The track Bob Dylan thought he could sue The Beatles over: “My song came first”
Not to sound too cliché about the mid-1960s, but I think there is a fair argument to be made that marijuana fuelled the decade’s most pivotal musical moment.
Because up until 1965, The Beatles were the poster boys of modern pop. Perfecting an innocent brand of blues rock that mused over the simple feelings of adolescent love, the Fab Four took over the world by charming everybody, from the kids all the way to their grandparents. At that point, they were a light-hearted antidote to the heavier, more philosophical and pointed worlds of Bob Dylan.
The Beatles were acutely aware of this difference in artistic perception and sought to shorten the gap and become similarly transcendental with their art. Then came a chance meeting in a hotel room in New York in August of 1964, where it was rumoured that Dylan gave the band their first true experience of marijuana and the rest, they say, is history.
“He was our idol,” Paul McCartney explained, adding, “It was a great honour to meet him, we had a crazy party that night we met. I thought I had gotten the meaning of life that night.”
Soon after, the psychedelic tinges of The Beatles’ future discography began to vignette releases. ‘Help!’ was arguably their first step into a new world, with John Lennon juxtaposing a genuine sense of existentialism with another conventionally pop arrangement. From there, he doubled down on that with ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’, on the same album, which he later admitted was him in his “Dylan period again”.
He added, “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,” Lennon said about the track.”
But which Beatles song upset Bob Dylan?
But then Lennon arguably took it too far, writing a track that Dylan was willing to sue them over.
Just six months after the release of Help, The Beatles released Rubber Soul, a record many as their first true psychedelic album. On it, Lennon delivered one of the band’s best-known tracks, ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’. It introduced a sitar to the band’s pop sound and built off something slightly more abstract, making it the gateway through which the band could walk and expand their music.
It was released just over six months before Bob Dylan’s record, Blonde On Blonde, which showcased a track many believed to be written to warn the Fab Four. ‘Fourth Time Around’ had a similar melody and concludes with an ambiguous final verse, where Dylan goes from the pronoun “she” to instead address directly something with “you”. This final verse contains the line, “I never asked for your crutch/Now don’t ask for mine.”
But journalist Johnny Black claimed Dylan had the song in his locker way before the release of Rubber Soul and was actually incensed by the fact that the band had so plainly ripped off his style. According to Al Kooper, Dylan “said that he had played it to The Beatles. So I asked him if they’d remarked on how similar it sounded to ‘Norwegian Wood’ and he said, ‘When I played it to them, there was no Norwegian Wood.’ Then I asked if they might sue him. He said, ‘No, my song came first. I could sue them.”
Imitation is indeed the highest form of flattery, and The Beatles made it very plain throughout their career, they admired no one quite as much as the famous songwriter.
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