Shake it up, Bobby!
Twist and shout!

The early 1960s brought a spate of songs based on the chord pattern of “La Bamba,” which had hit big for Ritchie Valens in 1958. The Isley Brothers produced the most obvious reworking with “Twist and Shout,” which was shortly covered by the Beatles — and which I have occasionally played as a medley with “La Bamba” — but there were a bunch of more complex and extended songs that used other chord patterns for the verse, then fell back on the repeated,  Latin-flavored I-IV-V for the chorus, including the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud,” the Rascals’ “Good Lovin’,” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”

The latter was Dylan’s first major hit, and the title has an obvious double meaning: it fits the lyric and also his choice to go head to head with the Stones and the new generation of rock bands that shared his immersion in deep US roots styles. He’d been playing Muddy Waters songs since his first days in New York — his live tapes include a version of “Two Trains Running” and the Freewheelin’ sessions include his reworking of “Louisiana Blues” — so when the Stones hit the US playing covers of Waters and Howling Wolf, and the Animals hit playing songs copped from his first LP, it was natural for him to team up with Mike Bloomfield and bring it all back home. Columbia Records framed the title of his first electric album in exactly those terms, presenting him as the native answer to the British invasion, and although some deaf or unthinking critics called his electric music “folk rock,” it had none of the soft folkiness of the Byrds or Sonny and Cher; it was blues rock, as loud and tough as anything the Stones were doing — especially by 1965, when they were adapting their style to fit his lyrical innovations.

There’s a funny story about that, which Mick Jagger told in an interview: I’m quoting from memory, but the gist was that Dylan had apparently met Keith Richards in New York and said, “I could have written ‘Satisfaction,’ but you couldn’t have written ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.'”

The interviewer, taken aback, asked “What did he mean? Was it a put-down?”

Jagger responded, “Well, of course. He’s like that. It’s funny. And it’s true.”

Moving on to “Like a Rolling Stone,” it was obviously Dylan getting into their territory, and also a classic example of his lyrical put-down mode. The usual gloss is that it was one of the multiple nasty songs he wrote after breaking up with Joan Baez; “She Belongs to Me” was the most obvious, but my uncle, who knew everybody, insisted that “Desolation Row” was about her circle in Carmel, and when I spent a few days there and met Ephraim “Don” Doner, a brilliant ceramic artist and ping-pong hustler with voluminous gray hair, I instantly identified him as “Einstein disguised as Robin Hood…”

Be that as it may, a lot of this song’s lyrics feel like Dylan putting down the lonely princess who went to the finest schools, from the point of view of a genuine denizen of the lower depths. Which was, as his own uncles might have said, pretty chutzpadik, since he was a middle class kid who had only visited the lower depths as a Guthrie-dazzled romantic, much as I did a few years later, and was already a millionaire and in the process of becoming a rock star.

Which said, he was a new kind of rock star, and when he sang this at Newport it was the knock-out punch of the combination that began with “Maggie’s Farm” — he wasn’t going to be part of their club anymore, was going his own way, alone, refusing to lead a new generation of committed idealists and sneering, “How does it feel, to be on your own?”

To a lot of the people listening, it felt miserable, and some of them had the energy to boo him — and the booing just added to the power of his new persona, proving that rather than following a trend he was fearlessly going his own way.

In fact, he was doing both: he had wanted to be a rock star since high school and was jumping on the latest trend, but insisted on doing it his own way, and he’s been doing it his own way ever since. If you go to see the Rolling Stones today, they’re still recycling their greatest hits of the sixties, playing the riffs the fans want to hear, while Dylan keeps adopting new personas, making new music, and constantly changing his setlists and arrangements. If he’s no longer a complete unknown, he remains resolutely unpredictable and always interesting.

I learned “Like a Rolling Stone” in my early teens — maybe even pre-teens. I never performed it because the world didn’t need another version, but like a bunch of Dylan’s early songs it is inextricably part of my musical life. As I wrote about “Mr. Tambourine Man,” I don’t even know if I like it; it is so deeply ingrained in my memory that it just is.