Over Easy:Bonus Bob
Listening to CKY Winnipeg in June of 1965 in my dad's car, I heard a song that changed everything. The blood rushing up the back of my neck, the hairs on my skinny teenage arms at full alert - these were the early warnings of a rock n' roll epiphany. A blast of carnival sloppiness poured out of the speakers and then there was the voice.
Dylan. Who else? The sneering maestro with the all-knowing patter of a carnival barker. That mocking sing-song opening with it's hammering internal rhyme started a slow motion landslide of lyrics, piling up on the listener while letting you know that you're in on the joke. And then, he asks how it feels?
You can say that in a song? Up till then I wanted to be one of the Beatles, but on this day I knew I wanted to write like Dylan. It was the clarion call of creative freedom.
How would it feel to be on the receiving end of this kind of invective? And yet, at the end of it all, six minutes and thirteen seconds of rant n' roll later, the subject is liberated with the chorus's final title line, in all its romantic rambling glory.
Dylan, who started his career imitating Woody Guthrie and rewriting old folk songs, had traveled so far so fast, to the point that "Like A Rolling Stone" sounded like it had no antecedent, and yet, there in the title was that call-out to the musical past of Muddy Waters' "Rollin' Stone", itself a rewrite of a traditional blues song. Having inspired the names of a magazine, the 'World's Greatest Rock n' Roll Band' and this Dylan masterpiece was a lot of cultural weight for one song.
I'm certainly not the only person who was rocked to their foundations by this song. Grail Marcus wrote a book dedicated to it and a collector paid over two million dollars for a rough draft of the lyrics.
Mere weeks after "Like A Rolling Stone" came out, the #1 song was "Mrs. Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter" by Herman's Hermits, but Dylan's full-throated challenge to the reigning rules of popular music wouldn't go unheard. In particular for one teenage future songwriter in his dad's car on a summer day in Winnipeg.
Happy Birthday Bob!
