Editing Like a Rolling Stone (section)

==Themes==
Unlike conventional chart hits of the time, "Like a Rolling Stone" featured lyrics that were interpreted as expressions of resentment rather than love.<ref name=polizzotti1>{{harvnb|Polizzotti|2006|p=33}}</ref><ref name=trager2>{{harvnb|Trager|2004|pp=378–379}}</ref> Author Oliver Trager characterizes 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". The song's subject, "Miss Lonely", previously opted for easy options in life—she attended the finest schools and enjoyed high-placed friends—but now that her situation has become difficult, it appears that she has no meaningful experiences to define her character.<ref name=trager2/> The opening lines of the song establish the character's former condition:

{{blockquote|<poem>
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?<ref name=lyrics>{{cite book|title=Bob Dylan Lyrics 1962–2001|author=Dylan, B.|pages=167–168|year=2004|publisher=Simon & Schuster|isbn=0-7432-2827-8}}</ref>
</poem>}}

And the first verse ends with lines that seemingly deride her current condition:

{{blockquote|<poem>
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal<ref name=lyrics/>
</poem>}}

Despite the obvious vitriol, the song's narrator also seems to show compassion for Miss Lonely, and expresses joy for her in the freedom in losing everything.<ref name=polizzotti1/> [[Jann Wenner]] commented: "Everything has been stripped away. You're on your own, you're free now&nbsp;... 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."<ref>{{harvnb|Polizzotti|2006|p=35}}</ref> The final verse ends with the lines:

{{blockquote|<poem>
When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal<ref name=lyrics/>
</poem>}}

The [[refrain]] seems to emphasize these themes:

{{blockquote|<poem>
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<ref name=lyrics/>
</poem>}}

Dylan biographer [[Robert Shelton (critic)|Robert Shelton]] gave this interpretation: <blockquote>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.<ref name="Shelton 1986 279"/></blockquote>

Dylan humorously commented on the song's moral perspective at a press conference at [[KQED (TV)|KQED]] television studio on December 3, 1965. When a reporter, suggesting that the song adopted a harsh perspective on a girl, asked Dylan, "Are you hard on [people in your songs] because you want to torment them? Or to change their lives and make them know themselves?", Dylan replied while laughing, "I want to needle them."<ref>{{harvnb|Cott|2006|p=64}}</ref><ref>{{cite video | people=Dylan, Bob |date=2006
|title=Dylan Speaks: The Legendary 1965 Press Conference in San Francisco| medium=DVD |publisher=[[Eagle Rock Entertainment]]}}</ref>

Commentators attempted to tie the characters in the song to specific people in Dylan's personal life in 1965. In his book ''[[Popism: The Warhol Sixties|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."<ref>{{harvnb|Warhol|1980|p=108}}</ref> The reason behind Dylan's alleged hostility to Warhol was supposedly Warhol's treatment of actress and model [[Edie Sedgwick]]. It has been suggested that Sedgwick is the basis of the Miss Lonely character.<ref name="h2g2">{{cite web|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A23814911 |title=No Direction Home—the Life and Death of Edie Sedgwick|publisher=BBC |date=June 20, 2007 |access-date=June 7, 2008}}</ref> 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.<ref name=stein>{{harvnb|Stein|1992|pp=283–285}}</ref> According to Warhol's 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.<ref name=stein/> However, in ''[[The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia]]'', [[Michael Gray (author)|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]]''".<ref>{{harvnb|Gray|2006|pp=603–604}}</ref>

[[Greil Marcus]] alluded to a suggestion by art historian [[Thomas E. Crow]] that Dylan had written the song as a comment on Warhol's scene:

<blockquote>
I heard a lecture by Thomas Crow&nbsp;... 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.<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/blog/j-gabriel-boylan/qa-greil-marcus-critic-scholar| title = The Q&A: Greil Marcus, Critic, Scholar| author = Boylan, J. Gabriel| date = April 20, 2010| access-date = April 21, 2010| work = More Intelligent Life| archive-date = August 16, 2011| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110816021216/http://moreintelligentlife.com/blog/j-gabriel-boylan/qa-greil-marcus-critic-scholar| url-status = dead}}</ref></blockquote>

[[Joan Baez]], [[Marianne Faithfull]] and [[Bob Neuwirth]] have also been suggested as possible targets of Dylan's scorn.<ref name="My Back Pages"/><ref name=heylin09/><ref>{{harvnb|Williamson|2006|pp=226–227}}</ref> Dylan 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 [Dylan] 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."<ref>{{harvnb|Sounes|2001|pp=178–179}}</ref>

[[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.{{' "}}<ref>{{harvnb|Marqusee|2003|p=157}}</ref> 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."<ref name=heylin09>{{harvnb|Heylin|2009|p=241}}</ref>

The song is also notable for the amazing characters who surround the heroine. Andy Gill recalls the strangeness contained in the lyrics: "Who, fascinated fans debated, was Miss Lonely, Napoleon in rags and—most bizarre of all—the diplomat who rode a chrome horse while balancing a Siamese cat upon his shoulder? What on earth was going on here?"<ref>{{harvnb|Gill|1998|p=82}}</ref> The diplomat in question, in the third verse:

{{blockquote|<poem>
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal<ref name=lyrics/>
</poem>}}

One interpretation was formulated in Jean-Michel Buizard's 2021 essay, ''Like a Rolling Stone Revisited: Une relecture de Dylan'' [French:''A Re-reading of Dylan''], which sheds new light on the possible identity of Miss Lonely and company. The central idea is that in 1965, the young Dylan remained secretly haunted by the country blues, which formed the framework of his first album (''[[Bob Dylan (album)|Bob Dylan]]'', 1962) and of which he would say in 2004 in his ''[[Chronicles: Volume One|Chronicles]]'': "it was a counterpart of myself".<ref>{{harvnb|Dylan|2005|p=240}}</ref> The song is then conceived as a half-historical half-imaginary tale in which the old blues, once sovereign in the Southern countryside, surrounded by its servants, the bluesmen, finds itself alone and abandoned in the 1940s, when these same bluesmen, following the great wave of migration of the black population, left for the cities of the North and founded there a modern blues, electrified and emptied of its roots. Miss Lonely is thus "an allegory of country blues".<ref>{{harvnb|Buizard|2021|p=52}}</ref>

[[Muddy Waters]], author in 1950 of a well-known blues entitled "[[Rollin' Stone (Muddy Waters song)|Rollin' Stone]]", is emblematic of this great history of the blues. He is the one we find as a "diplomat" shouldering his guitar (the "Siamese cat") on the train (the "chrome horse") that took him to Chicago in 1943, where he transformed the blues of his childhood into the city blues that made him famous ("he took from you everything he could steal"). Other legendary bluesmen appear in the song: presumably [[Blind Lemon Jefferson]] as "the mystery tramp" in the second verse and [[Robert Johnson]], "Napoleon in rags", in the final one.<ref>{{harvnb|Buizard|2021|pp=82–89}}</ref>