Credit: Far Out / Album Cover / Alamy

How Bob Dylan and George Harrison bonded while writing a hit song

Fri 7 April 2023 15:45, UK

Shortly after concluding his world tour, Bob Dylan totalled his 500cc Triumph Tiger 100 while driving to manager Albert Grossman’s house in Woodstock. Dylan would later explain that the so-called accident wasn’t actually all that accidental. “Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race,” he revealed in Chronicles. “Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me, and I was seeing everything through different glasses”.

In 1968 Dylan moved with his family to Woodstock, where he began writing and demoing new material with The Band. The musician would later describe this period as one of the most tranquil and productive of his life. It was around this time that Dylan sat down with another musician struggling with life in the spotlight: The Beatles’ George Harrison. The Fab Four had met Dylan many years before, with the folk singer introducing them to the wonders of marijuana and revitalising the group’s approach to songwriting. When he and Harrison sat down to write ‘I’d Have You Anytime’, however, Dylan seemed changed somehow.

“He’d gone through his broken neck period and was being very quiet, and he didn’t have much confidence anyhow,” Harrison said, reflecting on the making of All Things Must Pass with Crawdaddy back in ’77. “That’s the feeling I got with him in Woodstock. He hardly said a word for a couple of days. Anyway, we finally got the guitars out, and it loosened things up a bit. It was really a nice time with all his kids around, and we were just playing. It was near Thanksgiving. He sang me that song, and he was, like, very nervous and shy, and he said, ‘What do you think about this song?'”

Harrison was shocked to find Dylan so unsure of himself. “I’d felt very strongly about Bob when I’d been in India years before– the only record I took with me along with all my Indian records was Blonde On Blonde,” he continued. “I felt somehow very close to him or something, you know, because he was so great, so heavy, and so observant about everything. And yet, to find him later very nervous and with no confidence”.

For the next few hours, Dylan and Harrison threw around chords and lyrics, with Bob playing an early version of ‘I Threw It All Away’. “I was saying to him, ‘You write incredible lyrics,'” Harrison recalled. “And he was saying, ‘How do you write those tunes?’ So I was just showing him chords like crazy. Chords, because he tended just to play a lot of basic chords and move a capo up and down. And I was saying, ‘Come on, write me some words,’ and he was scribbling words down. And it just killed me because he’d been doing all these sensational lyrics. And he wrote: ‘All I have is yours / All you see is mine / And I’m glad to hold you in my arms / I’d have you anytime.'”

Bob then instructed Harrison to show him some of the major-seventh chords he used with The Beatles. George started playing a Gmaj7, which he stitched to a Bmaj7, a Cm7, an Am, an Em and a D to create the song’s intro. “And that’s how that came about,” Harrison said in 2001 (via American Songwriter). “It’s like a strange chord, really, it’s called G major 7th, and the song has got all these major-7th chords [laughs], so we just kind of turned it into a song. It’s really nice.”

Reflecting on ‘I’d Have You Anytime’ in her memoir Living in A Material World, Olivia Harrison explained that the song was George “talking directly” to Dylan. “He’d seen Bob, and then he’d seen Bob another time, and he didn’t seem as open,” she said. “And so, that was his way of saying, ‘Let me in here. Let me into your heart.'”

You can revisit ‘I’d Have You Anytime’ below.