The Best of Early Bob: George Harrison’s favourite Bob Dylan song in 1965
It’s 1965, and John Lennon is at the height of his powers as The Beatles reign supreme over the pop culture explosion. Fresh from recording Help!, the band’s best work to date, further fame, fortune, and frenzied adulation are inevitable. Yet, that isn’t what occupies Lennon’s mind as he sits at home in Weybridge, playing a record on repeat. Picking up the phone, he calls Paul McCartney and says something along the lines of, ‘You’ve got to come over and listen to this new Bob Dylan single’.
The rest of his Beatles bandmates are equally enamoured, none more so than George Harrison. The so-called Quiet Beatle had always been searching for something—something deeper than mere rock ‘n’ roll, and in Dylan, he found that. There was a sense of purpose, spirituality and prescience in the freewheeling folk star’s work. if Harrison had been quiet, it was because he was simply waiting for the right thing to say; now, he was moved to make noise and plenty of it by the rough and rowdy ways of the original vagabond.
However, this sense of inspiration flowed both ways. Dylan reflected on the “outrageous“ chords that added depth and originality to the Beatles’ music and craved something similar to add further poise to his own tunes. In fact, it seems Dylan clocked Harrison’s untapped songwriting potential before his own bandmates even had.
“George got stuck with being the Beatle that had to fight to get songs on records because of Lennon and McCartney,“ he later commented. “Well, who wouldn’t get stuck? If George had had his own group and was writing his own songs back then, he’d have been probably just as big as anybody.” In the early days, there was a sense that Harrison figured his best ploy to break the mould was to imitate the styles of his two pals, but Dylan’s music helped to push him towards a greater sense of individualism—to ditch any tropes and just write about what he thought was poignant and meaningful.
No song in Dylan’s back catalogue signifies that quite like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. In late 1965, the guitarist compiled his favourite songs for a George Harrison’s Jukebox feature. Alongside tracks by the likes of Chuck Berry and Roy Orbison, he highlighted ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ as the best of Bob until that point. The brilliance is, although he was only 22 when it was written, there are still plenty of people who would assert that it has still never been beaten.
Dylan’s record had a tragic prescience to it. Lines like, “How many times must the cannonballs fly, before they’re forever banned?” forecasted that further violence would come to pass before someone put a pause on things. This came to the fore a matter of months later with the Freedom Summer of 1964, during which six murders, 29 shootings, 50 bombings and 60 beatings of Civil Rights workers occurred during a bloody 14-week period between mid-June and the end of September.
On June 21st, three Civil Rights workers disappeared. It would subsequently be found that Mississippi law officers murdered them; it would also later come to light that approximately half of Mississippi’s law enforcement officers were associated with the Ku Klux Klan. Cannonballs were flying, but still, Dylan’s anthem was not subsumed by the violence; like the wind he croaks about, the song still wove its way around things. This sort of profundity and purpose changed songwriting forever.
Harrison and his bandmates would hear the track and be walloped with the realisation that they had to up their game. They might not have become political in a perfunctory sense, but they did ditch hand-holding for spiritualism. As John Lennon said of the song: “[It] wasn’t ever that political, really […] It’s only the constant necessity to identify and label people for the media and public. Maybe millions of people have been born again and then forgotten all about it next Friday. It just so happens that Dylan did it in public.”
And this is where the true potential of the song lingered—it was spiritual, poetic and stark all at once in one big Promethean middle finger to everything else. Thus, the fact it initially floundered in the charts is a moot point. Why would it soar? He was the original vagabond who had just emerged from some dive bar basement with a hoarse throat and a distinct lack of hip-shaking. And suddenly, Harrison saw an allie for his own musical mission that was suddenly falling into place.
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