of
meaning for another; other drummers, lastly and most
notably Mickey Jones, took his place until the group dis-
banded when their long tour, which took them back and
forth across the United States, to Australia, to Scandinavia,
to Ireland, and up and down England and Scotland, ended in
London in the late spring of t 966. After that Dylan had his
famous motorcycle accident and quit the road. In Wood-
stock, he played possum, and began to look for new music.
He appeared occasionally over the next years with the
Hawks, by t 968 renamed as the Band, with Helm again part
of the group. He did not tour again for eight years.
At Forest Hills Dylan's show was presented in the form it
would keep for the next eight months: a solo acoustic per-
formance, a break, and then a return with the band. New fans
Three Stages 161
of Dylan's Top 40 hits were there, and Top 40 disc jockeys

introduced both sets; Dylan could not have been more
provocative if he had appeared for the second part of the
show riding in a solid-gold Eldorado, or for that matter on a
golden calf, and people were ready to be provoked. The
crowd was with Dylan all the way for the acoustic half of the
show, instantly catching the rhythm and the refrain of the
still-unreleased, never-before-played "Desolation Row,"
laughing at the tricksters in the song as Cinderella turned
into Bette Davis and Einstein traded clothes with Robin
Hood. There were no formal protest songs, nothing from The
Freewheelin' Bob Dylan or The Times They Are A-Changin', no "With
God on Our Side" or "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," but the
troubadour was present and true, and the crowd cheered.*
When Dylan came back with the band, for "Maggie's Farm,"
an electric "It Ain't Me Babe," from the 1964 acoustic album
Another Side of Bob Dylan, and more songs that would appear
on Highway 61 Revisited, again and again fury coursed through
the crowd like a snake; the wails of hate are beyond belief.
Listening now, you can feel a mass of people bucking and
weaving, many of them as united in their screaming as
twelve-year-old female BeatIe fans were with theirs-"Okay,
* Even in 1974, when Dylan and the Band once again toured the country, the
segment of the show that featured Dylan alone, accompanied only by his own
acoustic guitar and harmonica, almost always brought the most ecstatic
response, with many cheering and applauding with such fervor they were
enacting a rejection of everything else that was played.
i62 Greil Marcus
when he goes 'hand,' we all go PAULI" except that at Forest

Hills it could be "Okay, right now, all together, SCUMBAG!"
The performance is a screech; the musicians flay at the songs.
"Like a Rolling Stone" came last. While here the cheers now
outnumbered the boos-this was, for many, the reason they
were there-you can hear both Dylan and the band pull back
from the song, from its difficulty, its elusive shape, from the
challenge, it turned out, that the song embodied not only for
whoever heard it, but anyone who thought he or she could
play it. By the end, with only Kooper, with his electric piano,
seemingly willing to take responsibility for the monster, the
song seemed reduced to one repeating plinking note.
Six days later in Hollywood, there was far less booing-
though the only person I have ever met who has admitted to
booing Bob Dylan in t 965, and perhaps the only person alive
willing to admit it, did it at the Hollywood Bowl-but the
sound of the ensemble had devolved toward whatever the
radio was sounding like, and "Like a Rolling Stone" was still a
fish story. Shirley Poston, writing in The Beat, the radio station
newsletter that for all of its embarrassments (even in t 965,
most Top 40 listeners probably knew that Eric Burdon of the
Animals was not "the greatest blues singer in the world") was
at the time as good as any other pop music publication avail-
able, tells the story best.
This was the moment the majority of the audience had been wait-
ing for. Dylan, in the flesh, singing the number one song that has
made him the idol of millions instead of just thousands.
Three Stages 163
It was probably the moment he'd been waiting for, too.

He knew the song by heart. So did his audience. Unfortu-
nately, the band did not. And the famous "Like a Rolling Stone"
was minus the powerful Dylan composed background that helped
catapult the song and the singer to international fame.
But Dylan made the best of it. There hadn't been time for the
band to learn the intricate arrangement, so the band just more or
less played on.
Soon enough, in Texas, Dylan would chase the song with

the Hawks. Over the next months, their music grew in power
and ambition. It seemed that nothing was beyond their
grasp-but "Like a Rolling Stone" remained out of reach. The
country they were traversing was, somehow, giving back less
than the country Dylan had already explored on Highway 61
Revisited.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
CHAPTER NINE
Democracy in America
This may be the truest setting for "Uke a Rolling Stone"-a

country imagined forty years ago, and as recognizable today
as it was then.
u.s. Highway 61 runs from the Gulf of Mexico to the
Canadian border, just above Grand Portage, Minnesota. In
Dylan's high school days in Hibbing it was a magic road; he
and his friends would cut twenty miles east for a straight shot
down U.S. 53 to Duluth, where he was born, and there
they'd pick up 61 and head for St. Paul and Minneapolis,
looking for scenes;* in 1959 and 1960, when Dylan attended
* In Minnesota the driving age was fifteen; Dylan made his first recordings at
Terline MUSiC, an instrument and sheet music store, in St. Paul on Christmas
Eve, t 956. Included were fragments of Little Richard's "Ready Teddy," Sonny
Knight's "Confidential" (a song Dylan took up again in t 967 with the Hawks,
166 Greil Marcus
the University of Minnesota, the highway took him to his

haunts. In the Cities Dylan discovered folk music, the old
country music and the old blues-and discovered that in
song and story there was no more protean line drawn in the
nation than the line drawn by Highway 61. History had been
made on that highway in times past, and history would be
made there in times to come.
Bessie Smith, the Queen of the Blues, died on Highway
61 in 1937, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Muddy
Waters grew up and where, in the 1910s and '20s, Charley
Patton, Son House, and others made the Delta blues; some
have pretended to know that Robert Johnson's 1936 "Cross
Road Blues" was set right there, where Highway 49 crosses
Highway 61. Elvis Presley grew up on Highway 61, in the
Lauderdale Courts public housing in Memphis; not far away,
the road went past the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther
[continued] as part of the Basement Tapes recordings, and was still performing
on stage twenty-five years after that), Carl Perkins's "Boppin' the Blues," Lloyd
Price's "Lawdy Miss Ciawdy," the Five Satins' "In the Still of the Nite," Shirley
and Lee's "Let the Good TImes Roll," and the Penguins' "Earth Angel." Dylan
accompanied himself on piano; friends Howard Rutman and Larry Keegan
also sang. Left a paraplegic after accidents in his teens and twenties, Keegan,
in his wheelchair, joined Dylan onstage in Merrillville, Indiana, in 1981, for an
encore of Chuck Berry's "No Money Down" (Dylan played saxophone), and in
1999 sang at Jesse Ventura's inauguration as governor of Minnesota. Keegan
died in 2001 of a heart attack, at fifty-nine; he had always kept the aluminum
disc that resulted from the 1956 session, and after his death relatives listed it
on eBay, supposedly with a $150,000 floor, though no bid close to that was
forthcoming. "Awful," says one sympathetic listener who heard the songs.
King was shot in 1968. "Highway 61, go right past my baby's

door," goes the blues that has been passed from hand to hand
since the highway took its name. "I walked Highway 61, 'til I
gave out at my knees," sang John Wesdon in 1993. The high-
way doesn't give out; from Hibbing, it would have seemed to
go to the ends of the earth, carrying the oldest strains of
American music along with businessmen and escaped cons,
vacationers and joy-riders blasting the radio-carrying run-
away slaves north, before the long highway had a single
name, and, not so much more than a century later, carrying
Freedom Riders south. Highway 61 embodies an America as
mythical and real as the America made up in Paris out of old
blues and jazz records by the South American expatriates in
Julio Cortazar's 1963 novel Hopscotch-a novel which, like a
highway, you can enter wherever you choose, and go back-
ward or forward any time you like.
Most people who bought Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited
in 1965 had probably never heard of the road the album was
named for; today the record is as much a part of the lore of
the highway as anything else. The album cover, as with Bring-
ing It All Back Home a photograph by Daniel Kramer, pictured
two people ready for a journey: Dylan, sitting on a sidewalk
in a gaudy pink, blue, and purple shirt open over a Triumph
Motorcycles T-shirt and holding a pair of sunglasses in his
right hand; and a second man, standing behind Dylan, visible
only from the waist down, in jeans and a horizontally striped
orange and white T-shirt, his right thumb hooked into his
.------------------------- -----
168 Greil Marcus
pants pocket with a camera hanging from his clutched fin-

gers, and the viewer's eye directed straight at his crotch. I
remember a college friend bringing the album home as a
present for his younger brotheri his mother took one look at
the thing and threw it out of the house.
The journey described on the album took in the country.
When you hear "Like a Rolling Stone" as a single, the story it
tells takes place wherever you happen to hear iti on Highway
61 Revisited, it was a flight from New York City. One step
across the city line, with "Tombstone Blues," you were in

Tombstone, Arizona, without Wyatt Earp-or Levittown, or
Kansas City, any town or suburb in the nation, where people
talked about money and school, losing their virginity and the
war in Vietnam, dreamed about sex and the west, about Belle
Starr and Ma Rainey, and the president damned them all.
Cutting hard around the turn of the song as it ended, Bloom-
field led the charge out of towni then the road took over, and
while anything could happen on it, there was nothing hap-
pening outside of it. The road was a reverie, movement on
this highway as peaceful, as slow-rocking as a cradle in "It
Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," a timeless
blues with a timeless, commonplace verse at its center, a
woman at the end, Dylan singing the song of an unworried
man and the band blowing behind him like a breeze-
Don't the moon look good, mama

Shinin' through the trees?
-and the road was a crackup, the singer shouting out the
window as he sped past the carnage in "From a Buick 6." The
band is trying to get out of there as fast as he is, taking the
turns too fast, as if there is such a thing as too fast when you
can't get the blood out of your mind, when, as Dylan sang, in
words that were suddenly about anything-films of what
Allied forces found in Nazi extermination camps in t 945, as
seen by American school children in the late t 940s and early
'50s, as the historian Robert Cantwell has suggested, or news
footage, just beginning to appear on American television, of
dead Vietnamese and U.s. Army body bags, as anyone could
have thought, or just the wreck on the highway-you "need
a steam shovel, mama, to keep away the dead."
In "Ballad of a Thin Man," the travelers have circled back
to New York. In a back room in a bar you're better off not
knowing too much about, someone who thought he
belonged anywhere is finding out what nowhere means. The
piano rolling the tune into place is so ominous it's one step
short of a cartoon starring Snidely Whiplash; then Snidely
Whiplash is Peter Lorre in M. On the highway, there is a
strange place every ten miles, somewhere where nobody
knows you and nobody cares, and no one is cool; in New
York City, the singer is a hipster, snapping his fingers, and as
he does a whole cast of grotesques appears to point and
taunt, to see if the mark can escape from the locked room.
Then the album turns over, into "Queen Jane Approximately,"
and the singer rides the wheels of the music on his back,
170 Greil Marcus
swimming in his own sound, as he reaches for a woman who,

like the girl in the song that started the tale, seemingly a
long, long time ago, has nowhere to go. It was one of many
mid-to-Iate sixties songs on the soundtrack of Bernardo
Bertolucci's The Dreamers, his 2004 movie about three young
people making their own world out of sex, movies, and
parental allowances in a Paris apartment, as, outside their
windows, the near-revolution of May 1968 took place in the
streets. There was Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, the Grateful
Dead. "It's not fair, to put them up against something from
that album," a friend said. Then "Highway 61 Revisited," with
Dylan squeezing a police-car siren in what is probably his
most perfectly written song, sung as the ultimate tall tale.
You find out that not only can anything happen on Highway
61-a father murdering his son, a mother sleeping with one
of hers, the Gross National Product dumped as landfill or
World War III staged as a stock car race, in other words
Bessie Smith killed in a car crash, Gladys Presley walking a
teenage Elvis to school, or Martin Luther King lying dead on
a balcony-it already has. As the song plays, the band chas-
ing a rockabilly rabbit, the singer snarling with glee, the road
goes in every direction at once, and then it is one of the tor-
nadoes that sweeps down from Fargo to Minneapolis, picking
up cars and dropping them off the map. In "Just Like Tom
Thumb's Blues," the singer turns up in Juarez, MexiCO, and all
he wants is out. He's seen the country east and west, north
and south, most importantly backward and forward. "I'm
Democracy in America
going back to New York City," he says, understanding that

the joke he tried to tell the country is on him. "1 do believe
I've had enough." But there is one more song.
"Desolation Row," Al Kooper wrote in 1998, was on
Eighth Avenue in New York City, "an area infested with
whore houses, sleazy bars, and porno-supermarkets totally
beyond renovation or redemption." At the time it was the
kind of place where you were told to walk down the middle
of the street if you were stuck there at night, because you
were better off with the drivers who didn't see you than with
the people on the sidewalks who did. But even more than
"Just like Tom Thumb's Blues," the eleven-minute song has a
south-of-the-border feeling, and not just because the work by
the Nashville session guitarist Charlie McCoy, brought in by
Bob Johnston, reaches back to Marty Robbins's 1959 cowboy
ballad "EI Paso." In the U.S.A. Mexico is a place you run to.
You are walking down the middle of Eighth Avenue, try-
ing not to look at the neon lights above the street and the
unlit doorways on either side of it. As it is on Eighth Avenue,
culture in "Desolation Row" is the scrapheap of Western civi-
lization, decay at best and betrayal at worst, and by now, at
the end of Highway 61, you can find culture anywhere, in a
beauty parlor, in a police station, on a bed, in a doctor's
office, at a carnival, on the Titanic as it sinks. Dylan follows
his characters through the song as if he is the detective and
they are the suspects; what he learns is that almost no one
keeps what she has, and that almost everyone sells his
172 Greil Marcus
birthright for a mess of pottage. The song, Dylan once said,

was his "America the Beautiful," and he sings the song dead-
pan, which is part of why it is so funny; the scrapheap gives
off a sickening but intoxicating smell of missed chances,
folly, error, narcissism, sin. Everything seems worthless. In
the theater, you're laughing, but when the show is over, as
the Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov once wrote, you turn
around to get your coat out of the coatroom and go home:
"No more coats and no more home." "Desolation Row" seems
merely to give the scrap heap a name-except that in Dylan's
guided tour of the place, with Cinderella making a home in
Desolation Row, Casanova punished for visiting it, Ophelia
not being allowed in, it becomes plain that the scrap heap is
also a utopia. It's a nowhere described again, in more ordi-
nary language, as a chronicle of more ordinary events, in
"Visions of Johanna," a song from Blonde on Blonde, from the
late spring of 1966, though under the title "Seems Like a
Freeze-Out" Dylan was already performing it on stage in the
fall of 1965, just after Highway 61. Revisited was released.
Here Desolation Row could very easily be an apartment
on Eighth Avenue, somewhere well above the street, with the
singer looking out the window. The song makes a dank room
where a draft just blows balls of dust across the floor. In the
corners some people are having sex; others are shooting up
or nodding out. It's a bohemian paradise, a place of with-
drawal, isolation, and gloom. It's fourth-hand Poe, third-hand
Baudelaire, passed down by the countless people who've
bought into the fable of the artist who cannot be understood,

the visionary whom society must exile for its own protec-
tion-must exile within itself, so that his or her humiliation is
complete and final, but that's the danger. That's the one card
left to the artist, and with that card the artist can change the
game. As Dylan does on Highway 61 Revisited, from one end of
the highway to the other, stopping at every spot that looks
like it might have the best cheeseburger on the strip or for
that matter the worst, the artist will return society's vitriol
with mockery and scorn of his or her own. The difference is
that while society speaks only in shibboleths and cliches, the
artist invents a new language. When society's language has
been forgotten, people will still be trying to learn the artist's
language, to speak as strangely, with such indecipherable
power. That's the idea.
The dank room where this magic is made is its own
cliche, of course, but there's nowhere else the singer in "Des-
olation Row," or anyone else in the song who's allowed in and
allowed to remain, would rather be. All of them, the Good
Samaritan, Casanova, Einstein back when he used to play the
electric violin, Cinderella-well, actually that's it, along with
the singer those are the only people named who've left traces
in the place, and Casanova's gone-stick their heads out the
window, eyeballing those few they might judge worthy of
joining them, laughing down at the crowds on the street, at
all those who don't know enough to beg to be let in. They
watch the horrors taking place in the building across the
174 Greil Marcus
street, where the Phantom of the Opera is about to serve a
meal of human flesh, but it's nothing they haven't seen
before; why do you think they're here and not there? The
voice in "Desolation Row" and "Visions of Johanna" is partly
Jack Kerouac's voice, in his narration for Robert Frank and
Alfred Leslie's 1959 life-among-the-beatniks movie Pull My
Daisy. "Look at all those cars out there," he says. "Nothing
there but a million screaming ninety-year-old men being run
over by gasoline trucks. So throw a match on it." From Ker-
ouac you can go back more than half a century, and hundreds
of years from there, and find yourself in the same room. In
the Belgian painter James Ensor's 1885 Scandalized Masks, a
man sits at a desk, a bottle before him, hat on his head and a
pig-snout mask on his face. A woman stands in a doorway,
holding a staff, a pointed hat on her head, black glasses over
her eyes. Her nose is huge and bulbous, her chin sticks out
like a growth; you can't tell if she's wearing a mask or if you're
looking at her face. Yes, it's Brussels, they're just going to
Mardi Gras-but at the same time, in this sadistically prosaic
scene, you know something unspeakable is going to happen
as soon as the two leave the chamber. You know the carnival
they're going to is not in the public streets but on Desolation
Row, that place where the old heretics, the witches, the
ancestors of the bohemians of the modern world, perform
their ceremonies.
That is where "Desolation Row" almost leaves you. And
then, eight and a half minutes into the song, with nine verses
finished and one to go, Dylan and McCoy begin to hammer

at each other with their guitars, and after more than a
minute-with Dylan running a searing harmonica solo over
the guitar playing, taking the song away from its form as a
nonsensical folk ballad, as a "Froggy Went A-Courtin'" with
its mice and ants and cats and snakes now dressed up by the
MGM costume department-Dylan snaps the song into its
last verse with three harsh, percussive bangs on his acoustic
guitar, and the circle is complete~ In this moment the song
opens back into the sound of "Like a Rolling Stone," all
threat, all promise, all demand. Once again it is time to get
out of this suffocating room and onto Highway 61. Because
all across Highway 6 i Revisited, "Like a Rolling Stone" has hung
in the air, like a cloud in the desert, beckoning. The song has
taken you out into the country, so that you might see it for
what it is, but also so that, caught up in the momentum of
"Like a Rolling Stone," the thrill of its explosion, you might
realize that the territory you have covered is also the country
as it was. "Like a Rolling Stone" promises a new country; now
all you have to do is find it. The engine is running; the tank
is full.
CHAPTER TEN
Swinging London
Luckily for Bob Dylan, if he had one foot in the heretic's

chamber, the bohemian's garret, the privileged slum of Deso-
lation Row, as a pop musician, which by the summer and fall
of 1965 he had so glamorously become-appearing on stage
in a Carnaby Street-styled checked suit that made him over
into a medieval court jester, or in a black shirt that, covered
with huge white polka dots, signified that life was a joke and
his mission was to tell it-his other foot was on the stairway
of a plane. * With the Hawks he traveled the country as if he
* "I didn't give a fuck about Electric Bob or Folk Bob, and [ didn't know anyone
who did," the singer Bob Geldof wrote in 2003 of his thirteen-year-old self in
Dublin in 1965. "It was the words, the voice, the shirt. I couldn't find one like
it, so I painted spots on my blue shirt collar, the shoulders, and halfway down
the front and didn't take my jacket off. One night I forgot and the girl who
became the song 'Mary of the 4th Form' said I was tragic and told her friends."
178 Greil Marcus
were running for president. From September through March

they went from one coast to another four times, heading as
far north as Canada, as far south as Atlanta and Miami Beach.
Then in April-when Bobby Gregg and Sandy Konikoff,
who had replaced Levon Helm on drums, were themselves
replaced by Mickey Jones, formerly the drummer in Trini
Lopez's band, the big beat behind "If I Had a Hammer"-
they crossed the International Date Line. They carried the
country with them; the drama they enacted was no more or
less American than Coca-Cola or Mickey Mouse, Charlie
Chaplin or the Vietnam War. They played their last show on
27 May 1966, and it took them almost until then to get their
arms around "Like a Rolling Stone."
Bob Johnston was in the U.K. to record that final per-
formance, and the concerts in Liverpool and Sheffield.
He remembers an incident that took place that last night
when, before the show began, with the curtain down, Dylan
came on stage to warm up. "I always just hung around the
curtains," Johnston says, "and he said, 'I think I'll play some-
thing on the piano.'" But the stage wasn't empty; to squeeze
in every last ticket, the promoters had ringed the stage itself
with seats.
They had about a hundred people sitting on the stage-they had

to get them all in the theater. People sitting on the stage-and this
one guy says, "As soon as he gets over here, and touches that
piano, I'm gonna knock the shit out of him." Dylan says, "You hear
Swinging London 179
that?" I said, "Yeah, come on over here, don't worry about it, let me
sit on the piano bench." So I sit on the piano bench, looking at this
guy, and I say [politely], "Look-I can do it myself, but I've got
about fifteen people who are ready to put your ass in the hospital,
or the morgue, whichever you would prefer. So if you open your
mouth, while this is going on, you're gone to one or the other
place, either the hospital or the fucking morgue."
"You can't tell when the booing's going to come up,"

Dylan said in San Francisco the previous December. "Can't
tell at all. It comes up in the weirdest, strangest places, and
when it does it's quite a thing in itself." But in Britain the sort
of protests that had followed Dylan and the Hawks around
the USA. were organized. In the U.K. the Communist Party
had long operated a network of Stalinist folk clubs, where
what songs could be sung, who could sing what, and in what
manner, was strictly controlled. The idea was to preserve the
image of the folk, where, as in that theatre-in-the-round in
the field in New Jersey where Joan Baez brought out Bob
Dylan, the gathered community, reenacting what the histo-
rian Georgina Boyes calls lithe imagined village," shared the
same land, speech, and values. Pop music symbolized the
destruction of that community by capitalist mass society,
where all land was divided, speech was class, where there
were no values and the Beatles were a commodity fetish.
Along with fans of Bob Dylan who were now disap-
pointed, or confused, or angry over his new music, people
180 Greil Marcus
were recruited out of the folk clubs to come to his shows and
break them up; in other words, people paid to leave. When
Dylan finished the first half of his shows, playing by him-
self-when, people have said again and again, the audience,
"in reverence," did not stir, did not whisper, afraid to miss a
word or an inflection-and then returned with the band,
there were group walkouts and foot-stomping. There were
banners unfurled and signs raised. There were cheers and
applause, curses and cheers for the curses. In Sheffield, a
bomb threat was phoned in to the hall. People in the crowds
tried to shout each other down. There was unison slow clap-
ping to throw the musicians off their timing, or to make a
noise too big for even their own noise to overcome. Songs
were stopped, sometimes for long moments; Dylan talked his
way out of the crowd's refusals, or with the Hawks would
playa false start, throw off the hand-clappers in turn, and
then dash for the song before anyone had a chance to strike
back. "Like a Rolling Stone" was always the last song, and on
most nights the musicians had to fight their way to it; some-
times, when they got there, in the middle of the song, when
it was flying under its own power, a machine that would keep
going whether the musicians kept playing or not, Dylan
would take his hands from his Stratocaster and flutter them
around his mouth, then cup his hands like a megaphone and
scream through his fingers, giving each word its own body.
"When I would crack my snare drum," Mickey Jones says, "it
was like a cannon going off. I played with a heavy right
Swinging London :18:1
foot-I used to tell people, like a t 05 howitzer. But you

know what? Because of that right foot, and Rick Danko's
beat, we worked together." No matter how well Bob Dylan
and the Hawks played in the United States, no matter how
fiercely, compared to the music sparked by the conflict in the
U.K. it was barbershop harmony in a rowboat.
"They're all poets," Dylan said from the stage of the Royal
Albert Hall in London, just before he began the song on May
27, introducing the band, sounding as if he were parodying
what a singer stoned to his toenails would sound like, offering a
final provocation, one last good luck. ''This song here is dedicated
to the Taj Mahal," he said sensibly enough, since there are ways
in which "Like a Rolling Stone" is like the Taj Mahal. "We're
going to leave after this song, and I want to say good-bye to all
of you people, you've been very warm, great people, 1-1-1-1, you
know, you've been very nice people. I mean, here you are, sit-
ting in this great huge place"-the crowd applauds heartily-
"and," he says, his mush-mouthed voice suddenly a snake's
tongue, focused on a single point, the venom pure sarcasm,
"believe me, we've enjoyed every minute of being here." Their
entry into the song is slow and grand, with a huge, shimmering
sound from Jones's cymbals, and then the opening lines, ragged,
furious, bitter. At the end the song falls apart, falls on the singer
and the band, but there is tremendous applause.
That performance of the song, Johnston says, "is the best
I ever heard in my life. Because he was angry, they were
screaming at him-he said, Fuck those people, let's play this thing."
182 Greil Marcus
He didn't tell 'em what it was, he just started it. I came unglued-
once those magic things happen, you know it. And that was one of
'em. You can put that together with Jimi Hendrix and 'The Star-
Spangled Banner." It's a revelation to put them together.
Dylan had been cheered for so long, and revered for so long-
all of a sudden he's out there and they're booing him. He said [in a
pinched, nasal voice], You people don't know what rawk and rowl is, you
don't know anything about rawk and rowl, we invented rock and roll in America,
and if you'll listen to it- He just kept getting madder and madder.
Ten days before the last show, at the Free Trade Hall in
Manchester on May 17, there was everything there was any-
where else in the U.K. and more of it. Because of that-
because of the tension between the people on the stage and
the shouters and clappers strategically spread out in pockets
throughout the theater-the result was likely the greatest
rock 'n' roll show ever played. It came to a head when it had
to, in a pause between "Ballad of a Thin Man"-which had
opened with a blues chord from Robbie Robertson so huge
you could imagine it raising the dead, or turning the living to
stone-and "Like a Rolling Stone," but not in a form that
Dylan, in his worst thoughts, could have expected.
"Judas!" shouted a young man.
"In many a dark houri I've been thinkin' about this/ That
Jesus Christl Was betrayed by a kiss." So Dylan had sung on
The Times They Are A-Changin': "But I can't think for you/ You'll
have to decide/ Whether Judas Iscariot/ Had God on his
Swinging London i83
side." Who stands up in a crowded theater and shouts "Judas!"

at a Jew? "Why'd you do it, Keith?" the radio producer Andy
Kershaw asked the late Keith Butler in 1999, in a tone
straight out of a 1950s cop show, a detective pushing a sus-
pect to confess that he killed his wife.
There was laughter, then cheers and applause, from
nowhere near the whole of the house. The Hawks try to start
the song. "I don't believe you/' Dylan says finally, the con-
tempt in his voice enough to suck water out of the ground.
Then he was inflamed: "You're a liar!" The musicians again try
to push him toward the music, and he turns to them, speak-
ing flatly, like an officer taking his troops out of their
trenches: "Play fucking loud." Butler got up and left. "He's a
traitor/' he told D. A. Pennebaker's film crew in the foyer.
"He wants shooting."
"In your face/' Mickey Jones remembers. Garth Hudson
sends out a chord from his organ, and you can hear it vibrate;
Rick Danko's bass is bigger than the hale bigger than the
town. The band rings Chuck Berry's bell; then from nearly
two hundred miles away it rings every bell in St. Paul's.
Dylan shoulders the song as if he has never felt such a
burden in his life-not the song, but everything that has
come before it, and the struggle that remains. It's a tiredness
beyond the body, a state of being; it turns into regret. Then
all emotions are possible; as it was when the song was
recorded, anything can be said. This time it is the fourth and
last chorus that takes the roof off the building, that blows out
184 Greil Marcus
all the limits of the song, with what at first seems like anger
changing inside each word to an embrace, then revulsion,
then awe, the singer himself agog at what comes next. Rob-
bie Robertson plays out the string of the song for nearly
another minute, as if refusing to let anyone leave; when he
finished, applause drowned out whatever other noise there
might have been.
"I'll never forget the look on Dylan's face," Malcolm Met-
calfe said in 1999. He had arrived too late to buy a ticket to
the sold-out show, so he and a friend sneaked in through a
side door, wandering through passageways until they reached
a door near the wings of the stage, where they listened to
"Like a Rolling Stone." Then the door flew back and two men
all but pulled the singer off his feet and out of the theater.
"He looked as if he'd been in a car crash-somebody totally
shocked."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
One More TIme
The song was never the same after England; neither was Bob
Dylan, and neither was his audience. He and the audience
changed over the years, but except for stray moments the
song had gone as far as people playing it could take it-or as
far as it could take whoever tried to play it. "It's like a ghost is
writing a song like that/' Dylan said in 2004 of "Like a
Rolling Stone/' talking to Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles
Times. "It gives you the song and then it goes away, it goes
away." On stage in the years to come, the song was itself the
ghost. It wasn't the singer who got to decide to sing the song;
the song decided.
The record stayed the same, which is to say that it
remained unstable, that it was never the same. On stage in
the years to come "Like a Rolling Stone" was all too often the
J
186 Greil Marcus
same: a warhorse, trotted out one more time to circle the

track. It could seem longer each time you heard it played, as
if the struggle had changed from getting to the song to get-
ting out of it. Often the music thinned, and the song was like
a bad bluegrass tune; often it was pumped up, and then a cer-
tain thrill came out of the lifts and rises in the rhythm, no
matter what else was missing. There was a night in 1992, on a
show marking the tenth anniversary of Late Night with David
Letterman on NBC, with Letterman wearing what looked like
Carl Perkins's toupee and Dylan fronting not only the house
band but guitarists Chrissie Hynde and Steve Vai (who, after
standing in for the Devil in Crossroads, an embarrassing 1986
Walter Hill movie about a lost Robert Johnson song, was
clearly delighted to be on the side of the angels), a gorgeous
Carole King on piano, and backing singers Mavis Staples,
Rosanne Cash, Emmylou Harris, Michelle Shocked, and
Nancy Griffith, who didn't come in until the third chorus,
when Staples took the lead from Dylan. It was one of those
times when anything he sang sounded like "One Hundred
Bottles of Beer on the Wall." It's exciting to watch the per-
formance today-to see the song sing itself, even if, as it does
so, it refers back only to what Dylan once did with it. There
have been a thousand performances where the same nothing
happens, with more flair or less, but no real difference.
Other people continued to sing the song. In 1990, the
Replacements, the Twin Cities' most confused and beloved
punk band, wasted three pained minutes on the first half,
One More Time 187
with leader Paul Westerberg chewing over the words, the

band trying to trash the chords, as if "Like a Rolling Stone,"
for the moment retitled "Like a Rolling Pin," was a great, rot-
ting corpse, and also their true legacy, something they could
no more deny than they could shed their own skin, though
they had already spent years trying to do just that. In 2001,
on Duluth Does Dylan, a birthplace tribute album marking
Dylan's sixtieth birthday, the addled surf band the Black
Labels (what, you don't think they have surfing on Lake
Superior?) offered their version of "Rainy Day Women # 12 &
35," Dylan's number 2 single from Blonde on Blonde. "Everybody
must get stoned, like a rolling stone," they insisted, and why
hadn't anyone thought of that before? On a 1995 album
recorded in small clubs, even the Rolling Stones finally
accepted the old dare; Dylan joined them onstage that year,
and he and Mick Jagger passed the number back and forth as
if exchanging trademarks. But except on the rarest occasions,
the song did not happen; it didn't sweep up time and start a
story for the first time. One night that it did was during
Dylan's two-week stand at the Warfield Theatre in San Fran-
cisco in 1980. It was November 12, three days before
Michael Bloomfield would appear to play the song, and this
time it flew.
There is a certain delirium the song can grant whoever
plays it; restaging the entire 1966 Manchester concert in 1996
at the Borderline Club in London, the singer Robyn Hitch-
cock, then in his early forties, found it in spades. Everyone
~ __ J
188 Greil Marcus
had a part to play, especially the audience; someone shouts

"Judas!" at the wrong time. Then at the right moment several
people shout it, and just like that, Hitchcock's band, each
member impersonating a member of the Hawks as they were
that night-Patrick Hannan as Mickey Jones, who became a
successful comedy actor on television; Andrew Claridge as
Robbie Robertson, who turned to the movies and solo proj-
ects after 1976, leaving the rest to struggle on as an oldies act;
Tim Keegan as Richard Manuel, who at forty-two hanged
himself after a Band show at the Cheek to Cheek Lounge in
Winter Park, Florida, in 1986; and Jake Kyle as Rick Danko,
who died of a heart attack in 1999, at fifty-six ("There is no
Garth Hudson replica on this recording," read the liner
notes)-has the song in the air, and Hitchcock, who made his
name in the late 1970s with the Soft Boys, a punk-psychedelic
group of no special distinction, sounds as if he's found himself.
They understand that to make the song happen you have to
make the chorus happen, and they do it by making a cacoph-
ony at its heart, a tangle of harmonica, trebly guitar, bass
notes, hammering drums, the whole piece swirling. For a
word it could be Johnny Rotten singing, then Joe Strummer.
Together the group finds the defiance in the song, the
absolute victory over an imaginary audience, the audience
contained in the song, implied by its story, far more than the
audience from the historical event that is being at least for-
mally reenacted. It's a victory over anyone who disbelieves in
the song-or that Hitchcock and the rest can play it.
One More Time 189
This is what Dylan found that night in San Francisco,

when, again, he sang the song for the first time. The gospel
chorus of Clydie King and Regina Harris seize the song as
their own; Dylan sings as if the song no longer belongs to
anyone. It is a long moment of ecstasy. You see a great ship
plowing the waves, and on its deck a man waving his arms in
the air.
Nothing as singular as "Like a Rolling Stone" ever influences

anything else in its medium as form or content-its only
influence is in the line that it draws. Richard Harris's hilari-
ously lugubrious "MacArthur Park"-with the immortal lines
about a cake melting in the rain, "I don't think that I can take
it/ Because it took so long to bake it"-was a version of "Like
a Rolling Stone" in 1968; so, with Dylan himself stepping out
of the crowd of Stevie Wonder, Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Spring-
steen, Ray Charles, and many more to perpetrate a Dylan
parody that would have humiliated a karaoke singer, was
USA for Africa's "We Are the World" in 1985, and so was the
Temptations' seven-minute "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" in
1972-for the way it turned Dylan's metaphor inside out.
With its nightmare strings and its relentlessly cold, mocking
blues guitar, this was the story of a liar and a cheat: a wastrel
with barbeque sauce smeared all over his phony preacher's
collar, a man who left nothing behind but wreckage and
despair. In its own mode, Led Zeppelin's 1971 "Stairway to
190 Greil Marcus
Heaven" was a leap for the territory "Like a Rolling Stone"

had mapped out, both in the grandeur of its sound and in its
call for an escape from the Kingdom of Mammon in its
words-an escape into a daydream of Druidic forests while
riding the escalator up to the lingerie floor of Harrod's. No
one saw the line drawn by "Like a Rolling Stone" more
clearly, or took up its challenge more gleefully-to the point
of enlisting Al Kooper to play organ, piano, and French horn,
actress Nanette Newman and singers Doris Troy and Made-
laine Bell to lift Mick Jagger's voice off the ground, and the
London Bach Choir to hover over them all like an army of
female saints-than the Rolling Stones did in 1969, with
"You Can't Always Get What You Want," the fin des annees soix-
antes epic that closed Let It Bleed, along with Highway 61 Revis-
ited the best rock 'n' roll album ever made. But all of these
songs, masterpieces or embarrassments, were productions;
"Like a Rolling Stone" was a runaway train. Except perhaps in
Jimi Hendrix's 1968 "Voodoo Chile," which was also a ver-
sion of Muddy Waters's "Rollin' Stone," the sense of real time,
of an event taking place as you listen, of history accumulat-
ing between notes and words as they are played and sung,
was not present at all. That was elsewhere.
Ten years after he released "Like a Rolling Stone," Bob
Dylan, having been carried through the decade by his own
legend, an oddly crepuscular figure who many believed still
carried within himself the secrets of an epoch when Desola-
tion Row was just across the street, emerged from the miasma
One More Time 191
of hit albums that people forgot almost as soon as they'd

played them. It didn't matter if it was Self Portrait and New
Morning in 1970, both top ten, the number one Planet Waves in
1974, or the top-ten Before the Flood, a live album from Dylan's
1974 comeback tour with the Band. Go back to this music
now, and aside from a stray mystery or a finger pointing in
your face-"Sign on the Window" from New Morning, "Going,
Going, Gone" on Planet Waves, "Highway 61 Revisited" from
Before the Flood-what it says is that a career continued. Why?
Why not? What for? Don't ask. That was why Blood on the
Tracks was a shock.
It was early 1975. For the first time in the history of the
republic, a president had resigned; a man for whom not a sin-
gle person had voted had taken his place. A war that had
begun before the name Bob Dylan had been uttered in public
had finally been lost; in disgrace, returning soldiers tried to
blend in with ordinary men and women, and in an even
deeper disgrace, ordinary men and women tried to blend in
with themselves. As the country went about its business in a
haze of meaninglessness, Dylan, it seemed, was ready to start
over, not as a private individual with money to make and
children to raise but as a legendary figure of many parts, cool
and reflective, drunk and mad, a pathfinder, someone who
had been from one end of the land to the other and returned
to tell the tale. Blood on the Tracks was a spare, unassuming
chronicle of a drifter struggling to hold a life together in a
country where no one wants him anywhere but gone. The
192 Greil Marcus
songs were presented without authority, as if the singer had

to earn his chance to speak. There were love songs and lost-
love songs; there was a Western-cum-detective story so cine-
matic it's a wonder it remains un filmed. There were
undertones of a mythic story, outside of any place and time
("In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes"-
that calls up Richard the Lion-Hearted traveling back from
the Crusades to England in disguise as readily as it does a
prospector in the Black Hills); nevertheless the sense of an
ongoing story, a history taking in the characters in Dylan's
past songs and all those who had followed their adventures,
was inescapable.
In two long numbers, the five-minute-forty-second "Tan-
gled Up in Blue" and the seven-minute-forty-five-second
"Idiot Wind," Dylan rewrote the story of the previous ten
years as if the drama in "Like a Rolling Stone" had actually
happened. People had set out to live as if no one knew them,
as if they had forgotten the names of the streets on which
they grew up and even those of the parents who gave them
everything or kicked them out. People turned their backs on
the past; they told themselves that anything was possible.
They took new names, made their way through the country
as if in disguise, and as they did so they discovered that they
were no longer at home there, that nothing looked the same,
that when they walked down streets named Elm or Broadway
they could not see their faces in the shop windows as they
passed.
One More Time 193
In "Tangled Up in Blue/' freedom has come down to a

series of odd jobs in places you might not have heard of until
you woke up in them. The way the singer comes down on
"Delacroix" is almost the whole story, the sound of the word
enough to make him dig in, dig down. He finds a voice: a
jaunty, I'm-from-Missouri tone that can explode into passion
and surprise at any time. With a jocular beat putting a spring
in his step, he crisscrosses the country, from east to west,
north to south-but not the country that makes the news. In
that country, people build fortunes and buildings; in the
singer's country they work as short-order cooks, fishermen,
topless dancers. One-time revolutionaries turn into heroin
dealers. Faces rot; eyes go blank; some dress in silk, some
sleep in rags on the street, but no one has anything left to
say. Still, the singer grins as he leaves, daring time to declare
the story over, daring you to follow him as he slams his car
door and pulls onto U.S. Highway 61, curious to see if it can
take him anywhere it hasn't taken him before.
For all of the miles on his tires, the man singing in "Tan-
gled Up in Blue" is unscarred, unafraid, unfinished, and
absolutely sane. Peace of mind is his birthright; the ground
beneath his feet is down to earth. But there is no ground
beneath the feet of the man singing in "Idiot Wind." As if it
were the Hudson River Valley in the eighteenth century and
the singer was at once Ichabod Crane and the Headless
Horseman chasing him, in the same body, in the same
moment, he travels in the air. He lights in Leadville, Col-
j
194 Creil Marcus
orado, in 1890, stalks into a bar, and demands a drink. "They

say I shot a man named Gray, and took his wife to Italy," the
man says to the other customers, speechifying as if he's run-
ning for office. "She inherited a million bucks, and when she
died it came to me. I can't help it-if I'm lucky." But nobody's
buying, and the bartender says the singer has to pay like any-
body else; he shoots the glass out of the bartender's hand and
storms out the door. He wears a rounder's duster, handling
his Winchester like a six-shooter; he wears a New England
preacher's black cloak and carries a knife in a scabbard.
He has nowhere to go and the only story he can tell is
made of curses; all he wants out of life is revenge. The laugh-
ing bluster of the man in the bar, trying to cadge a drink out of
his tall tale about the fortune that got away, turns into slit-eyed
hate when he thinks about the woman who got away, or the
self that disappeared; when the singer says, "One day you'll be
in the ditch, flies buzzing around your eyes," you want to
cover your own. There was rage and fear in "Like a Rolling
Stone," finally left behind by the sheer exhilaration of the
adventure the song promised; now there is no promise and
rage and fear are the only currency the singer trusts. But as a
wish to kill the past by murdering whoever wears its face, an
old lover, an old friend, yourself, fragments of the old exhilara-
tion are still there. The storm in "Like a Rolling Stone," the
storm that clears the ground of the familiar and reveals a thou-
sand roads is now a storm of pure destruction, but the lust that
carries the singer toward the storm is the same.
L
One More Time 195
Mapping the social landscape that opened up out of "Like

a Rolling Stone," "Tangled Up in Blue" is shapely, a pica-
resque with a cute tagline for every verse, our hero pulling
out his trusty harmonica, "headin' for another joint"-and in
the end the landscape disappears like smoke, the song leav-
ing the listener no sense that he or she has been anywhere at
all. "Idiot Wind" is all chaos; the emotional depth "Tangled
Up in Blue" skips over is very nearly all it has. There is too
much happening, too much violence, too much hate, too
much fear; as the people in the song tear by you barely catch
their shouts. The song is sprawling, ragged, running on
empty-but as with the hard, naked organ sound, the story
the song tells has been running on empty for years. "Idiot
Wind" has no ending, no beginning; it is a single damn that
will last for the rest of the singer's life. Finally the two songs
are no more than pieces torn from a greater body, echoes of a
song that can seem to swallow up whatever presumes to
speak its language.
There are songs that truly take place in the country "Like
a Rolling Stone" opens up-that follow the trail left by the
way of life the song calls for, that it demands, the cutting of
all ties, the refusal of all comforts, even your own name. One
is Dylan's "Highlands," from 1997, a song much longer than
"Like a Rolling Stone"; the other is the Pet Shop Boys' 1993
version of the Village People's 1979 "Go West."
The Village People were pure kitsch. They performed as
a catalogue of gay fetishes, with the singers costumed as
196 Greil Marcus
policeman, construction worker, cowboy, biker, GI, and

Indian chief. For a few months they were huge-a gross
parody of every homophobic fantasy about homosexuals
having a good time, which is to say a spectacle of gay cul-
ture even a homophobe could love. More than a quarter
century after it was a top ten hit crowds in ballparks shout
out the chorus of "YM.C.A.," the group's biggest hit, as if it
were no more threatening than "Take Me Out to the Ball
Game." In t 979, as with the Summer of Love in t 967, peo-
ple who never felt at home in their own home towns were
streaming to the wooden houses and cramped streets of San
Francisco's Castro District, the gay neighborhood with its
own unofficial gay mayor, Supervisor Harvey Milk. It didn't
matter that, along with Mayor George Moscone, Milk had
been shot to death by a homophobic fellow supervisor the
year before "Go West" hit the charts i this was pop, which
made its own time. "Go West" was Scott McKenzie's "San
Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" twelve
years later, and just as cheesYi as history repeating itself,
both were versions of "Sweet Betsy from Pike," which the
forty-niners sang all the way to San Francisco more than a
century before either of them. In t 979 no one had heard of
AIDS.
The Pet Shop Boys were as London as fog and gas lights.
Neil Tennant sang, synthesizer player Chris Lowe was the
band, and from the mid- t 980s they fashioned a portrait of
modern city life, where the people in their songs could be
One More Time 197
gay or straight, young or old, questing or waiting. The

songs-the unbearably lovely "Rent," a tune about a kept boy
that any number of women found themselves singing under
their breath as they said yes to the men who paid for their
drinks and their dinners; the reserved but blissful "I Wouldn't
Normally Do this Kind of Thing"; the glorious "What Have I
Done to Deserve This?" with Dusty Springfield; their ethe-
real cover of the Elvis heartbreaker "Always on My Mind"-
were subtle, nuances within nuances, sometimes so delicate it
seemed as if one wrong inflection might crack a tune in half.
"Go West" was not delicate, and by the time the Pet Shop
Boys took it up it had already broken. Even more than
Greenwich Village, the place that impresario Jacques Morali,
who died of AIDS in 1991, named the Village People for, in
1993 the Castro was a haunted house, a neighborhood of
funerals and walking dead. As a friend put it the year before
he died, it was a place where people waited "for their number
to come up."
This was the voice the Pet Shop Boys put into "Go West"
in 1993. There was the sound of seagulls calling, waves
crashing on San Francisco's Ocean Beach, and then a sixteen-
voice male choir chanting like the Red Army Chorus, loud
and manly and indomitable. In his thin, nearly apologetic
voice, the voice of someone who has never completely
believed that he deserves to be happy, Neil Tennant fol-
lowed. "TOGETHER," announced the choir. "We will go our
way," Tennant answered.
198 Greil Marcus
TOGETHER we will fly so high

TOGETHER tell all our friends good-bye
TOGETHER we will start life new
TOGETHER this is what we'll do
"GO WEST," sang the chorus. "This is our destiny," Ten-

nant sang, the enormous idea small but undeniable in his
mouth. Flags unfurled; the wind blew them straight. The
sound was like the sun, the disco beat stirring, the drum
machine a twentieth-century Yankee Doodle. The song gath-
ered the whole of the American story to itself, claimed it as
its own, and said that it would never end. "There where the
air is free," sang Tennant, "we'll be"-"WE'LL BE," answered
the choir-"what we want to be." "AHHH AHHH AHHHH,"
sang the chorus, rising on its own air. "Now," Tennant sang,
following in the footsteps of millions, from Sir Walter
Raleigh to Daniel Boone, Calamity Jane to Long Island-born
Harvey Milk himself, "if we make our stand, we'll find"-
"WE'LL FIND"-"our promised land."
And then the song took off, over mountains, through
valleys, across rivers, across oceans, each line more expan-
sive, more triumphant, heroic, and modest than the last, for
the singers were claiming no more than what anyone else
could take as a birthright. As the choir thundered again and
again, with Tennant oddly taking its place and the choir
his-
One More Time 199
Go west IN THE OPEN AIR

Go west BABY YOU AND ME
Go west THIS IS OUR DESTINY!
-you rose to the story as you listened, eager to join it, even
if, then, if not before, you realized that the massed voice of
the choir stood for all the voices of the dead, and Tennant,
thirty-nine in 1993, was the voice of an adventure that had
come to an end before he was ready to take part. As you lis-
ten, you hear history tearing the song to pieces-but the
song will not surrender its body. At five minutes it seems to
go on forever, and you want it to. You can't play it once.
Dylan's "Highlands," as it closed Time Out of Mind in
1997-the album was a Western, really, made of ghost towns
and bad weather, as complete and uncompromised a piece of
American art as Philip Roth's 1997-2000 trilogy of American
Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain-was six-
teen minutes long. Depending on your mood, or Dylan's per-
formance-on stage, this first-person tale of a man in his
fifties or sixties leaving his house and going for a walk, speak-
ing only to a waitress, watching the people around him, feel-
ing used up, dead, forgotten by whoever might remember
him and cursed by the fact that he can still remember him-
self, could be sly, withdrawn, teasing, an endless joke or a
digressive suicide note-"Highlands" can feel as if it could fill
up the whole day, as the adventures the man recounts have
200 Greil Marcus
filled his, or begin and end in the time it takes to walk around
the block. The singer is in no hurry. He looks at the people
passing him by; they don't look at him. He wonders if he
ever belonged anywhere; he doesn't care if he did or not. No
one kicks him into the gutter; if anyone did, he'd get up and
brush himself off. Vehemence rises out of him like smoke; he
lets it go into the air, and watches as it does.
Here, in a song that begins with a poem by Robert Burns,
itself a recasting of a Scots folk song, the line that "Like a
Rolling Stone" drew can no longer be seen. It's there, the
singer may even know precisely where it is, but no one else
does, and no one else wants to know. The country that song
opened up was named Highway 61 in 1965; now it is called
the Highlands. To find yourself riding out of "Like a Rolling
Stone" onto Highway 61 was to feel as the song said you
should feel, without a home; "Highlands" is about a mythical
place where you will feel absolutely at home, and it tells the
tale "Like a Rolling Stone" couldn't tell, and that Highway 61
Revisited hid in its corners: you can be at home only in your
idea of where you are from, whether that idea is ruled by the
hypocrisies described in "With God on Our Side" or the lin-
gering sense that, perhaps, God is. So Dylan's highlands, like
his fellow Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald's old American
republic, recede as they are pursued, and thus they stay in the
air as an inviolable image of the good-an image, the singer
says as he walks through a city where he can barely bring
himself to talk and where almost no one hears him if he does,
One More Time 201
that he can bring down into his heart if he must. If he does

that, though, it will no longer hang in the air, as a picture of
the world as it ought to be, so he leaves it there.
The unmapped country prophesied in "Like a Rolling
Stone" is still there too, hanging in the air as a territory of
danger and flight, abandonment and discovery, truth and lie,
but as "Highlands" plays, there is the sense that no one has
been there for years. The singer has long since traversed that
country; he knows his way around. He wouldn't mind com-
pany, but he can do without it. Every once in a while he
hears his old song on the radio, and the country is new again;
that will have to do.
Epilogue
15 June 1965, Studio A,

Columbia Records, New York City
With Michael Bloomfield, guitar, Frank Owens, organ, Joe

Macho, Jr., bass, Bobby Gregg, drums, and AI Gorgoni, gui-
tar, Bob Dylan has recorded nine takes of "Phantom Engi-
neer" and six takes of "Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence."
Take 1-1.11
"Let's roll, Larry-there's no-ah, I better slate it," Tom Wil-
son says. "Uh, CO 86446. 'Like a Rolling Stone'-one." Dylan
tests a note on harmonica. Bloomfield counts off: "One two,
one two three"-and Bobby Gregg hits the snare drum,
lightly. They enter the song very slowly, all covered by a
With Tom Wilson
Epilogue 205
bleating harmonica, which drifts into a long lament-close

to the solos Dylan would play in 1966 on "Sad-Eyed Lady of
the Lowlands" on Blonde on Blonde-as the band drops into the
theme.
Dylan: "It got lost, man. It didn't get lost?" Sounding
eager, upbeat: "It did get lost. Try it again." He blows his har-
monica. Bloomfield begins to run down the song: ''Two bars
and an E bar B flat minor-"
Take 2 a-c-3.01
"-there's two bars ... Hey, Bob, is that like"-then Dylan,
with his characteristic percussive style, is demonstrating on
the piano, banging a stately, somewhat martial theme as
Bloomfield comes in with high notes, working out the struc-
ture of the song, trying to lift it up. Bloomfield: "OK, it's two
bars of E flat minor, one bar E flat minor suspended, E flat
minor seven on the next one, four bars in the"-and he's
drowned out by a big, melodramatic Hammond sound from
Owens, like the accompaniment to a 1940s radio play: "Who
knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow
knows I" "Hey," Bloomfield says. "Hold it, fellas: the four bars
before C, E flat minor suspended fourth, E flat minor seven,
then, one bar of A flat suspension, and then A flat ... alright?
So it should sound like"-and the theme is banged out again.
Dylan comes in with a wavering harmonica; Bloomfield fol-
lows. "Four bars, before C, is this"-there's the piano, then
206 Epilogue
the organ, terribly churchy, all wrong. Bloomfield is more
businesslike: "E flat minor suspended fourth-E flat minor
without the seventh, E flat minor suspended," and the group
continues to work out the theme on piano, organ, guitar. "A
flat suspended-no, you got something else in there ... that's
not it, that's not right." Bloomfield plays a rolling chord.
"That's right ... So what are C-Ietter B now has one two
three four, five six seven eight-twelve bars, and then a B.
Eight bars in A, twelve bars in B, ten bars in C-"
"That's right," Dylan says, as if it's not news to him.
Bloomfield laughs, as if to say it might have been easier if
Dylan had been willing to explain this in the first place.
Dylan: "Slowly, now, a little bit slower and softer." Bloom-
field: "Rolling?" Another voice: "80646, or whatever the heck
it is." Wilson: "We were rolling all the time." Bloomfield:
"One two three, two-" The piano and harmonica play: "Too
fast," someone says. "Yeah, OK," Dylan says.
Take 3-1.46
Bloomfield, in a loud, commanding voice: "One two three,
two two"-and there's a big sound, again a very mournful
harmonica. With many sour notes, Bloomfield begins to find
a tune. The organ wrecks whatever is happening; it's over-
broad, and playing in an aggressive, destructively simplistic
manner. Then Bloomfield almost locks into the theme.
"What are you doing?" someone says. There is confusion.
Epilogue 207
A lot of people are talking at once. "This time," Bloomfield

says, the kindergarten teacher growing impatient, because
school was over twenty minutes ago and no one has come to
pick up their kids, "you only played six bars of C" "I want to
hear it through the system speakers," Dylan says. "I'll sing the
words." In the background: "That part doesn't fit, the building
part doesn't-" "Hey," Bloomfield says, "you know what, if I
play it it'd be a lot easier, man, and there'll be just one of us,
instead of the changes, because otherwise we're all gonna-"
Dylan, impatient in turn: "OK, let's go-no," he says to
Bloomfield, "he KNOWS IT, man, he knows it." "Well, I keep
hearing, suspension," Bloomfield says. Dylan clears his throat
twice, as if to shut him up. He hits a note on his harmonica.
"Go ahead," he says. "Four," says Wilson.
Take 4-2.20
Bloomfield: "One two three, two two_If Dylan goes immedi-
ately into the first verse. His voice is one drawn-out ribbit.
The piano bangs, and Dylan adds a squeaking harmonica. A
bass appears and drops out. The organ squeaks, but the
singing squeaks the most. Dylan reaches the end of the verse,
and hangs onto the last word: "Your next meeeaaalll ... " He
reaches the chorus.
This is the take that appeared on Dylan's the bootleg series,
volumes 1-3 [rare and unreleased], in 1991. There it sounds pitiful,
but in James Marsh's film Highway 61 Revisited, where it is used
208 Epilogue
to orchestrate footage signifying Dylan's arrival in New York,

it sheds its skin and emerges as a folk song, a field recording;
it could be the scratchy wire recording behind Ben Shahn's
1935 Farm Security Administration photo Doped Singer, 'Love
oh, love, oh keerless love,' Scotts Run, West Virginia-except that in
Shahn's portrait, the doped singer, sitting in a clearing in a
town that was known to the FSA crew as the poorest place in
the United States, and thus a gold mine, is movie-star hand-
some. Maybe he's a plant? But as Marsh tracks a car crossing a
bridge into nighttime Manhattan, the feeling is that Dylan's
sound in this fragment is from the deepest backwoods-and
also a cry of anguish with nobody listening but the song
itself, a stab in the dark, a hand grasping the door jamb: Don't
shut it in my face!
Beginning with a terribly clunky "You used to make fun
about"-something no one would ever say-on the way to
"Everybody that was hanging out," Dylan jumps the words:
the "Now" for "Now you don't" is soulful, suffused with sor-
row. "How does it feel? How does it feel? To be out on your
own-so alone," he says, the last two words wistful, regretful:
It didnt have to be this way. "Like a rolling stone." There is a har-
monica solo.
"The voice is gone, man," Dylan says. "You want to try it
again? You want to try it again?" Bloomfield: "That's a vamp
until ready. It's a one-four-to-five, like I said. And then we'll
keep doin' that, until he comes back on letter A." "What
about that part, Bob," someone says, "that holding-out part?"
Epilogue 209
"Oh, yeah!" Dylan says, as if he just woke up for the third

time in the last twenty seconds. "That's, that's after I say
'rolling stone.' And we're back up to speed then-and when
the next verse comes in, it just hangs on it, see, the harp will
just play-"
Bloomfield hits a count of the theme, harshly. Dylan: "You
want to try it? One verse?" Bloomfield: "You're not going to
hang this one this time-" Dylan: "OK, play it just a little
faster-" Bloomfield: "Softly, just a little faster." Dylan: "Just a
little bit." Bloomfield: "Are we rolling?" "Yeah, we're continu-
ally rolling," Wilson says. Bloomfield plays pretty notes,
shaping the theme-and for the first time you hear the hint
of a song, of something extraordinary.
Take 4 a-.39
Bloomfield finds a fairy tale sound. A second guitar is tuned\
high. The harmonica comes in. Bloomfield: "You're not all
playing the suspension at the same place." Dylan: "You want
to try it?"
Take 5 a-b-3.37
Wilson: "OK, rolling five." Bloomfield counts off: "Uh-one"-
he goes into handclaps-"uh-one, uh-one-two-three-four."
There are very hesitant drums, playing a clickety-clack beat.
"Once upon," Dylan tries to begin: "No, go ahead. I just
210 Epilogue
played the introduction, man, just those two things." "Is that
too fast?" "No, that's fine." Bloomfield claps again: "One two
three two, three two three four."
They start again with the harmonica introduction, with
the words unsteady. But as Dylan nears the end of the first
verse his voice fills out, and you can hear his wish for the
chorus. Nothing is rushed, but there is pressure building.
Dylan reaches the chorus and drives it hard; it draws him in.
At this point, "How does it feel?" is very nearly the whole
song. "Well!" Dylan says with satisfaction, precisely in time,
swinging the word. "Was that any good, or what?" someone
asks. Dylan is enthusiastic: "Yeah, yeah."
"Well, that's the format," Bloomfield says. "And when he
does the second verse, he stays on that A suspended"-there's
a demonstration on piano-"for the second time. I don't
know what happens after that-you're playing the suspended,
right?" There is a lighter, higher theme on the piano. "That's
how it's supposed to be," someone says. Bloomfield plays the
theme with confidence. There is a lot of cross-talk. "We done
for the day?" someone asks.
"Uh, Frank," someone says, "would you give me a form,
please?" "Hey, can we hear anything we did today, man?"
Dylan asks, realizing they are getting nowhere. "Yeah," Wil-
son says. Dylan: "Take of, uh, 'Phantom Engineer'?" "Yeah,
OK," Wilson says. "Uh, Larry? Let me have, uh, 'Phantom
Engineer,' this'll be, take-" The tape is turned off and soon
enough everyone is gone.
Epilogue 211
16 June 1965
AI Kooper is at the organ; Paul Griffin is at the piano; Bruce

Langhorne is playing tambourine. AI Gorgoni and Frank
Owens are not present.
Rehearsal take 1-1.53

Dylan leads the group into the song with a strong, strummed
theme on his electric rhythm guitar. Paul Griffin has a loose,
free bounce on the piano; Kooper immediately has a high, clear
tone. Dylan stops it: "Hey, man, you know, I can't, I mean, I'm
just me, you know. I can't, really, man, I'm just playing the song. I
know-I don't want to scream it, that's all I know-" He takes
up the theme again; Bloomfield and Gregg come in. The feeling
is right all around; a rich ensemble is coming together.
Hoarsely, Dylan starts the second verse-"Never turned
around to see the frowns"-and you can feel Bloomfield find-
ing his groove. "You never understood that it ain't no
good"-and it breaks off, just when it was getting exciting.
From the control booth: "Bob, just you alone, so you can hear
what your guitar sounds like, on this amplifier. Only you,
please, for a minute." Dylan plays the lead-in, again, the
rhythm behind "Once upon a time," a small, twirling dance
around something that is yet to appear, and you begin to
hear how the whole song is structured around those four
words, that idea: how the purpose of the song is to make a
212 Epilogue
stage for them. 'That's enough," says the voice from the
booth. "We can play it back for you."
Rehearsal take 2-3.03

"Let's do it, man," Dylan says. "Where's Gregg?" says Wilson.
"Let's just do one verse, man"-and Dylan again leads on gui-
tar. The tambourine is the first instrument to come in behind
him, then a deep, resonant bass, then Bloomfield's guitar,
then the organ. There is a lot of space in the sound; it hasn't
cohered, and they are not gathering around the singer.
Bloomfield is just fingering; there is no attack.
But with "You used to laugh about," both Bloomfield and
Kooper step forward, as if recognizing their place in the song.
With Dylan coming down on "... mmmmeeeaaalll," Bloomfield
begins to press, to take off. The moment is immediately lost,
and Dylan all but enters the chorus by himself:
How does it feel?

How does it feel?
To be on your own
-and here groaning, as if each word is a burden-
With no direction home

Epilogue 213
Dylan tries to bridge the gap into the next verse on his
harmonica, but what's left of the sound breaks into parts.
They stop. Dylan looks for the theme again on his guitar; he
and no one else is finding the melody, the point of view, the
structure of the song.
Take 1-3.10
Wilson is very laconic: 1I0K, Bob, we got everybody here, let's
do one, and then I'll play it back to you, you can pick it
apartll-and then he sees Kooper at the organ. IIWhat are you
dOing there?1I he says with evident amusement. Kooper breaks
out laughing. IIHah,1I Wilson says. Then he too is laughing:
1I0h oh oh-kayyyy, stand by. This is CO 86446, 'like a
Rolling Stone,' uh, remake, take one. 1I IIWait a second, man,lI
1I
someone says. liThe organ player hasn't found his headset.
lIyou gotta watch, Tom,1I Dylan says. IIHold tape,1I Wilson says.
There's a count-off, the snare shot and the kick drum
making a single noise-and everything flops as it begins, the
piano leading but nobody following. Then immediately
Kooper picks up the slack, with a distinctive part, and the
others playoff of his confidence-or his brazenness. But the
vocal is drifting, with Dylan searching for the right
emphases: lIyou used to!1I Bloomfield begins to find his foot-
ing-and you can hear how Kooper holds back as he does
so. Dylan bears down: IINow you don't talk so loudll-and when
he reaches IImmmeeeaaalll,1I that word now plainly the hinge of
214 Epilogue
the song, the magic word that will open its door, Bloomfield
catches the rising spirit that will take the verse into the cho-
rus, that thrilling spring! and then an upsurge, an exhalation,
after the first "How does it feel":
When you're on your own

Without a home
-with Dylan singing that line as if he's completely surprised

by it, as if he's never heard it before-
But the drumming is too strong, too loud, and the beat is
too crude-fit for a parade. Gregg is taking too much of the
rhythm for himself, damaging any sense of a common sound.
Kooper improvises on a chorus, but without focus, and he
drifts away, toward a reverie. Dylan breaks it off: "Naw, we
gotta work that part out." "You said once," a voice says, "but
you did it twice." "1 did it," Dylan says, "but I finished it once,
don't you see?" "No." "Like a rolling stooooonnnnne," he says,
demonstrating on guitar, hitting the strings hard, the theme
echoing. "Hold it out," says the voice, "go to the next verse."
"No, no, no," Dylan says, "here's what I mean"-and again he
sets about showing the others what the song is, how they will
get from the verse to the chorus, and then he loses focus.
Epilogue 215
"Hold tape," Wilson says. "Even if we screw it up," Dylan

says, a new command in his voice, "we keep going." "OK,"
Wilson says.
Take 2-.30
There's a bright introduction, but the piano slips, and after
"Once upon a time" everything is confused.
Take 3-.19
They have moved on without a break, and in these few sec-
onds a lot happens. With the count-off-"One two, one two
three"-Gregg hits his snare and kick drum hard, a huge
sound, the big bang, and it's the first true moment of realizing
the song, of setting whatever it is they're doing apart from
whatever else they've done. The musicians, especially Bloom-
field, Griffin, and Kooper, come in smoothly, as if they know
where they're going. There is a strong and single sound; they
try to get a purchase on the song, to give it definition, a real
beginning so it can reach its end-but they break off before
Dylan even begins to sing.
Take 4-6.34
"Four," Wilson says. As it happens, this will be the master
take, and the only time the song is found.
2:16 Epilogue
"One two, one two three": the bang that sets it off is not
quite as big as in the take just before, but it somehow makes
more space for itself, pushes the others away for the fraction
of a second necessary to mark the act. Gregg, too, has found
the song. He has a strategy, creating humps in the verses and
then carrying everyone over them.
As big as the drums are, Griffin plays with light hands;
you can imagine his keys loosening. At the very start, piano
and bass seem the bedrock-but so much is happening, and
with such gravity, you cannot as a listener stay in one place.
You may have heard this performance thousands of times, but
here, as it takes shape, the fact that it does take shape doesn't
seem quite real. The false starts have created a sense that
there can be no finished version, and even if you know this is
where it happens, as with all the takes before it you are wait-
ing for it to stop short.
Bloomfield is playing with finesse, passion, and most of all
modesty. He has a sense of what to leave out, of when to play
and when not to. He waits for his moments, and then he leaps.
And this is the only take where, for him, everything is clear.
There is a moment, just after the first "How does it feel?"
when Kooper's organ, Bloomfield's guitar, and Gregg's cym-
bals come together in a single waterspout, and you can feel
the song running under its own power. You wonder: what are
the musicians thinking, as this astonishing story, told with
such a sensation of daring and jeopardy, unfolds in front of
them for the first time?
First steps, first ensemble: from left to right, Bobby Gregg, unidentified
guitarist, Al Gorgoni, Michael Bloomfield, Frank Owens, Joe Macho, Jr.,
Tom Wilson (behind glass), Bob Dylan
218 Epilogue
Kooper holds down a stop at the fade, long after every-
one else has quit playing. "Like wild thing, baby," someone
says, beside himself. "That sounds good to me," Wilson says,
happiness aII over his voice.
Unslated take-l.OO
Wilson, confident: "AIl quiet, go, Bobby." Dylan leads with a
harsh guitar sound. "Ready?" he says. "Not ready." "When the
red light comes on." Dylan goes back to his guitar: "No good,
huh?" "Keep going," someone says. "Play that back, Pete,
please," says someone else.
Take 5-.30
"Hold it just a sec," Wilson says. "OK. RoIling five." Griffin
kicks the song off very fast i Dylan stops him. 'That's not it-
how do we do it?" "That's not how you do it," someone says.
"WeII," Dylan says, "how do we do it, man, how do we start it
out?" He goes back to the guitar and plays the theme slowly.
Take 6 a-b-2.06
"Six roIl," Wilson says, but the take cuts off as soon as the
stick hits the snare. "Hold," Wilson says. "Hold." Dylan fin-
gers his guitar, while Bruce Langhorne tries to make a beat on
tambourine. Wilson: "You ready, Pete?" "Wait a second,"
Epilogue 219
Dylan says. "Play one verse, do one verse first, without

recording." "OK, rolling six," Wilson says.
"Ah, no," Dylan says with disgust, as if this is the stupidest
thing he's ever heard. "Don't roll six." He begins the song on
guitar. "We're gonna have to do one verse."
They go back in. This time there is no snare; the piano
keys the fanfare. Dylan begins to sing, but the beat is slip-
ping. The drum beats stand apart from each other, and the
whole sound begins to separate into its elements. Bloomfield
steps up, with a luminous sound. The singing is fractured,
fading, as if Dylan has lost interest, but then he dives for the
chorus-and loses it. "Oh, let's cut it ... it's six minutes long,
man," he says, as if someone hasn't gotten the joke. "Only
you with the guitar, man," Wilson says.
Take 6 c-.36
"Rolling six," Wilson says. Again Dylan's guitar is harsh; the
drums clatter. Dylan stops after "dime." "Take it again, let's
take it again," he says. "Is my guitar too loud?"
Take 8 (there is no seven)-4.28

"Stand by, rolling eight," Wilson says. "Doesn't feel good?"
says a voice from the booth. "Yeah, it feels alright now,"
Dylan says. There's a count: "One two-four five seven," and
then the snare. Dylan leads on harmonica, the bass is
220 Epilogue
strong-and the drums have turned martial and busy, under-
mining the song from the start. It's a mess, but it's alive, scat-
tershot, everyone reaching in a different direction. The more
oppressively Gregg plays, Griffin plays more foolishly.
"WHOOAA-you've gone to the finest schools," Dylan
shouts, riding the bucking line. The second verse is crack-
ling, Dylan singing like William and Versey Smith chanting
their version of "The Titanic" on the street in Chicago in
1927 and everyone agreeing that, yes, it sure was sad when
that great ship went down, but everyone grinning, too,
because it was such a great ship, and it went down, and they
didn't. "Whooaa-you never turned around, to watch"-
Dylan is flying solo. His rhythm guitar is pushing; Bloomfield
is all but silent. Then Bloomfield picks up a theme from the
piano-he has lost his own hold on the song. Budda bump,
budda bump, say the drums, and by now that's all they say. The
take breaks off two words into the last verse. "My guitar's too
loud?"
Take 9-.20
There's a count, a few notes-Wilson whistles it dead.
Take 10-.24
Wilson, sounding weary: ''Ten.'' Again a count, notes, whistle.
"There's something wrong," he says. "Timewise."
Epilogue 221
Take 11-6.02
Dylan, again with disgust: "Say something's wrong time-"
"Eleven," Wilson says.
As the song starts, Dylan already seems tired of it, and the
first line is sing-songy. Everything out of his mouth is forced,
each word emptying itself of emotion as it passes. Bloomfield
is there only for the lead-ins to the choruses; Kooper presses.
Dylan's singing gains force, but the timing is still off, and the
drummer is still dropping dead weight. Dylan sings more stri-
dently; he's more effective. But there is no whole-there is
barely a song. So much is missing you can think that if every-
thing hadn't come together seven takes back, they could
reach forever and miss by more every time.
They're into the fourth verse, for only the second time,
and Griffin is playing like Floyd Cramer on "Last Date." There
is banging and clashing, but the vocal is beginning to take off.
With "You've got no secrets to CONCEAL" the last word
shoots up like a balloon with its string cut, tracing a dizzying
path in the sky. "Awwwwww," Dylan lets go after the last cho-
rus, carried away, ignoring his harmonica. "Awwwwww-"
"I'm afraid I screwed up," he says. The entire take was a screw-
up, but there were moments only chaos could bring.
Take 12-.29
"Stand by," Wilson says. "OK, we're rollin' for take twelve."
Kooper plays an introduction; Wilson whistles for a stop.
222 Epilogue
Take 1 3-1.49
"Hey, AI, layoff on that intro thing there. Thirteen."
Kooper now plays very schematically, as if solving a
problem in arithmetic, and it doesn't work-and then on a
chorus he goes wild. There is a strange, mysterious underwa-
ter sound from the piano. After a verse and a chorus they
stop. "Why can't we get that right, man," Dylan says, swinging
the words more effectively than he was able to do with any-
thing in the actual take. "OK," he says wearily. "Try it again."
Take 14-.22
"Fourteen," Wilson says. The drums are off the beat; Dylan
blows the first line.
Take 15-3.18
"Fifteen," Wilson says. Kooper tries out a few lines-in an
ice-skating rink. Gregg has lost the song entirely; everything
he plays is decoration, but he is decorating something that
isn't there. Dylan's voice is full but his singing has no focus.
He rushes the chorus, even as Griffin and Bloomfield lock
into the cadence the song wants. They get the chorus. The
organ gets bigger with every line. And, in a way that pushes
him forward, scrambling his timing but allOWing him to bar-
rel through anything in his way, his words dissolving and dis-
I,-
Epilogue 223
tant spirits handing them back deformed, now Dylan is

singing off of Gregg's martial beat.
You say you never

Compromise
With the mystery tramp
Now don't you realize
He's not selling
Any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say unto him
"Unto him"? Where are we, in the Bible?
Do you
Want to make
A DEAL
And then "DEAL," like "CONCEAL" in take eleven,

shoots up, out of the room, out of the building, with a tail of
smoke, and Dylan's head seems to go with it. After "tricks for
you" they lose the beat, and they stumble out of the song.
That was the end of the session.
"I think it's one of those songs that's pretty timeless," Al

Kooper says. "The other one that comes to mind is 'Good
224 Epilogue
Vibrations.' When you hear it on the radio, it could have
come out yesterday. It's a timeless record-so is 'Heartbreak
HoteL' They're putting out something unique, that has not
been done before. And because they were recognized, it's
become ageless. Which is great. We hear music that was
done by people who died before we had a chance to pick up
on it-for instance, Robert Johnson. So you're really glad,
when you pass on, that you know people are going to hear
'Like a Rolling Stone' and 'Good Vibrations' and 'Heartbreak
Hotel,' and Robert Johnson. It's a good feeling."
No matter how timeless "Like a Rolling Stone" might turn
out to be, what happened over the two days of recording ses-
sions makes it clear that had circumstances been even slightly
different-different people present, a different mood in the
studio, different weather in the streets outSide, a different
headline in the morning paper-the song might never have
entered time at all, or interrupted it. "1 told all the musicians,
you quit playing, you're gone," Bob Johnston says of the ses-
sions that followed. "You quit playing, you're never going to
hear that song again. Dylan would start a song-they'd be a
third of the way through, and someone says, Waal, I didn't git
that. The bass stops, or the piano player. Dylan would forget
about that song and you'd never hear it again." "Like a
Rolling Stone" is a triumph of craft, inspiration, will, and
intent; regardless of all those things, it was also an accident.
Listening now, you hear most of all how much the song
resists the musicians and the singer. Except on a single take,
Epilogue 225
when they went past the song and made their performance
into an event that down the years would always begin again
from its first bar, they are so far from the song and from each
other it's easy enough to imagine Bob Dylan giving up on the
song, no doubt taking phrases here and there and putting
them into another song somewhere down the line but never
bothering with that thing called "Like a Rolling Stone" again.
Following the sessions as they happened, it can in moments
be easier to imagine that than to believe that the record was
actually made-that, circling around the song like hunters
surrounding an animal that has escaped them a dozen times,
they caught it. That is what makes an event, after all: it can
only happen once. Once it has happened, it will seem
inevitable. But all the good reasons in the world can't make it
happen.
WORKS CITED
--------------
Except when the interviewer or quoting author is mentioned in the
text, quotations are noted according to interviewee, in the order in
which his or her quotations appear in the text. Films and radio and tel-
evision programs are noted by title. Recordings by one artist or group
are listed by performer; anthologies-recordings by various artists-
are listed by title.
Bob Dylan
Referenced collections
the bootleg series, volumes 1-3 [rare & unreleased], 1961-1991 (Columbia,
1991).
The Classic Interviews, 1965-1966 (Chrome Dreams, 2003). Notes by
Derek Barker.
McGregor, Craig, ed. Bob Dylan: A Retrospective. New York: Morrow,
1972. Reissued as Bob Dylan: The Early Years-A Retrospective. New
York: Da Capo, 1990.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -----~--~-~
230 Works Cited

Recordings
"A Change Is Gonna Come" (Sam Cooke). See Apollo at 70: A Hot Night
in Harlem. NBC, 19 June 2004.
"Acne." With Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Riverside Church, New York City,
broadcast on WRVR-FM, 29 July 1961. Included on Ramblin' Jack
Elliott, The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack-Original Soundtrack (Vanguard,
2000).
"Blind Willie McTel!." Recorded 1983 with Mark Knopfler, guitar. the
bootleg series, volumes i -3.
Blonde on Blonde (Columbia, 1966). Includes "Visions of Johanna."
Blood on the Tracks (Columbia, 1975). Includes ''Tangled Up in Blue" and
"Idiot Wind."
"Blowin' in the Wind." Live performance c. 2000 included on The Best of
Bob Dylan, volume 2 (Columbia, 2000). With the tune picked out on
acoustic guitars and the verses crooned, whispered, and overstated
("How many seas must a white dove sail, before she sleeps-sleeps
in the sand"), the song is a monster of sentimentality-a sentimen-
tality directed, it seems, more toward the iconic status of the song
than the nostalgic status of its various themes. The high, straining
passion of every chorus wipes that out, then the next verse wipes
out the preceding chorus, until the song is struggling over its own
meanings, or its capacity to still generate them, and the musicians,
Dylan included, seem mostly interested in how far the melody can
take them.
Bob Dylan (Columbia, 1962). Includes "See that My Grave Is Kept
Clean" (Blind Lemon Jefferson) and "House of the Risin' Sun" (tra-
ditional). See Animals.
Bringing It All Back Home (Columbia, 1965). Includes "It's Alright, Ma
(I'm Only Bleeding)" and "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream."
"Buzz-Buzz-Buzz" (recorded by the Hollywood Flames). Dylan's 1958
home recording of the 1957 Los Angeles doo-wop hit, from tapes
Works Cited 23:1
made with his Hibbing high school friend John Bucklen, can be
heard in Tales of Rock 'N' Roll: Highway 61 Revisited (James Marsh).
See also "Hey Little Richard" in this section.
"Can't Help Falling in Love" (recorded by Elvis Presley). From Dylan

(Columbia, 1973).
"Confidential" (Sonny Knight). The 1967 version with the Band is
included on A Tree with Roots: The Genuine Basement Tape Remasters
(Wild Wolf bootleg); a superb live performance from Indianapolis,
Indiana, 10 November 1991, is on the "Alternates & Retakes" disc
of The Genuine Never Ending Tour: The Covers Collection 1988-2000 (Wild
Wolf bootleg).
"Da Do Run Run" (cover of the Crystals'''Da 000 Ron Ron"). Included
on Almost Went to See Elvis (Cool Daddy bootleg). See Crystals.
"Don't Start Me Talkin'" (Sonny Boy Williamson). The 22 March 1984
performance from The Late Show with David Letterman is on Hard to
Find: Volume 2-Extraordinary Performances 1975-95 (Columbus boot-
leg).
Early 60S Revisited (Trade Mark of Quality bootleg, 1974). Sleeve car-
toon by William G. Stout.
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (Columbia, 1963). Includes "Masters of War,"

"Blowin' in the Wind," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," and "Talking
World War III Blues."
"Handsome Molly" (traditional). Recorded at the Gaslight Cafe, New

York City, fall 1962. Included on Live 1961-2000 (SME, 2001,Japan).
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." Recorded at the Gaslight Cafe, New
232 Works Cited
York City, fall 1962. Included on Second Gaslight Tape (Wild Wolf
bootleg).
"Hey Little Richard." Dylan's 1958 home recording of his own compo-
sition, from tapes made with his Hibbing high school friend John
Bucklen, can be heard in Tales of Rock 'N' Roll: Highway 61 Revisited
Qames Marsh).
"Highlands." From Time Out of Mind (Columbia, 1997). A live version of
"Highlands," at just over eleven minutes, kicking off with drunken
howling from the crowd, was included on The Best of Bob Dylan, volume
2 (Columbia, 2000). Many other versions are available on bootlegs
or on the Internet, and each one I've heard is different from any
other-except that all are as slow as an August day in Minneapolis
and none is anything close to the sixteen minutes of the version from
Time Out of Mind, which makes that performance all the more spectral.
Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia, 1965).
"House of the Risin' Sun" (traditional). Tom Wilson's overdubbed 1965
production of the version released in 1962 on Bob Dylan was
included on Highway 61 Interactive (Columbia CD-ROM, 1995),
and has since turned up on various bootlegs. An anticipation of
soon-to-be conventional 1965-style Los Angeles folk rock-light
drums, light electric guitar-it's less rock 'n' roll than the jug-band
style versions of "Corrina, Corrina" and "Rocks and Gravel"
recorded for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan three years earlier, not to
mention the version of 'That's All Right," Elvis Presley's first single
(see The Genuine Bootleg Series Take 2, bootleg), or Dylan's own first
single, the pumped-up bluegrass stomp "Mixed Up Confusion"
(Columbia, 1962; included on Biograph, 1985).
"It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." From The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Live
1964-Concert at Philharmonic Hall (Columbia, 2004). Notes by Sean
Wilentz. The first performance of the song, released in 1965 on
Works Cited 233
Bringing It All Back Home. A remarkable contemporary version can be

found on Live at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, March 16 & 15, 2000
(Bootopia bootleg).
"Like a Rolling Stone" (Columbia, t 965). Recorded t 6 June t 965. On

the occasion of Rolling Stone magazine naming "Like a Rolling Stone"
the greatest of the "500 Greatest Songs of All orne," Shaun Consi-
dine, in t 965 the new-releases coordinator for Columbia Records,
published 'The Hit We Almost Missed" in the 3 December 2004
issue of the New York Times. He related the tale of how the six-
minute single had been dumped into the oblivion of "unassigned
release" because of objections by the sales and marketing depart-
ments-and how, one day, when the company was moving offices,
he came upon a discarded demo pressing of the recording, took it
home, played it, played it again, and then brought it down to
Arthur's, the hottest disco in town, and asked the disc jockey to play
it. "Around t t p.m., after a break, he put it on," Considine wrote.
'The effect was seismic. People jumped to their feet and took to the
floor, dancing the entire six minutes. Those who were seated
stopped talking and began to listen. 'Who is it?' the DJ yelled at
one point, running toward me. 'Bob Dylan!' I shouted back. The
name spread through the room, which only encouraged the skeptics
to insist that it be played again. Sometime past midnight, as the
grooves on the temporary dub began to wear out, the needle began
to skip." A disc jockey and a programming director from New York
Top 40 stations were present; they called Columbia and demanded
their own copies. "Staff meetings were hastily called," Considine
wrote. "The release memo came shortly thereafter."
Take 3, t 5 June t 965 (,The voice is gone") is included on the bootleg
series volumes 1-3. Incomplete versions of takes t, 3, and 5, June t 5,
and takes t, 2, 4, 6, 8, to, and t 5, June t 6, are secreted within the
234 Works Cited
various views of Columbia's bare-bones Studio A that can be found
on Highway 61 Interactive (Columbia CD-ROM, 1995). A highly
effective dramatization of the session, based on these takes, was
included on the superb BBC Radio 4 documentary, "Soul Music-
Programme 5: Like a Rolling Stone," produced by Lindsay
Leonard of BBC Birmingham, which aired 27 July 2004. Speakers
included Al Kooper, Robbie Robertson, the singer Dana Gillespie,
the choreographer Bebe Miller, the critic Michael Gray, C. P. Lee,
and myself; see also Paula Radice. On the fullness of the sound in
"Like a Rolling Stone," Al Kooper comments: "While doing
research for this project, I was sent a CD that chronicled the
entire LARS session-in-between yakking as well. I was amazed to
note that Dylan's guitar was noticeably in C tuning. I don't think I
had ever heard Bob play in C tuning before, and wondered if it
was something that Bloomfield had brought to the table-as it is
more common in blues than in folk music. The guitar is tuned to a
C chord and the low E-string is lowered down to a C. In common
open-chord tunings like G or D, both detune the E to a D, so the
C is a rarer choice-to the best of my knowledge, first employed
by Bukka White in the '30s and '40s. Because the final mix of LARS
has Bob's guitar and my organ in exactly the right place, level-
wise, it may not be apparent on the average listen, but the C tun-
ing causes a certain frequency range to be filled that would most
certainly not be if Bob was in regular tuning. And now back to our
regularly scheduled book."
The 25 July 1965 performance at the Newport Folk Festival is
included, along with "Maggie's Farm," "Phantom Engineer," "It's All
Over Now, Baby Blue," and "Mr. Tambourine Man," on numerous
bootlegs, including Live in Newport 1965 (Document, 1988); footage
of the dynamic "Maggie's Farm" performance can be seen in The
History of Rock 'n' Roll: Plugging In, directed by Susan Steinberg
Works Cited 235
(Time-life Video, 1995). A tinny, distant audience recording of

the entire Forest Hills concert, from 28 August 1965, which cap-
tures crowd action far more fully than stage action, is included on
Dylan: 1965 Revisited (Great Dane bootleg), a 14-CD set devoted to
the revival of Scholasticism. "like a Rolling Stone" was the finale,
as it was at the 3 September 1965 performance at the Hollywood
Bowl, captured in its entirety on We Had Known a Lion (Vigotone
bootleg, 1998), with notes composed of Shirley Poston's 2 Octo-
ber 1965 concert report for KRLXs The Beat. A further 1965 per-
formance of the song can be heard on Long Distance Operator
(Wanted Man bootleg), recorded at the Berkeley Community
Theatre on December 4; when Dylan sings the words "mystery
tramp" it's with a queer familiarity, as if he's referring to somebody
everyone already knows.
The ultimate, post-"Judas!" performance of "like a Rolling Stone" from
Dylan and the Hawks' May 1966 tour of Ireland and the U.K.-
from Manchester, on May 17, which is to say about a minute post-
"Judas!"-is on The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Live 1966-The 'Royal Albert
Hall' Concert (Columbia, 1998, with notes by Tony Glover), so
called because the electric half of the concert was long bootlegged
as such. The true Royal Albert Hall performance of the song, from
May 27, the last night of the tour, with Dylan's introduction of the
Hawks, can be found on The Genuine Bootleg Series Take 2 (bootleg). It
is a rendition of violence: Mickey Jones counts down on each
measure and Rick Danko thumps above it, as if the song is a boxer's
light bag; in the third verse, the force of "Ain't it hard, when you
discover that" is frightening. In the following chorus Dylan's voice
almost gets away from him, a hawk he can't control, and he comes
into the final verse tired, flagging, falling, the song now not four-
and-a-half-minutes long but four hours; by the end of the verse he's
gone over a cliff, hollering in the air on the way down.
236 Works Cited
Other striking performances of the number are from Edinburgh, May
20, on Sings the Body Electric (Parrot bootleg) and on the 8-CD set
Genuine Live 1966 (Wild Wolf bootleg), and from Liverpool (the
concert recording includes two minutes of "Crowd"), on May 14,
on Genuine Live 1966, which in its elaborate packaging features the
Columbia ad for "Like a Rolling Stone": "A 6 MINUTE SINGLE?
WHY NOT I when you have 6 minutes of BOB DYLAN." The
1966 Scandinavian-Irish-U.K. performances were filmed by D. A.
Pennebaker for Eat the Document, directed by Howard Alk and
Dylan, made for ABC television but rejected, and, until a series of
screenings at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York
and Los Angeles in 1998, complete with period TV commercials,
only rarely seen since. The songs in Eat the Document are cut up and
reassembled from several different performances, to extraordinary
effect; the theme of the film is the artist versus the crowd, and
includes Keith Butler's "He wants shooting" comment ("a North
Country fatwa," Bleddyn Butcher called it in "The Butler Did It!"
Uncut Legends #1: Dylan, 2003, 30) immediately following his
"Judasl" shout-a moment noticeably omitted from Andy Ker-
shaw's "The Ghost of Electricity," a radio documentary on the
Manchester concert. Pennebaker made his own, unfinished film of
the tour, "Something Is Happening," which has never been pub-
licly screened; there is no theme, but the songs are presented as
single bodies, most astonishingly with "Like a Rolling Stone," at
the end, with Dylan, or the dervish standing behind him, singing
through his cupped hands. ("His idea of putting on a show that
stunned people, that's what made him happy," Pennebaker said of
the tour in 1998.) More detailed comment on Dylan and the
Hawks in the U.s. and the U.K. can be found in my The Old, Weird
America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, New York (Henry
Holt, 1997, as Invisible Republic): Picador USA, 2000, in the U.K.
Works Cited 237
titled Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, London: Faber &
Faber, 1997, and in Germany titled Basement Blues: Bob Dylan und das
alte, unheimliche Amerika, Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard, 1998.
There are many post-1966 recordings of the song by Dylan on official
albums, including those drawn from the 1974 tour with the Band
and the 1995 MTV Unplugged show. The most and least memo-
rable versions I've heard, from the Warfield Theatre in San Fran-
cisco on 12 November 1980 to the all-star extravaganza on Late
Night with David Letterman on 6 February 1992 (NBC), have almost
certainly been bootlegged-everything else has been.
"Little Maggie." From Good as I Been to You (Columbia. 1992).
"Love and Theft" (Columbia, 2001).
"Masters of War." As performed during the first Iraqi-American war on

the Grammy Awards telecast, 20 February 1991, with John Jackson
and Cesar Diaz, guitars, Tony Garnier, bass, and Ian Wallace,
drums, preceded by an introduction by Jack Nicholson and fol-
lowed by an acceptance speech by Dylan. Included on You Don't
Know Me, a valuable 4-CD collection of 1962-1992 live perform-
ances (Great Dane Bootleg).
The song came back like a lion when in the fall of 2002 President
George W. Bush made plain his intent to launch a second Iraq war.
On November 11 of that year, at Madison Square Garden in New
York City, just after the mid-term congressional elections that
Bush had used the specter of war to win, and that boosted his
hand, Dylan gathered Garnier on bass fiddle and Charlie Sexton
and Larry Campbell on acoustic guitars around him in a circle, as
if they were a coven, and the curse of the song was like something
dug out of the ground. In May 2003, with the war underway, Scott
Amendola and Carla Bozulich of Berkeley put a nine-minute ver-
sion of the song on www.protest-records.com. There were
238 Works Cited
moments where the storm they made-with Eric Crystal's shred-
ding saxophone solo at its heart-made it difficult to remember
what you were listening to. They took the song's rage almost into
the realm of abstraction-until the end, when the instrumentation
dropped away, and there was nothing left but taps, silences, and a
single voice. Then in October 2004, with Bush and John Kerry
battling for Minnesota, Mark Treehouse of Minneapolis, recording
as Brother Mark and the Dylanger Four, and working with the
punk singer Curtiss A. and the hip-hop assemblage Atmosphere,
put out a ranting recital of the tune-with Attorney General John
Ashcroft, Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld in red, white, and blue on the cover.
On November 2, on election night, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with
the votes cast but the outcome of the election still unknown,
Dylan offered the song once more, dead in the middle of a war,
just days before the beginning of an offensive that Bush had put
off until his return to office was assured. At first Dylan's delivery
was clipped, the words at once rushed and stuttered; the backing
was light but doomstruck. "You put a gun in my hand/' Dylan sang
in the voice of an old frontiersman; it sounded like "You put a gun
to my head." "Woo, woo!" people chanted in the crowd. An elec-
tric guitar came down hard, then shot out into a rough, twisting
solo that never really stopped. Deep troughs opened up in Dylan's
voice; with Deadheads thrOWing hippie whoops out of the audi-
ence, he could not have been more serious. "I'll stand over your
grave 'til I'm sure that you're dead"-there was no sense that the
line had ever been sung before. Dylan's voice was shaking at the
end; nothing was held back. And none of this, really, matched
what happened at Boulder High School in Boulder, Colorado, the
very next day.
On November 3, students staged a sit-in in the school library-
because, said freshman Sara Bernstein, "Bush will directly effect
Works Cited 239
our generation's future, and we were upset that we didn't have a

choice in that." Principal Ron Cabrera refused to have the students
removed; the next morning they were still there, along with news
trucks. Democratic Congressman Mark Udall came to the school
to speak; Democratic U.S. Senator-elect Ken Salazar scheduled a
talk as well. And then the stakes were raised. Calling themselves
the Taliband, a group of students began rehearsing a version of
"Masters of War" for the school talent show scheduled for Novem-
ber 12. Other students, hearing Allyse Wojtanek-Watson singing
the last verse of the song-"And I hope that you die/ And your
death will come soon"-called a local talk radio station with the
news that students had changed the song to call for Bush's assassi-
nation. The arrival of the Secret Service made the national news;
agents left with a copy of the lyrics. "If you think it has to do with
Bush," Wojtanek-Watson said, "that's because you're drawing your
own conclusions." 'There's nothing in there about killing Bush,"
band leader Forest Engstrom said. The group changed its name-
to Coalition of the Willing. Parents and radio hosts demanded
that the students be kept out of the show.
They played. "A punk rendition," Brittany Anas wrote in the Daily
Camera on November 13. "Still sweaty from performing, Allyse
Wojtanek received congratulations from her friends in the lobby
at Boulder High School. Perspiration had run Allyse's thick black
eyeliner into her bright green eye shadow after she poured her
emotions and voice in the lyrics of a song that has erupted into
controversy." '''We were misunderstood,' Allyse said after the show
... 'People thought we were like communists, and that was not it
at all. We have a peaceful message.'" "We think that the war we are
involved in is wrong, and that people need to come to their
senses," band member Brian Martens told Anas. 'That's what our
music is about." "The singer was drowned out by the guitar," Bern-
stein said. "You could hear 'war' and 'I hope that you die.' The audi-
240 Works Cited
ence cheered really loud-they liked it." Anas ended her story
with an open door: "Analise Nelson, a junior at Boulder High,
joked that students at her school want fake IDs so they can vote.
Analise's band, Down with Rhonda, a group of six students that
got together almost a year ago, also romped around on the stage
performing at the talent show. 'I think a lot of kids here are pas-
sionate-about music, art, democracy. We've got passion.'"
"New Minglewood Blues" (Noah Lewis). A startling 24 June 1996 per-

formance from Differdange, Luxembourg, can be found on I've Got
a Song to Sing: A Compilation of Rare Performances in 1996 (no label
bootleg).
"No Money Down" (Chuck Berry). The encore performance on the
illiterately credited Dylan bootleg Where the Corn Grows Tall-Mer-
riville Pavalion, Merriville, Indiana 10/19/81 (Mystic). Larry Keegan's
hipster vocal makes Berry's tale of buying a Cadillac feel like a
dope deal; the band falls easily into a slow, heavy Chicago blues
vamp, with dirty guitar chords hanging in the air here and there;
Dylan's garage saxophone pushes the tune from the start, then
slides down the lines of the rhythm with ease.
"No More Auction Block" (aka "Many Thousands Gone," traditional).
Recorded at the Gaslight Cafe, New York City, fall 1962. the bootleg
series, volumes 1-3.
"Phantom Engineer." This frantic early version of the Highway 61 Revisited

number "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" (one take
was mistakenly included on some copies of the album) can be found
on Dimestore Medicine Ooker bootleg), the 3-CD Church with No
Upstairs: Studio Outtakes 1965/1966 (Hanging Dog bootleg), and, from
25 July 1965, on Livein Newport 1965 (Document bootleg, 1988).
"Positively 4th Street" (Columbia, 1965).
Works Cited 241
"Seems Like a Freeze-Out." Early versions of "Visions of Johanna,"

from Blonde on Blonde-a loose, bluesy take from 30 November
1965, and a much more stately performance from 21 January 1966,
both probably cut with the Hawks (Bobby Gregg replacing Levon
Helm)-are collected on various bootlegs, notably Thin Wild Mer-
cury Music (Spank) and, with thinner sound, Church with No Upstairs:
Studio Outtakes 1965/1966. Live solo versions of "Visions of Johanna"
are on Biograph (Columbia, 1985),26 May 1966, and The Bootleg
Series Vol. 4: Live 1966-The 'Royal Albert Hall' Concert (Columbia,
1998).
"Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence." This early, big-beat, outrageously
swinging version of the Highway 61 Revisited number "Just Like
Tom Thumb's Blues" (there's nothing more rhythmically perfect in
Dylan's career than the way he says "Alright" at the end of a
phrase), recorded just before Dylan's first attempts at "Like a
Rolling Stone," can be found on the bootleg series, volumes 1-3, with
an alternate take on Church with No Upstairs: Studio Outtakes
1965/1966.
"Subterranean Homesick Blues" (Columbia, 1965).
TIme Out of Mind (Columbia, 1997). An Australian version of the album,

widely available in the u.S. and the U.K., adds seven live bootleg-
style "field recordings" (i.e., recordings with audience response, if
not recorded in the audience), including three numbers from TIme
Out of Mind. Not Standing in the Doorway with the Dirt Road Blues (Just
Yet) (Wild Wolf bootleg, 1999) collected live versions of nine
songs from Time Out of Mind, including an inflamed "'Til I Fell in
Love with You."
The Times They Are A-Changin' (Columbia, 1963). Includes "The Lone-
some Death of Hattie Carroll." William Zantzinger, her killer, went
on to live a notorious life as a criminal Maryland landlord, repeat-
edly sued and even jailed for refusing to maintain houses rented to
242 Works Cited
African-Americans at inflated prices or collecting rent on properties
he did not own, with every news story framing his offenses with
the tale Dylan had told years before. "He's a no-account son of a
bitch," Zantzinger said of Dylan in the late 1990s. "He's just like a
scum of a bag of the earth." Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The
Life of Bob Dylan. New York: Grove Press, 2001. 142.
"With God on Our Side." From The TImes They Are A-Changin' (Colum-
bia, 1963). The version from Dylan's MTV Unplugged (Columbia,
1995), which was as much a recasting of Dylan's black-and-white
polka dot shirt as any song, was the strongest piece in the set.
Citations
"What happens if they have to cut a song in half." Press conference,
San Francisco, 3 December 1965. The Classic Interviews, 1965-1966.
"Eight of the Top Ten." Anthony Scaduto, Bob Dylan. New York: Gros-
set and Dunlap, 1971.175.
"I've never written." See Hentoff. In McGregor, 134.
"I'll bet Tony Bennett." See Hentoff. In McGregor, 135.
"1 had never thought" and "Telling someone something." Jules Siegel.
"Well, What Have We Here?" Saturday Evening Post, 30 July 1966.
In McGregor, 158.
"All I know." From Pat Thomas, "Is It Rolling, Bob?" the definitive work
on producer Bob Johnston's work with Dylan. Unpublished, 2001.
Courtesy Pat Thomas.
"Desolation Row" as Dylan's "America the Beautiful." See Hentoff. In
McGregor, 145.
"You can't tell." Press conference, San Francisco, 3 December 1965. The
Classic Interviews, 1965-1966.
Works Cited 243
Akers to Zappa
Akers, Garfield. "Cottonfield Blues Part I and Part II" (Vocalion, 1929).
Collected on Son House and the Great Delta Blues Singers: Complete
Recorded Works in Chronological Order, 1928-1930 (Document, 1990).
In 1962 "Cotton field Blues" could be found along with House's
"My Black Mama" on Really! The Country Blues (Origin Jazz Library).
Animals. "House of the Rising Sun" (MGM, 1964). The full-length
version, shaped by organist Alan Price, is on The Best of the Animals
(ABKCO, 1987), which also features "I'm Crying" and the hilari-
ous "Story of Bo Diddley," and on Retrospective (ABKCO, 2004),
with bottomless sound and later LSD epics. Price, who appears in
Don't Look Back, said that the Animals' versions of both "House of
the Rising Sun" and "Baby Let Me Take You Home" (a rewrite of
"Baby Let Me Follow You Down") came from Dylan's first album;
Animals' singer Eric Burdon told Joan Baez it came from her first
album. In any case, the transfer, if that is what it is, of the song
from Dylan to the Animals and, in Al Kooper's organ playing,
back to Dylan for "Like a Rolling Stone," is folk music as the pop
process, or pop music as the folk process, if anything is.
Articolo 31. "Come una Pietra Scalciata." From Nessuno (Ricordi/BMG,
1998). See Masked and Anonymous: Music from the Motion Picture. Hav-
ing named their group for the article in the Irish constitution guar-
anteeing freedom of the press, J. Ax and DJ Jad of Milan recorded
Nessuno ("Nobody"), their fourth album, in New York. Complete
Italian lyrics can be found at www.angolotesti.itIAitestLcanzonL
articolo_31_32/testo_canzone_come_una_pietra_scalciata_
1918.html
Baez, Joan. "John Riley," from Joan Baez (Vanguard, 1960). A more
complete alternate take is included on the 2001 Vanguard reissue.
244 Works Cited
Belzer, Richard. See Terry Gross.
Bennett, Will. "Railroad Bill" (Vocalion, 1929). On the anthology The
Early Blues Roots of Bob Dylan (Catfish, 2000).
Berry, Chuck. The Autobiography. New York: Crown, 1987. 219.
---"Johnny B. Goode" (Chess, 1958).
Black Labels. "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35." From Duluth Does Dylan
(Spinout, 2001).
Bloomfield, Michael. "Dylan Goes Electric." In The Sixties, ed. Lynda
Rosen Obst. New York: Rolling Stone/Random House, 1977. "I
was cheering" (150); "I was wearing" (150); "To the folk commu-
nity" (151); "In penance" (151).
---"Impressions of Bob Dylan." Hit Parader, June 1968. "It's such an
old story" (26); credited quotations (24, 26). Courtesy B. George
and the ARChive of Contemporary Music.
---"Michael Bloomfield: The Rolling Stone Interview" Oann Wen-
ner). Rolling Stone, 6 April 1968. Collected in The Rolling Stone Inter-
views. New York: Pocket Books, 1971. "I play sweet blues" (46, re
1971); "You had to be as good" (56); "I bought a Fender" (63).
---"You can hear this." From an interview with Tom Yates, 13 Feb-
ruary 1981. Quoted in Ed Ward, Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall
of an American Guitar Hero. Port Chester, NY: Cherry Lane Books,
1983. 8-9. See also Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
Bronstein, Marvin. Interview with Bob Dylan (20 February 1966,
Montreal). See The Classic Interviews, 1965-1966.
Butler, Keith. See 'The Ghost of Electricity" and, regarding the entry
on "Like a Rolling Stone," Eat the Document.
Butterfield Blues Band. See Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
Byrds. "Mr. Tambourine Man" (Columbia, 1965). "'Like a Rolling
Stone' virtually went unnoticed by me in 1965," my friend Fritz
Schneider wrote in 2004 of Dylan's reception in West Germany.
"In those days, Bob Dylan was, for me and my friends (all born in
Works Cited 245
or around 1953), nothing more than the composer of that fantastic

new Byrds single 'Mr. Tambourine Man'-and his own version
couldn't hold a candle to their version. For us Dylan was just a
folkie with no rock 'n' roll credibility whatsoever-a guy, like
Donovan or, a bit later, Leonard Cohen, Cat Stevens, or James
Taylor, exclusively treasured by our female classmates."
In 1992, at a televised concert at Madison Square Garden marking
Dylan's thirtieth anniversary as a recording artist, Roger McGuinn,
the founder of the Byrds, looking at once proud and shy, just a bit
uncertain, appeared with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers to sing
"Mr. Tambourine Man" one more time. He launched into the song
with the same ringing Rickenbacker twelve-string notes and the
same fey voice that made it a hit in the first place; then he passed
the single verse of the song he'd used with the Byrds and lunged
for the next one. He became a different person. Suddenly his
voice thickened; he rocked back and forth on his heels. There was
a vehemence in his tone he had never had before; on the "and" in
"And if you hear vague traces," his voice lifted into the air and the
word broke into fragments, which floated down as pieces of some
ancient Scots ballad. Before you could register what you were
hearing, McGuinn was already making the hard consonants of the
next words into weapons, hammering "skkkkipping reels of rhyme"
like a blacksmith. See Dylan, The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration
(Columbia, 1993; Columbia Music Video, 1993).
Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge, MA

Harvard University Press, 1996. 1.
Clark, Petula. "Downtown" (Warner Bros., 1964).
Cooke, Sam. "Blowin' in the Wind." From Sam Cooke at the Copa (RCA,
1964).
---"A Change Is Gonna Come" (RCA Victor, 1964). Perhaps best
246 Works Cited
heard today on Cooke, Portrait of a Legend: 1951-1964 (ABKCO,
2003).
---"Geez." Daniel Wolff with S. R. Crain, Clifton White, and G.
David Tenenbaum, You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke. New
York: William Morrow, 1995.291. See also Rod Stewart.
Cortazar, Julio. Hopscotch (as Rayuela, 1963). New York: Random House,
1966, trans. Gregory Rabassa. The expats in a Paris apartment in
the 1950s, 78s follOWing one after the other like bottles: "all those
old records, showboats, Storyville nights, where the only really
universal music of the century had come from, something that
brought people closer together than UNESCO, or airlines, a music
which was primitive enough to have gained such universality and
good enough to make its own history ... a music that could be
known in Copenhagen as well as Mendoza or Capetown, a music
that brings adolescents together, with records under their arms,
that gives them names and melodies to use as passwords so they
can know each other and become intimate and feel less lonely sur-
rounded by bosses, families, and bitter love affairs, a music that
accepts all imaginations and tastes, a collection of instrumental 78's
with Freddie Keppard or Bunk Johnson, the reactionary cult of
Dixieland, an academic specialization in Bix Beiderbecke, or in the
adventures of Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, or Thad Jones, the
vulgarities of Erroll Garner or Art Tatum, repentance and rejection,
a preference for small groups, mysterious recordings made with
false names and strange titles and labels made up on the spur of the
moment, and that whole freemasonry of Saturday nights in a stu-
dent's room or in some basement cafe ... all this from a kind of
music that horrifies solid citizens who think that nothing is true
unless there are programs and ushers." 69-70.
Costello, Elvis. "What I've Learned" (interview with Tom Junod).
EsqUire, September 2003. 160.
Works Cited 247
Cropper, Steve. From "Booker T. and the MGs: The Rolling Stone
Interview" (Jann Wenner). Rolling Stone, 12 October 1968. Col-
lected in The Rolling Stone Interviews. New York: Pocket Books, 1971.
156.
Crouch, Stanley. "Come Sunday," in The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and
Liberty in the American Ballad, ed. Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. 246. See also "When Watts
Burned," in The Sixties, ed. Lynda Rosen Obst. New York: Rolling
Stone/Random House, 1977.
Crowell, Rodney. "The Times They Are A-Changin': A Radio Sympo-
sium on Bob Dylan and His Times," WFUV-FM, New York City, 5
March 2004.
Crystals. "Da 000 Ron Ron" (Philles, 1963).
Curtis, Lucious. "High Lonesome Hill." Recorded 19 October 1940 in
Natchez, Mississippi, by Alan Lomax. Collected on Mississippi Blues:
Library of Congress Recordings, 1940--1942 (Travel in' Man, 1973, 1979).
Debord, Guy. "Le declin et la chute de l'economie spectaculaire-

marchande." Dated December 1965, this shocking analysis of the
Watts riots ("Looting is the natural response to the society of abun-
dance ... The flames of Watts consummated the system of consump-
tion") was written in Paris in French, but first published in English
as a piece of action literature under the name of the Situationist
International, a small group of mostly European writers and artists.
It was published anonymously in Internationale situationniste 10 (PariS,
March 1966), and as "The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-
Commodity Society" in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and
trans. Ken Knabb. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981. 157.
Published under Debord's name as Ie dec/in et la chute de l'economie spec-
taculaire-marchande. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert aux Belles Lettres,
1993.26.
248 Works Cited
Dino, Desi and Billy. "Like a Rolling Stone," from I'm a Fool (Reprise,
1965).
Dion and the Belmonts. "I Wonder Why" (Laurie, 1958).
Dominoes. The Dominoes Featuring Clyde McPhatter: 18 Hits (King, 1996).
Don't Look Back. Directed by D. A. Pennebaker. Leacock-Pennebaker,
1967.
The Dreamers. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Fox Searchlight, 2004.
Drifters. "Money Honey" (Atlantic, 1953). See Clyde McPhatter.
---"There Goes My Baby" (Atlantic, 1959). Included on
1959-1965: All-Time Greatest Hits and More (Atlantic, 1988).
Geldof, Bob. "Turn the B1eedin' Noise Down, Bobbo." Uncut Legends #1:
Dylan, 2003. 23.
"The Ghost of Electricity," radio documentary on Bob Dylan in Man-
chester, UK, 17 May 1966 (BBC, 29 June 1999). Produced and
narrated by Andy Kershaw. Courtesy C. P. Lee.
Ginsberg, Allen. "A Western Ballad" (1948). See Ginsberg, Selected
Poems, 1947-1995. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. 6-7 (with
score).
Gross, Terry. Interview with Richard Belzer. Fresh Air (WHYY-FM,
Philadeiphia/NPR, 31 December 1987). Included on Fresh Air
Laughs with Terry Gross (WHYY/NPR, 2003). Courtesy Terry Gross.
HarriS, Richard. "MacArthur Park" (Dunhill, 1968).

Henderson, David. limi Hendrix: Voodoo Child of the Aquarian Age. Garden
City, NY Doubleday, 1978. 167-70.
Hendrix, Jimi. "Like a Rolling Stone." On the anthology Monterey Inter-
national Pop Festival (Rhino, 1992). Recorded 18 June 1967.
---"Star Spangled Banner." On HendriX, Live at Woodstock (MCA,
1999). Recorded 19 August 1969. With Billy Cox, bass, Mitch
Mitchell, drums, Juma Sultan, percussion, Larry Lee, rhythm gui-
tar, Jerry Velez, percussion.
Works Cited 249
---"Voodoo Chile," from Electric Ladyland (Reprise, 1968). As well as a

faraway version of "Uke a Rolling Stone," "Voodoo Chile" is a cousin
to "Catfish Blues" (Robert Petway's 1940 recording is probably the
first under that title, but as a commonplace theme it's decades older;
Hendrix's straight recording of "Catfish Blues," from 1967, is on Jimi
Hendrix: Blues, MCA, 1994). "Catfish Blues" is a precursor of Muddy
Waters's "Rollin' Stone," which is to say a precursor of ...
Hentoff, Nat. liThe Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan." Playboy, March
1966. In McGregor. "That's always been the easy way" (133). "I
was singing" (129).
Hilburn, Robert. "Rock's Enigmatic Poet Opens a Long-Private Door."
Los Angeles Times, 4 April 2004.
Hitchcock, Robyn. "Uke a Rolling Stone," from Robyn Sings (editions
PAFJ 2002).
The Hitmakers (segment of the series Pop Goes the Music). Written and
directed by Morgan Neville. A & E, 27 August 2001. Available as
part of the 2-DVD set The Songmakers Collection (A & E, 2001).
Horstman, Dorothy. Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy. New York: Dut-
ton, 1975. 323.
House, Son. liMy Black Mama Part I and Part II" (Vocalion, 1930).
Collected on Son House and the Great Delta Blues Singers: Complete
Recorded Works in Chronological Order, 1928-1930 (Document, 1990),
which also includes Garfield Akers's "Cottonfield Blues Part I and
Part II"; in 1962, both could be found on Really! The Country Blues
(Origin Jazz Library). House rerecorded "Part II" as "Death Letter
Blues" in 1965; see House, Father of the Delta Blues: The Complete j 965
Sessions (Columbia, 1992). "Death Letter" was covered in 2000 by
the White Stripes, in 2002 by David Johansen and the Harry
Smiths, and by John Mellencamp in 2003-differently and con-
vincingly every time. Seventy years after it was first recorded the
song was lingua franca, and a new kind of pop hit-a death letter
that took the form of a chain letter.
250 Works Cited
Johnson, Robert. The Complete Recordings (Columbia, 1990) is the basic
collection, but the reissues of King of the Delta Blues Singers (Colum-
bia, 1998, originally issued 1961) and King of the Delta Blues Singers,
Volume II (Columbia 2005, originally issued 1970) are more listen-
able. "I thought about Johnson a lot, wondered who his audience
could have been," Dylan wrote in 2004 in Chronicles, Volume One
(New York: Simon & Schuster), speaking of hearing King of the Delta
Blues Singers before its official release. "It's hard to imagine share-
croppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs
like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audi-
ence that only he could see, one off in the future."
Johnston, Bob, aka Colonel Jubilation B. Johnston. Moldy Goldies:
Colonel Jubilation B. Johnston and His Mystic Knights Band and Street
Singers Attack the Hits (Columbia, 1966). An album Johnston made
with the Nashville component of the Blonde on Blonde band, locked
in the studio in Nashville at four in the morning, with only a cou-
ple of hours to go before the alcohol runs out, turning the Right-
eous Brothers' "(You're My) Soul and Inspiration" into "Rainy Day
Women #12 & 35." Turning the Mamas and the Papas' "Monday,
Monday" into "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35." Turning Sonny and
Cher's "Bang Bang," Shirley Ellis's "The Name Game," the Young
Rascals' "Good LOVin'," the Lovin' Spoonful's "Daydream," and the
McCoys' "Hang on Sloopy" into "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35."
And turning Johnny Rivers's immortal "Secret Agent Man" into the
even more immortal "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean." In the 1980s
postmodernists croaked incessantly about pop culture and subver-
sion; Moldy Goldies is an early proof of the theory lined out by the
singer David Thomas in the course of a long story about how for
years he heard Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man" as "Stand
by, Earthman": "The song had nothing to do with a global per-
spective, aliens, or outer space. It seemed to be a standard man-
Works Cited 25:1
woman tragedy-but it got to the chorus, and it was 'Stand by,

earthman.' I couldn't believe it. The rest of us were wasting our time
with Captain Beefheart, Velvet Underground, all that stuff, while
these hillbillies, doing country music, had done post-modern before
the rest of us had even gotten to neo-classical modern. My mind-
cracked." See "Surfer Girl" on Meadville, in the 5-CD Thomas set
Monster (Cooking Vinyl, 1997).
---Interview with GM, 11 May 2004.
Jones, Mickey. See "The Ghost of Electricity."
Kerouac, Jack. Narration in Pull My Daisy. Directed by Robert Frank

and Alfred Leslie. G-String Productions, 1959.
Kooper, AI. Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards: Memoirs of a Rock 'n'
Roll Survivor. New York Billboard, 1998.7.
---Interview with GM, 14 May 2004.
---"This Diamond Ring" (United Artists, 1976). Included on
Kooper, Rare and Well Done (Sony, 2001).
Landau, Jon. "Bob Dylan: John Wesley Harding," Crawdaddy, May

1968. Collected in Landau, It's Too Late to Stop Now: A Rock and Roll
Journal. San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1972. 49. See McGregor,
256.
Led Zeppelin. "Stairway to Heaven," from 2050 (aka "Led Zeppelin
IV") (Atlantic, 1971).
Lee, C. P. like the night: Bob Dylan and the road to the Manchester Free Trade
Hall. London: Helter Skelter, 1998. 155.
Lewis, Gary, and the Playboys. "This Diamond Ring" (Liberty, 1965).
Beginning as an ice-cream band at Disneyland, between January
1965 and May 1966 the group had seven consecutive Top Ten hits.
"Why do you think rock 'n' roll has become such an international
phenomenon?" Nat Hentoff asked Bob Dylan in 1966. "I can't
252 Works Cited
really think that there is any rock 'n' roll," Dylan said. "Actually,
when you think about it, anything that has no real existence is
bound to become an international phenomenon. Anyway, what
does it mean, rock 'n' roll? Does it mean Beatles, does it mean John
Lee Hooker, Bobby Vinton, Jerry Lewis' kid? What about Lawrence
Welk? He must playa few rock 'n' roll songs. Are all these people
really the same? Is Ricky Nelson like Otis Redding? Is Mick Jagger
really Ma Rainey?" What's so remarkable about Dylan's words is the
way they speak for a time when all these people could be heard as
rock 'n' roll, when the term suggested not boundaries to cross, but
their utter irrelevance. See McGregor, 128.
LeWiS, Noah (aka Noah Lewis Jug Band). "New Minglewood Blues"
(Victor, 1930). A follow-up to Gus Cannon and His Jug Stompers'
1928 "Minglewood Blues," with Lewis on harmonica, "New Min-
glewood Blues" can be found on the anthology Blues: 36 Masterpieces
of Blues Music (Fremeaux & Associes, 1995) and many other collec-
tions.
Little Richard. "Ready Teddy" (Specialty, 1956).
Marsh, Dave. The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made
(1989). New York: Da Capo, 1999. Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It
Through the Grapevine" is number one.
Masked and Anonymous. Directed by Larry Charles, written by Sergei
Petrov and Rene Fontaine (pseud. Larry Charles and Bob Dylan).
Sony Pictures Classics, 2003.
Masked and Anonymous: Musicfrom the Motion Picture (Columbia, 2003).
McGuire, Barry. "Eve of Destruction" (DunhilI, 1965). As Golden Protest
unfortunately remains unissued, McGuire's still-shameless, still-
growly, still-stirring hit has to be heard on collections on the order
of the 8-CD box set The Folk Years (Time-Life, 2002), which,
golden protest-wise, also includes the Byrds' version of 'The
Works Cited 253
Times They Are A-Changin'/' Trini Lopez's "If I Had a Hammer,"

janis Ian's "Society's Child," Glen Campbell's version of "Universal
Soldier," Dion's "Abraham, Martin and john," and the Kingston
Trio's version of "Blowin' in the Wind."
McNamara, Robert. "Going to hell." In Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire:
America in the King Years, 1963-65. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1998.543.
McPhatter, Clyde. McPhatter's unmatched 1953-54 recordings with
the Drifters (along with "Money Honey," ''The Way I Feel," "Let the
Boogie Woogie RolI"-try and stop it-"Such a Night," "Bip Bam,"
"What'cha Gonna Do," "Honey Love," "White Christmas," and
"The Bells of St. Mary's") can be found on the Drifters' Let the Boogie
Woogie Roll: Greatest Hits 1953-1958 (Atlantic, 1988) and on McPhat-
ter's The Forgotten Angel (32 R&B), which also includes his later solo
recordings, many of them hits ("Treasure of Love," 1956, number
16, the stately "Without Love (There Is Nothing)," 1957, number
19, "A Lover's Question," 1958, number 6, "Lover Please," 1962,
number 7, plus three songs recorded live at the Apollo Theater in
1964. See also Dominoes. jesse Stone, the composer of "Money
Honey," died 1 April 1999, at the age of ninety-nine; perhaps in
tribute, later that year Dylan essayed a trail-dragging version of the
song to a crowd in Ithaca, New York. Included on The Genuine Never-
Ending Tour: The Covers Collection 1988-2000 (Wild Wolf bootleg).
Mellers, Wilfred. A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 140.
Metcalfe, Malcolm. See ''The Ghost of Electricity."
Mosley, Walter. Little Scarlet. New York: Little, Brown, 2004. 218, 17,
78. When Mosley began his series of Easy Rawlins murder myster-
ies in 1990, with Devil in a Blue Dress, the setting was 1948, but in
the way Mosley dramatized the special atmosphere of racism in
postwar Los Angeles, the specter of the Watts riots was already
254 Works Cited
present. The novels that followed-A Red Death (1991, set in
1953), White Butterfly (1992, set in 1956), Black Betty (1994, set in
1961), A Little Yellow Dog (1996, set in 1963), and Bad Boy Brawly
Brown (2003, set in early 1964)-traced the social history of the
city from the perspective of a black man who had learned to trust
absolutely nothing about it, but they also seemed like a holding
action, as if the closer Mosley came to the riots, to the inevitable,
perhaps even uncrossable divide in his tale and his hero's times,
the more terrifying the riots became. Set in 1965, just after the
riots, Little Scarlet crossed the gap. It dove deeper than the books
before it, and set a new stage.
Muldaur, Geoff. "Got to Find Blind Lemon, Part One," on The Secret
Handshake (Hightone, 1998) and "Got to Find Blind Lemon, Part
Two," on Password (Hightone, 2000).
Murray, Charles Shaar. Crosstown Traffic. New York: St. Martin's, 1989.63.
Mystery Tramps. "Like a Rolling Stone" ("30th St. Mix vocal," "30th St.
Mix instrumental," "Radio Mix," "1-800 Mix") (imago, 1993).
Courtesy Dave Marsh.
National Lampoon. Radio Dinner (Banana/Blue Thumb, 1972). Includ-

ing, along with 'Those Fabulous Sixties," horrifyingly funny
attacks onJohn Lennon, Yoko Ono, Joan Baez, and George Harri-
son's 1971 Concert for Bangladesh.
Nelson, Paul. "Bob Dylan," in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock &
Roll, ed. Jim Miller. New York: Rolling Stone/Random House,
1976. 208. Replaced in later editions of the book, unfortunately;
certainly the most idiosyncratic and, aside from Dylan's 2002 stage
announcement, probably the least pretentious overview of Dylan's
career there is.
---"Newport Folk Festival, 1965." Sing Out! September 1965. In
McGregor, 73.
Works Cited 255
Paul Butterfield Blues Band. An Anthology: The Elektra Years (Elektra,

1997). Includes Mike Bloomfield's first recordings, from 1965,
notably his hot-shot solo on "Nut Popper # I" and his fierce
between-the-lines work on "Born in Chicago," the latter from The
Paul Butterfield Blues Band, plus his nothing-to-prove solo on Robert
Johnson's "Walking Blues" from the Butterfield band's 1966 East-
West.
Pet Shop Boys. "Go West." From Very (EMIIERG, 1993). Five addi-
tional mixes (including "Farley & Heller Fire Island Mix," which
would seem to defeat the concept) are on the dispensable "Go
West" (EMIIERG, 1993).
Phillips, John. Notes to Monterey International Pop Festival (Rhino, 1992).
Pisaro, Michael. Letter to GM, 28 March 2004.
Poston, Shirley. "We Had Known a Lion." KRLA:s The Beat, 2 October
1965. Reprinted as liner insert to Dylan, We Had Known a Lion.
Presley, Elvis. "Can't Help Falling in Love" (RCA, 1961).
---"Mystery Train" (Sun, 1955).
Radice, Paula. Radice's unique account of hearing "Like a Rolling Stone"
for the first time was included on the BBC Radio 4 documentary
"Soul MUSic-Programme 5: Like a Rolling Stone" (BBC Birming-
ham, 27 July 2004, produced by Lindsay Leonard). Radice con-
tributes regularly to the Internet Dylan magazineJreewheelin-on-line.
Replacements. "Like a Rolling Pin" (1990). Included on AllJor Noth-
inglNothingJor All (1997).
Ridgway, Stan. "Classic Hollywood Ending," from Snakebite: Blacktop
Ballads & Fugitive Songs (redFLY, 2004).
Righteous Brothers. "You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling" (phiIles, 1964).
Rolling Stones. "Like a Rolling Stone," from Stripped (Virgin, 1995).
They start from the top, and immediately wipe the floor with
countless other attempts, including many of Dylan's own. Mick
Jagger sings in a country voice-he makes you turn up the volume
~--~ ~~--~~---------"
256 Works Cited
to hear him, and his shouts of "Yeah!" at the beginning of each
verse are an acknowledgment that the listener knows this song as
well or better than he does. Dylan's on stage duet with Jagger, from
Montpellier, France, on 27 July 1995, is collected on the Dylan
bootleg I've Got a Song to Sing: A Compilation oj Rare Performances in 1996
(no label).
Rozanov, Vasily. "No more coats." Quoted in Raoul Vaneigem, Traite de
savoir-vivre a l'usage des jeunes generations. Paris: Gallimard, 1967.
180-81. As The Revolution oj Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-
Smith, London: Rebel Press, and Seattle: Left Bank Books, 1994.
176.
Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home. New York: Beech Tree, 1986. 279.
Spector, Phil. "Phil Spector: The Rolling Stone Interview" Oann Wen-
ner). Rolling Stone, 1 November 1969. Collected in The Rolling Stone
Interviews, 1967-1980. New York: Rolling Stone/St. Martin's, 1981.
63.
Spitz, Bob. Dylan: A Biography. New York: McGraw-HilI, 1989. 299.
Springsteen, Bruce. "The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Speech" (1988).
Collected in Studio A The Bob Dylan Reader, ed. Benjamin Hedin.
New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. 202.
Stanley Brothers. "Little Maggie" (Rich-R-Tone, 1948). On Earliest
Recordings (Revenant, 1997).
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Rolling Stone Interviews, 1967-1980. New York: Rolling Stone/St. Mar-
tin's, 1981. 121. Stewart once said that if he ever sang "A Change
Is Gonna Come," that would mean he was quitting forever,
because he could never again face the public after failing to live up
to that song, which he has always wanted to sing. So far he's kept
his promise, but his 1973 version of "Twistin' the Night Away"
lives up to Cooke's 1962 original.
Works Cited 257
Stone, Allen. Interview with Bob Dylan. WDTM, Detroit, 24 October

1965. Included on Dylan: 1965 Revisited (Great Dane bootleg).
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Marsh (BBc/Arena, 1993). One of four such 1993 hour-long films
by Marsh: the others are on Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side,"
Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel," and Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue,"
one of the most inspired of all rock 'n' roll documentaries.
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---"A Letter from the Editor," Rolling Stone, 9 November 1967.
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--- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
258 Works Cited

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Acknowledgments
Since it was his idea, it can be said without hyperbole that

this book would not exist without Clive Priddle of PublicAf-
fairs. Working with him has been a continuing pleasure, as it
has with publisher Peter Osnos, design director Nina O'A-
mario and designer Mark McGarry, managing editor Robert
Kimzey, sales director Matty Goldberg, publicist Jaime
Leifer, and publicity director Gene Taft; copy editor John
Guardiano and indexer Robert Swanson both did a wonderful
job. At Faber & Faber, as I have for many years lowe much to
Jon Riley, and also to Lee Brackstone, Angus Cargill, and
Helen Francis. At Kiepenheuer & Witsch, I have benefited
from the enthusiasm and professionalism of Birgit Schmitz
and, far too often for comfort, the bottomless knowledge,
limitless patience, and indefatigable error-catching of transla-
tor Fritz Schneider. Wendy Weil and Emily Forland of the
260 Acknowledgments
Wendy Weil Agency made me feel lucky, as always, as did
Anthony Goff of the David Higham Agency in London and
Christian Dittus and Peter Fritz of the Paul and Peter Fritz
Agency in Zurich.
There are others whose aid and comfort were indispensa-
ble. In his laconically amused way, Jeff Rosen of Special Rider
Music made the trickiest problems seem like the simplest; in
his office, Diane Lapson, Lynne Okin, and Robert Bower
were instantly helpful and always friendly. In the course of
easy conversations and a letter, Jann Wenner, AI Kooper, Bob
Johnston, and Michael Pisaro gave me more than they could
have had any way of knowing, and I exploited what they
gave me to the full. Whenever there was a Dylan perform-
ance I had to hear, Kevin Reilly immediately knew where it
was-and with intimations of unimagined treasures to come.
When I chanced on Mick Brownfield's comic strip, I knew he
had caught the subject of this book in a way I never could,
and I thank him for just saying yes when I asked if I could
find a way to put his version of "Like a Rolling Stone" along
side of mine. I could not have worked without the warm and
enthusiastic support of Sony Legacy; Jeff Jones, John Jack-
son, Tom Cording, and especially Steve Berkowitz provided
invaluable help with recordings and photographs. Sean
Wilentz discovered both main title and subtitle one Septem-
ber morning in the back of a New York taxicab.
lowe a special debt to those people and institutions that
over the years gave me a chance to try out some of the
Acknowledgments 261
themes and some of the words that found their way into
these pages: Bill Strachan of Henry Holt, the Dorothy and
Lillian Gish Foundation, Joe Levy at Rolling Stone, the Centre
Georges Pompidou in Paris, Michel Braudeau of La Nouvelle
Revue Fran~aise and translator Julia Dorner, John Harris and
the J. Paul Getty Museum, Robert Hull of TIme-life Music,
Perry Richardson of A Publishing, Steve Wasserman of the
Los Angeles Times Book Review, Ingrid Sischy, Graham Fuller,
Scott Cohen and Brad Goldfarb at Interview, Jack Bankowsky,
David Frankel, and Sydney Pokorny at Artforum, Bill Wyman
at Salon, Wendy Lesser at Threepenny Review, Lindsay Leonard
and Sarah Howell of BBC Birmingham, and Melissa Maerz
and Steve Perry at City Pages in Minneapolis.
Other people helped me with ideas, records, archival
photographs, old letters, rare publications, expertise, break-
ing news, a glad hand and simple presence: Liz Bordow, Sue
D'Alonzo, Glen Dundas, Barry Franklin, Mike Gordon, Terry
Gross of Fresh Air, Andy Kershaw, C. P. Lee, Bill Marcus,
Cecily Marcus, Emily Marcus, David Gans of Truth and Fun,
B. George of the ARChive of Contemporary Music, Dave
Marsh, Paula Radice, Mary Rome, Bob Steiner, Patrick
Thomas, Steve Weinstein, Greg Tomeoni of Copy Central in
Berkeley, Eric Weisbard of the Experience Music Project in
Seattle, David Vest, Sara Bernstein, and especially Steve
Mack.
As Jenny Marcus said when Clive Priddle first called, in
one way or another I've been writing this book for as long as
262 Acknowledgments
"Like a Rolling Stone" has been on the air. We heard Bob
Dylan sing it at the Berkeley Community Theater in Decem-
ber 1965, at the Grand in San Francisco in October 2004,
and many times gratifying and dispiriting, predictable and
surprising, in between. All that time.
Index
Absolutely Free (Mothers of Inven- Apollo at 70: A Hot Night in Harlem,

tion), 106 41n, 230
"Acne" (Dylan), 230 Arnold, Eddy, 137
Adams, Mamie Jo, 137 Arnold, Jerome, 154
"Ahab, the Arab" (Stevens), Articolo 31, 78-79, 82-85, 243
63-64 Ashcroft, John, 238
Aint That Good News (Cooke), 39 Ashley, Clarence, 153
Akers, Garfield, 124, 125,243,249 Atmosphere, 238
"All Along the Watchtower" The Autobiography (Berry), 244
(Dylan),72 Autry, Gene, 137
All for Nothing/Nothing for All Ax,]., 78, 243
(Replacements),255
"Always on My Mind" (Pet Shop
Boys), 197 "Back in the U.S.A." (Berry),
Amendola, Scott, 237 61-62,63
American Idol, 71 Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bas-
Anas, Brittany, 239-40 tards: Memoirs of a Rock 'n' Roll
The Animals, 122, 162,243 Survivor (Kooper), 252
Another Side of Bob Dylan, 161 Baez, Joan, 14,23,24,43,244,
"Any lime at All" (Beatles), 95n 254
264 Index
Baez, Joan (cont.) Bennett, Will, 123,244
Dylan and, 16-17,56,120, The Bently Boys, 62
179 Berlin, Irving, 100
at Newport, 153 Bernstein, Sara, 238, 239
recordings of, 244 Berry, Chuck, 60, 61-62, 99,
Baez, Mimi, 14, 15 107, 166n, 183,244
"Ball and Chain" (Big Brother and Bertolucci, Bernardo, 170,248
the Holding Company), The Best of Bob Dylan, volume 2, 230,
108 232
The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack-Origi- Best, Pete, 135
nal Soundtrack (Elliott), 230 Big Brother and the Holding
"Ballad of a Thin Man" (Dylan), Company, 108
112,142,169,182 Biograph (Dylan), 232, 241
The Band, 26,160, 161n, 188, The Black Labels, 187, 244
191,231,237 "Blind Willie McTeII" (Dylan),
Barker, Derek, 229 26,230
Barry, Jeff, 137 Blonde on Blonde (Dylan), 136, 142,
Basement Tapes (Dylan), 166n 172, 187, 205, 230, 241, 259
"Be My Baby" (Ronettes), 140 Blood on the Tracks (Dylan),
The Beach Boys, 44 191-95,230
The Beat (KRLA), 135, 161-62, Bloomfield, Michael
179,235,255 with Butterfield, 254
The Beatles career of, 107-9
in America, 56 on Dylan, 109-10,244
on charts, xi, 4, 5, 6, 43, 44 with Dylan live, 130, 131, 187
drum intros, 95n Dylan on, 106-7
Dylan and, 61, 145 on Johnson, Robert, 131
early ambition of, 3 Kooper on, 110-11
Ed Sullivan show, 155 at "Like a Rolling Stone" ses-
Before the Flood (Dylan), 191 sions, xi, 116, 117-18,126,
Bell, Madelaine, 190 203,205-14,216,217,
Belzer, Richard, 148-49, 150, 219-22,234
151,244,248 at Newport, 154-55, 158
Bennett, Tony, 54 on ''Tombstone Blues," 168
Index 265
"Blowin' in the Wind" (Dylan), Bringing It All Back Home (Dylan),

39, 41n, 48-51, 69, 230, 38,44,60,61,167,230,234
231,245 Bronstein, Marvin, 70, 244
Bob Dylan, 21-22,23, 122n, 230, Brooks, Garth, 19
232 Broonzy, Big Bill, 106
Bob Dylan (Scaduto), 242 Brother Mark and the Dylanger
Bob Dylan: A Retrospective (McGre- Four, 238
gor), 229, 242, 243, 249, Brown, James, 31 n
251,255 Brown, John, 31
"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," 38, Brownfield, Mick, 81
60,61,62,63-66,113,230 Bucklen, John, 231, 232
"Bob Dylan's Blues," 137n Buffalo Springfield, 109
Boggs, Dock, 153 Burdon, Eric, 162,243
Booker T. and the MG's, 32-33 Burns, Robert, 27, 200
The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Live 1966- Burton, James, 107
The Royal Albert Hall' Concert Burton, Phillip, 15-16
(Dylan), 235, 241 Bush, George H. W, 58
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Live 1964- Bush, George W, 58, 237, 239
Concert at Philharmonic Hall Butler, Keith, 183,235,244
(Dylan), 232 Butterfield, Paul. See Paul Butter-
the bootleg series, volumes j-3 [rare and field Blues Band
unreleased], 196 j-1 99 1 "Buzz-Buzz-Buzz" (Dylan), 25,
(Dylan), 207, 229, 230, 230
233,240,241 The Buzzcocks, 125
"Boppin' the Blues" (Perkins), The Byrds, 44, 140, 147,244-45,
166n 252-53
"Boredom" (Buzzcocks), 125
"Born in Chicago" (Butterfield),
255 Cabrera, Ron, 239
Boyes, Georgina, 179 Campbell, Glen, 253
Bozulich, Carla, 237 Campbell, Larry, 50, 237
Branch, Taylor, 253 Cannon, Gus, 252
Brando, Marlon, 51 "Can't Help Falling in Love"
Bridges, Jeff, 75, 76-77 (Dylan), 122n, 231
266 Index
"Can't Help Falling in Love" Cochran, Eddie, 31 n
(Presley), 122,255 Cody, Bill, 71
Cantwell, Robert, 169,245 Cohen, Leonard, 136, 245
Carey, Mariah, 71 Coltrane, John, 104
Carter, Jimmy, 58 "Come On Down to My Boat"
Carter, Maybelle, 153 (Every Mother's Son), 49
Cash, Rosanne, 186 "Come on in My Kitchen" Oohn-
Castro, Fidel, 58 son), 103
"Catfish Blues" (Hendrix), 249 "Come una Pietra Scalciata"
"Catfish Blues" (Petway), 249 (Articolo 31), 78-79,
"A Change Is Conna Come" 82-85,97,243
(Cooke), 38-41,43-44, "Como una Piedra Rodante"
230,245-46,256 (Dino, Desi and Billy), 148
"A Change Is Conna Come" "Confidential" (Knight/Dylan),
(Dylan), 41n-42n 165n,231
Charles, Ray, 41n, 120, 189 Considine, Shaun, 233
Cheney, Dick, 238 Cooke, Sam, 38, 39-40, 41n,
The Chiffons, 137n 42n,44, 102, 113,230,
"Christianity Is Stupid" (Negativ- 245-46,256
land),31n "Corrina, Corrina" (Dylan), 232
Civil Rights Movement, 4, Cortazar, Julio, 167,246
15-16, 39,41n Costello, Elvis, 146,246
Claridge, Andrew, 188 "Cottonfield Blues" (Akers),
Clark, Petula, 37-38, 245 124-25,243,249
"Classic Hollywood Ending" "Count Me In" (Lewis), 44
(Ridgway), 55, 255 Cox, Billy, 248
Clayton, Elias, 28n Crain, S. R., 246
The Click Clacks, 137 Cropper, Steve, 32, 247
Cline, Patsy, 95n "Cross Road Blues" Oohnson), 166
Clinton, Bill, 27, 48, 58 Crossroads (Hill), 186
"Close the Door" (Dominoes), Crosstown Traffic (Murray), 254
100 Crouch, Stanley, 37,247
Coalition of the Willing, 239 Crowell, Rodney, 87, 247
Index 267
"Crying in the Chapel" (Presley), Debord, Guy, 36-37, 247

44 Dee, Joey and the Starlighters,
Crystal, Eric, 238 90
The Crystals, 34,140,231,247 "Desolation Row" (Dylan), 112,
Cuban Missile Crisis, 22, 57 159,161,171-75,242
Curtis, Lucious, 27, 247 "Diamond Joe" (Dylan), 74
Curtiss A, 238 Diaz, Cesar, 237
Dino, Desi and Billy, 147-48,248
Dion, 138n, 253
"Da 000 Ron Ron" (aka Da Do Dion and the Belmonts, 99, 103,
Run Run) (Dylan), 34n 248
"Da 000 Ron Ron" (Crystals), "Dixie" (Dylan), 74
34,231,247 The Dixie Chicks, 95n
"Dancing in the Street" (Martha The Dominoes, 99-100, 248
and the VandeIIas), 149 Donovan, 5
Daniels, Charlie, 34n "Don't Leave Me This Way"
Danko, Rick, 160, 181, 183, 188, (Dominoes), 100
235 Don 'f Look Back (Pennebaker),
Darin, Bobby, 138n 54-55,120,243,247
A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to "Don't Start Me Talkin'" (Dylan),
Bob Dylan (MeIIers), 253 123n,231
The Dave Clark Five, 145 "Don't Start Me Talkin' "
Davis, Clive, 135, 136, 141 (Williamson), 122,257
Davis, Ossie, 41 n The Doors, 145, 170
de Gregori, Francesco, 74 "Down on Penny's Farm" (Bently
De Lyon, Leo, and the Muscle- Boys),62
men, 106 Down the Highway: The Life of Bob
"Death Letter" Oohansen), 249 Dylan (Sounes), 242
"Death Letter" (MeIIencamp), 249 Down with Rhonda, 240
"Death Letter" (White Stripes), "Downtown" (Clark), 37-38, 38,
249 42,245
"Death Letter Blues" (House), The Dreamers (Bertolucci), 170,
249 248
268 Index
The Drifters, 85, 99-100, 103, Ertegun, Ahmet, 100
137n, 248, 253 Estes, Sleepy John, 109
Duluth Does Dylan, 187, 244 "Eve of Destruction" (McGuire),
Duryea, Pete, xi 5, 252
Dylan, 122n, 231 Every Mother's Son, 49
Dylan: A Biography (Spitz), 256
Dylan: Behind the Shades-The Biog-
raphy, Take Two (Heylin), 258 Ferbie, Willie, 101
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 63, 200
The Five Satins, 166n
The Early Blues Roots oj Bob Dylan, "Flat TIre" Oohnston), 138
244 The Fog oj War (Morris), 22
"Earth Angel" (Penguins), 166n Fontana, Wayne, and the Mind-
East-West (Butterfield), 255 benders, 43
Eat the Document (AlklDylan), 236, Ford, Gerald, 58
245 The Forgotten Angel (McPhatter),
The Ed Sullivan Show, 155 253
Edwards, Jonathan, 117 Frank, Robert, 174, 251
"Eight Days a Week" (Beatles), 4, Franklin, Aretha, 139
43 Freak Out (Mothers of Inventio),
"Eileen Aroon" (Dylan), 26 104
"EI Paso" (Robbins), 171 Freddie and the Dreamers, 43
The Electric Flag, 108 The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, 31, 60,
Electric Ladyland (Hendrix), 2489 161,231,232
Elliott, Ramblin' Jack, 230 Fresh Air Laughs with Terry Gross,
Ellison, Ralph, 65 248
"The End of the World and TIme "From a Buick 6" (Dylan), 94,169
Will Be No More" (Gates),
31
"Endless Love" (Carey), 71 Gallagher, Bill, 139, 140
Engstrom, Forest, 239 Gallup, Cliff, 107
Ensor, James, 174 "Game of Love" (Wayne Fontana
Epstein, Brian, 3 and the Mind Benders), 43
Index 269
Gance, Abel, 141 Gorme, Eydie, 54

Garnier, Tony, 237 "Got to Find Blind Lemon, Part
Gates,J. M., 31 One" and"Part Two" (Mul-
Geldof, Bob, 177n, 248 daur),254
"The Ghost of Electricity" (Ker- Goulet, Robert, 54
shaw), 236, 244, 248, 251, Goya, Chantal, 51
253 Grammy Awards, 29-30, 32,
Gillespie, Dana, 234 237
Ginsberg, Allen, 7, 123,248 The Grateful Dead, 170
Gleason, Ralph]., 48-49 Gray, Michael, 234
Glover, Tony, 235 Greenwich, Ellie, 137
"Go West" (Pet Shop Boys), 195, Gregg, Bobby, 241
197-98, 199,255 on "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream,"
"Go West" (Village People), 196 63
"God Save the Queen" (Sex Pis- at "Like a Rolling Stone" ses-
tols),31n sions, xi, 3, 94n, 106, 128,
Godard,lean-Luc,51 203,211,212,214,215,
Goffin, Gerry, 137, 138n 216,217,220,222,223
"Going, Going, Gone" (Dylan), replaced, 178
191 Griffin, Paul
Goldberg, Barry, 154 on "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream,"
The Golden Chords, 25 63
Goldstein, Harvey, 159, 160 at "Like a Rolling Stone" ses-
Goldwater, Barry, 58 sions, xi, 106, 111, 211,
Good as I Been to You (Dylan), 237 216,218,220,221,222
"Good Vibrations" (Beach Boys), Griffith, Nancy, 186
224 Gross, Terry, 148,244, 248
"Goodbye Earl" (Dixie Chicks), Grossman, Albert, 135, 139,
95n 140n, 144, 154
Goodman, John, 73 Gulf War, 30
Gordon, Ruth, 144 Gus Cannon and His Jug Stom-
Gore, Lesley, 31 n pers, 252
Gorgoni, AI, 203, 211, 217 Guthrie, Woody, 60, 157
270 Index
Hajdu, David, 60, 156 101,108, 170, 182, 190,
Halee, Roy, xi 248-49
Hamilton, Richard, 61-62 Hentoff, Nat, 33,55,242,249,
Hammond, John, 139, 140, 251
141n, 142n Herman's Hermits, 43, 44
"Handsome Molly" (Dylan), 25, "He's Sure the Boy I Love" (Crys-
231 tals),140
Hannan, Patrick, 188 "Hey Little Richard" (Dylan),
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" 156,231,232
(Dylan), 56-57,122, 161, Heylin, Clinton, 258
231 "High Lonesome Hill" (Curtis),
Harris, Ed, 75 27,247
Harris, Emmylou, 186 "Highlands" (Dylan), 26, 195,
Harris, Regina, 189 199-200,201,232
Harris, Richard, 189, 248 "Highway 61" (Wesdon), 257
Harrison, George, 34n, 254 Highway 61 Interactive (Dylan),
Hawkins, Dale, 107 232,234
The Hawks, 26, 51, 56, 160, Highway 61 Revisited (Dylan), 232,
165n, 177, 179, 180-81, 240
183,188,235,236,241 as best rock 'n' roll album, 190
The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 highway lore and, 167
Greatest Singles Ever Made imitations of, 147n
(Marsh),252 Johnston and, 136,142,143
"Heartbreak Hotel" (Presley), as map, 104, 153, 163, 168,
224,257 173,175,200
Hedin, Benjamin, 256 at Newport, 155
"Hellhound on My Trail" Uohn- opening of, 94
son), 103 sessions for, 144, 159
Helm, Levon, 160, 178,241 songs on, 112, 161, 172
"Help" (Beatles), xi "Highway 61 Revisited" (Dylan),
Henderson, David, 89-91, 170, 191
249 Hilburn, Robert, 185,249
Hendrix, Jimi, 77-78,89-91, Hill, Walter, 186
Index 271
Hit Parader, 244 Ian, Janis, 253

Hitchcock, Robyn, 187-88,249 "Idiot Wind" (Dylan), 192,
The Hitmakers (Neville), 249 193-94,195,230
Holcomb, Roscoe, 153 "If I Had a Hammer" (Lopez),
Holiday, Billie, 31 n, 139 178,253
Holly, Buddy, 159n, 257 "If You See Her, Say Hello" (de
The Hollywood Flames, 25, 230 Gregori), 74
"Honey Love" (Drifters), 100, I'm a Fool (Dino, Desi and Billy),
253 248
Hopkins, Lightnin', 91n, 158 "I'm Hypnotised" Oohnston),
Hopscotch (Cortazar), 167,246 138
Horstman, Dorothy, 120,249 "I'm Telling You Now" (Freddie
"Hound Dog" (Presley), 90, 99 and the Dreamers), 43
"House of the Risin' Sun" The Impressions, 94n
(Dylan), 60, 230, 232 "In the Still of the Night" (Five
"House of the Rising Sun" (Ani- Satins), 166n
mals), 122, 123n, 128,243 Invisible Man (Ellison), 65
House, Son, 9,102,124,153, The Isley Brothers, 120
158n, 166,243,249 "It Ain't Me Babe" (Dylan), 161
"Howl" (Ginsberg), 7, 123 "It Ain't Me Babe" (Turtles),
Hudson, Garth, 160, 183, 188 147
Hunt, E. Howard, 79n It Ain't Me Babe (Turtles), 7
Hurt, Mississippi]ohn, 153, "It Hurts Me" (Presley), 138
158n "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes
Hynde, Chrissie, 186 a Train to Cry" (Dylan),
142,168,240
"It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"
"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (Dylan),66, 158,234
(Rolling Stones), 5,44 "It's All Right" (Impressions), 94n
"I Wonder Why" (Dion and the "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleed-
Belmonts), 99, 248 ing)" (Dylan), 57-60, 113,
"I Wouldn't Normally Do this 230,232
Kind of Thing" (Pet Shop It's Too Late to Stop Now: A Rock and
Boys), 197 Roll Journal (Landau), 251
272 Index
Jackson, Alan, 19 Hammond and, 139, 140
Jackson, Elmer, 28n Highway 61 Revisited sessions
Jackson, John, 238 and, 171, 224
Jad, OJ, 78, 243 on "Like a Rolling Stone," 143,
Jagger, Mick, 187, 190,252, 144, 181-82
255-56 "Like a Rolling Stone" release
James, Skip, 153 and, 141
Thejamies, 149 sound of, 142-43
Jefferson, Blind Lemon, 22, 230 Wilson, Tom, and, 130, 142,
Jess, 62 144
Jimi Hendrix: Blues, 249 Johnston, Diane, 137
The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jones, Mickey, 160, 178, 180-81,
89-91 183,188,235,251
Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child of the Joplin, Janis, 108
Aquarian Age (Henderson), Junod, Tom, 246
89,249 'Just Like a Woman" (Dylan), 72
Joan Baet, 244 "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"
Johansen, David, and the Harry (Dylan), 170-71,241
Smiths, 249 Just what is it that makes today's homes
"John Riley" (Baez), 15,244 so different, so appealing?
John Wesley Harding (Dylan), 136 (Hamilton),62
"Johnny B. Goode" (Berry), 99,
244
Johnson, Lyndon B., 36,43,47, Keegan, Larry, 166n, 240
58,61 Keegan, TIm, 188
Johnson, Robert, 61,102-3,131, Kennedy, John E, 13,27,57
139,166,186,224,251,255 Kerouac, Jack, 174,251
Johnston,Bob,243,249-50,250 Kerry, John, 237
Bloomfield and, 130 Kershaw, Andy, 183,236,248
career of, 136-40, 141 n-142n Kilmer, Val, 73
on "Desolation Row," 159 King, B. B., 110
on Dylan's 1966 UK shows, King, Carole, 137, 138n, 186
178-79 King, Clydie, 189
Index 273
King, Martin Luther, jr., 2, Kramer, Daniel, 61, 167

14-15, 41n, 166-67, Ku Klux Klan, 39, 43
170 Kyle, jake, 188
King of the Delta Blues Singers Oohn-
son),250
"King of the Road" (Miller), 43 "La Bamba" (Valens), 9, 33, 34n,
Kinkkonen, Ol1i, 28n 85,257
Knabb, Ken, 247 Landau, jon, 80, 251
Knight, Sonny, 165n, 231 Lange, jessica, 73
Knights of Liberty, 28n Langford, jon, 95n
Knopfler, Mark, 230 Langhorne, Bruce, xi, 61, 106,
Konikoff, Sandy, 178 211,218
Kooper, AI, 147n, 234, 243 Lauper, Cyndi, 189
on Bloomfield, 110-11 "Lawdy Miss C1awdy" (Price),
Bloomfield and, 109 166n
career of, 106, 137 Lay, Sam, 154
on "Desolation Row," 171 "Leader of the Pack" (Shangri-
on drum intros, 94n-95n Las), 157
with Dylan live, 160, 162 Leaud, jean-Pierre, 51
on Dylan's impact, 137n Led Zeppelin, 189-90,251
Goldstein, Harvey, and, 159 Lee, C. P., 80, 234, 248, 251
Lewis, Gary, and the Playboys Lee, Larry, 248
and,42 Lennon, john, 5, 254
on "Like a Rol1ing Stone," Lenya, Lotte, 61
223-24 Leonard, Lindsay, 255
at "Like a Rol1ing Stone" ses- "Leopard Skin Pil1-Box Hat"
sions, xi, 104, 110-11, (Dylan), 159n
115-16,117,119, 127-28, Leslie, Alfred, 174, 251
131,147,211-16,218, Let It Bleed (Rol1ing Stones), 190
221-22 "Let the Boogie Woogie Roll"
memoirs, 251 (Drifters), 100,253
at Newport, 154 "Let the Good TImes Rol1"
Rol1ing Stones and, 190 (Shirley and Lee), 166n
274 Index
Letterman, David, 123n, 186, Little Scarlet (Mosley), 36,253-54
231,237 Live 1961-2000 (Dylan), 231
Lewis, Gary, and the Playboys, Lomax, Alan, 153, 154,247
42,44,251 London Bach Choir, 190
Lewis, Jerry, 42, 252 "The Lonesome Death of Hattie
Lewis, Noah, 122,252 Carroll" (Dylan), 53, 55, 241
"Light My Fire" (Doors), 145 Lopez, Trini, 178,253
"Like a RoIling Pin" (Replace- Lorre, Peter, 169
ments),255 "Lost Highway" (Williams), 9,
"Like a RoIling Stone" (Crowell), 120,122,123,131,257
87 "Love and Theft" (Dylan), 13,237
"Like a Rolling Stone" (Dino, Love, Darlene, 140
Desi and Billy), 248 Lowe, Chris, 196
"Like a RoIling Stone" (Hendrix), Luizzo, Viola, 43
89-91,108,248
"Like a RoIling Stone" (Hitch-
cock),249 M (Lang), 169
"Like a RoIling Stone" (Mystery "MacArthur Park" (Harris), 189,
Tramps),254 248
"Like a RoIling Stone" (RoIling Macho, Joe, Jr., xi, 106, 119,
Stones),255-56 159,203,217
"Like a RoIling Stone" (Turtles), "Maggie's Farm" (Dylan), 60,
257 62-63,63,142,155,161,
"Like a RoIling Stone" (Young 234
Rascals),258 Magokoro Brothers, 74
like the night: Bob Dylan and the road Malcolm X, 38
to the Manchester Free Trade Hall The Mamas and the Papas,
(Lee),251 250
Lincoln, Abraham, 55, 56 Mann, Barry, 137, 138n
"Little Maggie" (Dylan), 122n, 237 Manson, Charles, 140
"Little Maggie" (Stanley Broth- Manuel, Richard, 160, 188
ers), 122,256 Marley,Bob,148,257
Little Richard, 75, 99, 165n, 256 Marsh, Dave, 80, 95n, 252, 254
Index 275
Marsh, James, 156, 207, 208, Mellencamp, John, 249

231,232,257 Mellers, Wilfred, 33,253
Martens, Brian, 239 Mersey, Bob, 140
Martha and the Vandellas, 149 Metcalfe, Malcolm, 184, 253
Martindale, Wink, 138 Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall
The Matvelettes, 14, 157 of an American Guitar Hero
Masculin jeminin (Godard), 51 (Ward), 244-45
Masked and Anonymous "Miles and Miles of Texas" Oohn-
(CharieslDylan),72-76, ston), 137
84-85,252 Milk, Hatvey, 196, 198
Masked and Anonymous: Music from Miller, Bebe, 234
the Motion Picture, 243, 252 Miller, Jim, 254
"Masters of War" (Amendale and Miller, Roger, 43
Bozulich),238 "Minglewood Blues" (Cannon),
"Masters of War" (Brother Mark 252
and the Dylanger Four), 238 Mitchell Brothers, 109
"Masters of War" (Coalition of Mitchell, Mitch, 248
the Willing), 238 "Mixed Up Confusion" (Dylan),
"Masters of War" (Dylan), 31-32, 61,232
63,231,237-40 Moby-Dick (Melville), 131
Mastrangelo, Carlo, 99 Moldy Goldies: Colonel Jubilation B.
McCoy, Charlie, 171, 175 Johnston and His Mystic
McGhie, Isaac, 28n Knights Band and Street Singers
McGuinn, Roger, 245 Attack the Hits Oohnston),
McGuire, Barry, 5, 252 249, 250
McKenzie, Scott, 196 "Monday Monday" (Mamas and
McNamara, Robert, 22, 36,253 Papas), 250
McPhatter, Clyde, 99-100, "Money Honey" (Drifters), 99,
101-2,248,253-54 101,248,253
McQueen, Steve, 47 Monster (Thomas), 251
Meadville (Thomas), 251 Monterey Pop Festival (1967),
The Mekons, 95n 89, 91n, 108
Melcher, Terry, 140 Moore, Scotty, 107
276 Index
Morali, Jacques, 197 Nessuno (Articolo 31), 243
Morthland, John, 257 Neuwirth, Bob, 120, 121
Moscone, George, 196 Neville, Morgan, 249
Mosley, Walter, 36, 253-54 "New Minglewood Blues"
"Most of the orne" (Zelmani), 74 (Dylan), 123n, 240
The Mothers of Invention, 77, "New Minglewood Blues"
106 (Lewis), 122,252
"Mr. Tambourine Man" (Byrds), New Morning (Dylan), 136, 191
44,140,147,244-45 Newman, Nanette, 190
"Mr. Tambourine Man" (Dylan), Newman, Randy, 39
66,69-70,158,234 Newport Folk Festival (1965),
"Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely 25, 108, 153-59,234,254
Daughter" (Herman's Her- Newport Folk Festival (2002),
mits),43 158n
MTV Unplugged, 237, 242 Nicholson, Jack, 237
Muhammad, Elijah, 38 Nixon, Richard, 58
Muldaur, Geoff, 22, 156,254 No Direction Home (Shelton), 256
Murray, Charles Shaar, 80, 82, 254 "No Money Down" (Berry),
"My Back Pages" (Magokoro 166n, 240
Brothers),74 "No Money Down"
"My Black Mama" (Son House), (KeeganlDylan), 166n, 240
9,124,125,243,249 "No More Auction Block"
"Mystery Train" (Presley), 122, (Dylan), 25, 240
254 Noah Lewis Jug Band, 252
The Mystery Tramps, 79-82, 254 "Not Fade Away" (Dylan), 159n
"Nut Popper # 1" (Butterfield),
255
Napoleon (Gance), 141
Nashville Skyline (Dylan), 136
Nation of Islam, 38 Obst, Lynda Rosen, 244, 247
Negativland, 31 n "One Fine Day" (Chiffons),
Nelson, Analise, 239 137n
Nelson, Paul, 154, 155, 158,254 One Love at Studio One (Wailers),
Nelson, Ricky, 138,252 257
Index 277
"Only a Pawn in Their Game" "Phantom Engineer" (Dylan),

(Dylan),63 155,203,210,234,240
Ono, Yoko, 254 Phillips, John, 91 n, 255
Owens, Frank, 203, 205, 211, Pillar of Fire: America in the King
217 Years, i963-65 (Branch),
253
Pinkney, Bill, 101
Page, Patti, 139 Pisaro, Michael, 6-8, 9, 255
Paley, William S., 141n, 142n Planet Waves (Dylan), 191
Palmer, Eddie, 39 "Play with Fire" (Rolling Stones),
"Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" 4-5
(Temptations), 189,257 "Positively 4th Street" (Dylan),
"Parchman Farm" (Kooper), 106 159,240
Parker, (Colonel) Tom, 140n Poston, Shirley, 8-9, 162-63,
Patton, Charley, 27, 166 234,255
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Presley, Elvis, 44, 232, 255, 257
107,108,109,144,154, Beatles and, 3
255 Bloomfield and, 107, 109
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Bloomfield on, 131
255 Dylan and, 50, 61, 99,122
Paycheck,Johnn~62 on Ed Sullivan show, 155
Payne, Leo, 120 Goulet and, 54
Payne, Myrtle, 120 Hendrix and, 90
The Penguins, 166n Highway 61 and, 166, 170
Pennebaker, D. A, 54, 55,183, Johnston and, 138
236, 248 McPhatter and, 102
"Peppermint Twist" Ooey Dee Pet Shop Boys and, 197
and the Starlighters), 90 Spector on, 140n
Perkins, Carl, 166n, 186 "Pretty Peggy-O" (Dylan),
Pet Shop Boys, 196-97, 255 21-22
Peter, Paul & Mary, 39n, 153, Price, Alan, 128, 243
154 Price, Lloyd, 166n
Petty, Tom, 245 Pull My Daisy (Frank/Leslie), 174,
Petway, Robert, 249 251
278 Index
"Queen Jane Approximately" "Rocks and Gravel" (Dylan),
(Dylan), 169-70 232
"A QUick One While He's Away" Rogers, Roy, 137
(Who),108 "Rollin' Stone" (Muddy Waters),
9,121-22,123,131,190,
249, 257
Radice, Paula, 150n, 234, 255-56 Rolling Stone, 34n, 87-88, 233,
Radio Dinner (National Lampoon), 244,247,256,257
52,254 "Rolling Stone" (Wailers), 148,
"Railroad Bill" (Bennett), 123, 257
244 The Rolling Stones, 3, 4-5, 5, 6,
"Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" 9-10,44,88,145, 187, 190,
(Black Labels), 187,244 255-56
"Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" The Ronettes, 95n, 140
(Dylan), 250 The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and
Rare and Well Done (Kooper), 210 Liberty in the American Ballad
Ray, Robert, 53 (Wilentz/Marcus),247
"Ready Teddy" (Little Richard), Rosemary's Baby (Polanski), 144
99,165n,256 Roth, Philip, 199
Reagan, Ronald, 58 Rothchild, Paul, 144-45
Really! The Country Blues, 124,243, Rotten, Johnny, 188
250 The Royal Teens, 106
"Rent" (Pet Shop Boys), 197 Rozanov, Vasily, 172, 256
The Replacements, 186-87, 255 Rubber Soul (Beatles), 5
Ribisi, Giovanni, 75 Rumsfeld, Donald, 238
Ridgway, Stan, 55, 255 Rutman, Howard, 166n
The Righteous Brothers, 9, 42,
137n, 250, 255
Robbins, Marty, 171 "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands"
Robertson, Robbie, 160, 184, (Dylan),205
188,234 "Sail Away" (Newman), 39
Robinson, Smokey, 54 Salazar, Ken, 239
Robyn Sings (Hitchcock), 249 Sam Cooke at the Copa, 245
Index 279
Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Lyon and the Musclemen),
44 106
"San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Siegel, Jules, 242
Flowers in Your Hair)" "Sign on the Window" (Dylan),
(McKenzie), 196 191
Sandperl, Ira, 14 Simon and Garfunkel, 60, 104,
Sands, Tommy, 138 136
Savakus, Russ, 159 Simon, Paul, 139
"Say it Loud-I'm Black and I'm Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy
Proud" (Brown), 31n (Horstman),249
Scaduto, Anthony, 242 "Sinners in the Hands of an
Scandalized Masks (Ensor), 174 Angry God" (Edwards),
Schneider, Fritz, 244-45 117
"See that My Grave Is Kept "Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence"
Clean" (Dylan), 22, 230 (Dylan), 203, 241
Seeger, Pete, 31n, 60,153 The Sixties (Obst), 244, 247
"Seems Like a Freeze-Out" "Sleigh Ride" (Ronettes), 95n
(Dylan), 172,241 Smith,Bessie, 139,166,170
Self Portrait (Dylan), 136, 191 Smith, Versey, 220
The Sex Pistols, 31 n Smith, William, 220
Sexton, Charlie, 50, 237 Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads & Fugitive
Shahn, Ben, 208 Songs (Ridgway), 255
"Shake" (Cooke), 40 "Society's Child" (Ian), 253
The Shangri-Las, 157, 159n The Soft Boys, 188
Shelton, Robert, 84, 256 "Something Is Happening" (Pen-
The Shirelles, 137n nebaker),236
Shirley and Lee, 166n Son House and the Great Delta Blues
Shocked, Michelle, 186 Singers: Complete Recorded
"Short Shorts" (Royal Teens), Works in Chronological Order,
106 1928-1930, 243, 249
"Shotgun" Ounior Walker), 43 "Soul Music-Programme 5: Like
"Shout" (Isley Brothers), 120 a Rolling Stone" (BBC),
"Sick Manny's Gym" (Leo de 234,255-56
280 Index
'The Sounds of Silence" (Simon "Subterranean Homesick Blues"
and Garfunkel), 60, 136 (Dylan), 2, 5,38,60,241
Sounes, Howard, 242 Sultan, Juma, 248
Spector, Phil, 9,33-34,42,140, "Summertime Blues" (Cochran),
140n,256 31n
Spitz, Bob, 145,256 "Summertime Summertime"
Springfield, Dusty, 197 Oamies), 149
Springsteen, Bruce, 73, 94, 139, The Supremes, 43, 146
189,256 "Surfer Girl" (Thomas), 251
"Stairway to Heaven" (Led Zep- "Susie-Q" (Hawkins), 107
pelin), 189-90,251 "Sweet Betsy from Pike," 196
The Stanley Brothers, 122,256 "Sweet Dreams" (Mekons), 95n
Stanton, Frank, 141 n
Staples, Mavis, 186
Starr, Ringo, 95n, 135 ''Take It Easy" (Guthrie and
"Star-Spangled Banner" (Hen- Seeger),60
drix), 77-78,101,182,248 'Take This Job and Shove It"
Steinberg, Susan, 234 (Paycheck),62
Stetson, Carla, 28n Tales of Rock 'N' Roll: Highway 61
Stevens, Cat, 245 Revisited (Marsh), 156-57,
Stevens, Ray, 63 231,232,257
Stewart, Rod, 39, 256 The Taliband, 239
Stills, Stephen, 109 'Talking World War III Blues"
Stone, Allen, 48, 257 (Dylan), 53, 55, 57, 231
Stone, Jesse, 100, 101,253 'Tangled Up in Blue" (Dylan),
"Stop! In the Name of Love" 192-93, 195,230
(Supremes),43 Taylor, Cecil, 104
Stout, William G., 231 Taylor, James, 245
"Strange Fruit" (Holiday), 31 n Taylor, Sam 'The Man," 102
Streisand, Barbra, 140 The Temptations, 189, 257
Stripped (Rolling Stones), 255 Tenenbaum, G. David, 246
Strummer, Joe, 188 Tennant, Neil, 196, 197-98, 199
Studio A The Bob Dylan Reader 'That Summer" (Brooks), 19
(Hedin),256 'That's All Right" (Dylan), 61,232
Index 281
"That's Where It's At" (Cooke), ''Tombstone Blues" (Dylan),

113 168
"There Goes My Baby" "Too Much Monkey Business"
(Drifters), 85, 248 (Berry), 60
The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebra- Top 40 radiO, 35, 37, 44, 45, 66
tion (Dylan et aI), 245 Tosh, Peter, 148
"This Diamond Ring" (Kooper), Townsend, Pete, 108, 131
251 "Traveling Riverside Blues" Oohn-
"This Diamond Ring" (Lewis), son), 103
42, 251 Treehouse, Mark, 238
Thomas, David, 251 Troy, Doris, 190
Thomas, Patrick, 139, 242 The Turtles, 147,257
Thompson, Richard, 94n-95n ''Twistin' the Night Away" (Stew-
Thornton, Willie Mae, 108 art), 256
Thrasher, Andrew, 101
Thrasher, Gerhart, 101
The Thrasher Wonders, 100 Udall, Mark, 239
"TIcket to Ride" (Beatles), 44 Uncle Meat (Zappa), 77
"TIl I Fell in Love with You" "Up on the Roof" (Drifters),
(Dylan), 241 137n
Time Out of Mind (Dylan), 13,21, USA for Africa, 189,257
26, 199, 232, 241
The Times They Are A-Changin'
(Dylan), 161, 182,241 Vai, Steve, 186
''The TImes They Are A- Valens, Ritchie, 9, 85, 257
Changin'" (Dylan), 53, van Zandt, Townes, 74
54-55,62,74 Vaneigem, Raoul, 256
''The TImes They Are A- Varese, Edgard, 146
Changin': A Radio Sympo- Velez, Jerry, 248
sium on Bob Dylan and His The Velvet Underground, 251
TImes" (WFUV), 247 Ventura, Jesse, 166n
'The TItanic" (Smith & Smith), 220 Very (Pet Shop Boys), 255
"(Today I Met) The Boy ['m Vietnam War, 36,43,51,56,58,
Gonna Marry" (Love), 140 76,88,168,169,178,191
282 Index
The Village People, 195-96 Wenner, Jann, 34n, 87-89, 244,
Vincent, Gene, 107 247,255,257
"Visions of Johanna" (Dylan), Wesdon, John, 167,257
172,174,230,241 Westerberg, Paul, 187
"Voodoo Chile" (Hendrix), 190, "A Western Ballad" (Ginsberg),
249 248
Voting Rights Act, 43 "(What A) Wonderful World"
Voting rights marches, 36, (Cooke),44
42-43 "What Have I Done to Deserve
This" (Pet Shop Boys), 197
"What'd I Say" (Charles), 120, 141
Wailer, Bunny, 148 "When First Unto This Country"
The Wailers (aka Bob Marley (Dylan),26
and the Wailers), 148, 150, "When the Spell Is Broken"
257 (Thompson),95n
"Waiting Around to Die" (van "When the Swallows Come Back
Zandt),74 to Capistrano" (Dominoes),
Walker, Junior, 43 tOO
"Walking Blues" When We Were Good: The Folk
(Butterfield/Johnson), 255 Revival (Cantwell), 245
Wallace, Ian, 237 "Where Were You (When the
Ward, Ed, 244 World Stopped Turning)"
Warhol, Andy, 80 Oackson), 19
Waters, Muddy, 9,88, 108, t09, White, Bukka, 234
121-22,166, 190,249, "White Christmas" (Drifters),
257 100, 253
Watts riots, 36-37, 44, 150, 247, White, Clifton, 246
253-54 White Light/White Heat (Velvet
"We Are the World" (USA for Underground), 106
Africa), 189,257 The White Stripes, 249
"We Shall Overcome" (Seeger), The Who, 108
31n "Who Killed Davey Moore?"
Weil, Cynthia, 137, 138n (Dylan), 57, 63
Index 283
Wilentz, Sean, 158n, 232, "Wonderful World" (Herman's

247 Hermits),44
"Will You Love Me Tomorrow" Woodstock festival (1969), 76,
(Shirelles), 137n 77
Williams, Andy, 140 "Wooly Bully" (Sam the Sham
Williams, Big Joe, 107 and the Pharaohs), 44
Williams, Hank, 9, 75, 120,121,
257
Williamson, Sonny Boy (Rice Yates, Tom, 131, 244
Miller), 107, 122,231, "Yesterday" (Beatles), 5
257 "YM.C.A." (Village People), 196
Wilson, Jackie, 102 "You Can't Always Get What You
Wilson, Luke, 73 Want" (Rolling Stones),
Wilson, Tom, 232 190
career of, 106-7 "You Don't Own Me" (Gore),
Dylan and, 60, 61 31n
firing of, 135, 139-40 You Send Me: The Life & Times of Sam
Johnston and, 130, 142, 144 Cooke (Wolff et al.), 39n,
Kooperand, 104, 110 245
at "Like a Rolling Stone" ses- The Young Rascals, 147,250-51,
sions, xi, 111,203,206-7, 258
209-10,212-13,215,217, The Young Rascals, 258
218-22 "You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling"
sound of, 142 (Righteous Brothers), 9, 42,
Winchester, Oliver, 71 137n, 140,255
Winchester, Sarah L., 71
"With God on Our Side"
(Dylan), 18-21,48,161, Zantzinger, William, 27, 55,
200,242 241-42
Wojtanek-Watson, Allyse, Zappa, Frank, 77,104,106,146,
238-39 258
Wolff, Daniel, 39n, 246 Zelmani, Sophie, 74
Wonder, Stevie, 189 Zimmerman, Abraham, 28n
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Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music (1975)

Bob Dylan at the Crossroads

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Once upon a time you dressed so fine

How does it feel?

How does it feel?

With no direction home

How does it feel?

How does it feel

Democracy in America 165

Works Cited 227

In Columbia Records Studio A on 15 June 1965, the singer is

"Have you heard about the new Bob Dylan record?"

Questioner: "What happens if they have to cut a song in half

A drum beat like a pistol shot.

own intelligence, to suspend the contest in a cul-de-sac of

narrating it is having with his girl." It might be even more, a

And then Pisaro is in the air, looking down as the song

What is the nature of the decision Dylan is driving towards?

Or, as reviewer Shirley Poston put it in The Beat, the

Dylan's performance of "like a Rolling Stone" at the Holly-

People then understood everything Pisaro is saying now. But

The Day Kennedy Was Shot

"Everyone remembers where they were when they heard that

I remember very clearly where I was the first time I heard

upon himself to stand in Washington for those in Mississippi

The nation was coming to a verge, where it would have

The Day Kennedy Was Shot 17

who were buying Baez's albums as charms and trances, it was

ues-values of tradition and fraternity, equality and con-

away but physically present-and you understand it com-

the Second World War, even the Spanish-American War. His

As a performer, with "God on Our Side" the singer had at

found Fennario"); all in all the album was a collection of old

anything but the match. I was just dumbfounded enough to

That summation-boilerplate as it first appeared in the Buf-

Though throughout the years Bob Dylan has, as his stage

England, in May 1966, when Dylan and his band, an errant

singing a sixteen-minute song as if he were rewriting a single

Coursing through these incidents and many more like

1991. As television, it was a break from the round-the-clock

were speaking in tongues: was this a sermon, a curse, a juke-

In "Like a Rolling Stone/' that nowhere was a rising tide.

which Spector meant his own Wall of Sound. He drew a dis-

When you made the charts in 1965, you became part of a

The outside world, the apparent real world, changed very

Paris, "comfort will never be comfortable enough for those

somewhat differently, wearing your hair slightly longer, or

Inspired by Bob Dylan's 1963 "Blowin' in the Wind," which

Never rising higher than number 31, the B side of the

hesitations and demurrers of ordinary speech, or, for as long

"Downtown" was followed at the top of the charts by Phil

[continued] by the second verse-the singer in front of a movie theater, being

crime that four months later would be ended by the Voting

Whatever else you want to say about this, it was a field of