The bizarre moment Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson met in an emergency ward
Within the vast, ever-expanding musical landscape of the 1960s, Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan occupied different ends of the musical spectrum, but they were both utterly revolutionary in their own way. It wasn’t until years after the dust had settled on the counterculture age, however, that the pair finally crossed paths.
Back in the mid-1960s, while Brian Wilson was working on revolutionising pop through the guise of Pet Sounds, Bob Dylan was being declared a ‘Judas’ by the crowds at Newport Folk Festival, having cut himself free of his folk roots in favour of electrically amplified social commentary which typified the decade of counterculture. While nobody, particularly at that time, could denounce the songwriter’s power of either artist, they didn’t boast much in the way of musical crossover.
Despite their sonic disparities, though, it is worth remembering that Dylan, in particular, soaked up inspiration from countless different avenues of the songwriting spectrum, forging friendships with everyone from Johnny Cash to George Harrison. In other words, then, it was something of an inevitability that Dylan would be a natural disciple of Wilson’s groundbreaking work with The Beach Boys.
Seemingly, though, that mutual appreciation was not overtly spoken until the two songwriting titans crossed paths for the very first time. In the music equivalent of the Yalta Conference, Dylan reportedly introduced himself to the Beach Boy during a hospital visit. As Wilson shared in a 2023 Facebook post, “Once I was in the Malibu emergency room getting a weigh-in, and this guy walked up to me. He had curly hair and was on the short side.”
In the case that you couldn’t tell where Wilson was going with that anecdote, he continued, “‘Are you Brian Wilson?’ he asked. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m Bob Dylan.’ He was there because he had broken his thumb.” Although Wilson didn’t date this exchange explicitly, we can infer that this occurred during the late 1980s, as Dylan wrote in Chronicles, “It was 1987 and my hand, which had been ungodly injured in a freak accident, was in a state of regeneration.”
Then again, a mangled hand is a little different from a broken thumb, unless either Dylan was overexaggerating – as he is known to do – or Wilson was understating – as, again, he is known to do. Regardless of the exact time period, though, this exchange certainly occurred by the time that both songwriters were already musical icons in their own right, and Dylan probably didn’t need to introduce himself so explicitly.
“We talked a little bit about nothing,” Wilson continued. “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.”
Adding the ultimate compliment to his folk friend, “What a songwriter!”
That brief ER meeting quickly blossomed into an unlikely friendship between the pair, with Wilson inviting his fellow songwriter to his home the following day. “That was a longer conversation,” he remembered. “We just talked and talked about music. We talked about old songs we remembered, songs before rock and roll. We talked about ideas we had.”
Concluding, “Nice guy.”
It is only natural that Dylan and Wilson managed to strike up that kind of friendship. After all, not only were the pair two of the most important songwriters of the 20th century, but they were both self-professed music obsessives, too.
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