Like a Rolling Stone

"Like a Rolling Stone" is a Bob Dylan song that came out on July 20, 1965, through Columbia Records. The lyrics are confrontational and grew from a long stretch of verse Dylan wrote in June 1965, after he got back from an exhausting tour of England feeling drained. He trimmed that draft into four verses and a chorus. A few weeks later, he recorded it as the first track on his sixth album, *Highway 61 Revisited*, which was released on August 30, 1965. The preproduction was tough and took two days—Dylan struggled to find the song's core, and an early demo in 3/4 time didn't work. Things clicked when he switched to a rock arrangement, and Al Kooper, a rookie session musician, improvised a Hammond organ riff.

Columbia Records wasn't keen on releasing it because of its six-minute length and electric sound, so they held back. But in early July, before the official release, a copy leaked to a popular new music club, and influential DJs got their hands on it. That pushed the label to rush it out as a single on July 20. Many radio stations initially refused to play such a long track, but it still hit No. 2 on the US Billboard charts (No. 1 on Cashbox) and became a worldwide hit.

Critics called "Like a Rolling Stone" revolutionary for how it blended musical elements, the young, cynical edge of Dylan's voice, and the blunt question "How does it feel?" The song finished Dylan's shift from folk singer to rock star and is seen as one of the most influential pieces in postwar popular music. *Rolling Stone* ranked it No. 1 on their 2004 and 2010 lists of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time." The Jimi Hendrix Experience covered it. In 2014, Dylan's handwritten lyrics sold at auction for $2 million, a record for a popular music manuscript.

In early 1965, after the England tour shown in the film *Dont Look Back*, Dylan was unhappy with what the public expected of him and where his career was heading. He thought about quitting music. In a 1966 *Playboy* interview, he said he was "very drained" and the situation was "draggy," but "Like a Rolling Stone" changed everything—it was something he himself could dig. The song started as a long piece of verse. In 1966, Dylan told journalist Jules Siegel it was ten pages long, just a rhythm thing on paper about "steady hatred" aimed at some point, which turned into telling someone they were lucky.