It’s like no other recording that I know of. It inspires you, fakes you out, makes many around you seem stiff and boring, and takes you well outta your comfort zone.
I have been listening to “Like A Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan since 1965 when it was the opening track on the album “Highway 61 Revisited”.
To me, this meant having successfully crossed over from Dylan’s folkie days and songs like “Blowing In The Wind”, “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, “Masters Of War” and everything on those first two albums, all of which were introduced to me by my gone-too-soon best friend Steve, to him “going electric”.
This was something like a rite of passage and a coming of age for Steve and myself.
I understood what Dylan was singing about and the depth of the subject matter, but not living in America and not being American, it was a second hand understanding of the changes taking place though knowing about Dr King, his assassination, the Civil Rights Movement, Robert Kennedy, and young America suddenly having its own voice.
Having said all this, it was “Like A Rolling Stone” and Dylan “going electric” that hit me between the ears and the legs.
It was a chain reaction of thoughts and emotions that started from the sound of the first crack on the snare by Bobby Gregg that signalled Al Kooper and Michael Bloomfield and the rest of the band creating that brilliant intro before the voice and words of Bob Dylan made themselves heard and I suddenly grew up.
I grow up every time I hear the track as it echoes me changing as a person and a piece of music that’s something of a never ending song cycle.
There’s so much more to it than being a song.
When it first came out, it was thought to be “an album track” and “too long” for Pop radio, but, again, Dylan swam against the tide and broke through to the other side.
Sure, there were the Beatles, but here was a guy born Robert Zimmerman who had created a myth and mystique around him that was as hard to penetrate as some of his songs.
Gradually, or maybe overnight, Dylan became who he was not and kept changing and hasn’t stopped.
He’s mellowed over the years and plays the piano more writes more love songs and even records standards.
He can do whatever the hell he wants.
He was a huge influence on John Lennon, and very possibly, one of the reasons that the Beatle decided to stop being a Fab and moved towards more contemplative songs like “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”, “Norwegian Wood” and maybe even “Girl”.
This was before finding Yoko and “Mother”.
Bob Dylan brought Beat Poetry to songs and gave wings to a band like the Byrds and those others who followed and became part of the Folk Rock sound.
Will I watch “A Complete Unknown”? Not sure. But I don’t think so. Definitely not right away.
From all the trailers seen, the performances by especially Timothee Chalamet and the always brilliant Edward Norton are incredibly powerful.
Linking it all altogether are the early songs of Bob Dylan and a storyline loosely based on the stories created around him during those early years in Greenwich Village and his real time relationship with singer Joan Baez.
Here’s someone whose “Positively Fourth Street” played a major role in my courtship of the girl I married.
I have seen him in concert and have drunk his whiskey, but I don’t really know Bob Dylan. I doubt many do.
Even while interviewing him, the great Ed Bradley seemed in awe and was happy to get what he got, which was as much as Dylan wanted to give.
Dylan is elusive and an inspiration and someone who perhaps should be a mystery.
Having said this, it’s good that some of his early music will be heard by a new generation with glimpses of the folk scene at the time and the emergence of this complete unknown like a rolling stone.
Watching Timothee Chalamet joyously free dancing and singing along to “Visions Of Johanna” shows someone in his Twenties who totally gets into what Bob Dylan was about back then in what is now almost 2025.
Maybe “A Complete Unknown” will be seen by reviewers as another “biopic” of a musician just as there has been of Freddie Mercury, Elvis and a gawdawful one about Elton John.
Perhaps.
Maybe it’s best that I wait for the reviews to come in, never read any of them and wait until it’s the right moment for me to take in “A Complete Unknown” as its own special project and artfully crafted by director James Mangold who co-wrote the script with the brilliant writer and film reviewer for TIME in Jay Cocks.
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