'Mad Men': Like a Rolling Stone

And wouldn't you know it?

''The Summer Man'' took place between June 15, 1965 (per Don Draper's diary) and June 21, 1965. It just so happens that on June 15, 1965, perhaps at the exact same moment as Don Draper was rocking out to The Rolling Stones outside the New York Athletic Club, that freewheelin' Bob Dylan was inside a Manhattan studio just seven blocks away from Draper's swimming pool, making his first attempt at recording a little ditty called? ''Like A Rolling Stone.'' (According to the Dylan lore, he finished up production on the song the next day.) And while Dylan's angry anthem is addressed to a young woman, all you have to do is make ''Little Miss Lonely'' into a ''Mister'' and you have a song that applies quite well to Don Draper. The famous refrain, in fact, speaks to Don as fallen, soul-searching exile, trying make of his emotional life:

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

I'd like to think — in my reading-too-much-into-everything Doc Jensen kind of way — that Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner actually wanted us to search for and find Bob Dylan in the subtext of ''The Summer Man.'' The very last moment of the previous episode gave us Simon and Garfunkel's ''Bleecker Street.'' The very first sequence of ''The Summer Man'' gave us The Rolling Stone's ''(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction.'' The way I add things up (and mind you, I adhere to a new math that most people find rather loony), Greenwich Village coffee shop folk + Generation-shift rock anthem = Bob Dylan, ''Like A Rolling Stone.''

In fact, I dare say the one-two punch of ''The Suitcase'' and ''The Summer Man,'' Mad Men was neatly summing up a profound paradigm shift in rock music that Bob Dylan himself embodied that same very year and especially that very same summer. Don's summer of '65 reinvention coincides with Dylan's own artistic reinvention from folkie to rocker. Dylan teased the move in April of that year with his album Bringing It All Back Home, half of which was recorded using electric instruments — a first for him. In fact, if Mad Men hews to the chronological forward movement it has established for season, then next week's episode should take place in July of 1965 — the same month that Dylan released ''Like A Rolling Stone'' as a single; and the same month that Dylan's famous/infamous appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, the first time he played live with an electric guitar. The crowd either couldn't accept Dylan's artistic shift — or maybe the sound mix was just crappy — and booed him hard. Dylan cut the set short after just three songs. Nobody got any satisfaction that day, though the performance is now seen as a game-changing moments in the evolution of rock 'n roll.

My colleague Margaret Lyons reminds me that Mad Men has been dialed into folk music for quite awhile. See: Season 1, ''Rivers of Babylon,'' Season 2, ''Early In The Morning,'' and more. I like the idea that as the culture rolls forward into the rock era (as well toward Feminism, Civil Rights, and more), Don's own liberation is linked to stripping himself down, getting back to his roots. Which brings me to my final bit of milking-Dylan-for-Mad Men-insight tomfoolery. ''Like A Rolling Stone'' was included in Dylan's album Highway '61 Revisited, which was released in August of '65. If my Don Draper = Bob Dylan-In-Reverse theory continues to remain relevant, then I suspect before then season is over, Don will complete his journey to reconstruction by hitting the road and heading back to his country roots and making peace with the painful Dick Whitman past he's tried so hard to run away from and forget. Before Don can move forward, he must move backward. The time has come for him bring it all back home.

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That's it for this week. I'll have a few Tweets in response to Sunday's new episode of Mad Men @EWDocJensen after the episode airs on the West Coast, and Karen Valby will have a full work-up of the episode on Monday.