Bob Dylan recorded his rock ‘n’ roll masterpiece, “Like A Rolling Stone,” on this date in 1965. 30 years later The Rolling Stones released a version of the song as the lead single on their semi-live album, Stripped, containing performances from their intimate Voodoo Lounge Tour. Three years later, the iconic artists collaborated on the song in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Bob Dylan playing “Like A Rolling Stone” with The Rolling Stones (covered by Rolling Stone Magazine). This meta meeting of the minds begs the question: What is a rolling stone?
According to a Merriam-Webster.com blog entry:
In 1508 Erasmus of Rotterdam published a volume of ancient Greek and Latin proverbs; one of his Greek entries translates to “A rolling stone does not gather algae,” and one of the Latin entries to “A rolling stone is not covered with moss.” In 1546, a collection assembled by the English playwright John Heywood partly from the Erasmus anthology would include—in the immense opening poem rather than as one of the hundreds of proverbs that followed it—the line “the rollyng stone never gatherth mosse.”
In modern English: “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” The phrase seemed to have started out as something of a pejorative term or warning. More from Merriam-Webster:
…in a French-English dictionary from 1611, the French rodeur is translated and defined as “A vagabond, roamer, wanderer, street-walker, highway-beater; a rolling stone, one that does nought but runne here and there, trot up and downe, rogue all the country over.” The rambling man, in other words, acquires none of the civilizing accretions that define the respectable citizen.
“Runne here and there” and “trot up and downe” sounds like a description of what Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger does on stage, but more on that later. As the phrase “A rolling stone gathers no moss” and the term “rolling stone” itself made their way into the American English lexicon, they began to appear in American musical forms, most notably the blues. In 1950, Muddy Waters gave an interpretation of an older song, “Catfish Blues,” the title “Rollin’ Stone.”
Heavily influence by Waters, his “Rollin’ Stone” is where The Rolling Stones got their name in the early 1960s. It was the perfect moniker for a group that would be characterized as the bad boy foil to The Beatles. The Rolling Stones would soon, “rogue all the country over,” to borrow a phrase.
A few years later, Bob Dylan penned his magnum rock opus, “Like A Rolling Stone,” after returning from an exhaustive tour of England, documented in the D.A. Pennebaker film Don’t Look Back. The future Nobel Laureate for Literature distilled what would become “Like A Rolling Stone’s” four verses from a much longer “piece of vomit, 20 pages long,” Dylan said in a 1966 interview. While the song has been widely interpreted as a scathing rebuke of a high society type person, it can also be seen as a reflection of how Bob was feeling as he stradled the cutting edge of being a folk hero and rock god.
While the lyrics are phenomenal, “Like A Rolling Stone” wouldn’t have carried near the weight it did if not for the way it was recorded, marking Bob Dylan’s first rock ‘n’ roll record and the beginning of the notorious “Dylan Goes Electric” era.
Recording sessions for “Like A Rolling Stone” began on June 15 at Columbia’s 7th Avenue studio in New York City with producer Tom Wilson. The band on the song consisted of Bob Dylan and Mike Bloomfield on electric guitars, Bobby Gregg on drums, Joe Macho Jr. on bass, Frank Owens on tack piano, Bruce Langhorne on tambourine and Al Kooper on Hammond organ. The band cut numerous takes of the song but ended up using the fourth take from June 16, 1965.
Along with Paul Butterfield’s shimmering lead guitar work, Al Kooper’s Hammond organ line are what define “Like A Rolling Stone” musically. Kooper was famously not an organ player but found himself behind the Hammond where he shined at the right time. Bob liked his work and insisted that the organ be turned up in the mix.
The organ part became so synonymous with the song, touring keyboardist Chuck Leavell played a similar line with The Rolling Stones on their Voodoo Lounge Tour. Three years later, in late March of 1998, The Stones kicked off the South American leg of their massive Bridges To Babylon Tour.
Bob Dylan performed sets on a few dates during The Stones’ SA run. Dylan joined The Rolling Stones for a performance of “Like A Rolling Stone” in Buenos Aires in early April. The performance saw Bob leading the band through the iconic song with Mick and Keith Richards joining him on harmony vocals.
Watch Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones perform “Like A Rolling Stone” below:
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