“Nobody else could do it”: The song that made Bob Dylan realise ‘The Beatles is Coming!’
Every now and then, you meet the sort of idiot who tries to tell you that The Beatles were overrated. Trying to capitalise on outrage culture, they will try to trigger the masses with a baseless claim that simply misunderstands and disrespects the undying genius of this great band.
There is one easy rebuttal to this outrageous claim, should you ever be presented with it. Permitting this person isn’t wasting their time trying to convince Bob Dylan is of the same overrated ilk, then you can swiftly remind them that the famously hard-to-please songwriter, a man desperately unwilling to dish out praise to any of his contemporaries, was regularly on record saying just how good The Beatles were.
In simple terms, if Bob says they’re good, then they’re good. End of story.
Sure, Dylan and The Beatles had something of a complicated relationship further down the line. When The Beatles were growing somewhat disillusioned with their commercial trajectory in the mid 1960s, peddled by the mania of Beatles fandom, they saw Dylan as a songwriting north star, free of any commercial obligations and instead, exercising his artistic liberation.
Searching for a similar pathway, The Beatles began on relatively shaky and plagiaristic grounds. They wrote songs that emulated Dylan to a point where it irked the American so much that he called them out for doing so, but really, this squabble was sibling-like, like an older brother slapping their siblings on the wrist and instead encouraging them to follow their own path, knowing just how strong their potential was.
Despite his later grievances, Dylan was a fan from the very start, from back when The Beatles were mop-topped whippersnappers, releasing doo-wop blues classics to a hungry American audience, and in them, he spotted a melodic potential that would make them some of the most influential musicians of all time.
The band’s 1963 classic ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ immediately caught the attention of Dylan, who had that point, was already in New York, carving out a folk legacy. The song, primarily written by John Lennon with George Harrison as lead vocalist, stopped him in his tracks and sparked a fandom of the group that would continue on to the present day.
“The radio was on from beyond a wall, and the sound was coming through in static,” Dylan once recalled about the track on 2004’s Chronicles: Vol 1, “They were so easy to accept, so solid. I remember when they first came out. They offered intimacy and companionship like no other group. Their songs would create an empire. It seemed like a long time ago. ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’. A perfect ’50s sappy love ballad, and nobody but them could do it. Somehow, there was nothing wussy about it.”
Within that song and countless others from the early Beatles days, Dylan cited the band’s ability to write a melody and perform a harmony as the marked difference between them and the rest. Despite a brief flirtation with Dylan plagiarism, ultimately nothing changed until the end of the decade, when they took a formula built on those two things and took it stratospheric.
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