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“The start is identical”: The Beatles song Bob Dylan thought was completely stolen

Tue 31 December 2024 15:45, UK

Bob Dylan was never known as someone who minced any of his words whenever he sang. Throughout his entire career, his life’s work has been about making songs that could criticise anyone who was out of the line and that didn’t exclude some of his best friends along the way. Although Dylan did have a strange relationship with The Beatles during their tenure, he could see that they could have been thieves when pulling together one of their classics.

If we were talking about the number of artists that had copied from Dylan, the Fab Four would have been the least of his problems. Ever since he started blowing up on the strength of songs like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’, everyone and their mother took a swing at writing a song that meant something more than pop music, whether that was them trying their hand at that gravelly voice or making a political statement.

It’s not like The Beatles were immune to it, either. John Lennon had been the true Dylan fanatic when he first started listening to his music, and ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ was one of his first major attempts to inhabit that kind of folk song, complete with the weary vocal and having acoustic guitars dominate everything.

Dylan could even play fast and loose with the rules as well. Going through his work, ‘Fourth Time Around’ was written practically as a response to The Beatles going down the folk rock road when making ‘Norwegian Wood’. Mr Zimmerman may have been cheeky when saying that he wrote ‘Fourth Time Around’ first, but given the way that he speaks out of both sides of his mouth, it’s hard to take him at his word.

The Beatles were influenced by everyone around them, though, and by the time they got to working on Sgt Peppers, they had become accustomed to working off whatever their bandmates had brought in. When Dylan first heard the clangour of ‘Revolution’, though, he felt that it sounded all too familiar when he dusted off the song ‘Do Unto Others’ by Pee Wee Crayton.

While Dylan maintains that Lennon may not have realised what it was, he knew that ‘Revolution’ deserved some kind of credit to Crayton, saying, “I bet that John Lennon heard this record at a party once and probably didn’t even know who did it, but that guitar just stuck in his head. The song was released in 1954. The ‘B’ side of ‘Hey Jude’ by The Beatles is called ‘Revolution’, and it was released in 1968. The start of both of these recordings is identical.”

But it’s also hard to take Dylan seriously when looking at every other rock and roll song that started off that way. Plenty of artists had spent the first few seconds peddling away on this kind of lick, and if Lennon owed royalties to Crayton, he probably owed the same to artists like Chuck Berry for taking the entire basis of his sound on their first few recordings.

Still, this might have been a case of Lennon scrapping a song for parts and making an entirely new anthem out of it. Considering the tune was all about people saying their peace on their right to protest, Lennon needed a riff like this to get everyone’s attention right out of the gate.