LIKE A ROLLING STONE is a
memorable song with a lot of drive, but what about those lyrics ?
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you ?
People’d call say “Beware doll, you're bound to fall”
You thought they were all kidding you.
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out,
Now you don't talk so loud,
Now you don't seem so proud,
About having to be scrounging your next meal …
How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone ?
Ahh you've gone to the
finest school, alright Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it.
Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street
And now you're gonna have to get used to it.
You say you never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say do you want to make a deal?
How does it feel, how does
it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home,
A complete unknown, like a rolling stone ?
Ah you never turned around
to see the frowns
On the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you.
You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you.
You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat,
Ain't it hard when you discovered that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal ?
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 ?
Aah, princess on a steeple
and all the pretty people
They're all drinking, thinking that they've got it made
Exchanging all precious gifts
But you better take your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe.
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him he calls you, you can't refuse
When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose,
You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal.
How does it feel, ah how
does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone ?
My question is long and
poorly structured because it lurked in the back of my mind and festered for
about fifty years without me ever wanting to write it down.
People of my age will quite
possibly have heard the song hundreds of times.
It certainly was novel when we first heard it. So clever.
Witty. Articulate. Coherent. PENETRATING.
But it was part of a long line of Dylan’s songs about women that were bitter and complaining, in which his rhetoric seems whiney and self-pitying and borderline misogynistic. Too often, after losing his youthful sense of fun, he seemed to become cynical, as if cynicism was an art rather than a vice. Too often, it slowly dawned on me, he thought he was right about everything, and that the women he sang about were shallow and uncaring. Of course, many women were just so, but as they say down in Buenos Aires, “It takes two to tango.”
Of course, song-writers, like dramatists and novelists, don’t always write about themselves and the singer of the song might be a fictional third-party.
So now we
come to my question, which is for the women of my age that have survived …
Did you ever come to a point where this song suddenly became suspect, possibly tiresome, and did it make you question all of the thoughts and the principles of the men who loved it and knew its words by heart ?
That’s all.
