Like a Rolling Stone

‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is a 1965 song by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. Its confrontational lyrics originated in an extended piece of verse Dylan wrote in June 1965, when he returned exhausted from a grueling tour of England. Dylan distilled this draft into four verses and a chorus. At an auction in 2014, Dylan’s handwritten lyrics to the song fetched USD 2million, a world record for a popular music manuscript.

About Like a Rolling Stone in brief

Summary Like a Rolling Stone‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is a 1965 song by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. Its confrontational lyrics originated in an extended piece of verse Dylan wrote in June 1965, when he returned exhausted from a grueling tour of England. Dylan distilled this draft into four verses and a chorus. The song has been covered by numerous artists, from the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Rolling Stones to the Wailers and Green Day. At an auction in 2014, Dylan’s handwritten lyrics to the song fetched USD 2 million, a world record for a popular music manuscript. In an interview with CBC radio in Montreal, Dylan called the creation of the song a ‘breakthrough’ explaining that it changed his perception of where he was going in his career. He said: ‘I’d never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that I wasn’t interested in writing a novel, or a play or a song that I had too much, I want to write songs’ In 2014, when the handwritten lyrics were put up for auction, the four-page manuscript revealed that the full refrain of the chorus does not appear until the fourth page. A third line, ‘like a dog without a bone, gives you a way to give it to a person that you’re not supposed to give to a dog,’ was rejected without a second thought by the auctioneer. In 1966, Dylan described its genesis to journalist Jules Siegel: ‘It wasn’t called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end it wasn’t hatred, it was telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky.

Revenge, that’s a better word’ The track has been described as revolutionary in its combination of different musical elements, the youthful, cynical sound of Dylan’s voice, and the directness of the question \”How does it feel?\” The song is considered one of the most influential compositions in postwar popular music. Rolling Stone magazine listed the song at No. 1 in their \”500 Greatest Songs of All Time\” list. It is the statistically most acclaimed song of all time, according to review aggregator Acclaimed Music, and has been listed in the top 10 by Rolling Stone, Time, Billboard, and The New York Times, among others. The track was recorded as part of the sessions for the forthcoming album Highway 61 Revisited. It reached No. 2 in the US Billboard charts and became a worldwide hit. It was released as a single a month later after a copy was leaked to a new popular music club and heard by influential DJs. Dylan has never publicly spoken of writing any other major composition in this way. In a 1966 Playboy interview, he described his dissatisfaction with the public’s expectations of him, as well as the direction his career was taking, and seriously considered quitting the music business. However, Dylan told two interviewers that he had never thought of it as a song, until one day he was at the piano it was singing, “in a slow motion pace, in the utmost of slow motion”