by Jan Dalley
When the song was finally released, it changed lives. Bruce Springsteen said the opening snare shot was as if somebody had ‘kicked open the door to your mind’. Paul McCartney was almost hypnotized: ‘It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful.’ Even Frank Zappa, worldly beyond his years, thought the game was up. ‘When I heard “Like a Rolling Stone”, I wanted to quit the music business,’ he said, ‘because I felt “If this wins and it does what it’s supposed to do, I don’t need to do anything else”.’
But the release of Bob Dylan’s acerbic single in the summer of 1965 was far from an uncomplicated process. The life of this song began to take shape well before its improbable assault on the charts. It was brought to the songwriter’s band during the recording sessions for Highway 61 Revisited, the album that would transform Dylan’s working methods and status in the popular music pantheon. The release in 2015 of The Cutting Edge 1965–1966, the 12th in Dylan’s Bootleg Series, reveals the slow metamorphosis of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ into the masterpiece it would become. The box set devotes no less than an entire disc to various rehearsals and abandoned versions of the song. It draws vivid portraits of Dylan the experimentalist and Dylan the perfectionist at war with each other as the studio clock ticked away. Here was pop in its most anti-ephemeral form, built to last, as laden with significance as any heftier work of high art.
The song’s beginning was inauspicious. Take one is an instrumental run-through in 3/4 time, lurching like a Bavarian drinking song with Dylan’s febrile harmonica leading the melody. ‘I got lost, man,’ says Dylan after one minute. ‘Did you get lost?’ Pianist Paul Griffin reminds the group of the chord sequence. On take four, Dylan unleashes his vocal for the first time: ‘You threw the bums a dime, didn’t you?’ he sings, and immediately clears his throat, the vehemence of the lyric proving too much for him. ‘My voice has gone,’ he finally tells the band.
The song is remade, turned into a more orthodox and quicker 4/4 tune, and its first rehearsal sees Dylan’s anger muted. His tone is more sardonic, the vocal more reliable. But it lacks the righteous sneer that the devastating lyric demands. And the tempo is too even.
On take four of the remake, serendipity strikes. Session guitarist Al Kooper, 21, a friend of the band, walks in holding his guitar, hoping to join in. He is deemed surplus to requirements, but Dylan decides he wants an organ in addition to the piano, and Kooper volunteers to fill in. He improvises his part, as he would later recall, ‘like a little kid fumbling in the dark for a light switch’. And suddenly the song turns into the tumbling, cascading version that will become the finished article.
Dylan is still not happy. He orders 11 more takes of the song, experimenting at one point with a quicker, shuffling tempo, while on another version drummer Bobby Gregg tries some military-style fills. But these remakes are markedly inferior. Dylan and his musicians have already nailed it.
The song was released a month later, at more than six minutes long, much to the disapproval of Columbia Records. What did they know? ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ reached the Top 10 of most charts, nestling at Number 2 in the US behind The Beatles’ ‘Help!’, another, altogether poppier, cry of existential disarray.
The song has been covered in 50 years’ worth of musical styles, and is regularly voted the greatest pop song of all time by those lovingly compiled glossy magazines that wish it was still 1965. Observers have studied the lyrics scribbled in the rare manuscript documents scrupulously to find any hint of the identity of Dylan’s victim in the song. All they found were some doodles of a chicken, a hat, and the head of a deer.
Peter Aspden
4
STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN
In the only memorable moment of the 1992 comedy film Wayne’s World, the slacker played by Mike Myers visits a guitar shop. He starts to pick out the first four notes of a familiar acoustic arpeggio. Abruptly, the shop owner cuts him off, pointing to a sign that reads ‘No Stairway to Heaven’.
The song that became a favourite among budding bedroom guitarists was the highlight of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album, and arguably of their entire career. Singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page knocked together the outline of the song at a cottage in Wales in 1971 before finishing it off with their bandmates at the Hampshire manor house that was their base for the album.
‘Stairway’ combines the band’s signature themes. It starts with the folksy mysticism with which they had started to experiment on their previous album. The lyrics of ‘Stairway’ are often taken to be hippie gnosticism, but in fact the opening verse was, in Robert Plant’s words, ‘about a woman getting everything she wanted all the time without giving back any thought or consideration’.
For the first four minutes of the song, Plant’s voice wraps around Jimmy Page’s acoustic guitar and multi-tracked recorders played by John Paul Jones. Then, John Bonham’s drums reinforce the beat. The tension builds; the tempo subtly accelerates. A couple of minutes later, Page leans hard into an electric guitar solo and Bonham’s drumming suddenly explodes. This is no accident: Bonham was happy with the track he originally laid down, but Page deployed the right mixture of passive-aggression to goad him into another take, on which he audibly sizzles with anger.
‘Stairway to Heaven’ was never a single – it was too long, and impossible to edit, and in any case the band wanted people to buy the whole album – but it became Led Zeppelin’s calling card, regularly performed in concert. ‘Does anybody remember laughter?’ Plant would enquire rhetorically, mid-verse.
It has, though, had a contested afterlife. Wayne played the riff only in the cinema version of the film because the band, zealously protective at least of their own copyrights, squashed its use in television and home video releases. They were later hit with a lawsuit of their own by the estate of Randy California of the band Spirit, claiming that the opening bore a similarity to his melody for Spirit’s song ‘Taurus’. In June 2016, after a colourful trial during which Jimmy Page was quizzed as to whether the Mary Poppins song ‘Chim Chim Cher-ee’ might have influenced ‘Stairway’, a jury in California rejected the claim.
For years after the dissolution of the band in 1980, Plant refused to perform the song, although he was pressed into it for Live Aid (1985), along with Zeppelin colleagues Page and Jones, backed by the drummers of Genesis and Chic, as well as for the 2007 Led Zeppelin reunion that marked the death of their record company boss Ahmet Ertegun. Both renditions were ramshackle. Unlike other Zeppelin warhorses, it is not part of his current set with Plant’s band, The Sensational Space Shifters.
But others have attempted it. Frank Zappa and the Mothers went heavy on the prog – it might have been a joke, it might not. Parody band Dread Zeppelin’s version sounds like Elvis Presley fronting the Wailers. Lez Zeppelin, an all-woman ‘she-incarnation’ of the band, played it surprisingly straight.
Among the best covers is Dolly Parton’s, which starts with Appalachian guitar and Parton humming the recorder part, and works up into a full-scale hoedown, amid which she sneakily interpolates a couple of extra verses. Rodrigo y Gabriela, amiable Mexican acoustic buskers gone large, remove the words altogether in their Hispanic-flavoured rendition.
In 2012, all three surviving members of Led Zeppelin reunited to be honoured for an evening at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, with Barack Obama in attendance. Clad in white tie, Plant, Page and Jones saw Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart perform ‘Stairway’, accompanied by Bonham’s son Jason on drums and by a gospel choir in bowler hats. Page nodded appreciatively to his former comrades. Plant’s eyes filled with tears.
David Honigmann
5
YESTERDAY
In his two performances at the Californian Desert Trip festival in October 2016, Paul McCartney played for nearly three hours each time but still managed to omit one of his most famous songs. ‘Yesterday’ is one of the most regularly played numbers in the 75-year-old’s touring canon, but perhaps he decided that the audience at what was dubbed ‘Oldchel
la’ didn’t want to be reminded that they were clinging on to the music of the past.
Despite its popularity – it’s one of the most covered songs in history – ‘Yesterday’ has a divisive reputation among listeners: to fans, it’s a gorgeously simple, melancholy ballad; to detractors, it’s the first major manifestation of McCartney’s Achilles heel – his mawkish sentimentality.
Whichever camp you fall into, ‘Yesterday’ was certainly the seed of future ructions in the band dynamics. McCartney has said that the tune came to him almost fully formed in a dream one night in London in 1963. The then 21-year-old McCartney was living in an attic room in the five-storey Georgian family home in London’s Marylebone of his girlfriend, Jane Asher. He had begun dating the 17-year-old after the Radio Times sent her to interview The Beatles at a Royal Albert Hall gig earlier that year. The Beatles had just begun renting a flat together on Green Street, just off Park Lane. Despite finally having his own room, McCartney hated the austere surroundings of the sparsely furnished apartment. By contrast, Jane’s mother, Margaret Asher, a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, created a warm home for her husband and three children, and invited Jane’s boyfriend to come and live with them.
In this cosy atmosphere McCartney woke, he said, with the tune in his head, leapt up, and on the piano next to his bed, hammered out the wistful melody. Convinced that it must be one of the old jazz tunes his father listened to, he played the song to everyone he knew to see if they recognized it.
This was what he was doing one evening at the flat of actress and singer Alma Cogan on Kensington High Street. As he sat playing the still wordless tune to Cogan and her sister Sandra, their mother Fay walked into the living room and asked if anyone would like some scrambled eggs. McCartney sang the words on top of the melody, improvising for the next line: ‘Oh baby, how I love your legs.’
‘Scrambled eggs’ remained the song’s lyric until a trip to Portugal in 1965, where McCartney said the words suddenly came to him on the long drive from the airport. He scribbled them down on the back of an envelope. Going into the studio to record the song, the rest of the band found themselves redundant.
George Martin felt that what ‘Yesterday’ needed was not drums and guitars but a string quartet. McCartney feared that their producer was doing a ‘Mantovani’ but acquiesced. Because it was a solo performance, and because it was so unlike any of their previous output, The Beatles initially vetoed a release in the UK, letting both Matt Monroe and, ironically, Mantovani have hits with it before they did.
Few of the thousands of covers of the song have enhanced its charms – in the case of Linkin Park’s, quite the opposite. The most fertile period for interpretations was in the five years after it was released, when everyone from Elvis to Frank Sinatra tackled the strange juxtaposition between the chorus and verse.
Most often ‘Yesterday’ has been like an old mirror, dully reflecting back the style of the singer rather than revealing hidden depths within the song itself. The most successful attempts have tended to be by more singular vocalists, such as Marianne Faithfull’s delicate 1965 rendition or Willie Nelson’s honeyed drawl on his 1966 live Country Music Concert album.
Only Marvin Gaye in 1970 seems to find a whole other ‘Yesterday’, swapping the plaintive stillness of the original for a swinging soul shuffle and a yearning gospel cry that manages to make being trapped in the past sound almost like heaven rather than hell.
Bernadette McNulty
6
EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THORN
The record sleeve shows a pensive man with dark stubble, muscular tattooed biceps, a guitar and a cigarette. Confusingly, this otherwise macho rocker also has lustrous blonde hair falling below his shoulders, gold jewellery and voluptuous lips reddened with lipstick. To quote Aerosmith, dude looks like a lady.
He is Poison’s singer Bret Michaels, brooding over the break-up that inspired the Los Angeles band’s ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’. Taken from their 1988 album Open Up and Say … Ahh!, the power ballad was Poison’s biggest hit. Number 1 in the US for three weeks, it marked the high-water point of LA’s glam metal scene. Dudes who looked like ladies would never rock out with such gusto again.
Glam metal, mocked as ‘hair metal’, was a pumped-up Reagan-era mutation of 1970s glam rock and punk, headquartered in the fleshpots of West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Embraced by MTV and fuelled by the decade of excess, it was hugely popular. Poison came late to the scene, since they released their debut album in 1986, but rapidly rose to become one of its biggest names.
‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ was written while they were touring their first album, Look What the Cat Dragged In. Late one night after a Dallas show, a homesick Michaels rang his girlfriend, an exotic dancer in LA. The rocker was horrified to hear a male voice answer the phone. ‘Now, a female voice, that I could’ve lived with, you know what I’m saying?’ he recalled. ‘Hell, I may have even welcomed it! But another guy … It broke my heart.’ All the pain was poured into ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’. The song opens with a plaintive sigh and strummed acoustic chords. ‘We both lie silently still in the dead of the night,’ Michaels sings ponderously. But when guitarist CC DeVille makes a swaggering entrance with a brooding solo, the mood shifts. The drums kick in, the music swells up and Michaels’ voice acquires a certain lip-smacking relish for the infidelity he is supposedly lamenting.
Lyrical juxtapositions recur. Roses have thorns, nights have dawns, a couple lie close but ‘feel miles apart inside’. To have this sung by a man in lipstick and make-up adds a weird gravity to Michaels’ doggerel.
Somewhere in the depths of ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ lie Shakespeare’s sonnets. Number 35, to be precise – the one in which the poet forgives the ‘master-mistress of my passion’ for a ‘trespass’ against his love. ‘No more be grieved at that which thou hast done’, he tells the androgynous youth. ‘Roses have thorns …’
‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ was LA glam metal’s most abiding memento, its ‘Stairway to Heaven’ – an association suggested by the 1991 film Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey in which the bodacious duo Bill and Ted are confronted by St Peter at the gates of heaven asking, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ They respond by reciting lines from ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’.
That was the start of the song’s fruitful afterlife. It is a film and television soundtrack staple, from Glee to The Simpsons, has been belted out by contestants on American Idol and no doubt is being slaughtered right now by a karaoke caterwauler. Miley Cyrus reinterpreted it as a big pop number in 2009.
The shameless Michaels – who went on to star in a reality television show, Rock of Love, in which women competed to be his girlfriend – remakes it at regular intervals, including a kids’ version sung by his young daughters and a seniors’ version with country veteran Loretta Lynn.
The shape-shifting is apt. Poison’s mighty power ballad marks the last popular flourish of transvestism in rock, a tradition stretching back from the New York Dolls to David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Since LA glam metal was consigned to history by grunge, its scruffy Pacific Coast nemesis, male rockers have adopted a duller mode of dress. The days of stubble and lip gloss are over. ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ is a break-up song in more ways than one.
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
7
SURF’S UP
If there is one song that encapsulates the psychologically disturbed brilliance of Brian Wilson at his creative peak, it is ‘Surf’s Up’. He wrote it in 1966 while sitting at the piano at home in California in his ‘sandpit’ – he liked to feel the sand between his toes – at a time when he was deteriorating mentally. He was suffering symptoms of what would eventually be diagnosed as bipolar schizoaffective disorder, as well as embarking on a long period of drug abuse. The song took about half an hour to write.
‘Surf’s Up’ first surfaced in a 1967 CBS television special, Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, presented by Leonard Bernstein, with Wilson singing it solo at the piano. But t
hen the song disappeared and began to acquire a special mystique. The album for which it was intended, Smile, remained unfinished for decades. In the CBS film, Bernstein said he was ‘fascinated by the strange and compelling scene called “pop music”’, and rightly so: this was a period when pop was beginning to take itself seriously, pushing boundaries. In 1965 The Beatles had released their ground-breaking Rubber Soul album, launching a transatlantic to-and-fro with The Beach Boys, who responded with Pet Sounds, which in turn was released around the same time as The Beatles’ Revolver.
But then Wilson became mired in the quicksand of Smile. Part of the problem with the album was Wilson’s decision to ditch fellow Beach Boy Mike Love as lyricist and hire the young composer, arranger and lyricist Van Dyke Parks. Parks’ lyrics for Smile were dazzling but often so impressionistic as to be almost abstract, and Love made his feelings clear about what he called, derisively, Parks’ ‘acid alliteration’. Alongside fractious studio sessions, Wilson was under pressure from the record company, Capitol, to write more hits. He began to descend further into isolation. By May 1967 Smile had been abandoned. On 1 June Sgt Pepper was released. Game over.
In 1971 The Beach Boys finally released ‘Surf’s Up’ on an album of the same name. Fleshed out with a band, brass and harmonies, the song was beguiling and enigmatic: another ‘pocket symphony’ to follow 1966’s revolutionary ‘Good Vibrations’. Wilson, of course, never actually surfed. Parks’ lyric was catching a different kind of wave, the emerging 1960s counterculture, the rise of the baby boomers, and the phrase ‘surf’s up’ arrives at a point in the song where it is marking a transition from old to new, from age to youth: ‘Surf’s Up/Aboard a tidal wave/Come about hard and join/The young and often spring you gave’. Later, the lyric echoes William Wordsworth: ‘The child is father of the man.’