Spot where Bob Dylan probably wrote Like A Rolling Stone

The exact origin of 'Like a Rolling Stone' — widely considered one of the greatest songs ever recorded — has always been slightly blurry around the edges, which is appropriate for a song about dispossession and lost identity. What is known is that Dylan sat down in mid-1965 and wrote what he described as a long piece of venom, "a piece of vomit", twenty pages long, not initially intended as a song at all. From that stream of words, a chorus emerged, and from that chorus came the six-minute single that changed popular music.

Dylan was a restless traveller in 1965, moving between New York, his manager's home in Woodstock, and hotel rooms across the country during a relentless touring schedule. Washington DC was a regular stop, and the Woodley Park neighbourhood — close to the National Zoo and a cluster of mid-century hotels — was where Dylan and his entourage sometimes stayed when in the capital. The specific location pinned here reflects the area where he is believed to have been working on early fragments of the song.

The song was recorded on June 15–16, 1965, at Columbia Recording Studios in New York, and released as a single in July. It reached number two on the US charts and announced, definitively, that the three-minute pop song was no longer the only thing rock music could be.