There are those who work for once glossy New York City music mags who would say that “Like a Rolling Stone” is the most important rock song ever created. Stats and numbers aside, I think that there’s an element of truth to that.
But did you ever find yourself wondering what Bob Dylan’s rock n’ roll poem actually means? I have. And now I’ve got an answer for all of you.
Key Facts Table
| Released | July 20, 1965 |
| Album | Highway 61 Revisited |
| Songwriter | Bob Dylan |
| Artist | Bob Dylan |
| Genre | Folk Rock |
| Length | 6:13 |
Bob Dylan’s Road to Making “Like a Rolling Stone”
Bob Dylan has recorded dozens of albums. Some of them are in pop-rock masterpiece territory. Others are beautiful aberrations if you ask me. I love them all and thus have created a list ranking Bob Dylan’s albums. I do hope you’ll check it out.
Quite famously, Bob Dylan was a folkie inspired by the righteous social activist with a guitar, Woody Guthrie. He was born in the U.S.A.’s Midwest. But he found his fame in NYC, singing in coffee houses first and recording folk and blues standards for Columbia.
Essential to the story is that Dylan’s early songs had two elements that audiences loved: they were performed using an acoustic guitar and, usually, they contained some kind of commentary on society, like “Time They Are a-Changin'” or “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.”
“Like a Rolling Stone” began a new career path for Dylan. He opted to play electrified music. He chose to play surreal rock’n’ roll while backed by The Band. And, while the song became a hit, the success of the tune suddenly made him unpopular with the audiences that had previously praised him.
The Meaning of the Lyrics to “Like a Rolling Stone”
“Like a Rolling Stone,” I think, is one of the first grown-up pop-rock songs. Sure, it’s got a chorus, and you can almost dance to it.
However, the storytelling is strange, and purposely enigmatic. There are many theories about the meaning of the lyrics. What do I think it means?
The song likely started as a short story told in rhyme. It is, I think, the tale of a socialite similar to some whom Dylan had met within the circles in which he was socially active during the 1960s. Some believe that the song was written about Edie Sedgwick, a model and star within Andy Warhol’s circle. Dylan and Sedgwick are sad to have dated.
In the story, the rich socialite loses her fortune and is rejected by her former companions. This leads her into a world she had previously mocked. However, with nobody showing any particular interest in her anymore, she is free to see the world as it truly is.
It’s likely that Dylan got the title of the song from the Hank Williams line “I’m a rolling stone, all alone and lost.” Although written in the late 1940s, Williams’ song is inspired by the old proverb that a rolling stone gathers no moss.
The Legacy of “Like a Rolling Stone” and Bob Dylan
The impact of “Like a Rolling Stone” on pop culture and Dylan’s career is nearly as well known as the song itself.
Released in 1965, the song introduced a new rock’n’ roll era for Dylan with the epochal album “Highway 61 Revisited.” The single became a bona fide commercial hit. It reached number 2 on the US charts.
When performing electric-based songs on that tour, Dylan and his band were routinely booed. However, when playing this song, audiences routinely would launch into applause. The most notorious incident of boos occurred at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival during Dylan’s electric set.
Still, the song had an immense influence on important 1960s groups like The Beatles or The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary about Dylan takes its name, “No Direction Home,” from a line in the song. Rolling Stone magazine, predictably, ranked it as the greatest song of all time, and Alt77 called it the third-greatest rock song of all time and named Dylan the 2nd-greatest rock artist of all time.
