In March , the release of Bringing It All Back Home — a bipolar work, with an electric side and an acoustic one — signalled such a transition. Unkind and polemic towards a press that annoyed him by stressing his role as a protest singer and the conscience of his generation, Dylan goes on the defensive and tries to act as a circus jester or a distorting funfair mirror to avoid easy labels: instead of answering journalists, he prefers to pose questions, engaging them in a dialectic tug-of-war, or taking pictures of the photographers and entertaining other musicians, always taking refuge behind an eternal cigarette, as if to protect the signs of his new self-awareness.
We can see a restless Dylan approaching the music scene with caution, dealing with critics and fans as if almost afraid of being swallowed by them, of having no control over life and career. On stage, he seems annoyed with his folk repertoire, tired of playing solo, of being like a jukebox for an audience willing to only have its certainties confirmed. But this — as his friend Allen Ginsberg stated — is not the duty of art.
An artist should not please the public but look for something deeper. In this light, it was clear that folk revival had exhausted its power. The image of a committed songwriter that made him a star is in the background. In this documentary, Dylan appears as impudent and boastful as a year-old boy can be: amused, astonished and annoyed with some journalists — to recall Mr.
Jones in Ballad of a Thin Man — who gravely address him as a moral authority, a sort of secular pope of the protest song.
The English experience will clear the ideas of the young Dylan. Still a chrysalis protected by the usual dark suits that he used to wear as a paladin of civil rights, he was going to open to reveal a new and dazzling musical butterfly. No longer interested in writing a novel or a drama, he soon realized this song applied to a new category.
More than a song, Like a Rolling Stone is an emotional state, as well as an endless stratification of meanings involving a crucial moment of our recent history.
It is the hymn of a generation celebrating the search for freedom outside well-established social rules, a threat to the American way of life and its idols. It is the existential experience of a person compelled to lose their track to find themselves again, a story of fall and redemption in which failure is seen as an epiphany.
It is also the autobiographic catharsis of those who have rejected a favourable status. He's yours. According to Dylan's friend Paul Nelson, by the end of the three-song set, "the audience was booing and yelling 'get rid of the electric guitar. What did the darling of the folk movement do to upset the crowds so deeply? He picked up an electric guitar and sang a rock song.
Dylan had stumbled through a version of "Like a Rolling Stone" that had shown up on the pop charts just days before. He was abruptly thrown from being the voice of a generation to being a traitor to a movement. It may seem illogical now that anyone should tag Bob Dylan as a "sell-out.
But back before he'd carved out such a clear place in the world for someone as weird and eclectic as Bob Dylan, the expectations coming from his mostly folk fan base were intense: the Greenwich Village sensation was their icon "he's yours," said the announcer who brought him onstage , he was their star, and the crowds at Newport, hippies to the nth degree, wanted him to play their music.
They believed that the revival of folk was a return to an imagined past of purity and a key form of resistance to popular culture. According to guitarist Michael Bloomfield, "rock n' roll was greasers, heads, dancers, people who got drunk and boogied," not the stuff of the anti-establishment folk community. If Bob Dylan had ever believed in the hard-line ideologies associated with the folk movement, intensified fame had burst his bubble. He was increasingly detached from any one ideology, and questioning everything to the point of utter meaninglessness was the name of the game.
The last thing Dylan wanted in was to be forced to stand for anything. And now there he was at Newport, surrounded by all the purity and dogma of the folk revival movement, pissing off all his die-hard folk fans. His new song was climbing on the pop charts peaking at 2, it is still his biggest hit ever. Dylan couldn't care less about the folksters' fantasies of an unadulterated folk community. He had lost his drive to identify with the counterculture.
During Dylan's UK tour the following year, the self-important folk enthusiasts reportedly came up with even more distasteful and absurd responses. Groups of folk fans were in a tizzy, believing that "pop music symbolized the destruction of that [folk] community by capitalist mass society, where all land was divided, speech was class, where there were no values" source. Dylan played a double set—half acoustic and half electric—and some folk fans actively recruited other concertgoers to walk out halfway through the set in protest of the electric set to come.
In one locale, someone even called in a bomb threat to the hall before Dylan's show. Near the end of the tour, at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on May 17th, as Dylan was preparing to play "Like a Rolling Stone" always the last song in his set , an audience member stood up and yelled out "Judas! His British fans persisted: "He went really commercial," said one fan on film.
I think he's prostituting himself. Dylan was not without an ego quite the opposite, actually—the documentary Dont Look Back shows him as a near egomaniac , and he reacted to this harassment with venom and rage, flatly rejecting the folk label.
Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There's nobody that's going to kill traditional music. But what did Dylan's new read on "traditional music" mean? What was behind this accusatory and vengeful song that turned into such a huge rock hit? According to Greil Marcus, "the song did not explain itself at all" source. She has no home and nobody knows her name-all of which she used to have aplenty and be very proud of.
It means the people who are always on the go have no commitments to anything. They move, change and evolve. The ex-gf failed to grab on to anything. She let the riches flow her away-and flow away they did her to the gutter. And looking back, she has no roots to hold on to.
She went to the best school in the area, probably through her riches. But she was a loner there. Because she would not let anyone into her status. So looks like Miss Lonely partied it up-and even still she had no friends.
School makes you book-smart. People and society makes you street-smart. She did not associate people below her class and stature. Just being book-smart on the streets would probably get you killed.
The rest of the lines describe her being a prostitute. He obviously has emotionless-eyes, why? This girls is just a steam blower. She is asking if he wants to make a deal-probably sex for drugs. To be on your own With no direction home A complete unknown Like a rolling stone? People threw themselves at her. And the sad part is she accepted them as well.
They trick you as a profession and Dylan perfectly relates this to her situation. She got tricked by people showing her fame and fortune. But they had frowns on their faces, if she had cared to take a second look at them. The tricksters won her heart by buying her things. And she believed that was the world. But looks and interests fade and only then the reality hits. You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat.
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