An Interpretation of Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone

Like A Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan is about a lady who was once a wealthy upper class citizen with the luxuries of being in a position of riches but is now nothing more then a homeless person. This song is about how life can change so suddenly and how taking and becoming addicted to drugs can destroy your life completely. The girl in this song was given the best of the best opportunities to make it easier to succeed, money dresses etc. but this lack of restraint on money led to her being able to spend it on drugs. Now she has had to pawn all her old luxuries to maintain her lifestyle. Like A Rolling Stone has four verses and a chorus repeated after each verse.

The title "Like a Rolling Stone" is used because it explains the fact that once you continue on a downhill slope it gets harder and harder to stop making the decisions which are cascading downwards like a rolling stone. This phrase is also used as the last line of the chorus of the song. The chorus itself asks the question to the character in the song of "how does it feel to be on your own with no direction home like a complete unknown like a rolling stone?". In the chorus the line "To be on your own with no direction home" makes clear the fact that the character is now alone and there is no way to change back to the life that the character depicted originally had. "Like a complete unknown" describes the lady's new social status as one of the indistinguishable people in this world, it is as if she was never a wealthy superior class citizen.

The first verse of the song starts out with "Once upon a time you dressed so fine you threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?" This demonstrates her superiority to the "bums" in the song and clarifies her monetary benefits in her position before she lost it. The last seven lines in the lyrics of this verse show her at times where she would laugh at her peers when they warned her about what she was doing. This ideal is communicated through the lines "People'd call, say, beware doll, you're bound to fall you thought they were all kiddin' Everybody that was hangin' out you used to laugh about". The next three lines show the change in her outlook now as the consequences of making the wrong decision change her life drastically now that she is a homeless person. "Now you don't talk so loud, now you don't seem so proud about having to be scrounging for your next meal."

The second verse begins again with the appraisal to her previous standings in the upper class "You've gone to the finest school all right, miss lonely" and continues to say that even with education in the finest school your not taught how to cut it by yourself without money and the higher education that comes with wealth does not prepare you to survive on your own. This is detailed in the lines "And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street and now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it". The final lines of the verse depict the main character buying the drugs that destroy her life. The "mystery tramp" being the drug dealer in this song and he is revealed as a cold emotionless character as with the quote "but now you realize He's not selling any alibis as you stare into the vacuum of his eyes and ask him do you want to make a deal?" In these last few lines the word alibi is used to say that the drug dealer isn't selling a way out of your troubles and doesn't really care what happens to you.

The third verse identifies that she is a wealthy character that can afford "jugglers and the clowns" or servants to amuse her when in fact although seeming to be amused, the entertainers were actually unhappy. The verse goes on saying that "You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat". This refers to the character getting mixed up with someone else in the upper class who takes drugs. The terms "chrome horse" and "Siamese cat" are both jargon for types of drugs. Chances are, Bob Dylan was writing this song about a celebrity that he knew personally that had started to take drugs and lost their entire wealth to this "diplomat" who tricked the girl as "he took from you everything he could steal".

The first half of the fourth verse is about all the other wealthy people and how they take they're "precious gifts and things" for granted and do not realise how worthless they really are when you lose the more important things in life. This idea is conveyed particularly strongly in the third and fourth lines of the verse. The second half of the verse is about the prospects of the lady now that everything has changed. "Napoleon in rags" represents a homeless person and the life of the character is framed in the lines "when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose" and "You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal." This, another reference to the change in the status of the character and now that she is a "bum" she is ignored. When listening to the song it might be hard to distinguish the purpose of this song due to the way it is sang. Bob Dylan's song about change and how drugs can influence even wealthiest people teaches us that some mistakes can send us down a spiralling path like a rolling stone that we cannot recover fully from. The area of change depicted in this song is how illegal drugs or any bad decision if done repeatedly can radically affect your life.

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