Like A Rolling Stone - Greil Marcus

 LIKE A ROLLING STONE - GREIL MARCUS

Greil Marcus drills down into Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone and I'm intrigued, not so much by Dylan or the song itself but by the idea of a whole book being written about a single song. How do you do that? Like A Rolling Stone is six minutes and six seconds long so from the start is double the length of a normal song but how do you wring 258 pages of text from it and that's not including the Acknowledgements and the Index. How do you do that?

Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of The 20th Century, where he was the first writer to thoroughly link the Sex Pistols and Situationism, joining all the dots and making a pretty convincing case for it. John Lydon scoffed, of course, and dismissed the very idea that the Sex Pistols had been linked in some way to history and a secret one at that. As did writer Stewart Home scoff but only because Marcus got there first. Marcus was also the editor of Lester Bangs' collection of essays Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung, and if you know anything about Lester Bangs then that in itself should qualify any writer for practically any job.

So yes, if anyone can write a whole book about a single song then it's going to be Greil Marcus though the question remains: How do you do it?

Like A Rolling Stone was first released in 1965 so Marcus sets the scene, describing the world at that time in terms of politics, racial discrimination, civil rights, riots, Vietnam and so on; as well as highlighting other records populating the same musical landscape such as Petula Clark's Downtown, Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come, and the Supremes' Stop! In The Name Of Love. Of course, it's always been relatively easy to chart the Western world by songs and 1965 was no exception, it being a year of iconic releases including the Righteous Brothers' You've Lost That Loving Feeling, the Rolling Stones' (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, and interestingly the Byrds' version of Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man that actually reached number one in the Charts, something that Dylan has never done himself.

Marcus then maps out how Dylan was being perceived at that time and how he will probably always be perceived right up to the point when his obituary is one day written, that being as a 'protest singer'. Brought about primarily by his recording of Blowin' In The Wind, it's a perception that Dylan was never really happy about. When asked for his political opinions, Dylan would feign outrage: "I'll bet Tony Bennett doesn't have to go through this kind of thing. Does Smokey Robinson have to answer these questions?", implying that it was ridiculous to ask mere pop singers about the state of the world, and of course, he was right.

The problem, however, was that Dylan wasn't just a 'mere pop singer' but was instead something more akin to a conduit, a marker - a key figure within the zeitgeist who just happened to have the insight, the foresight and the talent at the right time and the right place. Dylan fulfilled a role - as did the audience - though he complicated things by also having the wherewithal to break expectations and subsequently confuse the audience, him being called 'Judas' for going electric being a case in point.

According to critic Robert Ray, the sound of Bob Dylan's voice changed more people's ideas about the world than his political message did and it's this that Marcus riffs on and when it comes to describing Like A Rolling Stone, going into metaphor overdrive on the sound and the feel of the song.

'As a sound the record is like a cave,' he writes 'where light flickers off the walls in patterns that seem almost in rhythm'. It 'stays in the air, its challenge to itself to stay up for six full minutes, never looking down.'

He describes the verses as Dylan chasing the person to whom the song is directed and harrying her before the chorus vaults him in front of her and as she flees him he appears before her, pointing and shouting "How does it feel? How does it feel?" And then suddenly it's no longer just the girl in the song being addressed but the listener of the song

But what is the song actually about? What is the actual meaning of Like A Rolling Stone? According to Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine it's about growing up and discovering what's going on around you, realising that life isn't all you've been told. And then there's the Jimi Hendrix version as performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 where Hendrix famously lit his guitar on fire and prayed to it, a version that writer David Henderson described as being about Hendrix's own life and the desperately winding path he has travelled before ending up at Monterey and his crowning glory.

Herein, however, lies a problem with Marcus's book because after 258 pages of convoluted prose he fails to pin down a definitive meaning to the song. We can only presume this is intentional, suggesting there are actually multiple meanings to it though it makes you wonder what was Dylan's meaning? There are two answers to this, the first being that the meaning is very simple, black and white, and uncomplicated. The second being that Dylan himself distorted any meaning when composing it which has consequently led to further distortion from practically every single, individual listener of the song. It's a mark of greatness, of course, when a song talks to people and is interpreted personally, which is why a lot of song writers decline to explain their songs or even have their lyrics printed so as not to pin them down like so many dead butterflies.

Myself, I always thought Like A Rolling Stone was about Edie Sedgwick - Andy Warhol's muse and one of his Factory superstars - and the time when Dylan was in a relationship with her. It fits the timeline as in the period they were seeing each other, their split, and the release of the song. The words fit as well where the Miss Lonely character in the song is Sedgwick and the Diplomat is Warhol and in these terms the song makes total sense, particularly when you know that Dylan didn't think very highly of Warhol. The strange thing is that Marcus mentions Sedgwick only once in the whole book and so fleetingly that her name isn't even included in the Index. 

So this, it would appear, is how you write a book about a single song: Process, setting, descriptive prose, metaphors, high praise, smoke, mirrors, a wink, a nudge and far too many words to the wise when a brief explanation would suffice.

John Serpico