The secret song Bob Dylan and George Harrison wrote together over a weekend
Division is far more common than unity within the realm of the music industry, with highly-publicised feuds and intra-band rows tending the command of the headlines more so than the few fleeting musical friendships.
Back in the 1960s, though, George Harrison and Bob Dylan went against that argumentative grain, typifying the phrase ‘birds of a feather flock together’ in the process
Nobody – either in or outside the musical realm – captured the spirit of the 1960s quite like The Beatles. Whether it was the fresh-faced teeny-bopper pop of their early days or the subversive psychedelia that followed, their output is inseparable from the age of ‘peace and love’. If anybody could rival that position, though, it was the folk heroism of Bob Dylan.
Rather than viewing each other as competition, The Beatles were always outspoken about their adoration of Dylan’s songwriting, and the Minnesota-born performer had a health appreciation for the Fab Four, too. In fact, the Merseyside mop tops were espousing Dylan’s influence as early as 1964 on their track ‘I’m A Loser’, on which John Lennon was directly inspired by the songwriting stylings of the folk singer.
Before the two musical titans of the 1960s had ever met, then, they had already shared an artistic dialogue, and it was only a matter of time before their respective songwriting talents united. In the end, it was George Harrison who made the pilgrimage to Woodstock, New York, to meet with Dylan in 1968. “Bob Dylan had gone through the thing of breaking his neck in a motorcycle accident and being out of commission for a time,” the Beatle remembered in his memoir I, Me, Mine.
“He’d got himself back together and had finished Nashville Skyline shortly before I arrived there,” Harrison continued. “I was hanging out at his house, with him, Sarah and his kids. He seemed very nervous, and I felt a little uncomfortable – it seemed strange, especially as he was in his own home.” Seemingly, the only way to break the rather strange tension of the Dylan household was to begin writing together.
Over the course of Harrison’s stay in New York, the pair penned two songs together. One of them, ‘I’d Have You Anytime’, ended up forming the opening track of Harrison’s legendary solo record All Things Must Pass, but the songwriters also struck upon another effort that went unreleased.
Originally titled ‘Everybody Comes to Town’, the song is evidently evocative of the mindsets of both Dylan and Harrison at that time; with Dylan waylaid from his motorcycle crash and Harrison succumbing to the increasingly mounting pressure of being a Beatle. “I get tired of being pushed around, trampled to the ground,” the lyrics read, making no effort to hide their mood and motivation.
Eventually, the song was rechristened ‘Nowhere To Go’ and, although it did not appear on All Things Must Pass, the pair did end up recording a demo version in 1970.
What’s more, those two joint ventures seemed to inspire a lasting friendship between the two songwriters, which, in turn, produced a wealth of incredible efforts, stretching from the heartbreaking ‘Mama, You’ve Been On My Mind’ to the beloved discography of the pair’s shared supergroup, The Traveling Wilburys.
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