This article recounts the creation of Bob Dylan's 1965 single "Like A Rolling Stone", widely regarded as a turning point at which he shifted from acoustic folk towards rock music. Exhausted and disillusioned after a two-month solo tour of the UK in May 1965 and considering giving up performing altogether, Dylan instead wrote a lengthy stream-of-consciousness poem on his flight home, which he pared down into the song that reinvigorated his career and which he called the best he had ever written.

Back in his Greenwich Village apartment, Dylan found the song's focus in the "slow motion phrase" of "How does it feel?", setting the verses to a simple three-chord progression borrowed from Ritchie Valens's "La Bamba". He recorded it at Columbia Studio A in New York on 15 June 1965 with producer Tom Wilson and a band led by blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield, whom he told not to play conventional B.B. King-style licks. Early takes were unfocused waltz-time attempts, but the arrival of Al Kooper—who, shut out of a guitar spot, improvised on the Hammond B-3 organ—sparked the track's distinctive groove. The roughly six-minute song defied the era's three-minute single convention, and Columbia hesitated to release it until an acetate was leaked to the fashionable Manhattan discotheque Arthur, where enthusiastic DJ and crowd reaction prompted calls to the label.