Vomit." That's what Bob Dylan called the lyrical brainstorm that brought "Like A Rolling Stone" into being.
"I'd literally quit singing and playing," Dylan told a CBC interviewer in 1966, "and I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit about twenty pages long, and out of it I took 'Like a Rolling Stone' and made it as a single" (Mark Polizzotti, Highway 61 Revisited, p. 32).
Dylan had quit singing and playing because his sudden stardom was somewhat unwelcome. Rising to the top of the folk revival, in the midst of the swirl of social change that his songs had come to represent, Dylan had inadvertently become an icon. At 25, he was suddenly being called "the voice of a generation." His 1965 tour of the UK is well-documented in the searing documentary Dont Look Back, in which a brooding and angry Bob Dylan takes the stage to sing about peace and love to packed houses, and then returns backstage to mock and berate the people around him.
"I don't believe in anything," he told a reporter in 1965. "I don't see anything to believe in." And on the subject of his already-iconic songs about the politics of the time: "I don't have anything to say about 'em. They don't have any great message."
Whether or not Dylan really believed that his songs ("Blowing In The Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'") were devoid of meaning, his frustrations with the media, and with the entire idea of being a folk hero, were evident in interview after interview. "I could tell you, I'm not a folksinger, and explain it, but you wouldn't understand it," he spat at a reporter from Time. "Do you think anybody that comes to see me is coming for any reason other than entertainment?" The folk movement had embraced him, but the embrace was at the expense of his independence. "Like A Rolling Stone," a song about both independence and loss, came out of this storm of anger.
A disillusioned Dylan plays the Newport Folk Festival
At the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in 1965, in the belly of the folk beast and surrounded by obsessed fans, Bob Dylan was introduced by a woman who told the screaming crowds, "You know him. He's yours." Dylan took the stage looking "like someone from West Side Story," said guitarist Michael Bloomfield—wearing a black leather jacket and a tie-less yellow pin shirt. According to Dylan's friend Paul Nelson, by the end of the three-song set, "the audience was booing and yelling 'get rid of the electric guitar.'" Historian Greil Marcus says, "there were catcalls and screams and shouts and cheers" (Greil Marcus, Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At the Crossroads, p. 155).
What did the darling of the folk movement do to upset the crowds so deeply? He picked up an electric guitar and sang a rock song. Dylan had stumbled through a version of "Like A Rolling Stone" that had shown up on the pop charts just days before. He was abruptly thrown from being the voice of a generation to being a traitor to a movement.
It may seem illogical now that anyone should tag Bob Dylan as a "sell-out." These days, he has a long career of independent thinking behind him, and he's done a million little things to both alienate fans and assert his artistic independence (a country phase and a born-again Christian phase among them; or check out his recent Christmas album). But back before he'd carved out such a clear place in the world for someone as weird and eclectic as Bob Dylan, the expectations coming from his mostly folk fan base were intense: the Greenwich Village sensation was their icon ("he's yours," said the announcer who brought him onstage), he was their star, and the crowds at Newport, hippies to the nth degree, wanted him to play their music. They believed that the revival of folk was a return to an imagined past of purity and a key form of resistance to popular culture. According to guitarist Michael Bloomfield, "rock n' roll was greasers, heads, dancers, people who got drunk and boogied," not the stuff of the anti-establishment folk community (Marcus 158).
If Bob Dylan had ever believed in the hard-line ideologies associated with the folk movement, intensified fame had burst his bubble. He was increasingly detached from any one ideology, and questioning everything to the point of utter meaninglessness was the name of the game. The last thing Dylan wanted in 1965 was to be forced to stand for anything. And now there he was at Newport, surrounded by all the purity and dogma of the folk revival movement, pissing off all his die-hard folk fans. His new song was climbing on the pop charts (peaking at #2, it is still his biggest hit ever). Dylan couldn't care less about the folksters' fantasies of an unadulterated folk community. He had lost his drive to identify with the counterculture. "This was the rebel rebelling against the rebellion," wrote Robbie Robertson of Dylan's decision to go electric.