Book: Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and The Beatles Changed Each Other And the World
Author: Jim J. Windolf
Published by: White Rabbit
Price: Rs 1,450
It wasn’t coup de foudre — a bolt of lightning — when Paul McCartney heard a strange sound in 1962 as his brother, Mike, played a Dylan album. The Beatle dismissed it as “folk c**p”. But time makes strangers familiar. This happened during The Beatles’ Paris residency when they came upon Dylan’s early albums.
Their music would change, and so would the world.
The Beatles met Dylan at New York’s Delmonico Hotel. During a press conference at the Delmonico, The Beatles were weary of questions. Back in the suite, Lennon rang the journalist, Al Aronowitz. “Where is he?” Dylan was in Woodstock, but Aronowitz ensured that the meeting took place.
Where the Music Had to Go — the most comprehensive account of that encounter by Jim Windolf — is a portrait of two worlds colliding. At that point, Dylan was everything
The Beatles weren’t. The latter wore matching suits; Dylan wore whatever was lying around. The Beatles smiled for cameras; Dylan scowled. They sang about love; Dylan sang about war, injustice, and everything uncomfortable.
Dylan seemed free in a way The Beatles were not. Yet, something deeper
held them together — each had known struggle in a world rebounding from war. Dylan hailed from Hibbing, Minnesota. “Four thousand miles away,” writes Windolf, “John, Paul, George, and Ringo were also growing up in a place whose days of prosperity lay in the past.”
At the Delmonico, the five bonded over more than the marijuana legend. We read of Dylan at a Santa Monica cafe feeding quarters into a jukebox to hear “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” again and again. The admiration ran both ways. McCartney later reflected: “It was a great honour to meet him. We had a mad party the night we met. I thought I got the meaning of life that night.”
The music young people celebrate most in 2026 is that of The Beatles post-1964. “Norwegian Wood” from 1965 was nothing like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” — there was a touch of Dylan, so much so that the Nobel laureate recorded what many consider a parody: “4th Time Around”. When someone noted the similarity, Dylan replied, as
Windolf records: “Well,
actually, Norwegian
Wood sounds a lot like
this. I’m afraid they took it from me, and I feel that
I have to, you know,
record it.”
George Harrison shared a deep friendship with Dylan. They co-wrote “I’d Have You Anytime” for
the former’s album, All Things Must Pass. Dylan was a star at Harrison’s The Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden, 1971.
Windolf’s book is packed with anecdotes that make for an essential reading for anyone interested in — obsessed with — Bob Dylan and The Beatles. In other words, anyone truly obsessed with music.