Like A Rolling Stone - Themes

Themes

Unlike conventional chart hits of the time, the lyrics of "Like a Rolling Stone" were not about love, but expressed resentment and a yearning for revenge. Author Oliver Trager describes the lyrics as "Dylan's sneer at a woman who has fallen from grace and is reduced to fending for herself in a hostile, unfamiliar world." Until now, the song's target, Miss Lonely, has taken the easy way out, gone to the finest schools and had high-placed friends, but now that her situation has become difficult she has no meaningful experiences on which to base her character. The opening lines of the song establish the woman's former condition:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine

Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?

And the first verse ends with lines deriding her current condition:

Now you don't talk so loud

Now you don't seem so proud

About having to be scrounging your next meal

Despite the vitriol, the song also depicts compassion for Miss Lonely, as well as joy in the freedom of losing everything. Jann Wenner has commented that "Everything has been stripped away. You're on your own, you're free now ... You're so helpless and now you've got nothing left. And you're invisible—you've got no secrets—that's so liberating. You've nothing to fear anymore." The final verse ends with the lines:

When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose

You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal

The refrain emphasizes these themes:

How does it feel

How does it feel

To be on your own

With no direction home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone

Dylan biographer Robert Shelton summed up the song's meaning as: "A song that seems to hail the dropout life for those who can take it segues into compassion for those who have dropped out of bourgeois surroundings. 'Rolling Stone' is about the loss of innocence and the harshness of experience. Myths, props, and old beliefs fall away to reveal a very taxing reality."

In a humorous vein, Dylan commented on the moral perspective of "Like a Rolling Stone" at a press conference at KQED television studio on December 3, 1965. A reporter suggested to Dylan the song took a hard line on a girl, and asked "Do you want to change their lives? or do you want to point out to them the error of their ways?" Laughing, Dylan replied, "I want to needle them."

Commentators have tried to tie the characters in the song to specific people in Dylan's orbit in 1965. In his book POPism: The Warhol '60s, Andy Warhol recalled that some people in his circle believed that "Like a Rolling Stone" contained hostile references to him; he was told, "Listen to 'Like a Rolling Stone'—I think you're the diplomat on the chrome horse, man." The reason behind Dylan's alleged hostility to Warhol was supposedly Warhol's treatment of Edie Sedgwick, an actress and model. Sedgwick has been suggested as the basis of the central character in the song, 'Miss Lonely'. Sedgwick was briefly involved with Dylan in late 1965 and early 1966, around which time there was some discussion of the two making a movie together. According to Warhol collaborator Paul Morrissey, Sedgwick may have been in love with Dylan, and was shocked when she found out that Dylan had secretly married Sara Lownds in November 1965. However, in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, Michael Gray argues that Sedgwick had no connection with "Like a Rolling Stone", but states "there's no doubt that the ghost of Edie Sedgwick hangs around Blonde on Blonde".

Greil Marcus has alluded to a suggestion by art historian Thomas Crow that Dylan had written the song as a comment on Warhol's scene: "I heard a lecture by Thomas Crow ... about "Like a Rolling Stone" being about Edie Sedgwick within Andy Warhol's circle, as something that Dylan saw from the outside, not being personally involved with either of them, but as something he saw and was scared by and saw disaster looming and wrote a song as a warning, and it was compelling." Joan Baez, Marianne Faithful and Bob Neuwirth have also been mooted as possible targets of Dylan's scorn. Dylan's biographer Howard Sounes warned against reducing the song to the biography of one person, and suggested "it is more likely that the song was aimed generally at those perceived as being 'phony'". Sounes adds, "There is some irony in the fact that one of the most famous songs of the folk-rock era—an era associated primarily with ideals of peace and harmony—is one of vengeance."

Mike Marqusee has written at length on the conflicts in Dylan's life during this time, with its deepening alienation from his old folk-revival audience and clear-cut leftist causes. He suggests that the song is probably self-referential. "The song only attains full poignancy when one realises it is sung, at least in part, to the singer himself: he's the one 'with no direction home.'" Dylan himself has noted that after his motorcycle accident in 1966 he realized that "when I used words like 'he' and 'it' and 'they,' and talking about other people, I was really talking about nobody but me."