'Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads,' by Greil Marcus

When Bob Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone” hit the airwaves on July 20, 1965, it knocked the world of popular music off its axis for all time. Now approaching its 50th anniversary, and still capturing the imagination of millions, Dylan's vitriolic ode to Miss Lonely has claimed its place in rock history as the  iconic and definitive song of the 1960s. In his 2006 book, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, acclaimed music critic Greil Marcus dissects the far-reaching implications of Dylan's most influential hit.

Where were you the first time you heard “Like a Rolling Stone”? It's a thing that most people who were around back in 1965 still remember vividly. Whether driving a car, sitting in a club, or parked in front of the home turntable, after that singular stop-time crack of the snare, listeners were held under Dylan's spell for six minutes and one second of sheer musical bliss. That is, until the DJ snapped them out of it or the jukebox spit out the next number. As Marcus explains in the book, “Like a Rolling Stone” was not just a song, but an “event.”

Marcus explores this event in what amounts to a book-length essay, with the author wrapping his topic in a sociopolitical, sociocultural framework. Padded with personal experience, he follows the song from its inception and traces its path through the years from multiple perspectives, including those who were present during its recording, the music critics who picked it apart, and especially the fans and public at large, whose reactions ranged between instant rapture and furious disdain.

Detailing the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan debuted the song live, Marcus fleshes out the controversies surrounding America's then-hottest singer-songwriter's conversion from acoustic folk to amplified electric rock and its reception around the globe. Every audience Dylan performed for that year and the next became a mob of booers the moment the electric instruments came out. “It has since become weirdly fashionable to claim that there was no booing,” writes Marcus, in an attempt to set the record straight and undercut the revisionists. “Newport forced people to take sides.”

In analyzing Dylan's film Masked and Anonymous, Marcus (who wrote the special feature essay for the DVD release) plunges in with his pencils sharpened. With three different cover versions of “Like a Rolling Stone” in the soundtrack, Marcus uses the film as a departure point to detail every cover version of the song over the years, from Jimi Hendrix's singular live version at the Monterey Pop Festival (which he reckons is the greatest version of the song ever done), to The Wailers 1966 reggae rendition, as well as the Mystery Tramps' recent (and unremarkable, says Marcus) DJ mixes.

As the “Crossroads” subtitle indicates, the book isn't exclusively about the song “Like a Rolling Stone.” Rather, the song used as an on-ramp into wider territory as the author explores Dylan's artistic evolution during the epoch that it appeared. The book is also about America and Americans. And Europe and Europeans. It's about war and the cultural landscape of a nation undergoing rapid change. It's about the success or failure of '60s idealism, and the significance of one song that captured the essence of those times.

While Marcus's book is far from being an “exhaustive” study, by using fresh interviews with Al Kooper, and statements from people ranging anywhere between producer Phil Spector and Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, Marcus fleshes out the vast mythology that has built up around the song, while throwing in plenty of trivia for the detail-thirsty infomaniac.

For example, the mystery behind why Tom Wilson (who produced “Like a Rolling Stone”) was fired and replaced by Bob Johnston for the rest of the Highway 61 Revisited sessions. Or how, unorthodox to the times, the six-minute track was released as a 7” single, with three minutes on one side and three on the other. As a bonus, for an epilogue, the author kindly transcribed the studio tapes from both days of sessions, giving readers the verbal exchanges between the musicians, producers, and everyone else on the scene.

The hippy dream is still alive for Greil Marcus. Which is no insult. However, blanketed in velvety prose, the connective tissue holding together some of his interpretative analysis is thin. Not that Dylan (and especially Dylan) isn't open to interpretation, but Marcus, being one of the nation's leading authorities on Dylan, likes to throw his conclusions around without qualifying his arrival.

For instance, when he states that the song's first four words, “Once upon a time,” “takes the listener [out of the profane world and puts them] into a fairy tale” and its sublime realm of myth. This Hero-With-A-Thousand-Faces Campbellesque interpretation is just a tad romantic, putting humans, and Dylan, on a pedestal, giving them far more credit than they've earned. Is it possible that the beer-drinking masses merely have got caught up in the song's catchy rhythm and lyrical barbs, resulting in its huge popularity? A guy's song by and large, Dylan obviously wrote it after getting his emotions pummeled by a lover. Could the song be nothing more than internalized wish fulfillment for thousands of men who, hearts broken, associate with the song's vengeful message to Miss Lonely?

Despite his idealistic tendencies, Marcus is an impeccable writer with solid critical analysis. He looks at things with amazing scope, and his knowledge of Dylan is unparalleled among music writers and Dylanologists alike. So if you're curious as to why Rolling Stone magazine recently ordained “Like a Rolling Stone” the number one song of all time, Marcus is the guy to ask, and this book is his 225-page answer.