Bob Dylan recorded 'Like a Rolling Stone'. Many rock and roll critics place 'Like a Rolling Stone' the number one rock song of all time. It is a cultural milestone worth noting and remembering it if you were around in the summer of 65. I was. I was a very clueless 14 year old and for me it was still a summer for the Beatles and Help.
'Like a Rolling Stone' is still number one on Rolling Stone Magazine's Top 500 songs of all time. From the review.
"I wrote it. I didn't fail. It was straight," Bob Dylan said of his greatest song shortly after he recorded it in June 1965. There is no better description of "Like a Rolling Stone" — of its revolutionary design and execution — or of the young man, just turned 24, who created it.
Al Kooper, who played organ on the session, remembers today, "There was no sheet music, it was totally by ear. And it was totally disorganized, totally punk. It just happened."
The most stunning thing about "Like a Rolling Stone" is how unprecedented it was: the impressionist voltage of Dylan's language, the intensely personal accusation in his voice ("Ho-o-o-ow does it fe-e-e-el?"), the apocalyptic charge of Kooper's garage-gospel organ and Mike Bloomfield's stiletto-sharp spirals of Telecaster guitar, the defiant six-minute length of the June 16th master take. No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time.
The entire article is here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/...
This Day in History notes:
It was the fourth of 11 takes that day that yielded the six-minute-and-34-second recording that very nearly didn’t become a revolutionary hit single. Returning to the CBS studios to hear “Like A Rolling Stone” several days after the recording session, Dylan and manager Albert Grossman were thrilled by what they heard, but the sales and marketing staff of Columbia Records—the gatekeepers who decided what songs would and wouldn’t be released as singles—did not agree. At 6:34,
The marketing guys didn't think Dylan, 'was where it's at.'
How it became a hit:
As Shaun Considine, the coordinator of new releases for Columbia Records at the time, recounted 40 year later in a New York Times Op-ed, Dylan’s magnum opus was rejected as a single and resurrected only after Considine slipped a studio acetate to a DJ at a prominent Manhattan nightclub in mid-July. Two well-known radio DJs in the audience heard “Like A Rolling Stone” and the overwhelming crowd reaction to it that night and called Columbia the next day, demanding their copies of “the new Bob Dylan single.”
The entire article is here:
http://www.history.com/...
I eventually realized the greatness of Dylan and this song when I went off to college in 1969. Listening to albums in dorm rooms and off campus apartments and being old enough to understand the poetry was what converted me to the greatness of Dylan and this song. Also having a Dylan fanatic as a roomie for two years was a big help.
One other point is that a little more than a month later Dylan played this song at the Newport Folk Festival and got booed for going electric. Getting booed for playing the greatest rock song of all time - there were a bunch of kids who 'didn't know where it's at' in 1965.