Bob Dylan and the Beatles: A new book that captures how music changes its creators

Where do songs come from? And where will they go?

The first is a question of inspiration, and the second is a question of posterity. Consider the Beatles’ standard “Yesterday,” famously haunted by Paul McCartney in a dream, or Bob Dylan’s classic “Like a Rolling Stone,” whose author later said, “It’s like a ghost writing those songs. You give them a song and they disappear.”

It would be hard to name two songs that are more different. One is a perfectly calm semi-classical ballad, the other a frenzied rant full of bitter rhymes. But they were written and released in the same year, 1965, by artists whose music and personal lives were intertwined in myriad ways, as author Jim Windorff teases in his delightful new book. Where is music heading? How Bob Dylan and the Beatles changed each other and the world.

At its most basic level, Windolf’s book is a clever rereading of two famous biographies from the 1960s, those of the Beatles and Dylan, through the lens of their influence on each other. It’s old news to anyone with even a passing knowledge of rock history that folkie Dylan turned to electric around the same time the Beatles picked up acoustic guitars and began writing more mature lyrics, with their albums Rubber Soul and Blonde on Blonde being two of the main signposts of this exchange. But far beyond this apparent convergence, Windorff found resonances and contexts that I had never thought of.

As an example, he points out that the run-down post-industrial towns where Dylan and the Beatles spent their youth, respectively the declining mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota, and the once-thriving British port city of Liverpool, helped shape their rebellious sensibilities. He also traces how fan hysteria has dogged everyone throughout their careers, from the crazy fan who shot John Lennon to the weirdo “Dylanologists” who scavenged for their idols. He traces the various spiritual paths they pursued, from Dylan’s long engagement with Biblical texts and vaunted Christian days to George Harrison’s exploration of Hinduism and Krishna consciousness. He even traced a particular Gibson guitar that Harrison gave Dylan, which appears on the cover of Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline.”

Windorff’s books have an engaging storytelling that makes you feel like you’re there. Mr. Windorff interjects scenes that sound like scenes from a movie, detailing the famous 1964 New York summit where Dylan and his entourage first met the Beatles at the Delmonico Hotel and introduced them to marijuana. Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s ex-girlfriend, receives a call from Delmonico during an activist meeting planning a protest against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which would have escalated American involvement in Vietnam. An invitation to join Dylan and the Beatles at a hotel, after a call from a payphone, was scoffed at by Rotolo’s avid left-handed colleagues and founders. Few can evoke a richer moment, fully compressing the details of the time.

The core of this book was actually shot on film. Windorff spends a chapter poring over a nearly 20-minute clip shot by documentarian Prosecutor Pennebaker in 1966. The clip shows Dylan and Lennon talking seemingly nonsense in the back seat of a limousine, with Dylan becoming increasingly carsick. You can watch this clip on YouTube, but it’s not easy to watch. The tension between these two 1960s icons is palpable.

Windorff fills in that subtext nicely. In his own awkward way, Dylan tries to confront Lennon about how much he feels the Beatles appropriated his folk sound. Lennon, with a stiff face, showed no reaction. Of course, Dylan had already leveled this accusation more effectively in song, responding to Lennon’s folky “Norwegian Wood” with the eerily similar “Fourth Time Around.”

Aside from such irrelevant passages, the main theme of this book is how music has changed, and how both creators and listeners have changed as a result. There is a rough transatlantic symmetry in that Dylan’s early folk work borrowed many of its songs from English and Scottish sources, while the Beatles’ early rock work drew from American country and rhythm and blues.

And Windorff makes a convincing case that, given their different backgrounds, subsequent efforts to return to roots have understandably taken diverging paths. While the Beatles tapped into British music hall traditions and place names with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Dylan was dipping into old-school, weird Americana with a series of demo recordings released as “The Basement Tapes,” with Canadian musicians who later referred to themselves simply as “The Band.”

Recalling the later sessions, guitarist Robbie Robertson said that Dylan “would pull these songs out of nowhere. You didn’t know if he wrote them or if he remembered them.” Windorff traces this back to Dylan’s early, dawning realization that he was working within a tradition larger than narrowly pop or folk music, that he was writing “everybody’s songs.” So music wasn’t his thing. Even songs that seem like only he could have created.

This applies equally to the Beatles catalog. Despite the distinct Beatles-esque personality of their records, and certainly that has always been a big part of their appeal, the songs themselves have an uncannily timeless quality that has always been around. This also applies to the Tin Pan Alley standards that came before them and much of the classic rock that came after them. In fact, Windolf’s title carries a sense of inevitability, derived from Dylan’s words about how the Beatles showed him the future. When he first heard them, he said, he could hear “where the music was going.”

What we admire as musical genius may simply be a masterful attunement to a timeless frequency.

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