Like a Rolling Stone

In the summer of 1965, Bob Dylan was ready to quit music. Exhausted after a draining tour of England, he sat down and wrote a long, sprawling piece of verse—ten or twenty pages of what he later called "vomit." From that raw material, he carved four verses and a chorus. The song that emerged, released on July 20, 1965, by Columbia Records, was "Like a Rolling Stone."

The recording sessions were a mess. Dylan first demoed the song in 3/4 time, but it didn't click. Then, in a rock arrangement, something changed. A rookie session musician named Al Kooper improvised a Hammond organ riff, and the song found its shape. While there was internal debate at Columbia Records about the six-minute length and the electric sound, the label released it as a single on July 20, 1965, without a significant delay—the popular myth about a copy leaking to a music club is not supported by the historical record. Many radio stations refused to play such a long track, but it still hit No. 2 on the US Billboard charts and No. 1 on Cashbox, becoming a worldwide hit.

Critics called it revolutionary: the cynical, youthful snarl of Dylan's voice, the blunt question "How does it feel?"—it all combined to transform him from a folk singer into a rock star. Rolling Stone later ranked it No. 1 on its 2004 and 2010 lists of the greatest songs ever. The Jimi Hendrix Experience covered it. In 2014, Dylan's handwritten lyrics sold at auction for $2.045 million, a record for a Dylan manuscript.

Dylan himself said the song changed everything. "I was very drained," he told Playboy in 1966. "But 'Like a Rolling Stone' changed it all. I mean it was something that I myself could dig." He had been typing incessantly in his hotel room in London, captured in the film *Dont Look Back*, and the song grew from that long, angry draft. On paper, he tried out lines like "like a dog without a bone" before settling on "now you're unknown." He toyed with rhyming "how does it feel?" with "shut up and deal" and "raw deal." The song was written on an upright piano in D flat, then shifted to C on guitar in the studio.

The recording took place on June 15–16, 1965, at Columbia's Studio A in New York. Dylan brought in Chicago blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield, who recalled, "The first thing I heard was 'Like a Rolling Stone.' I figured he wanted blues, string bending. He said, 'Hey, man, I don't want any of that B.B.