by Agostino Roncallo
On June 15, 1965, Bob Dylan entered Columbia's Studio A with his band of Mike Bloomfield (guitar), Al Kooper (organ), Paul Griffin (piano), Russ Savakus (bass), and Bobby Gregg (drums). He was restless, feeling a weight he wanted to free himself from, no longer recognizing himself as a folk musician that had been sewn onto him and to which he felt imprisoned. In search of an alternative path, he wrote a composition of about twenty pages, on which the musicians worked tirelessly. The following day, Dylan left the studio with six minutes of recording in his pocket: "Like a Rolling Stone" was born, a song destined to leave an indelible mark on music history.
Despite its unusual length for the time, the single was released on July 20, 1965, a month before the album Highway 61 Revisited, of which it is part. It was perhaps the singer-songwriter's greatest success, remaining on the US charts for three months, subsequently beaten only by the Beatles' "Help!". In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it first on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.
But what had Dylan freed himself of, and what "betrayal" are we talking about? By shedding his role as folk prophet, the singer-songwriter had decided to follow a personal path that distanced him from folk and approached rock for the first time. The audience will recognize and empathize with the passionate energy with which he sings the song, the anger with which he himself wrote the lyrics.
We are in the presence of not just a song but a film, a screenplay, a novel, a painting that speaks of the rise and fall of a woman. Miss Solitude thought she had it all, everything she could desire: wealth, beauty, well-being, and suddenly, she finds herself with nothing. Miss Solitude is a stone, rolling aimlessly, unable to stop its relentless course toward the precipice. The void that opens beneath her is as unbridgeable as the desperation of all those who have felt invulnerable and who, for this reason, have ignored the existence of others, the lives of those living on the margins.
The certainty of one's own privileges is a fata morgana, a wall of seemingly sturdy stones that crumbles before the astonished gaze; that wall is a thin diaphragm, a layer of powdered sugar, just blow on it and nothing remains: reality reveals itself, and merciless bewilderment is all that remains.