The Bob Dylan Top 125 Countdown & This Week's Statistics

Hello everybody! We are finally at the end of our long and beautiful journey in the company of one Bob Dylan. Since every end is also a beginning, another countdown will begin next week; Dylan is my favorite American singer-songwriter of all-time, coming up is the countdown of the best songs of my favorite American group of all-time. Here's a clue as to the name of this group: in the post-dictatorship years in Greece in the 70s, many students used to go to school carrying a military-style back-pack. On it, things were written, the most usual being the peace sign and the name of this group. Enough said, let's get on with the countdown!

At #6 in our countdown is Dylan's best song after the 60's, a song from the album Blood On The Tracks (1975) called Tangled Up in Blue. Dylan said to journalist Ron Rosenblaum that he wrote the song after repeated listens to Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which would help explain the title. Released as a single, it reached #31 on the Billboard Hot 100. Rolling Stone ranked it #68 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

"[This song] took me 10 years to live, and two years to write," Dylan often said before playing Tangled Up in Blue in concert. His marriage was crumbling in 1974 as he wrote what would become his most personal examination of hurt and nostalgia. Dylan's lyrical shifts in perspective, between confession and critique, and his acute references to the Sixties experience evoked a decade of utopian dreams and broken promises. His plaintive vocal and the fresh-air picking of the Minneapolis session players hearkened to an earlier pathos: the frank heartbreak and spiritual restoration in Appalachian balladry. Dylan has played this song many different ways live but rarely strays from the perfect crossroads of this recording, where emotional truths meet the everlasting comfort of the American folk song.

Tangled Up in Blue is one of the clearest examples of Dylan's attempts to write "multi-dimensional" songs which defied a fixed notion of time and space. Dylan was influenced by his recent study of painting and the Cubist school of artists, who sought to incorporate multiple perspectives within a single plane of view. As Neil McCormick remarked in 2003: "A truly extraordinary epic of the personal, an unreliable narrative carved out of shifting memories like a five-and-a-half-minute musical Proust." In a 1978 interview Dylan explained this style of songwriting: "What's different about it is that there's a code in the lyrics, and there's also no sense of time. There's no respect for it. You've got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there's very little you can't imagine not happening".

What seems so attractive to the listener hearing this as a song, rather than a poem set to music, is the integration of Dylan’s singing mixed with occasional declamation, with that trade mark last note of the line in a collapsing glissando. Never has the effect been more controlled or more effective – because this is what the song is; the story of a collapsing glissando.

The way that Dylan conveys yesterday, today and tomorrow in the music is through the rotating two chords that open each verse and return and return and return. Time is endlessly rotating.

Of course in writing such a song some stability is needed to stop the whole piece unravelling, and here this is done with the last five lines of each verse, in which the percussion suddenly becomes much more dominant, and the chord changes become much more definite.

So many interpretations of the lyrics exist; it's mind-blowing. I have my own interpretation, but I would rather present you with the lyrics and let you decide how the story plays out for you:

Early one mornin' the sun was shinin'
I was layin' in bed
Wondrin' if she'd changed at all
If her hair was still red
Her folks they said our lives together
Sure was gonna be rough
They never did like
Mama's homemade dress
Papa's bank book wasn't big enough
And I was standin' on the side of the road
Rain fallin' on my shoes
Heading out for the east coast
Lord knows I've paid some dues
Gettin' through
Tangled up in blue

She was married when we first met
Soon to be divorced
I helped her out of a jam I guess
But I used a little too much force
We drove that car as far as we could
Abandoned it out west
Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was best
She turned around to look at me
As I was walkin' away
I heard her say over my shoulder
We'll meet again some day
On the avenue
Tangled up in blue

I had a job in the great north woods
Working as a cook for a spell
But I never did like it all that much
And one day the axe just fell
So I drifted down to New Orleans
Where I happened to be employed
Workin' for a while on a fishin' boat
Right outside of Delacroix
But all the while I was alone
The past was close behind
I seen a lot of women
But she never escaped my mind
And I just grew
Tangled up in blue

She was workin' in a topless place
And I stopped in for a beer
I just kept lookin' at the side of her face
In the spotlight so clear
And later on as the crowd thinned out
I's just about to do the same
She was standing there in back of my chair
Said to me "Don't I know your name?"
I muttered somethin' under my breath
She studied the lines on my face
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
When she bent down to tie the laces
Of my shoe
Tangled up in blue

She lit a burner on the stove
And offered me a pipe
I thought you'd never say hello, she said
You look like the silent type
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
And everyone of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul
From me to you
Tangled up in blue

I lived with them on Montague Street
In a basement down the stairs
There was music in the cafes at night
And revolution in the air
Then he started into dealing with slaves
And something inside of him died
She had to sell everything she owned
And froze up inside
And when finally the bottom fell out
I became withdrawn
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin' on
Like a bird that flew
Tangled up in blue

So now I'm goin' back again
I got to get to her somehow
All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenters' wives
Don't know how it all got started
I don't know what they're doin' with their lives
But me, I'm still on the road
Headin' for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point
Of view
Tangled up in blue

Here's the song:

Tangled Up in Blue

... and here's a live version (1975):

... finally, here's a good cover version by KT Tunstall:

The song at #5, Positively 4th Street, was first recorded by Dylan in New York City on July 29, 1965. It was released as a single on September 7, 1965, reaching  #1 in Canada,  #7 in the US, and  #8 in the UK. Rolling Stone magazine ranked the song as  #206 in their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.

The song was released between the albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, as the follow-up to Dylan's hit single Like a Rolling Stone, but wasn't included on either LP. The song's title does not appear anywhere in the lyrics and there has been much debate over the years as to the significance or which individual the song concerns.

Two lines of music – just eight bars long – repeated over and over and over. And yet it is brilliant, a song one never tires of because the record is so perfect in its delivery. Maybe because it is so viscous in its lyrics that the repetition of the eight bars over and over again without variation just brings home that feeling of unresolved hatred. “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend…”

It is the absolute and complete song of disdain. When has there been another piece with such a strong opening? It is a wall of disgust that pours out from Dylan, as he attacks the so-called "friend", while the music continues unchanging, as the emotion is unchanging too.

And even if we have never faced someone with such feelings of hatred, we can all empathize with the notion that “You just want to be on the side that’s winning.” How many people like that do we know?

There’s no variation in tone, melody, chord structure, volume… It just hits you like a rolling wave from which there is never an escape and never will be an escape – and that is how it should be.

Here's what Lucinda Williams has to say about it:

"I love the theme of this song: jealousy over artistic success. I've seen it happen. "You see me on the street, you always act surprised / You say, 'How are you? Good luck!' But you don't mean it." I discovered that when I tried to move back to Austin. I started there singing on the street in 1974, and then I tried to move back there later after I'd been in Los Angeles. It just didn't work. Once we were playing somewhere, and I ran into a friend I knew from back in the day, another musician. I was getting back on the bus, and she wanted to hang out – she said, "Lucinda, sometimes I wish you weren't famous." What the hell is that supposed to mean? Jesus. But that's exactly what Positively 4th Street is about. I love the way the song closes: "I wish that for just one time, you could stand inside my shoes / You'd know what a drag it is to see you." Those lines feel so good to sing. I've heard that Dylan wrote the song when he started getting famous and he was still living in the Village in New York. Nobody wants to admit that that kind of stuff goes on, and of course nobody knows anything about what it's really like to be Bob Dylan. There's only one of him. And he's so damn good at that."

This is the original:

Positively 4th Street

This is a live version in Sydney, Australia, 1966, which is almost punk in its intensity:

Johnny Rivers was probably the first to cover this song, using it as the closing track on his Realization album in 1968. Dylan said in his best selling book Chronicles: Volume One that he preferred Johnny Rivers' version of Positively 4th Street to his own recording of the song. Here it is:

At #4 is Subterranean Homesick Blues, a track from Bringing It All Back Home (1965), which was also released as a single, making the Top 10 in the UK and being his first Top 40 hit in the US.

Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again…

If you had to distill Bob Dylan down to his essence, the result would probably be Subterranean Homesick Blues, where he manages to cram 7 minutes worth of words into 2 minutes and 21 seconds of pop perfection. Witty, wise, rebellious, and verbally dexterous, the song represents all of Dylan’s greatest attributes, captured at the precise instant he was giving himself a musical makeover. Add some drums and bass to acoustic guitar, and you’ve got a brand new bag.

It’s hard to imagine anyone not liking this song, with its bluesy balance of pop prophecy and street theater, and it’s interesting to contemplate how it would have been received by the folk music community had it not been presented with electric backing. Would Dylan have been embraced as a non-linear Woody Guthrie, or would his lyrical flights of fancy been deemed too great a folk music faux pas, regardless? Either way, Dylan’s use of electric instrumentation would go on to change the course of rock music history.

The song introduces the character of Maggie, who possibly reappears one album later in Maggie’s Farm. The lyrics rattle off a litany of satirical advice about consumerism, delinquency, and avoiding the Man, who’s coon skin cap should not be seen as a sign of being “with it.”

Walk on your tip toes
Don’t try “No Doz”
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose.

It ends with a bit of whimsy that still resonates today, whatever it actually represents:

Don’t wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don’t work
‘Cause the vandals took the handles

Subterranean Homesick Blues kicks off Dylan’s first foray into electric music, 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home. Its meter and chord progression borrow from Chuck Berry’s 1958 chart hit Too Much Monkey Business (Dylan himself has confirmed the link: “It’s from Chuck Berry, a bit of Too Much Monkey Business and some of the scat songs of the Forties,” our man admitted recently). Its title may be an homage to Jack Kerouac’s free-form novel and tribute to hipster youth, “The Subterraneans.”

The song is also famous for its sublime music video, one of the first of its kind, which opens the 1967 film Don’t Look Back. In it, Dylan flips cards containing key words from the song in time with the music, with uncanny timing, as Allen Ginsberg stands in the background, monitoring the poet’s progress.

John Lennon was so overwhelmed when he first heard it, he was quoted as saying he didn’t know how he would ever compete. “You don’t have to hear what Bob Dylan says, you just have to hear how he says it” the Beatle quipped. Lennon went on to produce Harry Nilsson’s 1974 garage rock-style cover, which featured Ringo Starr on drums.

Musicians weren’t the only one who were influenced by the song. The 1960s radical communist group the Weathermen took their name from the song’s famous line, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The Weathermen went on to bomb several political targets in the late sixties before disbanding.

We have now reached the Top 3: At #3 in Just Like a Woman, a song from Blonde On Blonde (1966). Dylan's superb ballad is not a love song. Just Like a Woman is a complex portrait of adoration and disappointment, written as vengeance but sung as regret. Dylan never revealed a specific inspiration for the woman indicted. (Dylanologists often cite Andy Warhol's star-crossed protégée Edie Sedgwick, who was fond of amphetamines. Other cite the final line of the last verse, “Please don’t let on that you knew me when/I was hungry and it was your world” to make the case that the lyrics deal at least in a small part with Dylan’s relationship with Joan Baez - who was a successful folksinger before Dylan was.) But the song is more about his own turbulent lessons in romance – the giving, taking and leaving. It is also Dylan's first great country-rock performance. Dylan was making thunder and headlines onstage that year with the Hawks, but he cut this song with Nashville session cats who heard and heightened his tangle of rapture and despair. "There's a lifetime of listening in these details," songwriter Jimmy Webb said. "I still marvel at what an absolutely stunning piece of writing it is."

Just Like A Woman is one of those Bob Dylan songs that gets under your skin. The chorus’s connotations are a puzzle we all must figure out for ourselves, be we male or female. The verses are tinged with sadness and a need to strip away the layers of artifice surrounding the hungover singer and the girl he can now see clearly. If nobody feels any pain at the beginning of the song, by the time we get to the bridge, the pain must be dealt with. The sad facts are these: baby can’t be blessed, the ribbons and bows have fallen from her curls, and one thing is clear — “it’s time for us to quit.”

Another thing Just Like A Woman has got going for it is the emotionally charged bridge, which Dylan can write like no other (see Ballad of A Thin Man, Temporary Like Achilles, I Want You, Most Likely You Go Your Way). The way it spills out into the final verse (“ain’t it clear, that I… just don’t fit”) is masterful.

Just to show how open to interpretations Dylan's songs are, here's an analysis that gives us a totally different perspective:

"It gets to me, whenever anyone gets down on this song for being against women in some way. It also amazes me when people take the song literally. ‘Cause the song is not about a woman, but about a drug. You can hear this most clearly in the “Before the Flood” live version, where he’s speaking from further down the road.

The album starts off with Rainy Day Women, which is about the biblical version of getting “stoned,” but is also tongue-in-cheek about getting high. A “Rainy Day Woman” would be a joint saved for a rainy day.

That sounds like a stretch, but Dylan uses “rain” for drugs often. Like a couple songs later, he’s hanging out with friends in a loft at night and “Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it.” Passing him a joint as he sits there, writing about what he sees and hears as the visions conquer his mind.

A couple songs later “the rainman gave me two cures,” and “it strangled up my mind” and “I have no sense of time.”

Later on we have him asking, “Where are you tonight, sweet Marie?”, looking for someone to bring him a bag, just like in the album before this he says that he’s tired of himself and all of his creations, and so “Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?”

So there you have Marie and Jane – Mary Jane. One is sweet and one’s a queen. And he goes to the queen when “you want somebody you don’t have to speak to.” Meaning a drug, not a woman. It’s a theme that repeats in “Empire Burlesque,” and it’s all through this song.

First it starts off letting you know he’s stoned – “Nobody feels any pain / Tonight as I stand inside the rain.” He’s enthralled by the drug, how she takes him in and embraces him, but then the high drops and “she breaks just like a little girl.”

Then you have the drug imagery of “her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls,” (referenced in U2’s song of heroin abuse, Running to Stand Still) and then it’s back to the rain: “It was raining from the first,” and he goes for it, and while “your long-time curse” of addiction hurts, “what’s worse / is this pain in here.”

Again he tries to get off it, saying, “Yes, I believe it’s time for us to quit.” And knows that he’ll be at a party or backstage somewhere and someone will offer him something – “When we meet again / Introduced as friends” – he doesn’t want anyone to know how strung out he was: “Please don’t let on that you knew me when / I was hungry and it was your world.” Meaning the drugs made over the world, and that was all he saw.

Almost forgot, there’s also this line in the song: “Queen Mary, she’s my friend.” So there’s Queen Mary and Queen Jane, and for a while they inspired him like no woman before."

This is the studio version:

Just Like A Woman

This is a live version (1966):

Just Like A Woman (Live)

The song's bridge would give Richie Havens a leg up - in his version, he adds a lightning-fast series of strums on his acoustic guitar to amp up the tension. It’s now one of the things he’s best known for, his signature move. Here it is:

I was conflicted about which song would be #1 and which would be #2. I love them both equally. In the end, by a hair's breadth, I made a decision; at #2 is a song from the only album that has two songs in the Top 5, Bringing It All Back Home (1965). The song is Mr. Tambourine Man.

The song has a bright, expansive melody and has become famous in particular for its surrealistic imagery, influenced by artists as diverse as French poet Arthur Rimbaud and Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. The lyrics call on the title character to play a song and the narrator will follow. Interpretations of the lyrics have included a paean to drugs such as LSD, a call to the singer's muse, a reflection of the audience's demands on the singer, and religious interpretations.

Whether you’re a Bob Dylan fan or not, almost everybody who hears Mr. Tambourine Man has to admit that it’s a pretty great song. It’s the Bob Dylan song even your grandma could love; featuring a flowing, pretty and engaging melody, and words that soothe and beckon instead of divide. It’s the lyrical equivalent of a profoundly beautiful sunset after a productive day, and it speaks of wonders yet to come. “Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship… I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade, into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it.” Dylan may have been alluding to the effect of drugs, or he may have been singing about the effects of a good book, or a cup of tea. Or a cup of tea and a good book, on drugs. These days, it’s just a great song.

Though you might hear laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun,
It’s not aimed at anyone, it’s just escapin’ on the run
and but for the sky there are no fences facin’.
And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme
to your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind,
I wouldn’t pay it any mind, it’s just a shadow you’re
seein’ that he’s chasing.

Here it is:

Mr. Tambourine Man

This a live version at the Newport Folk Festival:

The Byrds also recorded a version of the song that they released in the same year as their first single on Columbia Records, reaching #1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 chart and the UK Singles Chart. Here's what David Crosby has to say about it:

"As far as I can tell, the Byrds' recording of Mr. Tambourine Man was the first time anyone put really good poetry on the radio. The Beatles hadn't gotten to Eleanor Rigby or A Day in the Life – they were still writing, "Ooh, baby." But Bob's lyrics were exquisite. "To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free" – that was the line that got me. I think he was finding himself as a poet.

I had seen Bob at Gerde's Folk City in New York years earlier. Everyone was talking about him. I thought, "Fuck, I can sing better than that. Why are they making all that fuss about him?" Then I started really listening. And I almost quit, right there. I think the Byrds were Bob's best translators. Bob did not envision this song the way we did it. When he came to the studio where we were rehearsing and heard us do Mr. Tambourine Man, he was stoked. I think hearing our version was part of what made Dylan shift over to being a rocker. He thought, "Wait a minute, that's my song," and he heard how it could be different."

The line that Crosby has mentioned is my favorite line too, as well as the whole verse. Here it is:

And take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time
Far past the frozen leaves
The haunted frightened trees
Out to the windy bench
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
With one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands
With all memory of fate
Driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow

... and here's my favorite cover version, by the great Odetta:

Now we are ready for Dylan's top song: It is found on the Highway 61 Revisited (1965) album. Rolling Stone also placed the song at number one on its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". It could be that the magazine was named after the song, which is: Like A Rolling Stone.

It was thought to be inspired at least in part by the Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick whom Dylan had an affair with. His relationship with her was a cause of some friction however, creating an emotional tug of war between Dylan and the Warhol camp in which she was heavily entrenched both emotionally and chemically.

“Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse, when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose,
you’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.”

A lot has been said about Like A Rolling Stone already. In fact, entire books have been written about it. It’s a rock and roll institution, a declaration of independence, and a cosmic romp through interior streets. And once it hit airwaves in the summer of ’65, it looked to be the final nail in the coffin in the image of Bob Dylan, acoustic guitar-wielding protest singer. Old conventions were laid to rest. The future was now. How did it feel?

It felt right to the record-buying public, who took the song to #2 in the US (behind the Beatles' Help!), Dylan's biggest hit single ever. It was also a Top 10 hit in other countries, including Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

At six minutes long, DJs had to abandon their pre-concieved notions of how long a radio single could be, paving the way for freeform radio and the eventual deification of Stairway to Heaven.

The song had a huge impact on Bruce Springsteen, who was 15 years old when he first heard it:

The first time I heard Bob Dylan, 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 ... The way that Elvis freed your body, Dylan freed your mind, and showed us that because the music was physical did not mean it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and talent to make a pop song so that it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording could achieve, and he changed the face of rock'n'roll for ever and ever "

Dylan's contemporaries in 1965 were both startled and challenged by the single. Paul McCartney remembered going around to John Lennon's house in Weybridge to hear the song. According to McCartney, "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful ... He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further." Frank Zappa had a more extreme reaction: "When I heard Like a Rolling Stone, I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else ...' But it didn't do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have.

The All Music Guide calls it “one of the most self-righteous and eloquent indictments ever committed to wax.”

Author David Hadju decreed it “his venomous rock and roll masterpiece.”

Bono of U2 had a lot to say about it:

"That sneer – it's something to behold. Elvis had a sneer, of course. And the Rolling Stones had a sneer that, if you note the title of the song, Bob wasn't unaware of. But Bob Dylan's sneer on Like a Rolling Stone turns the wine to vinegar.

It's a black eye of a pop song. The verbal pugilism cracks open songwriting for a generation and leaves the listener on the canvas. Like a Rolling Stone is the birth of an iconoclast that will give the rock era its greatest voice and vandal. This is Dylan as the Jeremiah of the heart. Having railed against the hypocrisies of the body politic, he starts to pick on enemies that are a little more familiar: the scene, high society, "pretty people" who think they've "got it made." He hasn't made it to his own hypocrisies – that would come later. But the "us" and "them" are not so clearly defined as earlier albums. Here he bares his teeth at the hipsters, the idea that you had a better value system if you were wearing the right pair of boots.

For some, the Sixties was a revolution. But there were others who were erecting a guillotine in Greenwich Village not for their political enemies, but rather for the squares. Bob was already turning on that idea, even as he best embodied it, with the corkscrew hair Jimi Hendrix imitated. The tumble of words, images, ire and spleen on Like a Rolling Stone shape-shifts easily into music forms 10 or 20 years away, like punk, grunge or hip-hop. Looking at the character in the lyric, you ask, "How quickly could she have plunged from high society to 'scrounging' for her 'next meal'?" Perhaps it is a glance into the future; perhaps it's fiction, a screenplay distilled into one song.

It must have been hard to be or be around Dylan then; that unblinking eye was turning on everybody and everything. But the real mischief is in its ear-biting humor. "If you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose" is the T-shirt. But the line that I like the best is "You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns / When they all did tricks for you / You never understood that it ain't no good / You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you."

The playing on this track – by the likes of guitarist Mike Bloomfield and keyboardist Al Kooper – is so alive that it's like you're getting to see the paint splash the canvas. As is often the case with Bob in the studio, the musicians don't fully know the song. It's like the first touch. They're getting to know it, and you can feel their joy of discovery as they're experiencing it.
When the desire to communicate is met with an equal and opposite urge not to compromise in order to communicate is when everything happens with rock & roll. And that's what Dylan achieved in Like a Rolling Stone. I don't particularly care who this song is about – though I've met a few people who have claimed it was about them (some who weren't even born in 1965). The thrill for me was that "once upon a time," a song this radical was a hit on the radio. The world was changed by somebody who cared enough about an unrequited love to write such a devastating put-down.
I love to hear a song that changes everything. That's the reason I'm in a band: David Bowie's Heroes, Arcade Fire's Rebellion (Lies), Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, Public Enemy's Fight the Power. But at the top of this dysfunctional family tree sits the king of spitting fire himself, the juggler of beauty and truth, our own Willy Shakespeare in a polka-dot shirt. It's why every songwriter after him carries his baggage and why this lowly Irish bard would proudly carry his luggage. Any day."

Dylan himself described it as a “long piece of vomit,” but he meant that in the nicest of ways:

“This long piece of vomit, 20 pages long, and out of it I took Like a Rolling Stone and made it as a single,” he said. “And I never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that was… that was what I should do. After writing that, I wasn’t interested in writing a novel or a play or anything, like I knew like I had too much, I wanted to write songs.”

“The first two lines, which rhymed ‘kiddin’ you’ and ‘didn’t you,’ just about knocked me out,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1988. “And later on, when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much.”

Like A Rolling Stone tells the story of Miss Lonely, who went to the finest schools, but learns too late that she knows very little. Now, after an undisclosed amount of time on “the street,” her ideals have been compromised, her friends are gone, and chrome horse rides with diplomats are no longer feasible. Even Napoleon in rags has lost his charms, now that she’s homeless.

Of course, those are just details, all of which get blurred when we apply the song to our own situations. Part of LARS’s enduring power comes from its open-ended chorus. “How does it feel?” it asks. It doesn’t tell you what to feel. You supply that part yourself. In that way, it’s like a personality test. Does losing everything you once knew (be it childhood, your innocence, your preconceived notions or your first apartment) depress and scare you, or exhilarate you?

Apparently, Dylan didn’t find the song’s acerbic lyrics as mean-spirited as everyone else did. In Robert Shelton’s “No Direction Home,” he complained:

“Why does everybody say of something like Like a Rolling Stone, “That Dylan… is that all he can do, put down people?’ I’ve never put down anybody in a song, man. It’s their idea. ‘Like a Rolling Stone was very vomitific in its structure… It seemed like twenty pages, but it was really six. I wrote it in six pages. You know how you get sometimes. And I did it on a piano. And when I made the record, I called the people who made the record with me, and I told them how to play on it and if they didn’t want to play it like that, well, they couldn’t play with me….When I wrote “all you got to do is find a school and learn to get juiced in it,’ I wasn’t making this song about school. That’s their idea. Their definition of school is much different than mine. My language is different than there’s. I mean REALLY TOTALLY DIFFERENT! The finest school might be out in the swamps.”

The song’s origins are steeped in legend (nearly as large as the one behind Robert Johnson’s Cross Road Blues, in which Satan gets a co-writing credit). There’s the story of how Al Kooper finagled his way into playing the celebrated organ part that made it onto the final recording, even though he’d never played the organ before. Despite his inexperience, the take used for the commercial release of Like A Rolling Stone is pure rock and roll alchemy. Fittingly, the chorus contains the essence of rock and roll itself, employing the same chord progression as La Bamba, Wild Thing, Louie Louie, and Twist and Shout.

Dylan debuted it live at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, prompting Pete Seeger to run for his axe. He went on to perform it with members of the Band on their historic, booed-out world tour. Responding to nicely allegorical cat-call (“Judas!”) during a heated gig in Manchester, Dylan hit back with “I don’t believe you… you’re a liaaaarrrr,” and a wall-melting rendition of Like a Rolling Stone. Here is the studio version:

Like A Rolling Stone

Here's Bob doing it live:

An awed Jimi Hendrix performed the song during his coming-out party at the Montery Pop Festival, stumbling over the lyrics - he was on a lot of acid at the time. “It made me feel that I wasn’t the only one who’d ever felt so low…” Hendrix said of the song. Later the guitar god would record and immortalize Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower, prompting Dylan to remark that all of his songs were Jimi’s as well. Here's Jimi's version:

The Rolling Stones released the own version in 1995:

Finally, from 2005, here's a live version by Patti Smith:

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics. This was a more interesting week than the one before, the visits increasing by 54%. Still, they haven't surpassed this blog's "golden period", which began at mid-November 2016 and continued until the end of May, this year. The United Kingdom is still rising, as well as Belgium; the United States is still falling, also the United Arab Emirates, as well as Russia, but less so. Greece, France, Cyprus, Germany, and Italy are stable, while Brazil and Canada also join this week's Top 10. Here are this week's Top 10 countries:

1. the United States

2. the United Kingdom

3. France

4. Greece

5. Belgium

6. Cyprus

7. Brazil

8. Canada

9. Germany

10. Russia

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Chile, China, Colombia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Caledonia, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Vietnam. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 46%

2. Greece = 8.3%

3. France = 7.8%

4. the United Kingdom = 6.8%

5. Russia = 4.7%

6. Germany = 4.5%

7. Cyprus = 1.06%

8. Italy = 0.95%

9. the United Arab Emirates = 0.79%

10. Belgium = 0.75%

That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!