“Like a Rolling Stone” – Single by Bob Dylan from the album Highway 61 Revisited
B-side “Gates of Eden”
Released July 20, 1965
Recorded June 16, 1965
Label Columbia
Songwriter Bob Dylan
Producer Tom Wilson
Charted No.2 in US; No.4 in UK; Number 3 in Canada; No.13 in West Germany; No.9 in Ireland
Dylan performed the song live for the first time within days of its release, when he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, in Newport, Rhode Island. Many of the audience’s folk enthusiasts objected to Dylan’s use of electric guitars, looking down on rock ‘n roll, as Bloomfield put it, as popular amongst “greasers, heads, dancers, people who got drunk and boogied”.
The July 1965 Newport performance of the song is included in Murray Lerner’s film The Other Side of the Mirror, while a May 21, 1966, performance in Newcastle, England is featured in Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home.
The title is not a reference to The Rolling Stones. It is taken from the proverb “a rolling stone gathers no moss.” Dylan got the idea from the 1949 Hank Williams song “Lost Highway,” which contains the line, “I’m a rolling stone, all alone and lost.”
Thanks to The Rolling Stones, many associate the phrase with a life of glamor, always on the move, but Williams’ song is about a hobo paying the price for his life of sin. Dylan also used the phrase to indicate loneliness and despair: his rolling stone is “without a home, like a complete unknown.”
“Like A Rolling Stone” is Dylan’s most popular song and his first big hit, although having a hit song was low on his list of priorities.
