WHERE THE MUSIC HAD TO GO

A meeting of great musical minds.

It’s no news that Bob Dylan and the Fab Four influenced each other, both competitively and cooperatively. They discovered each other at roughly the same time, Paul McCartney having somehow found Dylan’s first two albums in London and Dylan having heard “I Want To Hold Your Hand” over the radio while driving across Colorado, recalling in 1970, “Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid.” The Beatles would soon issue their outrageous chords on acoustic guitars, with John Lennon in particular writing Dylanesque songs like “I’ll Cry Instead,” “I’m a Loser,” and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” Windolf, an editor at the New York Times, is quick to note that Dylan wasn’t shy of following the Fabs’ lead at several points, from obviously borrowing from “Norwegian Wood” for “Fourth Time Around” to wearing the same Greek sailor’s cap that Lennon sported and, indeed, writing a book of surrealist prose and poetry just after Lennon’s A Spaniard in the Works appeared (albeit not publishing it for another six years). As Windolf observes, for all the cultural back and forth between McCartney and Lennon and Dylan, it was George Harrison who formed an actual friendship, teaming up with Dylan to write songs both for his 1970 All Things Must Pass album—its title song being an answer of sorts to Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released”—and for their later venture as two-fifths of the Traveling Wilburys. There’s enough Beatlemaniacal and Dylanocentric trivia to please fans of either or both, from Windolf’s note that Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” was the result of a dream he’d had about the Beatles to the odd notion that Lennon had of producing Dylan’s next album after Blood on the Tracks. And no, Dylan didn’t introduce the lads to marijuana…

Not exactly groundbreaking, but a pleasing enough exercise for the classic rock set.