Bob Dylan on the three ways The Beatles illuminated the future of music
When the experimental musician Bill Holt was looking back at the late 1950s, he said life was “very much like a frozen dinner, all prepared for you by others. Then, out of the blue, that orderly world is shattered. The shattering started with the assassination of President Kennedy.” Suddenly, an alternative future seemed essential, and the likes of Bob Dylan and The Beatles were happy to oblige.
And like many artists of the time, these forward-thinking folks were feeding off of each other. As John Lennon recalls in The Beatles Anthology: “In Paris in 1964 was the first time I ever heard Dylan at all. Paul got the record *The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan) from a French DJ. For three weeks in Paris, we didn’t stop playing it. We all went potty about Dylan.”
He became the band’s “idol”, and when their first introduction began with a rather stoned Bob offering them a toke on his joint, the world was never to be the same again, with Paul McCartney even saying he “discovered the meaning of life” that night. However, the influence ran both ways, and it extended far beyond any substance.
While Dylan might have been reticent about it, of course, he was influenced by The Beatles. Who wasn’t? As Jackson Browne said when the shoe was on the other foot, and the Fab Four were hot on the heels of Pet Sounds rather than leading the way, “Imagine a band influencing The Beatles!” In truth, even this was part of their impact: they encouraged bands to nab ideas from their peers.
But for the most part, it was their revolution that others were happily ploughing in the wake of. However, there were three specific ways that Dylan thought they were foisting the future. Firstly, he says: “They were doing things nobody was doing.” This was showcased by the way the band added orchestration to rock ‘n’ roll, adopted synthesisers early doors, and got avant-garde with things like backmasking.
Secondly, Dylan appraised the musicology. “Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous,” he told Rolling Stone in 1972. Indeed, the band were always trying to find quirks within the limited vocabulary of pop, which was even remarked upon by Leonard Bernstein.
As Dylan later said: “George had an uncanny ability to just play chords that didn’t seem to be connected in any kind of way and come up with a melody and a song. I don’t know anybody else who could do that, either. What can I tell you? He was from that old line of playing where every note was a note to be counted.”
And finally, he figured those notes were given extra oomph by virtue of the quality of the band and how they gelled. “Their harmonies made it all valid,” he concluded. This added energy and class to their future. “I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.”
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