The first time Brian Wilson met Bob Dylan
Throughout the 1960s, pop music was transformed by many artists, but few could claim to have pushed the bar as high as Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and The Beatles. Indeed, few would argue against the position that Dylan, Brian Wilson, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were among the top ten songwriters of their generation.
Each of these intensely creative minds brought something different yet equally essential to the 20th century’s musical tapestry. The Nobel laureate Bob Dylan was distinguished by a ravenous appetite for poetic lyricism, which attained an oblique edge in the mid-1960s, enhanced by a recent friendship with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
Meanwhile, Brian Wilson’s genius lay in composition. The surf-rock extraordinaire found his footing with sun-soaked ditties, but thanks to competition from The Beatles across the Atlantic, he led The Beach Boys to experimental and progressive pastures. Most famously, Pet Sounds arrived in 1966 as The Beach Boys’ masterpiece thanks to cutting-edge contrapuntal harmonies and a seamless retention of pop consciousness despite an apparent embrace of psychedelia.
One can only imagine what sort of weird and wonderful music might have arisen had Bob Dylan formed a band with Brian Wilson during their concurrent peaks in the 1960s. Needless to say, each greatly admires the other’s strengths. “Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to the Smithsonian,” Dylan wrote in a comment on Wilson’s official website. “The records I used to listen to and still love, you can’t make a record that sounds that way. Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.”
Wilson returned some praise to Dylan in a May 2023 post on social media. The Beach Boys songwriter remembered the first time he ever met Dylan. “Once I was in the Malibu emergency room getting a weigh-in, and this guy walked up to me,” Wilson shared on Twitter. “He had curly hair and was on the short side. ‘Are you Brian Wilson?’ he asked. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m Bob Dylan.’”
Just like that, two titans of the 1960s cultural tidal wave collided in a Malibu ER. “He was there because he had broken his thumb,” Wilson continued. “We talked a little bit about nothing. I was a big fan of his lyrics, of course. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was one of the best songs, you know? And ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ and so many more. What a songwriter!”
Over the years, Dylan and Wilson have remained mutual admirers and friendly acquaintances. The pair even collaborated on several occasions, including their work on ‘The Spirit of Rock and Roll’, a song from Brian Wilson’s unofficial early 1990s album Sweet Insanity. Listen to the track below.
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