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Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone
The June 1965 Columbia Studio A sessions that produced 'Like a Rolling Stone'—a cascade of bisociative events, from Dylan's Woodstock overflow through Kooper's accidental organ, that Koestler's framework reads as paradigmatic.
The creation of 'Like a Rolling Stone' in June 1965 is the paradigmatic case study of bisociation operating at multiple scales in a single creative process. Dylan returned from his 1965 England tour exhausted, ready to quit music, and produced twenty pages of rageful 'vomit' in Woodstock. He condensed the overflow into verses over several days. He brought the material to Columbia's Studio A, where the band found the rhythm and where Al Kooper—hired to play guitar—accidentally played the Hammond organ line that became the song's signature sound. Each stage is a bisociative event: the collision of formless overflow with song form, the collision of Dylan's material with the band's musical matrix, the collision of Kooper's guitar competence with his organ incompetence.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The retrospective narrative tempts linear reading: exhaustion produced overflow, overflow became verses, verses became song. Koestler's framework reveals the process as recursive rather than linear—a series of