“I Said I Don’t Like It”: The Time Bob Dylan Confronted John Lennon Through Song

Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, but as Bob Dylan and John Lennon learned during a tense interaction one night in London, that flattery falls flat to someone who prioritizes individuality over praise. Though their careers started in notably different ways, Dylan and Lennon’s musical trajectories paralleled one another in many ways.

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But a particularly cutting Dylan track from 1966 suggests that the folk-rock legend thought their paths got a little too close.

Bob Dylan Offers Private Performance To John Lennon

The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” is one of John Lennon’s most notable attempts at writing through an introspective, almost philosophical lens, á la Bob Dylan. The Fab Four released the song on their 1965 album, Rubber Soul, introducing a new era of the Beatles’ music that incorporated Indian instrumentation, like the sitar, and the kind of opaque lyricism Lennon would continue experimenting with for the rest of his career. Bob Dylan noticed this shift, too.

One need not be a professional musician or historian to hear the similarities between Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood” and Dylan’s “4th Time Around,” which he released the following year on his seventh album, Blonde on Blonde. The songs share a similar chord structure and rhyming pattern, ending with a particularly cutting final line: And I never took much, I never asked for your crutch, now, don’t ask for mine. Whether or not Dylan meant to call out Lennon with that line, the Beatle couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable the night Dylan first showed Lennon his new song while hanging out in London.

“I was very paranoid about that,” Lennon recalled to Rolling Stone. “He said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I don’t like it.’ I didn’t like it. I was very paranoid…I just didn’t like what I felt I was feeling.” Lennon said he felt like he was in an “out and out skit, you know, but it wasn’t. It was great. I mean, he wasn’t playing any tricks on me. I was just going through the bit.”

Clashing Artist Egos Is A Tale As Old As Time

Bob Dylan has established his entire career on being inimitable, unpredictable, and wholly authentic to his creative whims. He had certainly asserted his dominance over contemporaries in the past, whether by pointedly singing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” to Donovan in an infamously awkward scene of D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary, Don’t Look Back, or refusing to invite his former partner and the woman who helped kick start his career, Joan Baez, on stage to perform with him during a 1965 tour of England.

So, it doesn’t require too much stretching of the imagination to assume Bob Dylan would do the same to John Lennon. During his 1968 conversation with Rolling Stone, Lennon acknowledged that his and Dylan’s egos were somewhat doomed to clash. “Both of us were always uptight, you know. Of course, I wouldn’t know whether he was uptight because I was so uptight, and then when he wasn’t uptight, I was.”

In true Dylan fashion, he has never confirmed nor denied that “4th Time Around” was a not-so-subtle jab at Lennon for copying his writing style. However, as Richard Thomas wrote in Why Dylan Matters, “It is very easy to believe reports of Lennon being unhappy at what must have seemed like mockery and parody. Dylan outdoes, accentuates, overloads the rhymes, and on one level, does parody the simple rhyme of the Beatles song.”

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