Both Bob Dylan and The Beatles had quite a profound effect on popular culture and music as a whole throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Unless you’re a pretty hardcore fan, you might not know that Bob Dylan had a profound effect on The Beatles, especially on John Lennon, in particular.
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But was the relationship that one-sided? There’s some (tepid) evidence to support that Dylan was as influenced by The Beatles as Lennon was influenced by him.
The Impact Bob Dylan Had on John Lennon
Bob Dylan had a big creative impact on John Lennon, particularly after The Beatles got to hear The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan for the first time in 1963. Lennon and Paul McCartney realized that pop music could be so much more than what was being manufactured at the time. Folk and poetry had their places in pop, and that notion led them to do a bit of creative soul-searching.
The result of that influence was “I’m A Loser” from the 1964 album Beatles For Sale, which was primarily written by Lennon.
“Instead of projecting myself into a situation, I would try to express what I felt about myself,” said Lennon of the writing process for the song. “I think it was [Bob] Dylan who helped me realize that.”
However, Dylan’s response to Lennon’s admiration of him wasn’t exactly… great. He would go on to write “Fourth Time Around” as a response to Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood”, and it was more or less an attempt to make fun of the Beatle.
A Contentious Fan-Icon Relationship, or Quiet Mutual Influence?
So, was the relationship really so one-sided? Perhaps. But there’s a good chance that The Beatles (and John Lennon, specifically) impacted Dylan, too. At least, they might have influenced (in one way or another) his decision to hit the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in a leather jacket with an electric guitar.
A lot of people were mad about Dylan going electric. They were especially unhappy with his performance of “Maggie’s Farm”, which was a notable departure from his signature sound. It’s a great song today and often considered a proto-punk jam, but that’s beside the point.
Dylan wasn’t interested in catering to what his more traditional fans wanted. His change in look and music could have been the result of seeing how much creative success The Beatles were pulling in by going electric. Maybe, just maybe, that influenced Dylan’s decision to switch things up.
We’ll never know if the relationship was as one-sided as people tend to think. However, one can’t deny that “I Want You” from Blonde On Blonde (as well as the whole of that album) sounds very Lennon-esque. And Dylan also had some nice things to say about Lennon.
“I dig John [Lennon],” said Dylan in a KRLA Beat interview from 1965. “As a writer, a singer and a Beatle. I dig every time I meet them, but him I dig. He doesn’t take things seriously as so many guys do. I like that.”
Photo by John Byrne Cooke Estate/Getty Images
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