How Does It Feel?”: The Day Bob Dylan Changed Rock Forever With “Like a Rolling Stone”

 

“How Does It Feel?”: The Day Bob Dylan Changed Rock Forever With “Like a Rolling Stone”

Recorded June 16, 1965 — Columbia Records Studio A, New York City

On June 16, 1965, in a modest Manhattan recording studio, Bob Dylan sat behind a piano and unleashed a song that would reshape the landscape of popular music forever. That song was “Like a Rolling Stone” — six minutes of defiance, electricity, and poetic fury, recorded at Columbia Records Studio A in New York City.

What began as a stream-of-consciousness rant scribbled on a typewriter became what many critics consider the greatest rock song ever written.

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A New Dylan Emerges

By mid-1965, Bob Dylan was at a crossroads. Already the voice of a generation for his acoustic protest songs, he had grown restless — disillusioned with being labeled a “folk singer” and hungry to push boundaries. The lyrics of “Like a Rolling Stone” were born out of that creative rupture: an unfiltered emotional purge written as a long piece of verse.

“I had never thought of it as a song until one day I just laid the lyrics down and it turned into something else,” Dylan later recalled.

And that “something else” turned out to be nothing less than revolutionary.

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A Rough Start in Studio A

The initial sessions on June 15 were clumsy. Dylan had first imagined the track as a slow waltz — a 3/4-time ballad — but it simply didn’t land. The next day, June 16, something clicked. Dylan picked up a Fender Stratocaster. Organist Al Kooper, not even supposed to be part of the session, slipped onto the bench and added an improvised riff that would become iconic.

The final take — Take 4, on June 16 — was the moment it all came together.

The room crackled. Dylan’s vocals were urgent, raw, accusatory. The snare drum hit like a gunshot. Mike Bloomfield’s guitar licks danced like sparks. Kooper’s organ snuck in unexpectedly, then refused to be ignored.

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Six Minutes That Broke Every Rule

Clocking in at over six minutes, “Like a Rolling Stone” was considered unthinkably long for radio. Columbia Records executives were skeptical. DJs weren’t sure whether they could even play it. But when they did? Phones lit up. Audiences demanded more.

It wasn’t just the length. It was the attitude. The mystery. The sneering chorus —

“How does it feel?” —

aimed like a dagger at some unnamed socialite who had fallen from grace. But really, it was for all of us. A challenge. A reckoning.

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A Cultural Earthquake

Released just weeks later on July 20, 1965, “Like a Rolling Stone” hit No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for weeks. But more than a hit single, it was a declaration.

Dylan had plugged in. He had gone electric. And rock music — with its radio-friendly formulas and teenage love songs — would never be the same again.

Rolling Stone magazine later named it the No. 1 song of all time on their 500 Greatest Songs list. Bruce Springsteen called hearing it for the first time “like somebody kicked open the door to your mind.”

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Legacy Born in One Take

And it all began — that legendary sound, that revolution in six minutes — on a summer day in Studio A, June 16, 1965. The tape rolled. The band clicked in. And Bob Dylan, with a sneer, a stare, and a Stratocaster, asked a question that still echoes today:

“How does it feel… to be on your own?”

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