‘Like A Rolling Stone’ may not be the song the baby-boomers, peaceniks or political activists would prefer to remember Bob Dylan by, but as a recorded performance, its downright mean energy has ensured that to this day it remains the most anticipated ritual in his live show.
When Greil Marcus’s publishers suggested a book to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the song’s recording, the writer rejected the idea almost out of hand. Marcus’s best books, as anyone who’s read Mystery Train, Lipstick Traces or Invisible Republic will attest, are usually too ambitious, unruly and overarching to stay put within such a linear pitch. Yet once implanted, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head, and almost before he knew it, the book was completed.
Like A Rolling Stone – Bob Dylan At The Crossroads is, by Marcus’s standards, a spontaneous blurt rather than an epic discourse (although his forthcoming treatise on prophesy and the American voice sounds like a major work-in-progress). The book’s most interesting revelation results from Dylan’s management granting the author access to tapes of the original Tom Wilson-produced recording sessions that took place in Columbia Records’ New York studios in June 1965. What Marcus heard was not a strategic attempt to nail the song so much as a rag-tag bunch of session pros, plus new bloods like Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, fumbling and stumbling toward that single ark-of-the-covenant take, and thereafter struggling – and failing – to repeat the spark. The knowledge that the song only really came alive one time, with no out-takes of note, retrospectively imbues the recording with a dramatic sense of event.
“It’s the last thing I expected,” Marcus says, headquartered in the Faber & Faber offices for the duration of his London promotional trip, looking exactly like what he is – a 60-year-old professor of popular music, white-haired, craggy and pleasant-featured. “When I heard I was going to be able to listen to a tape of the whole session over the two days that they were trying to record this song, I knew that I would end the book with that. And before I heard what you just described, that they fumbled their way toward it, flailing around, I never would’ve expected this sense of terrible suspense."
It’s worth pointing out that the Pollock-like nature of Dylan’s creative process was not lost on Martin Scorsese (whose Bob biog No Direction Home was one of the music-television highlights of the year). The director used the song as a motif in one of his most overlooked works, the Dostoevsky-inspired, Richard Price-scripted ‘Life Lessons’ segment of New York Stories (the other two episodes of the 1988 film featured Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola on auto-pilot). Scorsese’s 40-minute piece depicted Nick Nolte as a big bear of a hard-drinking abstract expressionist painter, tormented by sexual jealousy, savagely hurling paint on the canvas as a live version of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ blares through his studio.
“The heart of the book for me is that ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ has a total sound,” says Marcus. “One of the metaphors that came to me when I was writing was a ship pitching on the sea in the middle of a terrible storm, that’s how it feels. It’s a sense that nothing has been predicted, that these are people playing in the dark in a way.”
Ironically, when Dylan’s Chronicles was published last year, its mercurial prose style reminded me of no-one so much as Marcus himself.
“Well, that’s a great compliment. I mean, I was shocked by that book. I expected a big, oversized, overpriced book with lots of ‘unseen’, ‘rare’ photographs, memorabilia, lyrics scribbled on napkins or something like that, and a text that essentially would have been drawn from interviews that he did with somebody, if it wasn’t dictated. The last thing I expected was a small, modest book, with no pictures whatsoever, not even a picture of him on the front cover. A very literary book. A written book where you can feel the choice between one word or another in every sentence. It has a subject, and the subject is not ‘Bob Dylan - My Life’. The subject is ‘Bob Dylan – When I Knew Nothing, when I was a neophyte, when I was learning how to listen, to keep my mouth shut, to watch and see what other people were doing, find out what was going on.’
“And then later in the '80s when he’s famous and rich, when everybody wants to know what he thinks and hang around him, he realises again he knows nothing, he has come to a complete dead end. He had nothing to say, he had no way to even say that. What an interesting way to write not only a book, but a first book. Not My Great Achievements or What Made Me Famous or My Breakthroughs, just the opposite. You know, it’s very humbling if what you do is write books. I’ve written a lot of books, and I’ll never write a book that good.”