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| From | "Judy B" <HeyJude@socal.rr.com> |
| Subject | Bob's Breakthrough, Like a Rolling Stone... |
| Date | Mon, 25 Jul 2005 09:39:45 -0700 |
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This is quite interesting.
Bob's Breakthrough; "Like a Rolling Stone"
40 years ago last week 'LIKE A ROLLING STONE'
> john goddard
> Toronto Star, July 24, 2005
>
> Like a Rolling Stone" was back on Bob Dylan's set list last week as he
> entered Western Canada for several dates on a tour with Willie Nelson and
> Family.
>
> He performed the song again Tuesday as a final encore at Vancouver's
> Orpheum
> Theatre, although not in the same venue the following night - 40 years to
> the day when it was first released as a single.
>
> The enduring power of the song seems undeniable. So does its significance.
>
> From the opening drum crack to the closing harmonica solo, in an elapsed
> time of six minutes, six seconds, "Like a Rolling Stone" marks a period
> for
> Dylan in which sound, lyrics and emotion began to swirl together in
> revolutionary new ways.
>
> Last fall, Rolling Stone magazine listed it at the top of 500 songs as the
> best rock 'n' roll track yet. More recently, music writer Greil Marcus
> published an entire book on the song's musical and social importance. And
> film director Martin Scorsese used a line in the song to title his
> two-part
> Dylan documentary,
> No Direction Home, airing in late September on PBS.
>
> Two aspects of the song's origins make it especially fascinating.
>
> One is that it came out of an acute artistic crisis for Dylan. The other
> is
> that the crisis was captured on film.
>
> D.A. Pennebaker documented it in Don't Look Back, an intimate Dylan
> portrait
> that previews elements of the song as they enter his consciousness, one
> consequence of which was Dylan's fateful trip three months later to
> Toronto.
>
> The movie begins in London in late April 1965.
>
> Dylan, a few weeks shy of his 24th birthday, is developing and changing
> rapidly. One month earlier, he had released his fifth album, Bringing it
> All
> Back Home, which includes "Subterranean Homesick Blues," with a piano, an
> electric guitar and a backbeat that is unmistakably rock 'n' roll.
>
> He knows now what he has to do. He must get an electric band. But in the
> meantime he is contractually obliged to tour as a solo folk hero in
> England,
> where his latest material remains unreleased.
>
> That is Dylan's bind and, from the movie's outset, he appears agitated and
> behaves badly.
>
> He openly ignores Joan Baez, who is expecting to perform with him onstage.
> She eventually leaves, humiliated.
>
> He continually ridicules Donovan, a Scottish singer-songwriter who
> performs
> solo with a harmonica and an acoustic guitar, the exact format Dylan has
> come to loathe for himself.
>
> The most painful scene to watch is when Dylan mockingly performs "It's All
> Over Now, Baby Blue" to Donovan in a hotel room, while Donovan sits
> literally clenching his jaw.
>
> Dylan is also mean to reporters, answering their questions with nonsense.
> Out of his anger, however, and what he identified afterward as feelings of
> vengefulness, arise the central juxtaposition of "Like a Rolling Stone."
>
> "What is really the truth?" a Time magazine reporter asks in the middle of
> a
> particularly colourful Dylan diatribe.
>
> "The truth is just a plain picture of a tramp vomiting, man, into the
> sewer," Dylan replies in a stream of consciousness. "And next door to the
> picture of Mr. Rockefeller."
>
> He is suggesting that Time run the juxtaposition of tramp and rich man,
> but
> uses a version of it himself in "Like a Rolling Stone," setting the fallen
> high-society figure, the "princess on the steeple," against "the mystery
> tramp," the "Napoleon in rags."
>
> The film also previews the song in other ways, as Dylan biographer Paul
> Williams points out in his first volume of Bob Dylan Performing Artist.
>
> "We may be seeing the actual moment of inspiration for the song's title
> and
> chorus when (friend Bob) Neuwirth demands that Dylan sing another verse of
> Hank Williams's 'Lost Highway,'" Williams writes.
>
> "I'm a rolling stone," Dylan sings, "all alone and lost."
>
> In another scene, Dylan is shown improvising energetically at a piano
> backstage.
>
> "In the ascending chords (that) Dylan plays," Williams writes, "we can
> hear
> the basic musical pattern ... that will form the basis of the chorus
> melody
> and the repeated harmonic figure in 'Like a Rolling Stone.'"
>
> Dylan played his last concert of the U.K. tour on May 10. He took a
> holiday
> in Portugal, then returned to England to film two BBC television shows on
> June 1.
>
> When he returned to the United States, he immediately wrote what he later
> described as "a long piece of vomit."
>
> Out of it emerged "Like a Rolling Stone." On July 15, he rounded up six
> other musicians and recorded it in New York.
>
> On July 20 it was released as a single and five days later - 40 years ago
> tomorrow - he played it and two other songs with an electric band at the
> Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island. Famously, the crowd booed. But
> Dylan
> knew that he had found the sound he was looking for.
>
> On Sept. 15, after two similarly controversial performances, he flew to
> Toronto to rehearse for an electric tour that would start later that month
> and last into the following year.
>
> His musicians would be Levon and the Hawks, later to become famous as The
> Band. They were a Toronto bar band performing nightly at the Friar's
> Tavern
> at Yonge and Dundas Sts., now the Hard Rock Cafe. For two nights, after
> the
> shows, Dylan rehearsed with them there.
>
> At one point, he spoke to cultural columnist Robert Fulford, then an
> entertainment writer at the Star. Fulford asked Dylan if his current work
> was being influenced by anybody, the way his early work had been
> influenced
> by Woody Guthrie.
>
> "It's all sort of formed in its own way now," Dylan replied. "It's not
> influenced by anyone. I know my thing now, I know what it is. It's hard to
> describe. I don't know what to call it because I've never heard it
> before."
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