A drum beat like a pistol shot.
24 July 1965 was the day Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" hit the charts. It was on the radio all across the U.S.A. and heading straight up. When drummer Bobby Gregg brought his stick down for the opening noise of the six-minute single, the sound -- a kind of announcement, then a void of silence, then a rising fanfare, then the song -- fixed a moment when all those caught up in modern music found themselves engaged in a running battle for a prize no one bothered to name: the greatest record ever made, perhaps, or the greatest record that ever would be made. "Where are we going?" To the top?" the Beatles would ask themselves in the early 1960s, when no one but they knew. "To the toppermost of the poppermost," they promised.
But by 1965, everyone -- the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and whoever else could catch a ride on the train -- was topping each other month by month, as if carried by a flood. Was it the fear and possibility that had flooded much of the West since the assassination of President Kennedy less than two years before, a kind of nihilist freedom in which old certainties were swept away like trees and cars? Was it the utopian revolt of the civil rights movement, or the strange cultures appearing in college towns and cities across the nation, in England, in Germany? No one heard the music on the radio as part of a separate reality. Every new hit seemed full of novelty, as if its goal was not only to top the charts but to stop the world in its tracks and then start it up again.
What was the top? Fame and fortune, glamour and style, or something else? A sound that you could leave behind, to mark your presence on the Earth; something that would circulate in the ether of lost radio signals, somehow received by generations to come, or apprehended even by those who were already gone? The chance to make the times speak in your own voice, or the chance to discover the voice of the times?
Early in the year, the Beatles had kicked off the race with the shimmering thrill of the opening and closing chords of "Eight Days a Week." In March, the Rolling Stones put out the deathly, oddly quiet "Play with Fire," a single that seemed to call the whole pop equation of happiness, speed and excitement into question: to suspend the contest in a cul-de-sac of doubt. Three months later, they came back with "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." It erased the doubt, and the race was on again.
