Bob Dylan
"Like a Rolling Stone" was classified as "unassigned release" by Columbia Records' sales team and rescued from the discard pile during an office move by a single employee named Shaun Considine. He brought the acetate to Arthur nightclub in Manhattan, where patrons danced through the entire six minutes. Radio stations demanded copies the next morning. Dylan had written the song after returning from his 1965 UK tour feeling co-opted, describing the process as "twenty pages of vomit." The only surviving final-lyric manuscript sold at Sotheby's in 2014 for two million dollars, with marginal notes including "Al Capone" beside the line about being "a complete unknown."
In our deep dive into Like a Rolling Stone, we trace the song from the discard pile to the Manhattan nightclub to the Sotheby's auction, and what it reveals about a songwriter who wrote something too big for anyone to know what to do with.
