“Anyone who is one of the best in his field, as [Bob] Dylan is, is bound to influence people,” John Lennon told Melody Maker in 1965. Lennon had revealed one of his biggest influences who helped shift his songwriting style and the Beatles’ sound. By 1964, Bob Dylan‘s influence on the Beatles was evident as they began transitioning from pop songs to more introspective songwriting. Traces of Dylan were drawn on Beatles for Sale and Help! and even earlier on the A Hard Day’s Night track “I Should Have Known Better,” which Lennon directly linked to Dylan.
Originally, “A Hard Day’s Night” was also more in the vein of Dylan before it became more of a Beatles pop song. “But later we Beatle-fied it before we recorded it,” Lennon added.
As the band continued pivoting on Rubber Soul, along with more experimentation with instrumentation and in their storytelling, which continued on through the more psychedelic tones of Revolver and Abbey Road, Dylan’s influence was still apparent.
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“That’s me in my Dylan period again,” Lennon proudly said when discussing the band’s “I’m a Loser” from Beatles for Sale and Help! track “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away.” He continued, “I am like a chameleon, influenced by whatever is going on. If Elvis can do it, I can do it. If the Everly Brothers can do it, me and Paul can.”
With more attention to the detail of the lyrics and some folkier rock bends, the Beatles never denied Dylan’s influence and how it shifted their musical directions. Here’s a look behind just four Beatles songs inspired by Dylan.
“I’m a Loser” (1964)
“I could have made ‘I’m A Loser’ even more Dylan-ish if I tried,” said Lennon. Months before the release of Beatles for Sale, the band met Dylan at the Delmonico Hotel in New York City in August of ’64. By this time, Lennon had already taken a more vulnerable stance on the album track “I’m a Loser,” tapping into some of Dylan’s more self-deprecating lyrics—I’m a loser / And I’m not what I appear to be.
“Instead of projecting myself into a situation, I would try to express what I felt about myself,” said Lennon of the song. “I think it was Dylan who helped me realize that.”
“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” (1965)
Released on the Beatles’ 1965 album Help!, “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” had a folksier acoustic pace that echoed Dylan’s sound.
Paul McCartney later said that the Beatles were nearly worshipping Dylan at the time, and the songs that came out of it, particularly “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away,” were more than merely inspired by him. “That was John doing a Dylan—heavily influenced by Bob,” said McCartney. “If you listen, he’s singing it like Bob.”
Before Waylon Jennings covered it on his 1967 album Love of the Common People, a band called the Silkie was the first to cover “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” which was produced by Lennon and featured McCartney on guitar and George Harrison on tambourine. That year, the Beach Boys also covered the song on their Beach Boys’ Party! album.
“Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” (1965)
Keeping to the same pattern of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” when Rubber Soul came along, “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” was another entry in the Beatles’ “Dylan-esque songbook” and had a more poetic movement:
I once had a girl
Or should I say she once had me
She showed me her room
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?
She asked me to stay
And she told me to sit anywhere
So I looked around
And I noticed there wasn’t a chair
I sat on a rug biding my time
Drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said
“It’s time for bed
When Dylan released “4th Time Around” on Blonde on Blonde in 1966, it was interpreted as a response or parody to “Norwegian Wood” since it used a similar melody to the Beatles’ song.
“Yer Blues” (1968)
Released on the Beatles’ self-titled release (The White Album), “Yer Blues” was written by Lennon while the band was in India in 1968 and cites Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” in the lyrics—I feel so suicidal, just like Dylan’s Mr. Jones. “I knew what he [Lennon] was talking about because I knew that Dylan song,” Lucinda Williams told American Songwriter in 2024. Williams covered “Yer Blues” on her album Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road. “And when that line came up, I went, ‘Oh my God, that’s crazy that he was obviously listening to that song, and he got it.’”
In 1968, Lennon also performed “Yer Blues” on the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus with his one-off supergroup The Dirty Mac—the name, a supposed play on Fleetwood Mac—featuring Yoko Ono, Keith Richards, and Eric Clapton, with drummer Mitch Mitchell (The Jimi Hendrix Experience) and violinist Ivry Gitlis.
Photo: The Beatles pose for a portrait in circa 1967. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
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