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| Ten Thousand Motels |
How Does It Feel ... 40 Years Later?
By Greil Marcus,
Greil Marcus' newest book, "Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads," was published this month by PublicAffairs.
www.latimes.com April 6,2005
A drum beat like a pistol shot.
24 July 1965 was the day Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" hit 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. "Where are we going?" To the top?" the Beatles would ask themselves in the early 1960s, when no one but they knew. "To the toppermost of the poppermost," they promised.
But by 1965, everyone the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and whoever else could catch a ride on the train was topping each other month by month, as if carried by a flood. Was it the fear and possibility that had flooded much of the West since the assassination of President Kennedy less than two years before, a kind of nihilist freedom in which old certainties were swept away like trees and cars? Was it 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." 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 suspend the contest in a cul-de-sac of doubt. Three months later, they came back with "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." It erased the doubt, and the race was on again.
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 "Yesterday." Barry McGuire would reach No. 1 with "Eve of Destruction," an imitation-Dylan big-beat protest song that was so formulaic, so plainly a jump on a trend, that the formula and the trend became hooks in themselves.
In the pop arena, it seemed anything could happen; it seemed that month by month everything did. The race was not only between the Beatles, Dylan, the Rolling Stones and everyone else. The pop world was in a race with the greater world, the world of wars and elections, work and leisure, poverty and riches, white people and black people, women and men and in 1965 you could feel that pop was winning.
When people first heard about it, "Like a Rolling Stone" seemed less like a piece of music than a stroke of upmanship beyond pop ken. "Eight of the Top 10 songs were Beatles songs," Dylan would remember years later, casting back to a day in Colorado, listening to John, Paul, George and Ringo soon after their arrival in the United States in 1964. "I knew they were pointing the direction where music had to go." That was the moment that took 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 delirious. But when the song hit the radio, when people heard it, when they discovered that it wasn't about a band, they realized that the song did not explain itself at all, and that they didn't care. Few grasped that the pull of the past was as strong as the pull of the future. Few wondered how many dead or vanished voices the song contained, or realized that along with the song's own named characters Miss Lonely, the Mystery Tramp, the Diplomat also present were the likes of Phil Spector and the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling" from only a few months before, Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba" from 1958, 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."
What people understood in the wash of words and instruments was 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.
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
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| BILL PERKS |
THE STONES VERSION IS THE ONLY ONE I CAN LISTEN TO..THE ORIGINAL BLOWS |
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| justforyou |
Hendrix' Monterey version is beautiful.
Didn't you ? |
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| MrPleasant |
Honestly, I don't like the stones' version (one of their least likeable records, for me). I find it obnoxious.
[Edited by MrPleasant] |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Dylan's stone rolls on, no longer a complete unknown,
By GRIFFIN ONDAATJE
Globemail
Saturday, April 9, 2005
Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads
By Greil Marcus
In the middle of a field in New Jersey, in the summer of 1963, Greil Marcus saw Bob Dylan for the first time. The unknown Dylan landed on an open-air stage looking "dusty and indistinct," with shoulders "hunched," acting "slightly embarrassed." We envision a purposeful yet self-effacing young singer making his way to the microphone, like a seabird toward a biscuit on a ship. While Dylan "seemed as ordinary as any of the people under the tent or the dirt around it, something in his demeanour dared you to pin him down," Marcus writes in his new book, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads.
Four decades later, Marcus is still trying to pin Dylan down. He can "remember very clearly" the instant Dylan began to sing. The scruffy performer, whose age "you couldn't tell," was intense and remarkably distinct on stage, singing "in a manner that . . . made the familiar unstable, and the comforts of familiarity unsure." Dylan was 22; and Marcus -- who'd later become the United States' leading rock critic -- was 18.
Since earning degrees in American studies and political science in the late 1960s, Marcus has written extensively on dozens of musicians, artists and trends. He is best known for Mystery Train (1975), a first book and a treatise on rock and roll as American myth. Marcus's associative style, shown best in his inspired previous book on Dylan, Invisible Republic (1997), adds footnotes, anecdotes and diverse marginalia to history the way a chef adds garnishes to a plate. Chapters are set in pools of time and Marcus pulls a plug to set his theories and references in motion: old newspapers, Billboard charts, dialogue from novels, lyrics, speeches, ads, films -- all get drawn into the whirlpool as he races to describe events as he sees them.
Marcus is creative and informed in his use of musical history, and that's important, since Dylan's work (especially his text) is being swarmed today by academic writers. In a funny review in the New Republic of Oxford professor Christopher Ricks's 517-page textual analysis, Dylan's Vision of Sin (2004), James Wolcott comes to Dylan's defence: "No artist should be subjected to this much wanton affection: it's . . . like being hugged by a stranger who won't let go . . . a full-body mind-meld." Yet Dylan's art always seems to have a built-in circuit breaker, somehow turning serious academic analysis into a dimly lit circus wheel.
The year 1965 is the hub inside all the wheels turning in Marcus's book. Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone was recorded in New York City on June 16. While typewriters uptown in Tin Pan Alley were still tapping out formulaic tunes, Dylan and a team of dam-busting musicians had a breakthrough -- a stunning studio take that would flow for six minutes and open floodgates to unheard-of directness in popular song. How does it feel? The song's question rises like a swimmer caught in a resulting flood: six powerful minutes of focused life-force that begin with, as Bruce Springsteen said, a snare shot "like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind." The song ends leaving listeners exultant, "agog for what comes next," or, as Marcus says, "free from history with a world to win."
The song's title is not free from history, as the book points out; it echoes a range of sources (as does most of Dylan's work). A mime and former slave from Syria wrote in the 1st century BC, in Latin, the phrase: "A rolling stone gathers no moss." In 1944, a blind songwriter wrote "I'm a rolling stone," the first line to Lost Highway (sung in 1949 by Hank Williams). Muddy Waters recorded, in 1950, his classic Rollin' Stone. And an even earlier composition (overlooked, strangely, by this book) which may have influenced Dylan is Jesse (Babyface) Thomas's 1929 My Heart's a Rolling Stone.
In 1965, things were serious for Dylan: The mythical image of Bard of a Generation had spun out of control to the point where he was being compared to Orpheus: the private singer was pursued by obsessive "fans" who followed him seeking some sort of answer. Yet Dylan, living in myth, always found escape in humour. In 2001, when he donated Shelter from the Storm to the World Wildlife Fund, his only statement accompanying the gift was: "Early on, animals were the only ones who liked my music. Now it's payback time."
Marcus conveys a United States reeling in 1965 from long-overdue growing pains started by the civil rights movement. A daring, almost desperate atmosphere in the studio allowed the 24-year-old Dylan's voice to "whirl in the air, striking out in all directions." Paul Williams, perhaps the best music writer on Dylan, has said that the song "needs no interpretation, since it speaks so directly to every person who hears it."
This spirit of risk runs throughout Dylan's career and into his concerts today. A singer is "not a record that repeats itself," the amazing Egyptian vocalist Oum Kalthoum (whom Dylan admires) once said. Marcus recognizes this -- although many listeners want Dylan to sound the same in concert as he does on recordings. Salman Rushdie, perhaps aglow after joining U2 on stage, praised the Rolling Stones recently for not having "fallen into the Bob Dylan trap of murdering their old songs." Such an attitude seems to confine songs to static advertisement, and as recent developments suggest, the enemy is already inside the gates: U.S. companies are, in 2005, offering rap artists money to name products in songs.
Like a Rolling Stone burned with anger and truth, a voice of fire that "melted the mask of what was beginning to be called youth culture," and it did so in 1965, when the United States was filled with "public terror and danger, unparalleled courage and unspeakable venality, truth and lies, and business as usual."
Marcus makes 1965 sound a lot like today. He is a writer charting the United States' mythic landscape, a man running alongside the shadow of a bird. And Like a Rolling Stone has, all this time, flown on the gut feeling in all of us that it's possible to say everything -- and it does so inside a whirlwind, even as "the last verse is spinning off its axis." It says that the individual spirit doesn't have to fall apart; that the centre can hold.
Griffin Ondaatje recently finished directing Complete Unknown, a documentary film about Bob Dylan.
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| April 10th, 2005 05:09 PM |
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| Jair |
I use to think no one could do a better version, and then Stones did!!!
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CHAT
ROOM aka THE FUN HOUSE] [
RESTROOMS]