The Double Life of Bob Dylan by Clinton Heylin

Author:Clinton Heylin [HEYLIN, CLINTON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Al Aronowitz: Suze Rotolo thought The Beatles were great… and she and I used to gang up on Bob about them. To him, The Beatles were ‘bubblegum’. But then, Bob had a habit of turning up his nose at most everything that everybody else liked.

Dylan and the gang had been in a (TV-less?) motel in Meridian, Mississippi – Jimmie Rodgers’ birthplace – on February 9, when an unprecedented 78 million Americans tuned in to see The Beatles’ debut on the Ed Sullivan Show. As such, his own epiphany had to wait till he was ‘driving through Colorado… and eight of the top ten songs were Beatles songs… Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, [but] their harmonies made it all valid… I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.’

Serendipitously for the sixties, The Beatles themselves had reached much the same conclusion about Dylan’s music three weeks earlier, in Paris. All but barricaded in at the George V Hotel by Beatlemania, the Fab Four used this time to assimilate The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, leaving one to wonder, where did they find it? The album had yet to be released in France (or England), and Lennon’s April 1965 claim that ‘we cadged [it] off a DJ who came to interview us’ was almost immediately contradicted by John himself, who told Melody Maker, ‘Paul got [the Dylan albums] off whoever they belonged to.’

As with most musical trends, McCartney had the jump on Lennon, who gamely admitted, ‘Paul had heard of him before, but until we played [Freewheelin’] his name did not really mean anything to [the rest of] us.’ ‘Macca’ could well have brought the album with him to Paris, having ‘borrowed’ it from his brother, Mike McGear, who had borrowed it from a girl he had been (vainly) trying to impress, someone hip enough to own an import copy. McGear’s first reaction on hearing Freewheelin’ at her place – or so he claims – was ‘This guy can’t sing.’ But he was real keen on this Liverpool gal, so he persevered; to the extent that he eventually asked to borrow the album to listen to at home, where he was caught in flagrante by his brother, who opined, ‘What is this shit? This guy can’t sing.’ Mike replied, ‘It kinda grows on you.’ Fast-forward to January 1964. Mike has come to raise the siege of George Cinque, only to be stunned to hear, upon entering the boys’ palatial suite, Dylan’s dulcet tones. He challenges Paul, ‘Hey, I thought you said he couldn’t sing.’ The remark engendered a slightly sheepish, ‘It kinda grows on you.’

Already looking beyond the he-loves-you-blah-blah-blah platitudes of Please Please Me, Paul had the sense to realize the guy with the nasal whine was ‘pointing the direction of where music had to go’, with a little help from his fab friends, who were just as anxious to meet him as he them.6

Even as The Beatles’ presence gridlocked Manhattan through the first half of February, Dylan continued heading west to a rendezvous with Baez and the Berkeley radicals.

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