Rolling Stone magazine just announced its choices for
“The 500 Greatest [Rock] Songs of All Time.” Your favorites are all
there — “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” by the Beatles, “Respect,” by
Aretha Franklin, “Light My Fire,” by the Doors, “Let’s Stay
Together,” by Al Greene.
But the shocker is the selection for Number One — Bob Dylan’s
“Like a Rolling Stone.” Huh? I wouldn’t even rate this as Dylan’s
best song. (I’d go with “Blowing in the Wind,” #14.) “Like a
Rolling Stone’s” outstanding feature is its clanging
electric-guitar-and-organ arrangement (one of the first to use this
particularly obnoxious sound), its plodding, can’t-dance-to-it
beat, and of course Dylan’s raspy, insulting voice.
“Like a Rolling Stone” has never appeared anywhere near the top
of the charts in the radio Oldies polls. The pick is usually
“Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones (#2 here), “Louie, Louie,” by
the Kingsmen (#55), or “In the Still of the Night” by the Five
Satins, which always wins the Doo-Wop contests but is #90 here. Of
course, rock ‘n’ roll now has a 50-year history and picking
favorites is as much a battle of generations as of music.
Rolling Stone also has an obvious proprietary interest,
since the magazine took its name from Dylan’s song (or was it from
the real Rolling Stones, or Muddy Water’s 1948 hit, “Rolling
Stone,” ranked #459?). Still, there’s much more going on here than
meets the ear.
For Sixties-bred liberals, “the personal is political and the
political is personal.” That makes music political as well. You can
tell that from reading Rolling Stone, where Jon Stewart
may be on the cover one week and John Kerry the next. For these
people, Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” represents the Dawn of
Creation — the day radical politics was wedded to rock ‘n’ roll.
It didn’t last long. Dylan’s creation of folk-rock set off a brief
era that lasted approximately as long as the Vietnam War.
Springsteen revived the tradition in the next two decades, but for
the most part folk-rock came and went.
Yet it has never died in the heart of true believers. Although
he has never had a #1 record or #1 album, Dylan has kept a cult
following, with his career moves are constantly celebrated by
writers at Time and Newsweek. Thus his arrival at
the top of the heap last week.
IT’S A SHAME POLITICAL liberalism has appropriated rock ‘n’ roll
for its own purposes, because it really represents a remarkable
flowering of many diverse elements of American culture. Rock ‘n’
roll was born in the 1950s at the intersection of white and black
society, both in the South and the North. Little Richard was a
gospel singer. Fats Domino was a New Orleans piano player. Bill
Haley and the Comets were a rockabilly roadhouse band suddenly
catapulted to national fame with “Rock Around the Clock.” The
Everly Brothers were childhood gospel stars, as was Sam Cooke, who
(like many others) recorded his first songs anonymously so he
wouldn’t be seen as “leaving the church.”
Then there were the urban street corner groups, mostly blacks
and Italians, who began by harmonizing popular songs from the 1930s
and 1940s and then started writing their own material. Frankie
Lymon and the Teenagers, the Cadillacs, the Crests, and Dion and
the Belmonts were all products of Harlem and the Bronx. At first,
many of their songs were “covered” by popular artists like the Crew
Cuts and the McGuire Sisters. But like bloggers of today, these
talented amateurs — often recording in garages and basements —
finally broke through.
All this amounted to an enormous cross-fertilization of diverse
cultural strains. Elvis Presley — the “white boy who could sing
black” - epitomized this hybridization, but the common carp that
Elvis “stole” his music from black artists is completely misplaced.
Elvis was a supremely talented musician in any vein. The best
defense of Presley was made by Bo Diddley, another of the great
originals of the era, who once commented, “Hell, give the guy
credit. I stole a lot of stuff myself.” (His first great hit, “I’m
a Man,” is a remake of Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy.”)
Probably the most representative artist of the period was Chuck
Berry, whose “Johnny B. Goode” (#7) was chosen by Carl Sagan to
represent American culture aboard the Voyager space probe on its
trip beyond the edges of the solar system. Berry began his career
in the South as a black singer performing country-and-western. He
was dubbed the “black hillbilly” and often booed off the stage by
black audiences. Yet he “crossed over” to become one of the
founders of rock ‘n’ roll. His first big hit, “Maybellene” (#18),
is a rewrite of an old Hank Williams tune.
SO WHERE DOES Bob Dylan fit into all of this? Dylan was a folk
singer from a very different tradition. The 1952 issuing of Harry
Smiths’ Anthology of American Folk Music set off a folk
revival that produced a string of #1 hits for The Weavers in the
early 1950s (“Goodnight, Irene,” “On Top of Old Smokey”).
Right-wing zealots soon exposed the group’s left-wing background,
however, and they were driven from the air, but the ball was picked
up by the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, and other coffeehouse
performers, who added Old English ballads to the repertoire. Dylan
came from this tradition, borrowing some early material from the
Anthology but writing his own songs as well. Following in
the footsteps of Woody Guthrie, he became an authentic American
folk troubadour.
Performing with only an acoustic guitar and harmonica, Dylan had
a moderately successful career before college audiences in the
early 1960s. He had a Columbia Records contract and “The Times They
Are a’Changin’” became the anthem for a generation. Still he was
not widely known. Then in 1965 he dismayed the Newport Folk
Festival by going onstage with electric guitars and drums and
giving his new material an upbeat, jingle-jangle rhythm. Pete
Seeger frantically tried to pull the plug but it was no use.
“Folk-rock” had been born.
The new mode — with no roots in gospel, rhythm-and-blues, or
Doo-Wop — had a modest four-to-five-year run, coinciding largely
with the Vietnam War. Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction”
(unranked) was the high-water mark. A few popular groups covered
Dylan songs (“Mr. Tambourine Man,” “All Along the Watchtower,”
“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”) and Dylan also dumbed down much of
his earlier material for popular consumption. His success was
brief, however, and he soon retreated into obscure poetry and vague
prophecies. Dylan still writes fantastic folk music (try “Tiny
Montgomery,” a dead-on perfect re-creation of something from the
California gold fields), but his convoluted lyrics and rather
ordinary music have never won large popular audiences.
One obvious limitation was his subject matter. Some of his best
offerings are what can only be called the “12-chorus insult.” “It
Ain’t Me, Babe” is a fare-thee-well to an old girlfriend that goes
on so long you have to wonder who is reluctant to let go.
“Positively 4th Street” (#203) is an endless rant. (“I wish that
for just one time/You could stand inside my shoes/You’d know what a
drag it is/To see you.”)
And then there is “Like a Rolling Stone,” the Greatest Rock ‘n’
roll Song of All Time, whose message is:
How does it feel?
To be on your own
With no direction home
Just like a rolling stone?
In last week’s New York Times, Shaun Considine,
coordinator of new releases at Columbia in 1965, breathlessly
recounted how he rescued “Like a Rolling Stone” from the slush pile
and introduced it at a popular East Side disco. “By August it was
in the [Billboard] Top Ten, rising to Number 2,” he says. Wow. The
Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” (#179) was the #1 record (and
Saturday Night Fever the #1 album) for almost an entire
year and defined the Disco era. (As John Updike wrote, they were
“three white men who managed to sound exactly like black women.”)
But then Disco was distinctly apolitical. As one critic sneered, it
was “the sound of black upward mobility.”
Dylan’s pop success remains largely a media phenomenon. His
albums do not sell particularly well, rising quickly the first few
weeks as cult followers run to the stores, then fading away. Like
Laura Nyro and Carole King, he is an artist whose material has been
best performed by others.
So how does “Like A Rolling Stone” emerge as the Greatest Hit of
All Time? Because it is a landmark to Sixties-bred radicals who
like to think of American history as “Things That Happened To Us.”
“Like a Rolling Stone” still marks that first joyous 1965 uniting
of protest songs and electric guitars. It was a political event,
not a musical moment.
The greatest rock ‘n’ roll song of all time? For generating
great music, Dylan couldn’t even tune Elvis’s guitar.
