“Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan

"Like a Rolling Stone" kicks open Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan's sixth album, and it came out on Columbia in 1965 sounding like nothing else on the radio. It began as a long, bilious screed Dylan wrote in June 1965, back home and worn out after a punishing tour of England, which he boiled down to four verses and a chorus.

The sessions nearly strangled it. Two days of preproduction went nowhere until Dylan cut it as a rock song, and a rookie session player named Al Kooper, sitting in on Hammond organ, improvised the riff that gives it wings. Mike Bloomfield and Charlie McCoy play guitar, Frank Owens piano, Joe Macho bass and Bobby Gregg drums, with Dylan on vocals, guitar, piano and harmonica, and Tom Wilson producing. Columbia balked at the six-minute running time and the electric racket, and only put it out after a copy leaked to a music club and influential DJs got hold of it.

Plenty of stations wouldn't touch anything that long, but it reached No. 2 in Billboard, No. 1 in Cashbox, and went around the world. That sneering, youthful voice finished the job of turning a folk singer into a rock star. Rolling Stone put it at No. 1 of its "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" in both 2004 and 2010, and in 2014 Dylan's handwritten lyrics sold at auction for $2 million.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.