It was a cold and frosty January in 1959. Seventeen-year-old Bob Dylan was wandering the streets of Duluth, Minnesota, with his collar turned up against the cold and damp. He didn't yet know his place in the world, and the world didn't know Bob Dylan's place in it, according to "Far Out". Up to that point, the young man's influence was as faint as his figure in the fog that crept ominously like mold from the shivering Lake Superior. But despite this, his step was decisive, hastened by a fact still unknown to the fragile teenager—the evening had something fateful in store for him.

That night, the aimless young Dylan saw Buddy Holly and discovered a future illuminated by music. A future that, just a few days later, would turn from a calling into a duty. "I saw Buddy Holly two or three nights before he died. I saw him in Duluth, at The Armory. He was playing there with Link Ray. I don't remember Big Bopper. Maybe he had left when I got there. But I saw Ritchie Valens," he recalled in a 1984 interview with Rolling Stone. "And Buddy Holly, yes. He was great. He was incredible. I'll never forget the image of Buddy Holly on stage. And he died — it must have been a week after that. It was incredible."

In fact, he died three days later, on February 3. When the news broke, Dylan remembered the feeling of validation he had felt when he left The Armory with a new purpose in life just a few nights earlier. From that moment on, he hardly stopped moving. As you might believe, if you believe his own legend, he almost walked all the way to New York City to take up the torch of significant culture from Woody Guthrie. As his second album said, he was "freewheelin'."

This frenetic pace continued at breakneck speed, fueled by inspiration. However, as divine as his desire to create seemed, if you keep going at that pace, sooner or later you're going to crash. The wandering vagabond released "Bringing It All Back Home," "Highway 61 Revisited," and "Blonde on Blonde" within 15 months. In fact, from his debut in March 1962 to the end of the decade, he released nine albums, none of which received less than four stars—about three of them could easily be classified as the greatest albums of all time.

This triumphant output may sound like a miracle, but it came at a human cost—so great that long before he recorded his last album of the 1960s, Nashville Skyline, he was considering giving up. Tired and burdened by the label "Voice of a Generation" that had been imposed on him against his will, a unique revolutionary song would wake him from his lethargy and convince him that when you are committed to your calling, your own will is almost irrelevant.

The song that saved Bob Dylan

In "Like a Rolling Stone," you can feel the angry rage of an exhausted man. It hurts like a slap in the face, which is exactly what it did to the counterculture movement. It was the moment when Dylan seemed to unite the mission he felt he had when he left The Armory just six years earlier with his own reconciliation with where it had taken him. He was no longer singing about people, he was singing to them, and it sounded like a finger being wagged or, as he described it, "a long stream of vomit."

The song proved to be a great stimulus. In 1966, he told Playboy, "Last summer, I think I was going to give up singing. I was very exhausted and things were moving very slowly... But 'Like a Rolling Stone' changed everything. I mean, it was something I could understand myself. It's very tiring when other people tell you how much they like you when you don't like yourself."

That was the problem: when an admiring Dylan left Buddy Holly's show, he later remarked that the singer was "everything I wasn't and wanted to be." But he meant it figuratively — he wasn't trying to imitate him. The problem Dylan faced was that a legion of fans thought they were him, and he was them. But as Dylan famously said, "All I can do is be myself, whoever that is."

"Like a Rolling Stone" clarified that — along with many other things — and the relief from it all pushed him to the point where the need to quit was suppressed, and he continues to tour tirelessly to this day.

Is "Like a Rolling Stone" Bob Dylan's best song?

To judge whether "Like a Rolling Stone" is Bob Dylan's best song, we must first consider what makes him a great artist. Perhaps his most praised trait, both by his peers and his fans, is his poetry. In this respect, he is in a league of his own, with only one or two others coming close – he is most often compared to Leonard Cohen. In fact, Cohen may surpass him in terms of consistency—the Canadian has certainly never written anything as comically bad as "Wiggle Wiggle." But where Dylan far surpasses his contemporary with "Hallelujah" is the influence his music has had on society as a whole.

As the last 60 years of dwindling artistic revolutionaries have proven, the hardest thing for an artist is not to create great art, but for great art to grab society by the collar and make it pay attention. In this respect, there are again only one or two others in human history who can measure up to Dylan's seismic impact.

And beyond the adrenaline-fueled tones of his visceral instrumentation, the bold way he barked at the very stage to which Dylan once belonged, the beautifully abandoned production, the rage-filled manner with which Dylan presents it all, and the waltz melody, "Like a Rolling Stone" caused such a sensation and still holds such a prophetic mirror up to society that to look beyond it is like standing at the foot of Everest and trying to peer over the summit to see if there are higher hills beyond. |BGNES