For reasons that I hope will become eventually obvious, for about six months I’ve had Bob Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone” on the brain. In itself, Dylan on the brain is not unusual, but the song choice is odd– I couldn’t listen to it for about two years, a period that coincided with the dawn of my truly heretical notion that the work from ‘64-66 is some of Dylan’s weakest.

The more that I hear the Thin Wild Mercury, the more Dylan sounds like what he was: a callow jerk in his mid-twenties. Having recently been a callow jerk in his mid-twenties, it’s a little too familiar. I prefer the work surrounding the period. Perhaps in my mid 30s I’ll be down on Planet Waves. “I love you more than money!? I love you more than blood? A little touch of your love? I’m goin’ back to New Orleans and puttin’ on Another Side of, dammit!” says the Future Self of 2012, just before the Mayan Calendar blows up the world.

Anyway. Back in the late 90s, I had a laugh with my friend Sam Tregar, author of CPAN module HTML::Template and its companion book, the rivetingly titled Writing Perl Modules for CPAN. The joke was that one should break up with a woman at the exact moment when she informed you that she believed “Like a Rolling Stone” was about her life. The theory being that this association bespoke a deep psychological problem that no amount of Love & Companionship could ever make right. Why would anyone want to be the subject of such a hate filled song? Or willingly admit a narrative similarity between their life and the song’s (apparent) protagonist?

But hello, part of why people are so nuts over the song is its profound superiority to any other piece of music from the First Rock period. God knows it is the best song of its decade, with a quality that prefigures Blood on the Tracks, an album of songs & lyrics of such astonishing quality that one is tempted to believe that Dylan was being ghosted by God. As with any work of Real Art, “Like a Rolling Stone” bares no real traces of its creation; it feels as though it has always existed, like Dylan (in his own words) “pulled it out of the air” and laid it down.

(Fear not, aspiring artists–”Like a Rolling Stone” took a lot to laugh and a train to cry. There’s a very documented history of Dylan struggling in the studio. The Bootleg Series, Vol 1 has an outtake of the song in 3/4ths time & accompanied by a harpsichord. So. Masterpieces are always made.)

I think the confusion of “Like a Rolling Stone” comes from the often unrecognized fact that the song contains two narratives– there’s clearly the very familiar, but never better rendered, venom and bile of Bob Dylan towards an unknown woman who hasn’t lived up to his (impossible) expectations, which is the A Story of the verses, but then there’s also the B Story of the chorus. The writing here is incredibly tight; in five repeated lines, Dylan manages to achieve a story as consistent and well rendered as the first, but one that also bleeds into and seemingly informs the A Story. Which is to say: you can listen to the chorus and think it’s about the same person as the verses.

With that in mind, you start seeing why a lot of people think the song is about themselves. Informed by the A Story, the B Story can be read as a ballad of the open road, of the freedom of being out on your own; it’s almost as if the chorus functions as a counterpoint to the verses– okay, yeah, Miss Lonely, you had to make juice with it, but here you go, you’re away from that darkness now, you’re out living the hipster dream of 1964, and by the way, how does it feel? The inferred answer being: “Well, redemptive and pretty good, actually.”

I’d argue the opposite: that the B Story is, if anything, Bob Dylan’s address to himself. It’s a cry of pain in the existential mirror of the Chapter One in a first novel. It’s about the dark side of the American Dream– I don’t mean some HST fantasy where hobo midgets dry hump your leg while you’re on acid & cops beat you for daring, daring! to dream, but rather what happens when America shrugs and allows you to make it; when you push yourself so far into your own destiny that you’re forced to realize, oh snap, I done done it and it ain’t no different. There’s no direction home because there is no home, and not in some grand delusion of being a pilgrim on the expeditionary road to oblivion, but being so bored & lonely & lowdown that every possible option is exhausted and you can’t figure out where to go or what to do, because ain’t it gonna be the same anyway? And how does it feel?

Awful, apparently.

And where do you go?

To a basement, to upstate New York, where you hide out and reincarnate as a 19th Century Mystic, a slightly less gay Walt Whitman. One of the roughs while everyone’s dressed in ascots & paisley.