Jim Windolf. Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and The Beatles Changed Each Other – and the World. White Rabbit, 2026. 374 pp.
Review by Andrew Beck
“The Beatles are comin’, they’re gonna hold your hand”
A problem facing anyone trying to write about Dylan or the Beatles, or Dylan and the Beatles, is their stories are incredibly well known and have been told countless times. When Stuart Maconie told veteran Beatles chronicler Hunter Davies he was contemplating writing his own Beatles book, Davies wryly responded, “Oh you absolutely should. There hasn’t been one for a good half hour” (Maconie 2). Although initially slow off the mark, the academy now handles Dylan and Beatles appreciation and interpretation. That has resulted in enlightening evaluation and delightful writing—as well as, at times, specious argument and convoluted prose. But when the facts of their lives and careers have been endlessly raked over, can there be anything left to add? If the story is about Dylan and the Beatles, perhaps there is. Jim Windolf’s Where The Music Had To Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other—and the World is ostensibly the first time an entire volume is dedicated to the story of how the lives, times, and recorded works of Dylan and the Beatles were entwined.
Certain elements are common to nearly all tellings of their story. On first hearing, Dylan and the Beatles share a distaste for each other—Dylan on the Beatles late 1963: “bubblegum” music for “teenboppers”; John Lennon on Dylan July 1964: “To hell with Dylan.”
On a long cross-country road trip in early February 1964, Dylan hears “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the car radio and has his Beatles damascene experience: “Fuck! Man, that was fuckin’ great! Oh man—fuck!” (Hajdu 197). Backstage at his May 17, 1964, Royal Festival Hall concert Dylan is handed a congratulatory telegram from Lennon. On August 28, 1964, the Al Aronowitz-brokered first meeting of Dylan and the Beatles takes place at the Delmonico Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Dylan is in the wings when the Beatles perform at Manhattan’s Paramount Theater on September 20, 1964, and meets with them after the show.
In the January 1965 Melody Maker interview, John Lennon admits to being influenced by Dylan in composing “A Hard Day’s Night” in July 1964 and “I’m A Loser” in December 1964. The Beatles visit Dylan at London’s Savoy Hotel several times during his late-April to mid-May 1965 British tour. Dylan also visits Lennon at his Weybridge, Surrey home. On August 13, 1965, Dylan visits the Beatles at the Riviera Motel near Kennedy International Airport. They stay up half the night talking.
Dylan’s influence is clear on yet another Beatles recording, their August 1965 song “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” On December 3, 1965, the Beatles release their Rubber Soul LP featuring the song “Norwegian Wood.” Dylan detects similarities with his own work and, irked by what he felt to be the Beatles’ repeated appropriation of his melodies and lyrical concerns, decides to copy the Beatles by way of retaliation. On February 14, 1966, in Columbia Records Studio A, he appropriates the melody and some of the lyrics of “Norwegian Wood” in composing and making his first attempt at recording “Fourth Time Around”—so called because this is the fourth time the Beatles have copied him.
All four Beatles are in the audience for Dylan’s May 26, 1966, Royal Albert Hall concert, offering him moral support in the face of audiences increasingly hostile to his having “gone electric.” Dylan and George Harrison co-write songs together in late November 1968. On August 31, 1969, three-quarters of the Beatles (minus Paul McCartney) are in the audience for Dylan’s return to the performing stage at the first Isle of Wight Festival.
With Dylan living in Greenwich Village and McCartney in Manhattan in 1971, the two become socially close. On June 27, 1980, Lennon records “Serve Yourself” at home as a riposte to Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody,” the opening track on his August 1979 LP Slow Train Coming. In April and May 1988 Dylan and Harrison, together with Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty, become the Traveling Wilburys and record the album Vol. 1, released on 18 October of that year. A second album, Vol. 3, is released on October 23, 1990.
There are eight million Beatles and Dylan stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.
Enter Jim Windolf. According to Uncut editor Michael Bonner, the “idea for the book came when Windolf spotted errors in existing biographies. He began by listing common elements and parallels, and the work began to snowball, yielding pleasing symmetries as well as factual revelations” (Bonner 98). The notion that the book is a revisionist text was reinforced by his UK publishers, White Rabbit, in their press release: “Windolf’s meticulous research uncovers hidden gems, peeling back layers of history to reveal the stories fans didn’t even know they were missing.” The undue pre-publication emphasis on the book’s revelations, setting the record straight where, the press release implies, other writers have failed, is made at the expense of a more nuanced characterization of Windolf’s ambitions. While it’s a given that nuance is not the stock-in-trade of press release writers, the hype is unnecessary. Neither Dylan nor the Beatles can be held responsible for their obsessive fans who claim absolute knowledge of where their idols were on any given day or what their intentions were in writing and performing any given song. That kind of certainty has been repeatedly denied by the artists— je ne suis pas Dylaniste. So, too, Windolf cannot be held responsible for any hyperbole on the part of his publishers. If his intention was to critique previously published histories, nowhere is this made explicit in the book itself. In fact, Windolf avoids the temptation to point out the inaccuracies, inadequacies, and failings of almost all other Dylan historians, commentators, and scholars who predate him: no point-scoring here. His stated ambition is more sober: “In these pages I won’t go so far as to argue that Dylan was the fifth Beatle, but I will make the case that the relationship was deeper and more consequential than has been noted by earlier writers” (xvii).
In shaping his material, Windolf conforms to a common enough publishing convention: frame the book’s narrative by opening with a significant event at or near the present day, and then flip back in time to the subject’s youth. Windolf starts with Dylan’s 2009 Liverpool visit, taking in Woolton Village, scene of Lennon’s childhood, Strawberry Field, the Salvation Army home for orphans, Mendips, 251 Menlove Avenue, where Lennon’s Aunt Mimi took him in after his mother’s death, and 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, home to McCartney from 1955 (1-7).
Here’s an under-investigated sub-genre in Dylan studies: Dylan as fan. Windolf does tip his hat to this aspect of Dylan with his detailed account of him carefully examining the interior of Mendips. (Dylan has also tried, and sometimes succeeded, visiting the childhood homes of Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young.) Both Dylan and the Beatles shared a love of the songs of Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Clyde McPhatter, and Larry Williams (12-14). Both Dylan and the Beatles loved Larry Williams’ “Slow Down” (126), Dylan and Harrison bonded over singing the Everley Brothers’s “All I Have to Do Is Dream” (267), and Dylan, again accompanied by Harrison, recorded McCartney’s “Yesterday” in 1970, a revelation that comes to McCartney courtesy of Windolf himself (316).
But after Windolf has set the scene for tracing the Dylan-Beatles shared story, he resolutely sticks to chronological order, starting with a sketch of Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan’s hometown (8-10), and the Beatles’ Liverpool (10-11). While it’s possible to offer a simple gloss of the Dylan-Beatles story as one that moves from mutual contempt, to competition, to imitation, to friendship, it’s never that simple—and that 500-word outline of key events above becomes 310 densely packed pages of detailed narrative in Windolf’s capable hands. Dylan and Lennon are especially volatile, not averse to cutting people out of their lives. After Jann Wenner, against Lennon’s express wishes, published Lennon Remembers in 1971, Lennon never had anything to do with Wenner or Rolling Stone magazine again. The Beatles’ Apple organization even pulled all their advertising from the paper.
Windolf offers an especially insightful reading of the Dylan-Lennon relationship as evidenced by Lennon’s finding his own songwriting and singing voice through donning Dylan’s persona:
Paradoxically, by assuming the Dylan guise, John felt free—free enough to write on a subject he had not dared to approach in his earlier songs; and free enough to allow himself to sing in a voice unadorned, without asking [George] Martin to double-track it or having Paul or George provide supportive harmonies, as he had for nearly every previous Beatles recording. So while Lennon might have been doing a Dylan impression on “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” he was also, for once, nakedly himself. (110)
In a similar vein, true to his book’s subtitle, Windolf astutely charts the continuing influence Dylan and Lennon & McCartney had on each others’ songwriting in early 1966:
Just as Lennon and McCartney were turning away from their old subject matter on “Nowhere Man” and “The Word,” Dylan was focusing his creative energies on romantic relationships. So now, in addition to working in the same musical style, as they had been doing for more than a year, Dylan and the Beatles were moving toward each other in the substance of their lyrics. (173)
Windolf writes in an engaging fashion, whisking the reader through the sometimes turbulent, never boring, story of Dylan and the Beatles. He builds up to the impending meeting of the five protagonists over six long chapters in detail both granular and cinematic: it’s easy to picture this as a film where the director is cutting back and forth between Dylan and the Beatles. Over eighty-four pages, he alternates the focus, painting pictures of the lead actors as dynamic forces leading parallel lives, tracking their personal, musical, cultural, and professional developments, apart but aware of each other, being almost inexorably propelled towards each other. Describing how Dylan and the Beatles are sometimes repelled by each other, and at other times strangely attracted, Windolf builds the tension as their first encounter looms. The impression is not so much wonder at their meeting but the impossibility of their not meeting.
Given their stories are so well known, much of the appeal of any new writing about Dylan and the Beatles will be in the quality of the storytelling. The joy evident in Windolf’s writing flows through rich portraits of each individual Beatles’s relationships with Dylan. Windolf makes a convincing case for Dylan having the most in common with McCartney:
Both are born entertainers with ever-active creative powers who have proved themselves unable to tear themselves away from studio and stage into their eighties. Both have egos sturdy enough to withstand the adulation and the often-harsh criticism that have followed them through the decades. And both have wide-ranging tastes in music, making them perhaps the only two singers who have rapped on record […] and made albums of standards from the pre-rock era. (xvi)
Beyond McCartney, Windolf avers, Harrison had the most fruitful collaborative relationship, Ringo Starr the most convivial, and Lennon the most dynamic, hence most fractious.
In Mellers’ pioneering 1984 study of Dylan, he essays the positive effect Beatles songs had on his own compositional technique. He ventures Dylan was nudged towards realizing simple songs weren’t at all simple “by the stunning impact made on him by the Beatles’ middle phase” (Mellers 139). He grants that “Fourth Time Around” may have some “parodistic reference” to the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” (Mellers 149) but confines his discussion to compositional processes rather than delving into the psychological relationship between the two songs and, by extension, the two songwriters.
Harrison was more sanguine about this “controversy,” although it’s somewhat surprising he didn’t think any listeners had detected the similarities between the two songs. Windolf painstakingly contextualizes the “Fourth Time Around” ordeal, both acknowledging the positive impact of Dylan’s songwriting and singing on Lennon (173) as well as tracking the manner in which Dylan both created and fueled tension with Lennon as a compositional aid. Windolf’s sensible and historically accurate position is that Dylan wasn’t doing anything new when he wrote “Fourth Time Around.” Just as singers in early English folk song took an existing tune or lyrics, so too did Dylan repurpose a found tune and lyric: “For the music, Dylan borrowed Lennon’s melody for ‘Norwegian Wood,’ following a method he had employed before, as when he had hung his own lyrics onto the bones of ‘Lord Randall’ to write ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’” (171-2). Granting that Dylan could be, and frequently was, provocative in his song lyrics, his public pronouncements, and his public and private behavior, Windolf concludes: “With ‘Fourth Time Around,’ Dylan was sending Lennon a warning, while also setting him straight on how to depict a late-night romantic call gone awry” (173).
Windolf provides further context when “Fourth Time Around” next appears in his narrative. McCartney and Dylan are having what might be considered a cutting contest, albeit via the medium of early pressings of their new records. McCartney plays Dylan “Tomorrow Never Knows,” sonically and lyrically a huge leap forward for the Beatles. Dylan counters with “Fourth Time Around” (180). Lennon hears Dylan directly addressing him—and doesn’t like it. Then doing something he rarely does, Windolf teases the reader with a hint of more to come: “For now, Dylan was content to allow the song to speak for itself on his behalf—though, as we’ll see, he wouldn’t be able to resist returning to this sore subject before his departure from London” (181). That tease is uncharacteristic of Windolf. Where other commentators have played up the Dylan-Lennon antagonism, Windolf eschews emotive language, his delightfully dry, almost affectless prose style notable for its lack of narrative tricks.
In Eat the Document, there’s a brief scene of Dylan and Lennon in the back seat of an Austin Princess. There’s an evident tension but, because the scene is so short, the viewer can only ponder what was really going on. Dylan, Howard Alk, Gordon Quinn, and Robbie Robertson edited D.A. Pennebaker’s extensive film footage in a legendarily crude, messy, and often random manner. Windolf visited the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to view the newly restored twenty-minutes of film from which the segment was hacked. For Windolf, and for his readers, the complete footage shines a clear light on Dylan’s modus operandi both in composing “Fourth Time Around” and in goading Lennon to act up for the camera—in accordance with the film script in Dylan’s mind. In a long section where Windolf shares his transcription of the dialogue and his description of the visuals, he shows Dylan playing to the camera, doing his best to get Lennon to accuse him of copying “Norwegian Wood” for “Fourth Time Around.” If he can succeed in this, then he can counterblast with his unhappiness about all the Lennon & McCartney songs that used his songs for their inspiration. That may have been Dylan’s intention but, as the full footage shows, the scene then descends into chaos. Dylan clearly exhibits the ill effects of something he’d taken, and Lennon resorts to his childhood trick of parodying the voices, the accents, of the British establishment, in this case “a British commercial pitchman” (195).
Both Dylan and Lennon were capable of taking extreme positions in their public pronouncements. Where Dylan appears to have adopted a lifelong habit of “never apologize, never explain,” Lennon never seemed to experience any agony retracting statements made or positions adopted. But while there is no disguising the vitriol conjured by Dylan in the Eat the Document scene, there is never any sense that he and Lennon are headed for permanent splitsville, as with Lennon and Wenner.
In passing, Windolf remarks that Dylan “didn’t use the recording studio as a compositional tool in the manner of the Beatles, who increasingly took advantage of overdubs and audio effects” (171). He could have made more of this as an example of one way the Beatles quite plainly didn’t influence Dylan. There is an almost career-long difference between Dylan and the Beatles in their use of the recording studio. For much of his career, Dylan didn’t take touring musicians into the studio with him, his preference being studio pros often contracted by his producers. That brilliant songs such as “She’s Your Lover Now” remain unrecorded in full (or full recordings remain unissued) is testimony to Dylan’s impatience with the recording process, his habit of banging it down on tape as quickly as possible and moving on. Very early in their career the Beatles—Lennon and McCartney especially—realized the possibilities opened by the recording studio, rapidly evolving recording technology, and a patient, disciplined, musically literate and adept producer.
It’s inevitable that a close reading of a text about such rich subjects will reveal errors. Less egregious are the missed opportunities. Nonetheless they are missed.
Detailing the increasingly complex recording methods of the three songwriting Beatles in piecing together Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Windolf states George Harrison relied on Indian musicians for “Within You Without You” (226). There is no reason for them to be anonymous. They were Purushottam Dattatraya (known as Anna) Joshi, Amrit Gajjar, dilruba, Buddhadev Kansara, tamboura, and Natvar Soni, tabla.
Windolf mentions Tony Glover only in passing, and then almost dismissively (93). Glover was not just a Minneapolis acquaintance, but a good friend of Dylan’s, an accomplished musician, and later a member of Koerner, Ray, and Glover. Formed in 1962, they cut their first LP, Blues, Rags And Hollers, for Elektra in March 1963. In late August 1963, Tony Glover visited Dylan at his 4th Street apartment. He had travelled to New York City as a contributor to another Elektra LP, The Blues Project: A Compendium of the Very Best on the Urban Blues Scene, and Dylan joined him at Mastertone Studios.
Besides these omissions, there are conspicuous errors. On his 1966 world tour, Dylan surely wasn’t “backed by a 4-piece band” (xiv). This is the five-piece Hawks with Mickey Jones in the drum seat. Martin Carthy isn’t Irish (29); he’s not even of Irish stock. Lockhart-Smith is Judy on page 106 but June on page 107. The Roundhouse was, isn’t, a club but a very large performance venue, a former railway shed containing a railway turntable, repurposed and opened in 1964, a vital site of London cultural and countercultural history (252). Andy White is Alan White. And he wasn’t essentially a session drummer; a longtime member of various bands (Griffin, The Alan Price Set, Yes) he was then between bands so took on session work (272). Angela Davis and George Jackson were never married (282).
A lifetime of listening to both Dylan and the Beatles prompted Windolf to write this book. Even so, apart from some early vignettes about first encountering the Beatles through listening to his best friend’s older sister’s copy of Sgt. Pepper’s—he’s of an age where older siblings were the conduit to music—he resolutely sticks to the third person. But towards the very end something approaching heartfelt autobiography bursts through the objective façade: “Life is wonderful and horrible. The hours may pass sweetly, but we know from an early age that we’re under a death sentence” (306). From there till the end, for the final five pages, the tone is more elegiac. Quite possibly nudged into these ruminations by having traced a longform narrative that includes the early and ugly deaths of two Beatles and being mindful of the advanced years of the three survivors, the prose becomes personal: he’s all too aware of what happens after the forlorn rags of growing old. And so, as the evening sun goes down, Windolf turns to Dylan’s tribute to Lennon. Echoing the way in which Dylan signed off his 2012 album Tempest with “Roll On John,” Windolf closes his book with the song’s chorus. Quite clearly that friendship, begun in 1964 and brutally curtailed in 1980, was preying on Dylan’s mind, for it isn’t his only published tribute to Lennon. In The Philosophy of Modern Song, ostensibly writing about Nina Simone’s 1964 rendition of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” Dylan offers some final thoughts on how difficult it is to be simple in making art, and how audiences are often misled by that very simplicity: “Sometimes art can be a blunt fist—the colored rectangles of Mark Rothko, the copious polka dots of Yayoi Kusama, or John Lennon’s inexhaustible repetition of the phrase ‘I want you’ in a single song. These are artists so in control of their tools that they know exactly what they are doing. Yet some people in their rush to judge brand the work simplistic” (Dylan 299).
Windolf’s book exudes empathy and understanding as it evokes a time when Dylan and the Beatles were artistically successful and materially rewarded. The four Beatles shared so many experiences—the milestones to maturity, the secret embarrassments—that when they fell out with each other in 1970, some intra-Beatle relationships never recovered. Not so with Dylan. More recently, that sense of an ending, that death sentence, seems to have given both Dylan and McCartney an equanimity that speaks of artists in old age at peace with themselves and the world. Windolf draws to a close the written text of his book with Dylan’s tribute to Lennon in song. The final photographic plate of the book reproduces McCartney’s May 2009 letter to Dylan thanking him for the “Friends and Neighbors” episode of Theme Time Radio Hour. He closes: “All the best you lovely boy.”
Works Cited
Bonner, Michael. “They are friends and rivals at the same time.” Uncut, 350, April 2026, p.98.
Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Volume One. Simon & Schuster, 2004.
—. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon & Schuster, 2022. Hajdu, David. Positively 4th Street. Bloomsbury, 2001.
Harrison, George. ‘Brief Encounter.’ The Telegraph, 56, Winter 1997, pp.126-7. Maconie, Stuart.
With a Little Help from their Friends. Harper North 2026.
Mellers, Wilfred. A Darker Shade of Pale. Faber, 1984.
Miles, Barry. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now. Henry Holt, 1997.
Salewicz, Chris. ‘Paul McCartney Interview.’ Q, October 1986.
