The line from 1965 Paul McCartney calls his favourite lyric of all time: “My inspiration”
When Paul McCartney first met Bob Dylan, the original vagabond introduced him to weed. But he may as well have offered him a puff on the world’s bohemian future.
After a few tokes and a chat, old Macca (or young Macca as he was then – it was the summer of 1964 and he was only twenty-bloody-two years old) thought that he had discovered the meaning of life, so he scribbled down this prized wisdom.
When he looked the next day, he had penned the words: “There are seven levels”. Weirdly, this nonsense ties into William S Burroughs’ studies of ancient Egypt and the ‘Seven Souls’, but that’s a leap that goes beyond the rather more tangible inspiration that Dylan served up in McCartney’s career.
“He was our idol. It was a great honour to meet him, we had a crazy party that night we met. I thought I had gotten the meaning of life that night,” said a bemused McCartney. At that point in time, he had been their idol for around a year. His depth and sagacious wit had inspired them to move beyond mere hand-holding tales.
In The Beatles Anthology, John Lennon is quoted as saying: “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.”
There is no doubting that after this period, the songs that the Fab Four were crafting became more complex, lyrically more probing and literary, and more outwardly politically liberal, too. However, the important point they shared that made them so beloved as artists is that they also retained a melodic beauty and alluring romanticism.
Paul McCartney’s favourite lyric
So, when McCartney was picking out the lyric that he strives towards with his own songwriting for HMV’s ‘My Inspiration’ campaign, he went with the following line from ‘She Belongs to Me’: “She’s an artist, she don’t look back.”
The verse in full reads as follows: “She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist / She don’t look back / She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist / She don’t look back / She can take the dark out of the nighttime / And paint the daytime black.”
While ‘She Belongs to Me’ is a very possessive-sounding title, in truth, Dylan sings of an adoration way beyond something he could ‘own’ if he intended to. Complete with one of his finest opening verses in history; his poetry is in full Byronian swing as he eulogises an artist with the sort of zest that makes it seem like Dylan himself is a lowly lad who can strum a few chords but not a lot more, bowing beneath a higher power.
All the same, like many of the best things in life, Dylan was a taste that Macca had to acquire. “I used to lose his songs in the middle, but then I realised it didn’t matter,” he told Flip in 1966. “You can get hung up on just two words of a Dylan lyric. ‘Jealous monk‘ or ‘magic swirling ship‘ are examples of the fantastic word combinations he uses. I could never write like that, and I envy him. He is a poet.”
That gorgeous phrasing is instantly apparent in ‘She Belongs to Me’. Complete with a sweet and efficient melody, he lets his prose do the talking, and it barely talks but screams. This song almost stands as the opposite side of the coin to ‘Just Like A Woman’, and what a duo they form. Who is this woman, and where can we meet her is the conclusion for the listener. Well, she’s very likely Joan Baez, and your best bet is Woodside, California.
Song and line alike carry a McCartney-like innocence (with an undercurrent) that shows the inspiration probably flows both ways. Dylan may have been more laconic with his praise of the Fab Four, thus propagating the notion of a one-way relationship, but he has, on occasion, let his stiff upper lip loosen to eulogise his contemporaries and acknowledge their influence on him. “I just kept it to myself that I really dug them,” Dylan told biographer Anthony Scaduto.
But perhaps his admiration was self-evident from the way in which his own music evolved as the Fab Four invaded America and pointed the direction “where music had to go”. As he said himself, “I’m in awe of Paul McCartney. He’s about the only one that I am in awe of. But I’m in awe of him,” the usually reticent Dylan also told Rolling Stone in 2007. “He can do it all and he’s never let up, you know.”
The alternative version of ‘She Belongs to Me’
Alongside the album track from 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan also released an alternative version of his stirring ode as part of the No Direction Home bootleg compilation series, and it may even eclipse the original version. Never afraid to reinvent a song, Dylan pares his ditty back to the basics in a manner that seems even more fitting, eliciting the sense that it is a humble offering to a hero.
This rare cut has been cited as a favourite by many fellow musicians, and it perhaps represents the original vagabonds’ most earnest love song. With a bassline that McCartney would be proud of, he cryptically sings, “She’s a hypnotist collector You are a walking antique”. What does he mean? Well, give Macca a toke, and he might be able to figure it out.
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