When Bob Dylan wanted to make an album with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones
It was a strange time for Bob Dylan in the late 1960s. After experiencing major success as first a folk-minded protest singer and then an electric rock and roll heathen, Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident gave him the opportunity to step out of the spotlight and regroup. He opted to turn to country and roots music, first by casually recording songs in the basement of Big Pink, the house owned by members of The Band, and later on albums like John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline.
But after years away, Dylan was still itching to get back out in the public eye. Going on tour didn’t interest the singer, so instead, he conceived the idea of creating a massive all-star record featuring The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Whether he actually planned to go through with it was anyone’s guess, but producer Glyn Johns, who had worked with both The Beatles and the Stones by that point, seemed to think that it was a real idea.
“I had it all figured out,” Johns explains in his memoir, Sound Man. “We would pool the best material from Mick and Keith, Paul and John, Bob and George, and then select the best rhythm section from the two bands to suit whichever songs we were cutting.”
“He said he had this idea to make a record with the Beatles and the Stones,” Johns would later tell Rolling Stone after fatefully meeting Dylan at an airport. “And he asked me if I would find out whether the others would be interested.”
When Johns floated the idea to the potential participants, he received a mixed reaction. “Keith [Richards] and George [Harrison] thought it was fantastic,” Johns said, “Since they were both huge Dylan fans.” Johns also felt that Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman were “amicable … as long as everyone else was interested”.
But that’s where the idea broke down. Notably, the main singers from each respective camp didn’t seem all that interested in giving away some of their material to Dylan. “John [Lennon] didn’t say a flat no, but he wasn’t that interested. Paul [McCartney] and Mick [Jagger] both said absolutely not.”
And thus, the all-star Dylan-Beatles-Stones album was dead. Although the collaborative album was stalled, there was a precursor to its existence that had already come to fruition. George Harrison had visited Dylan in New York during the tail-end of 1968, writing the song ‘I’d Have You Anytime’ together. While the collaborative album plans broke down, Dylan and Harrison continued to work together, with Dylan making an appearance at the Concert for Bangladesh in 1970 and later forming the supergroup The Travelling Wilburys in 1988.
Check out ‘I’d Have You Anytime’ down below.
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