Vocal performance and speech intonation: Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone".
Michael Daley, York University, Toronto
During my thesis research, I studied the vocal style of Bob Dylan from 1960
to 1966. In that six year span, I found that four distinctive sub-styles could
be delineated. The last of these, beginning in 1965 and continuing up to Dylan's
motorcycle accident in July 1966, is probably his most well-known sub-style.
This sub-style seems to lie in a middle ground between song and speech, with
a great deal of sliding pitch and rhythmically free text declamation. This is
also the time period when Dylan had his greatest commercial and critical success,
peaking with the release in July 1965 of "Like A Rolling Stone". In
addition to the song's commercial success, a number of commentators have pointed
to it as an artistic peak, many of them citing "Like A Rolling Stone"
as the most important single performance of Dylan's 44-year (at the time of
writing) recording career.
My intention here is to analyze a recorded performance of a single verse of
one of Dylan’s most popular songs, observing the ways in which intonation
details relate to lyrics and performance. The analysis is used as source material
for a close reading of the semantic, affective and ‘playful’ meanings
of the performance, and this reading is compared with some published accounts
of the song’s reception.
For this analysis, I have drawn on the linguistic methodology formulated by
Michael Halliday. Halliday has found speech intonation, which includes pitch
movement, timbre, syllabic rhythm and loudness, to be an integral part of English
grammar and crucial to the transmission of certain kinds of meaning. Intonation
patterns are shared by the fluent speakers of a given language, and the understanding
of basic intonational gestures precedes words both in infant language acquisition
and in evolutionary brain development. That is, intonation is a lower brain
function than word recognition, thus developing as a perceptual tool much earlier.
Speech intonation is a deeply-rooted and powerfully meaningful aspect of human
communication. It is plausible that a system so powerful in speech might have
some bearing on the communication of meaning in sung performance. This is the
premise by which I am applying Halliday's methods to this performance.
The musical object in question is the originally released studio recording of
“Like A Rolling Stone”, a performance that has generated much discussion
among Dylan’s commentators and fans. I begin with a short history of the
song’s reception among critics and fans, as well as the assessments of
Dylan himself.
“Like A Rolling Stone” was recorded on June 16, 1965 and was released
as a single on July 20, later appearing on the album Highway 61 Revisited. It
was an immediate success, eventually climbing to #2 on the Billboard pop chart
and #1 on the Cashbox chart. The song was somewhat different from the top ten
fare of the time, though. At a length of over six minutes (it was chopped for
radio play) it was significantly longer than the two-and-a-half or three minute
standard length then dominating pop radio, with a raucous guitar and organ based
arrangement and four verses of dense, rapid-fire verbiage. It is generally agreed
by commentators that the lyrics, at least on the surface, recount the privileged
upbringing and subsequent fall into desperate poverty of a second person “Miss
Lonely”. The narrator’s accusations and unflattering observations
are couched in a series of declarative statements and questions, culminating
after each verse in the famous refrain: “How does it feel…to be
on your own…with no direction home, a complete unknown, like a rolling
stone” (there are slight variations in the refrain from stanza to stanza).
Perhaps the most strikingly unique aspect of the record is Dylan’s vocal
performance, with its use of nasal, sliding pitches and a speechlike, highly
rhythmic declamatory style. Dylan later described, in somewhat stylized terms,
the genesis of the song:
“I wrote it as soon as I got back from England. It was ten pages long. It wasn’t called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper – all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end it wasn’t hatred. Revenge, that’s a better word. It was telling someone they didn’t know what it was all about, and they were lucky. I had never thought of it as a song, until one day I was at the piano, and on paper it was singing ‘How does it feel?’ in a slow motion pace, in the utmost of slow motion. It was like swimming in lava. Hanging by their arms from a birch tree. Skipping, kicking the tree, hitting a nail with your foot. Seeing someone in the pain they were bound to meet with. I wrote it. I didn’t fail. It was straight (to Jules Siegel, quoted in Scaduto 1973:244-5).
Whether or not one chooses
to take Dylan’s comments at face value, they provide us with a sense of
the artist’s own perception of his creative process and the degree to
which the endeavour succeeded. They also give us a glimpse into the visual and
gestural correlatives of Dylan’s sonic sense; he refers here to outward
movement, directed towards a specific point. These metaphors, I suggest, are
not arbitrary. They are in fact strongly indexed to the metaphorical constructs
of much of the reception of “Like A Rolling Stone”, as well as the
gestural aspects of Dylan’s use of vocal pitch in the performance.
In addition to the popular acclaim accorded to Dylan’s recording shortly
after its release, a steady procession of commentators on Dylan’s life
and work have offered their own assessments. The larger works from which the
following quotations are drawn include Dylan biographies as well as short articles
about Dylan and more scholarly analytical works (in the cases of Mellers and
Bowden):
Anthony Scaduto:
When you heard ‘Rolling Stone’ back then it was like a cataclysm, like being taken to the edge of the abyss, drawn to some guillotine of experience…[Dylan was] biting off a word, spitting out venom, spreading a virulent emotion, infecting the listener (Scaduto 1973:245).
Patrick Humphries:
…steamrollering all that had gone before and spiraling onwards through outrageous rhymes and meter, lyrics flung like accusations, affronting yet compelling, that age-old fascination which lures unwary travelers right to the heart of darkness (Humphries and Bauldie 1991:57).
John Herdman:
Rock bottom intensity of feeling…he tells us what he feels himself, he projects himself with eerie immediacy into the feelings of others, and in so doing he shows us what we feel too (Herdman 1982:14).
Paul Nelson:
The definitive statement that both personal and artistic fulfillment must come, in the main, by being truly on one’s own (Nelson 1966:107).
Betsy Bowden:
…the absence of any personal pronouns (sic) sucks the listener into the song…the song’s ‘you’ gets thoroughly conquered in both sense and sound (Bowden 1982:104).
Wilfred Mellers:
Although the words are dismissive, the music – with its jaunty repeated notes and eyebrow-arching rising thirds…is positive in total effect (Mellers 1985:140).
“Hugh Dunnit” writing in The Telegraph (a Bob Dylan fan magazine):
…his birth cry is the primal demon voice that whoops out the surging refrains of this song…each is a searing, vituperative taunt, designed to needle to the bone. But the tone of the words (as sung) and music is unmistakably joyous, celebratory. [Dylan] is exultant, free, on his own, ecstatic that he is as he once was, a complete unknown – unknown because unknowable (quoted in Williams 1991:153).
While these assessments are rather broadly variant in tone and content, some recurring themes are discernible. I have grouped some salient metaphors and descriptors from the critical history of “Like A Rolling Stone” (including Dylan’s own commentary) into five main thematic areas below:
Thematic area 1:
Strong antagonism
“venom”
“dismissive”
“affronting”
Thematic area 2:
Attractiveness
“sucks the listener in”
“lures unwary travelers”
“compelling”
siren song metaphor
“drawn to some guillotine of experience”
Thematic area 3:
Positive message
“joyous…exultant…celebratory”
“personal and artistic fulfillment”
Thematic area 4:
Projecting
Thrusting outward
“spitting out venom”
“lyrics flung”
“directed at some point”
“whoops out”
“spiraling onwards”
Thematic area 5:
Sureness/effectiveness
Virtuosity
Intensity of feeling
Expressivity
“I wrote it. I didn’t fail. It was straight”
Thematic area 1 parallels
the mood and content of the lyrics as they appear on paper – a strong
antagonism is conveyed through the constant, invasive questioning and damning
judgments of the invisible first person (who may or may not be identified as
Dylan himself). I would doubt, though, that the lyrics alone create such a strong
mood of condemnation. Dylan’s overall vocal timbre here is quite hard
and nasal, the kind of vocal sound that might accompany a ‘tongue-lashing’
by someone who clearly feels that they are in the right, perhaps directed at
a child or some other person in a position of lesser power. Such a tone suits
this classic monologic text, whre the life history and inner thoughts of the
“you” are co-opted by the narrator who is himself invisible, that
is, not named, not described: an inviolable, inscrutable disembodied voice.
Much of Dylan’s expressive output around the time that “Like A Rolling
Stone” was recorded displays a similar style of interpersonal communication.
Thematic area 2 groups together references to the ‘attractiveness’
of the performance, its power to draw the listener towards something which,
when it is named at all, is vaguely dangerous or forbidding. Humphries seems
to refer to the ancient Greek myth of the Sirens, who lured travelers towards
destruction with an irresistible song. Scaduto, perhaps specifying the nature
of the destruction, refers to a “guillotine of experience”, which
might suggest that the listener experiences some irrevocable change in worldview
once drawn into “the abyss”. These types of metaphors are difficult
to reconcile with the sense of the lyrics as written, so it seems that this
theme of ‘attractiveness’ might be connected in some way with thematic
area 5, which is concerned with virtuosic control. The “abyss” might
be the potentiality of the listener herself being targeted for this kind of
vitriol, while at the same time she is drawn to the source by the sheer mastery
with which the antagonism is delivered.
Thematic area 3, headed by “positive message”, primarily comes from
Paul Nelson’s 1966 essay, which suggests that all of the characters in
“Like A Rolling Stone” are actually in some way Dylan. This theme
was taken up in the Telegraph, whose author connects the performance with a
projection of Dylan as triumphantly breaking the chains of his safe, successful
‘folksinger’ career in favour of some new, uncharted musical terrain
in the rock milieu. Thus the ‘story’ of the verses is just a scaffolding
upon which to hang the exultant chorus. Rather than chalking up this interpretation
to creative critique, though, I would suggest that this, too, is an impression
based on performative factors more than lyric sense. The band’s performance
certainly helps matters along in this regard. There is nothing careful about
the way the studio musicians barrel through the song, in spite of Al Kooper’s
famous story (found in his autobiography, Backstage Passes) that this song marked
his first ever try at organ. Dylan, too, contributes sloppily transcendent rhythm
guitar and harmonica flourishes. The harmonic structure of the song itself can
also be seen as a series of affirmations, with the verse consisting primarily
of stepwise climbs from the I to the V chord, which is held until a satisfying
return is made to the tonic I. The inevitable perfect cadences that begin each
line of text are contradicted only once in the form, when a IV chord intervenes
at the prechorus. This IV chord then reverses the movement of the previous lines,
falling stepwise down to the I until the upward movement is restored with an
extended II – IV – V climb. The choruses condense the stepwise climbs
of the verses into terse I – IV – V statements which Dylan might
have associated with the irony-free rock’n’roll aesthetics of “Twist
and Shout” and “La Bamba”. I submit, then, that the commentators
who associate “Like A Rolling Stone” with joy, celebration and liberation
might be hearing these values primarily as embodied in the music, despite the
fact that their critical faculties might impel them to look to the lyrics first.
Thematic area 4 might be fruitfully compared to thematic area 2 in that they
both seem connected to gesture, space, movement and energy. Whereas area 2 contains
metaphors of attraction, area 4 refers to outward projection, ostensibly from
the same source that attracts. The references to “spitting out”
and “lyrics flung” directs our attention towards the mouth, and
indeed Dylan referred to this song on a number of occasions as “vomitific”.
Could this thematic area, along with area 2, be related to various listeners’
connections with the corporeality of the performance? We hear Dylan’s
mouth as he sings, but we can also envision his facial expression, perhaps his
body movements as well. This we deduce from the aural landscape of the recording,
which gives us information about Dylan’s vocal timbre, the speed of enunciation,
and other details, but I believe that it is in the area of pitch that we will
find the greatest correlation to gestural metaphors. As we will see, much of
Dylan’s vocal pitch use in “Like A Rolling Stone” finds him
taking a syllable and describing a kind of arc, with medium or short rise and
a longer fall. This parallels somewhat the spatial path of an object thrown
into the air. And since Dylan performs this arc repeatedly, sometimes several
times in a single line of text, it follows that a listener might hear the words
as “flung”, or even “spiraling outwards”, as each arc
is succeeded by another.
Thematic area 5 contains metaphors of ‘sureness’ and ‘effectiveness’,
connected with what might be though of as virtuosic expressive control. Robert
Walser has traced the 18th century origins of the term “virtuoso”,
a word that is popularly though of as referring to technical mastery. Walser
points out that this technical mastery was always in the service of expressive
and rhetorical control (see Walser 1993). The ways that this virtuosity is manifested
in “Like A Rolling Stone” are twofold. As I hope to demonstrate,
Dylan uses vocal pitch to emphasize the lyric sense – this may be interpreted
as a rhetorical use of performative virtuosity. But his division of phrases
does not always serve the ‘sense’ of the discourse; on the contrary,
his re-alignment of points of emphasis in the lyrics, again through pitch use,
can be understood as playful. The virtuoso makes meaningful performances, but
he also shows off what he can do. By sometimes obscuring meaning, he displays
his mastery.
A close reading of Dylan’s vocal performance in “Like A Rolling
Stone” will allow for a better understanding of the metaphorical constructions
that followed in its wake, in the form the critical responses recounted above.
This close reading will consist in the main of an analysis, based on Michael
Halliday’s linguistic method, of pitch use in the second verse and chorus.
First, a word on Halliday’s method.
Through much of the history of linguistic inquiry, the written word has occupied
a privileged place as an object of study. Languages are traditionally analyzed
primarily in terms of their grammars; this reflects the popular belief that
words and sentences constitute the essential part of human verbal communication.
As such, spoken language is routinely transcribed to written form for analysis.
Of course, popular knowledge also tells us that ‘how you say something
is often as important as what you say’. Every native speaker of English
performs the language in some way that communicates things that the written
word can not. The scientific understanding of this ‘sonic sense’
of speech, however, has developed slowly and fitfully until recent years.
As early as the 1930s, work began to be undertaken towards the understanding
of speech intonation, the universe of sonic details that accompany every utterance.
These details include large and small gradations in pitch, timbre, amplitude
and rhythm. The British linguist Michael Halliday has formulated a cogent system
for understanding speech intonation in the context of a “functional”
English grammar in his 1970 monograph A Course in Spoken English: Intonation
and his larger work from 1994, An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Since
Halliday’s work on the nature of speech has constituted one of the starting
points for my own research, I include here a thumbnail explanation of his theory
as it applies to the present work. The following short explanation is a paraphrase
of some of the ideas put forth in Halliday’s 1970 and 1994 publications,
with an aim towards setting the stage for the analysis here.
Tonality
Intonation in English is organized in units Halliday calls tone groups. Halliday says of the tone group:
The tone group is one unit of information, one 'block' in the message that the speaker is communicating; and so it can be of any length. The particular meaning that the speaker wishes to convey may make it necessary to split a single clause into two or more tone groups, or to combine two or more clauses into one tone group (Halliday 1970:3-4).
The pattern by which tone groups are distributed throughout speech, called tonality, is crucial to the sense of an utterance. The speaker divides up the stream of spoken words into groups, and this reveals to the listener how to mentally organize the information. Almost all of the time, tonality follows a predictable course, with tone groups basically corresponding to grammatical clauses. But when it is disrupted, as in Bob Dylan’s 1965 studio performance of "Like A Rolling Stone", grammatical sense can be fundamentally altered.
Tonicity
Each tone group has a tonic syllable, a place of prominence which the speaker seeks to mark as most important and which carries the most pronounced pitch change. It often carries the burden of "new information" in the clause and as such the normative place of a tonic syllable is on the last word in a clause. Placement of the tonic syllable in places other than this is understood to be contrastive. The placement of tonic prominence is referred to as tonicity.
Tone
Halliday has identified five basic tones, or pitch contours, in English. Tone interacts with tonality (distribution of tone groups) and tonicity (placement of tonic prominence) to create meaning in English intonation. Following are the tones identified in Halliday's system:
simple tone groups:
tone 1 falling
tone 2 high rising, or falling-rising (pointed)
tone 3 low rising
tone 4 falling-rising (rounded)
tone 5 rising-falling (rounded)
I have transcribed the lyrics of the second verse and chorus of “Like A Rolling Stone” using an adaptation of Halliday’s notation for speech intonation. The second verse is not dissimilar to the other three verses in style, but I chose it because it seemed to me to contain the widest variety of playful inflections and pitch gestures. The tones themselves (the numerals which begin each tone group) were chosen on the basis of their resemblance to Dylan’s use of sung pitch, as shown here. Each tone group is set off in a separate line of text and framed in double slash marks; syllables with tonic prominence are underlined and rhythmic feet are divided by single slash marks.
a) //5 ah you// (rising, then falling, tone)
b) //1 gone// (falling tone)
c) //1 to the/ finest//
d) //1 school//
e)//1 all//
f) //1 right//
g) //1'^miss/lonely/but you/know you/only/used to/get//
h) //5 juiced in/it//
i) //1 ^no/body's/ever/taught/you/how to/live out/on/the street//
j) //5 ^and/now you're/gonna/have to/get/used to//
k) //5 it//
1) //1 ^you/say you'd/never//
m) //1 compro/mise//
n) //1 with the/mystery/tramp but/now you//
o) //1 realize//
p) //1 he's not/selling/any//
q) //1 alibis//
r) //1 as you/stare in/to the/vacuum/of his/eyes//
s) //1 and say//
t) //1 do you/want to//
u) //1 make a/deal//
v) //1 how does it/feel//
w)//1 how does it/feel//
x) //1 to be/on your/own//
y) //1 '^with/no di/rection/home//
z) //2 a com/plete un/known//
aa) //2 like a/rolling/stone//
Below I have transcribed the same verse and chorus "grammatically", using line breaks to mark off likely clause divisions:
ah you gone to the finest school all right miss lonely
but you know you only used to get juiced in it
nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street
and now you're gonna have to get used to it
you say 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 say "Do you want to make a deal?"
How does it feel?
How does it feel to be on your own
with no direction home
a complete unknown
like a rolling stone?
The verse begins with a
tone 5 (line a). This being a tone group unto itself, it would be plausible
to refer to this speech function as an initiating call; tone 5 in this case
has a meaning of "insistence". This is the second verse, after all,
which can be thought of as constituting an expansion of the ideas begun in the
first. Thus the highly tonicized first pitch gesture of this verse might be
interpreted as a kind of fanfare; musicologist Philip Tagg characterizes such
strong upward pitch sweeps as "a call to attention and action, a strong
movement upward an outwards...energetic and heroic" (Tagg 1979:14).
What follows is a rapid-fire series of Tone 1s. The use of the Tone 1 pitch
fall here is unremarkable in itself, but it is the tonicity characteristics
that are unusual here. The listener is bombarded with a series of tonicized
words (tonic prominence is used in normal speech as a pointer to the new information
in an utterance) and Dylan gives tonic prominence to nearly every word in the
first part of the first line. This overloading of new information pointers renders
the text as forceful and intrusive upon the listener. There is a sense of an
intoxicating sensory overload.
Right away a general non-alignment of tone groups as sung with the grammar of
the written lyric is evident. This manifests itself in the distribution of tone
groups in many different places within the grammatical clause, as well as the
placement of tonic prominence on syllables other than the last lexical item
in the clause. In tone groups e) and f) this unusual, seemingly indiscriminate
use of tonality breaks up the cohesion of the phrase "all right",
a phrase that has become fused, or indivisible, through popular use. The phrase
is rendered contrastive to its usual meaning and marks the word "all"
as a piece of new information. This would force the cliched phrase to be processed
in terms of its actual meaning, rather than as a purely 'textual' conjunctive
phrase, which it has become in popular usage. Thus the listener hears "all
right" as an emphatic confirmation of the text immediately preceding. This
technique seeks to renew the cliche, something that Dylan has done lexically
in other songs by substituting unexpected words in common phrases (see Ricks
1987).
It would be grammatically plausible to segment the first line of this verse
into two clauses as follows:
ah you gone to the finest school
all right miss lonely
but you know you only used to get juiced in it
The second clause would
usually be distributed over one tone group. This does not happen here, though
not because of the overloading of tone groups that occurred in the first clause.
Instead, the last part of the first clause ("miss lonely") is included
in the second clause's tone group, which itself cuts off at "get"
rather than being completed with "juiced in it". Thus the normative
placement of the tone group on the clause is shifted backward by one phrase.
This has the effect of presenting a grammatically incoherent group of words
as a single package of information. This clouds the meaning of the clause somewhat,
but perhaps more importantly it constitutes a poetic strike against grammar,
at least as it appears in straight written narrative. Clearly Dylan, like Chuck
Berry and others before him, is reveling in his virtuosic masterof the medium
of sung text here.
The next couple of lines contain relatively little in the way of pitch playfulness,
even though symmetry would suggest that the pitch falls should continue at the
same rate. Dylan, though, refuses to do the expected. When the chorus begins,
tonic syllables seem to be in their proper places. But Dylan throws in a few
more curveballs. Curiously, the last two lines are sung in contours similar
to tone 2. This would seem to introduce a mood of questioning – tone 2
indicates uncertainty, most often. But this coincides musically with the melodic
resolution to the tonic, or home note, so the overall effect is that of closure.
Close reading of the vocal performance of a song, as I have attempted here,
can yield a good deal of information about how meaning is handled beyond the
lexical and grammatical levels of the lyrics. In the case of the second verse
of "Like A Rolling Stone", these prosodic details can be seen in the
context of that song's reception; intonational play and emphasis in the performance
might be connected to perceptions of virtuosic expressive control, a sense of
'expressivity' or 'intensity of feeling', and gestural metaphors such as "flung"
and "spiralling outwards". On the other hand, certain aspects of reception
can be more precisely connected to other facets of the musical object: a sense
of strong antagonism might be traced mainly to the lyrics, while a feeling of
celebration and joy may be connected to the general raucousness and energy of
the band's performance.
Though I am certain that pitch in sung language does mean in a significantly
patterned way, I am also aware that singing is not speech, and other factors
do enter the semantic and affective landscape of musical expression. Nonetheless,
a look at Dylan's use of pitch in this song, through the lens of linguistic
speech intonation, goes a long way toward explaining the precise nature of Dylan's
communication of meaning in sung performance. One need only observe the many
gestural and metaphorical correlations between the linguistic aspects of the
performance and the effects of that performance (as recounted in the reception
history) on listeners. A certain thoroughgoing nature of Dylan's aesthetic is
suggested here, with musical, linguistic, gestural and (perhaps subsuming all
of these) metaphorical aspects all articulating a cohesive, deeply embedded
system of drives and directions. Postponing any further investigation into this
broader inquiry for now, this analysis of vocal performance in the second verse
of "Like A Rolling Stone" reveals much common ground between speech
and song in the transmission and reception of meaning, though the precise nature
of this shared sign-system may only be understood through further interdisciplinary
inquiry.