It Was 50 Years Ago Today: “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan
September 22, 1965
“Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan
#1 on the Cashbox Top 100, September 18-24, 1965
According to the Billboard charts, Bob Dylan has never had a #1 single. Nor did he have a #1 LP until 1974’s Planet Waves, a reunion with his onetime backing group the Band — a good album, but one that’s rarely ranked with the likes of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, or Blonde on Blonde. While Dylan earned a few Top 10 singles and LPs in the ’60s, and several of his albums went to #1 in the UK, somehow the most influential American musician of the decade never actually topped the US charts.
… Except that he did. As mentioned in a previous column, Billboard wasn’t the only chart compiler in town. Cashbox, originally a trade magazine for the jukebox industry, also published a weekly ranking of the 100 biggest songs in the United States. The primary difference between the two was methodology: Cashbox recorded strictly sales and jukebox plays, while Billboard also factored in radio airplay. While Dylan had gathered a fervent cult by 1965, his gritty, nasal voice, minimal folk instrumentation, and alternately political and obtuse lyrics didn’t exactly beckon to radio programmers.
If Dylan was going to make a pop breakthrough, however, 1965 seemed like his year. In the spring, the musician embarked on a short but grueling tour of England that propelled him to overnight stardom in that country, as documented in D.A. Pennebaker’s film Dont Look Back. In May, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” became Dylan’s first Top 40 American hit, albeit peaking at a lowly #39. That summer, the Byrds’ easygoing cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man” hit #1 on both sides of the Atlantic. Lastly, at the Newport Folk Festival in late July, Dylan famously “went electric,” fleshing out his simple acoustic guitar and harmonica accompaniment with full rock ‘n’ roll backing that could plausibly fit among the sounds of contemporary pop radio.
Five days before Newport, however, Dylan released a single that seemed perversely designed to halt any gathering commercial momentum. “Like a Rolling Stone” clocks in at six minutes and 13 seconds, nearly three times the ideal length for radio airplay at the time. The lyrics are a torrent of sarcasm and bitterness with little variation in the song’s structure: no bridges or middle eights, no key changes or harmonies, just a sporadically recurring refrain (“How does it feel / to be on your own?”). While it mixes elements of both folk and rock music, the repetition and loose, improvisational nature make “Like a Rolling Stone” far rawer than the warm, melodic sounds of the Byrds and other early folk rockers. Add to that the fact that the record seemed destined to turn off Dylan’s established folkie fan base, as well as befuddle pop fans, and it’s obvious why Columbia Records initially tried to cancel its release.
Yet Dylan understood that, as uncommercial as “Like a Rolling Stone” seemed, he wouldn’t have a career without it. The year 1965 might have seemed poised to be a breakthrough, but it also threatened to be a breaking point. Burned out and on the verge of quitting the music business — “it’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you,” he told Playboy in 1966 — “Like a Rolling Stone” represented a chance for Dylan to “vomit” out the contents of his anxious, overstuffed brain. It also provided an escape hatch from the suffocating folk bubble into a more stimulating type of music that he could craft virtually out of scratch. Nothing, even bands like the Byrds and the Beatles that had followed Dylan’s lead, were producing records that sounded anything like this.
On one level, then, the immediate and acute success of “Like a Rolling Stone” surprised the record industry. Perhaps this is why it only peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100: radio programmers and DJs hadn’t anticipated such a high level of demand for the latest Dylan single, so it didn’t get the boost from early airplay that may have sent it to the top of the charts. On another level, however, “Like a Rolling Stone” sounds destined to be a hit — not only to save Dylan’s career, but to push the sound of pop music forward to a more direct place. Fans may debate the symbolism in Dylan’s more esoteric songs, but “Like a Rolling Stone” requires no such unpacking; there’s no mistaking the meaning of the lyrics, and the attitude behind them is even clearer.
While Billboard insisted the top single of the week was still “Help!” by the Beatles, Cashbox, the chart dictated entirely by how music fans voted with their wallets, granted “Like a Rolling Stone” the title of Dylan’s first and (to date) only US #1 single. Nevertheless, after its lone week atop the Cashbox charts, “Like a Rolling Stone” was succeeded by “Eve of Destruction,” Barry McGuire’s artless attempt to ape the Dylan of two-to-three years prior. In the end, however, it’s the piercing and candid “Like a Rolling Stone” that triumphed, propelling Dylan to pop star status and changing the shape of rock to come.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
