The rolling stone that changed rock and pop forever

I guess Rolling Stone magazine had to put it at the top of their 500 greatest songs of all time – after all, they wouldn’t have a name or an identity without it.

Bob Dylan’s 1965 song “Like a Rolling Stone” changed rock and pop forever. A 15 year old Bruce Springsteen (regular readers know that I rate ‘The Boss’ as highly as ‘The Sage’) heard it and felt “it kicked open the door to your mind”.

Next week the manuscript of the lyrics – doodles, crossings-out, random extra thoughts – is expected to fetch up top U$2 million at auction. Rock memorabilia is often ridiculously overpriced but this might just be worth it.

Dylan said the song started out as a “vomit” – a splurge of anger and bitterness. It might have been a poem or a novel but when it became a song he knew not only that was right, but that he had found his medium and his metier.

The theme of a woman (“Miss Lonely”) who has abandoned privilege for some romanticised idea of poverty was, he later said, “telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky”.

In 1965 no-one wrote six minute long songs of bitterness and revenge with strange lyrics like:

“You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat
“Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat.”

The song with its excoriating ire and mesmerising chorus was like nothing before.

“How does it feel, how does it feel?
“To be on your own, with no direction home. A complete unknown. Like a rolling stone.”

Sometimes it’s hard to remember what it must have been like to hear such music for the first time before all the poor imitations and wannabes. But listening – as I’m doing now – to the recording from the Newport Folk Festival of 1965, I can almost capture the extraordinary originality of it.

Springsteen put it best, of course. “The way that Elvis freed your body, Dylan freed your mind.”

Follow Lindsey Hilsum on Twitter: @lindseyhilsum