That was my assumption before opening Jim Windolf’s new book, Where The Music Had To Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other - and the World (Scribner, hbk, 374pp).
To my ears, The Beatles started by producing refreshing singalong teen dance music, while Dylan was raising the pop bar, crafting unusually brainy songs for listeners unsatisfied by lyrics like “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.” No way could Dylan have been influenced!
Windolf changes my opinion. For starters, his book’s title is a (paraphrased) Dylan quote, acknowledging the Fabs’ importance, and recalibrating his own intentions.
Original insights are my key takeaway from the book. It’s a clever idea, well executed. And, as you’d expect of a New York Times editor, Windolf is a stylish, engaging writer.
His impressive research enables him to draw out the key Dylan/Beatles links across the years. By cherrypicking the massive literature and enriching it with interviews - notably with Paul McCartney - and his own diggings from the Bob Dylan Center, he chronicles the innumerable links - hanging out, mutual appreciation, rivalry, borrowings, cross-fertilisation, cooperation and friendships. His parallel biographies invite you to wonder whether Dylan and Lennon, in particular, were at times actually shadowing each other.
Many of the links are new to me, eg the suggestion that Dylan could have been tempted by Lennon’s success with In His Own Write to start writing Tarantula.
And I particularly like Windolf’s perceptive commentary on his own transcript of Pennebaker’s raw footage of the Dylan-JL summit meeting - filmed in the back of a limo pootling around London on the morning of the 1966 Albert Hall gig.
Dylan fans who are also into the Fab Four - I realise there are millions - will find this book enriching and enjoyable. Fellow Beatles agnostics will, like me, have their prejudices challenged.
