Dylan the human chameleon has played so many parts in his long life, that it is meaningless to talk about “Dylan” at all. You have to say which Dylan you mean: the Dylan of the earliest protest songs, the reinvented post-acoustic singer, or today’s grand old man of music. If there is continuity in his personality, it is hard to discern - any attempt to understand him in depth gets no help from him. He seems content to encourage the mystery, and his autobiographical testimony is unenlightening.


We are left with the songs. And here it is worth looking at the lyrics without the magic of the music. When I first heard “Like a rolling stone”, I was a teenager with a bitter, disillusioned attitude towards the world, and Dylan’s bitter, disillusioned songs fitted my mood like a glove (it took me years before I became disillusioned with disillusionment). I hardly listened to the content of the words. It just sounded like bad things were happening to rich people, and that was fine by me.


But when I came back to the words later and read them for what they actually said, I found them disturbing. The song appears to be about a woman who has had the misfortune to land up on the street without money, and is having to prostitute herself to get enough to eat. You might expect that Dylan, the friend of the underdog, would sympathise with such a woman, but not a bit of it. He seems to relish her desperation:


“You said you’d 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 you ask him if you want to make a deal” …


“You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.”


And there is the almost gloating refrain:


“How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
Like a complete unknown
Just like a rolling stone
Tell me
Tell me
Tell me
Yeah”.


Why the bitterness, the schadenfreude? What did this hapless woman ever do to him?


Maybe the very question provides the clue: I suspect that the woman in this song stands for all the girls who had ever refused him, or who had ever left him for some more glamorous man. Dylan’s male rivals are caricatured in the figure of the “diplomat who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat”, an image which is too bizarre a combination of Long John Silver and a Bond villain to take seriously: but clearly we are intended to take it seriously. This is one song where unusually for Dylan, a sense of humour seems completely absent, with the result that he is blind to his own absurdities.


This song, like nearly all of Dylan’s songs, was clearly inspired by strong feelings. But the feelings appear to be negative ones. The general paralysis of the critical faculties that overcome us all when we are in the presence of a revered figure like Dylan may have simply blinded us to the fact that in this song, he reveals a powerful and ugly strain of misogyny in his emotional makeup.