The Beatles song that showed John Lennon to be “a chameleon”
The Beatles made their name by following in the footsteps of their favourite artists. Whether it was by directly covering the likes of Chuck Berry and Larry Williams or incorporating the songwriting technique of Buddy Holly into their own material, the Fab Four were experts at taking a sound they liked and building upon it.
That style of music-making became obvious in the mid-1960s when The Beatles began to shift with the times. As folk music saw a major revival in America, John Lennon took a special liking to the music of Bob Dylan. After meeting in a New York hotel room in 1964, Dylan’s influence began to more formally permeate The Beatles’ own music, with the earliest tastes of folk appearing on albums like Beatles for Sale and Help!
The latter album featured a few acoustic-based songs, most notably McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’ and Lennon’s ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’. The second of the two was highly influenced by Dylan, as Lennon copped to in a 1980 interview with David Sheff. “That’s me in my Dylan period again. I am like a chameleon, influenced by whatever is going on. If Elvis can do it, I can do it. If the Everly Brothers can do it, me and Paul can. Same with Dylan.”
‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ is my Dylan period,” Lennon is quoted as saying in Anthology. “It’s one of those that you sing a bit sadly to yourself, ‘Here I stand, head in hand…’ I’d started thinking about my own emotions. I don’t know when exactly it started, like ‘I’m A Loser’ or ‘Hide Your Love Away’, those kind of things. Instead of projecting myself into a situation, I would try to express what I felt about myself, which I’d done in my books. I think it was Dylan who helped me realise that – not by any discussion or anything, but by hearing his work.”
Little did Lennon realise that Dylan was taking as much from The Beatles as The Beatles were taking from Dylan. “Dylan once wrote a song called ‘Fourth Time Around,’” George Harrison told Guitar World in 1992. “To my mind, it was about how John and Paul, from listening to Bob’s early stuff, had written ‘Norwegian Wood.’ Judging from the title, it seemed as though Bob had listened to that and wrote the same basic song again, calling it ‘Fourth Time Around.’ The title suggests that the same basic tune kept bouncing around over and over again.”
“I was very paranoid about that. I remember he played it to me when he was in London,” Lennon claimed. “He said, ‘what do you think?’ I said, ‘I don’t like it.’ I didn’t like it. I was very paranoid. I just didn’t like what I felt I was feeling – I thought it was an out and out skit, you know, but it wasn’t. It was great. I mean he wasn’t playing any tricks on me. I was just going through the bit.”
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