The connection between Bob Dylan and The Beatles is a complex one. For the Fab Four, it’s a story of an idol turning on them. They loved Dylan and were utterly obsessed with him, but when they started to be inspired by him, their hero changed tunes. However, on Dylan’s side, he began to be equally obsessed, albeit because of a misheard lyric.
Of course, the two acts knew about each other; they were at the peak. In the early 1960s, both were on fast-track skyrockets. Dylan had been picked up by Columbia and was now the new saviour of folk. His voice was everywhere, and it seemed like every single person in the music industry was obsessed with him. Artists were covering his tracks at every turn, festivals begged him to play, and fans swarmed him wherever he went.
That’s something The Beatles knew well too, as Beatlemania was taking hold. After their own booming beginning, the band became the biggest in the world. But the connection between the two isn’t about fame. Both were artists’ intent of doing something new and different, but mostly something of their own. Dylan was beginning to grow tired of classic folk and start dabbling in electric sounds, while The Beatles were starting to get restless of more standard rock and roll. They were both on the edge of these new eras when they collided.
They collided as musicians long before they collided as people, obviously. Each of their songs was dominating the radio, so there was really no escape. “I think Paul got the record from a French DJ,” John Lennon recalled of the moment the band got their hands on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan during a Paris residency. “And for the rest of our three weeks in Paris, we didn’t stop playing it. We all went potty on Dylan.”
Around the exact same time, Dylan had a similar experience. “Did you hear that?” Dylan’s tour manager Victor Maymudes remembers him frantically asking after a radio station playing ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ and almost made him jump out of the car, screaming, “Fuck! Man, that was great!” Not long after that, he bought his first electric guitar. While he’d never admit outright where the inspirational move came from, he said of The Beatles, “I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.”
But, perhaps down to his own penchant for not enunciating clearly, Dylan misheard the band. When The Beatles finally met Dylan and he offered the band weed for the first time, he was baffled when they said they’d never tried it. “But what about the song?” he asked, singing his version of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ back at them; “I get high, I get high, I get high.” The group had to sheepishly correct him that the lyrics were actually, “I can’t hide.”
Could this be a point that changed everything? It wouldn’t be long after this moment that Dylan would start turning on the band. He’d claim they were copying him as they moved into their own more folk-led era, perhaps as a symptom of maybe feeling scorned that the group weren’t already the hippies he thought they were. When they did start singing about getting high and living a more hazy, countercultural life, Dylan acted like a kind of bitter older sibling in a way, watching his influence be complemented and celebrated in someone else, annoyed that not only were they starting to sound more like him, but that he’d introduced them to the medicine that made it happen.
The Fab Four were rolling with it, though. “The Beatles had gone beyond comprehension,” Lennon said of the months after that meeting, “We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just glazed eyes, giggling all the time.” So if they hadn’t written “I get high” before, they certainly would after.
