The song George Harrison wrote for Bob Dylan: “A soul connection”
Scour the musical world of fandom in the 1960s, and one argument raged more strongly than most: who was the best Beatle? The band had dominated the charts and the critical landscape for so long that their fame had made them an irreversible part of culture. The Beatles were the biggest band on the planet and had the musical chops to back it up, but it didn’t stop the superficial question from being asked at every corner. Bob Dylan certainly had a favourite Beatle.
Although there was undoubtedly plenty of interaction between Dylan and all of the Beatles, Paul McCartney labelled the songwriter the group’s “idol” and Lennon was clearly influenced by his writing style, there was a specific friendship and connection between him and George Harrison that went beyond musical respect.
The pair met in 1964 after the band played a show in Queens, New York. Allegedly, George Harrison and the rest of the Fab Four were introduced to marijuana by the legendary singer-songwriter that very night, leading Paul McCartney to believe he’d figured out the meaning of life. Ringo Starr also held onto the joint instead of passing it along in what is something of a hilarious faux pas to link to the greatest band of all time.
And thus began the friendship and slight artistic competition between Bob Dylan and The Beatles. However, when the group broke up in 1970, Dylan remained close with one specific member: George Harrison. The two actually began to work together quite frequently. Dylan even co-wrote the song ‘I’d Have You Any Time’ with Harrison, and allowed him to record his own version of the song ‘If Not For You’, both of which appeared on the album All Things Must Pass.
About ‘I’d Have You Any Time’, Harrison himself explained: “I’d Have You Anytime’ was started in America, in Woodstock—I was invited there by the Band. It was Thanksgiving time and I’d just finished producing a Jackie Lomax album, directly after the Beatles White album. About the third day we got the guitars out and then things loosened up and I was saying to him, ‘Write me some words,’ and thinking of all this: Johnnie’s in the basement, mixing up the medicine, type of thing and he was saying, ‘Show me some chords, how do you get those tunes?’ He wrote the bridge: ‘All I have is yours/ All you see is mine/ And I’m glad to hold you in my arms/I’d have you anytime.’ Beautiful!—and that was that.”
The track was written alongside Bob Dylan as Harrison tried to find his own ‘voice’ on record. Harrison remembered in his autobiography: “He seemed very nervous and I felt a little uncomfortable—it seemed strange especially as he was in his own home. We got the guitars out and then things loosened up.” One such loose track to come out of the sessions was ‘I’d Have You Anytime’, which, apart from being sincerely underappreciated, sees Dylan become the only co-writing credit on All Things Must Pass. It must’ve been a point of pride for the guitarist as he made the song the first track on the album.
In addition to all of these connections in writing the track together, there’s another detail that might make the song even more special to their relationship. George Harrison’s wife, Olivia, has said that the two great songwriters “had a soul connection”.
Olivia went on to explain that in the song they wrote together, Harrison seemed to be telling Dylan that it was OK to open up and let him in, as that was the kind of friendship they had. She said: “He was talking directly to Bob because he’d seen Bob and then he’d seen Bob another time and he didn’t seem as open and so that was his way of saying, ‘Let me in here, let me into your heart.’ And he was very unabashed and romantic about it in a sense. I found that he was very-he had these love relationships with his friends. He loved them.”
Not only did they write the song together, but on a certain level, it was a song about their own friendship, too. If you want to listen to the song, ‘I’d Have You Any Time’, you can find it down below.
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