Lulu

From Leslie Griffiths, Methodist Minister:

A few days ago, I heard Andy Kershaw talking about Bob Dylan – a bit like Hamlet discussing Shakespeare – in a radio programme that marked the 50th anniversary of Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.” And I heard snatches of the monumental opening number, “Like a Rolling Stone” which I hadn’t listened to for years. It stopped me in my tracks. I remember how dismissive the critics were – too long, cynical, an explosion of spite and anger, one long sneer and filled with resentment – just to quote a few. It was certainly chaotic, much of it written in the recording studio and done with musicians who didn’t have a clue what was going on. But, to my mind, it hits the button. This song was in the same beat register as Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and Allen Ginsberg’s protest scream of a poem “Howl.” Commentators have wondered about the identity of the woman who figures in the song, someone who used to have everything but who is now reduced to living on the streets. “How does it feel?” the singer cries, “How does it feel to be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?” I don’t think he has any particular person in mind – it’s himself he’s talking about, it’s me he’s describing. Strip away all that protects us from life on the street – money, possessions, status whatever or, as in my case, the comfortable platitudes of religion and piety, and what do you amount to? Jesus could have claimed equality with God, the Bible says, but instead he took the form of a slave, accepted humiliation, and it was on the basis of his self-emptying and never through lofty dogma or sanctimonious self-righteousness, that he can claim our attention and speak across the ages. I think Bob Dylan caught that primal vision too. “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”