Hey, you!! Wait a minute!!!

If anything, "LIKE A ROLLING STONE" was absolutely prophetic in that it foretold of a time when the nomenclature changed---and that's about it.

Yes, that was when hobos ceased to be seen as a relics and remnants of all of the older generation's Charlie Chaplin-esque funny guys who were now heading into the sunset--and/or Bilbo Baggins' gray havens. ----------- This song was a wake-up-call telling us that those scroungers could, easily, be US!!

The guys and gals we called the hobos, back then, morphed pretty quickly into the homeless when they panhandled on our very own streets! There was no way to romanticize homelessness. (It was too f*****g close to home--as it were!!!!!!!!)

Hobos were romantic! But homelessness was just frightening---pure fear---the stuff panic attacks came from. We had to learn a "SCAM"---as Bruce U. Utah Phillips might say. Some of us did just that---! Some asked for our loose change. My friends and I learned the FOLKSINGING HUSTLE!! Others died out on that very same highway.(Alex singin', "Goodbye booze"!!)

Dylan was telling the youth of his time, my generation, that it wasn't the old bum/hobo/jungle-hound/Dean Moriarty wannabees that were On The Road in these brave new times. It was me and you, here and now, who were one major disease, one horrendous crash with a drunk away from financial ruin -- and homelessness. We were one George W. away from financial ruin of the whole damn country--and homelessness in another large sense:---- The United States Of America started to abandon the people to the free market's aesthetic, and actual poverty. And where does it go and flow from there, good people??? Eventually, again, it trickles down and clobbers US.-- We have no way to find the millions now needed for our illnesses! The only "trickle down theory" that I've ever seen funnel real and actual well-being to anybody in America is the thousands of hidden Enron and big oil money sponges full to overflowing as they run with the big cash---while the guy caught 3 times (and he's out) stealing a loaf of bread gets put in prison for life. (What the hell is that all about? Where has any fairness at all gone?

We were one stolen election (maybe two) away from the new American Revolution that would gut every inkling of socialism that had wormed it's way into our lives and made life decent and good for those of us who saw the big money chase as something we would rather not spend/waste our own valuable time on.

Yes, changes will come, as they always do. The more things change, the more they get different! But neither this nor any other song will change things all that much.

But this song sure did shed light on what was coming!!

And nobody has clue about how to fix it.

Art Thieme