Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone
There is a romantic image we have of how art flows out of the poet's mind. Bob Dylan, legal pad on his knee, cigarette in the ashtray, the sounds of Twenty-Third Street coming through the window. The song arriving in a single volcanic session. Six minutes of fury and precision, resulting in “Like a Rolling Stone.”
It didn't happen that way.
Here’s what we do know. Dylan came back from his 1965 England tour exhausted. He later said he was ready to quit music. What came out of him was not a song. It was twenty pages of what he called "vomit," a long, rageful, formless rant. He wrote it in Woodstock. He condensed it over days, cutting and reshaping until something emerged from the wreckage that had a structure he recognized. Then he brought it to Columbia's Studio A, where the band found the rhythm and where Al Kooper was not even supposed to be playing organ that day.
The rant became the song, but not through solitary genius. It took