Christopher K. Coffman. Clowns in the Burying Ground: The Grateful Dead, Literature, and the Limits of Philosophy. Duke University Press, 2026. 251 pp.

Review by Olivia Carter Mather, Chapman University

There are a few rock artists with both devoted long-term followings and an unconventional musical style that repels other listeners. Their repertoires establish a bedrock that, for fans, is both the center of the rock solar system and an alternate universe that critiques the assumptions of rock altogether. Others find their unpolished recordings to be an acquired taste. One of those artists is Bob Dylan, another is the Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead was a psychedelic rock band that emerged from the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s. Its members started out in folk, bluegrass, blues, jazz, and early rock ‘n’ roll. The Dead came of age in the mid-1960s Bay Area counterculture, itself an heir of the 1950s Beat poets and the CIA’s LSD program. In 1965, they pioneered psychedelic rock when they played for Ken Kesey’s acid tests and staged multi-media performances with visual artists. By 1970, the Dead had pivoted back toward folk and experimented with country on the albums Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. They recorded some of their most famous songs during this period (“Ripple,” “Truckin’,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Casey Jones”). Unlike other bands in their scene, the Dead was a musical collective based on the curiosity of its members (collectives don’t often cohere for long, but this one did.) Individual members specialized in side projects, collaborations, and unexpected musical skills (such as Jerry Garcia‘s competency at one of the most difficult string instruments, the pedal steel guitar, which he played on Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s famous “Teach Your Children,” among other tracks). The band was best known for the communal energy of their live performances that featured all their previous styles of music, though their concerts were not the large-scale spectacles of their arena rock contemporaries such as the Rolling Stones, Queen, or Boston. Extended jams, long and improvisatory medleys, guest musicians, and covers filled their set lists, earning the Dead’s place as the original “jam band.” Performances were open-ended: creating music that couldn’t be completed, exhausted, or finished.

In congruence with their music, the Dead’s lyrics are often incoherent, unbounded, or enigmatic (“Didn’t get to sleep last night till the morning came around” or “the shoe is on the hand it fits”). The Dead famously sang about folk tales, mysticism, drug trips, and outsider status, but as a new study demonstrates, their lyrics sourced the literary canon. In his 2026 book, Clowns in the Burying Ground: the Grateful Dead, Literature, and the Limits of Philosophy, Christopher K. Coffman shines a light on the band’s approach to words, showing how the Dead’s lyrics—fragmentary, paradoxical, at times disorienting—rework well-known texts in English literature. Coffman’s argument is that reading the band’s lyrics through the concept of the Romantic literary fragment reveals how they question the notion of the coherent subject. The book features one chapter on the Dead’s connections to Bob Dylan, and the rest of the book offers interpretations of the Dead that run parallel to possibilities for Dylan studies.

A scholar of English language and literature, Coffman rehearses a version of the “Romantic literary fragment” that comes from French post-structuralist philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, whose theory responds to a line of thought on subjectivity going back to Kant. The power of the literary fragment is not just in its ability to point to art as unfinished, but in its state of devolution to open new possibilities for creation. Such art presents as incomplete, incoherent, crumbling, fragmentary, or in ruins, all the while based on a compositional strategy that seeks new productivity: the fragment “falls short of achieving entire unity, but gestures toward the inexhaustible processes that underlie creative powers in general” (8). What this means first for the Dead and Dylan is that their lyrics, on the surface paradoxical, use allusion to make new meaning. It also means that their lyrics will point to their own fragmentary state as a way of mining liminal spaces for the origins of creativity. Both artists exhibit an understanding of the Romantic literary fragment as a tool for an updated critique of the post­war American subject. However, Coffman never mentions Derrida or the word “post-structuralism,” so it’s unclear how Coffman perceives post-structuralism more broadly.

Coffman has taken on lyricists with an unconventional approach to songwriting: the Dead collaborated with several lyricists in partnerships that blurred the boundaries of band membership. The Dead were not simply performing someone else’s songs (though they often covered songs by established artists, including Dylan). Their original songs arose out of a give-and-take between musicians and lyricists, with both types of artists knowledgeable in the other one’s craft. Although musicians Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir occasionally contributed lyrics, poet-lyricists Robert Hunter, John Perry Barlow, and Robert Peterson wrote most of the band’s famous songs. The book focuses on the work of Hunter, the only member of any band to earn induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a non-performer. Hunter’s compositions include, among others, “Ripple,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Dire Wolf,” and “Terrapin Station.”

At its most concrete, Clowns in the Burying Ground is about how Grateful Dead lyrics engage the literary tradition through allusion, topic, structure, and more. Much of their lyrics center on concepts such as play, transgression, the ephemeral, destruction vs. creativity, darkness, unease, and travel. Chapter 1 establishes the Dead’s connections to the Beat poetry scene in the Bay Area and the band’s friendships with figures such as Neal Cassady. Coffman’s interpretation of the song “The Other One” summarizes much of his argument about the Dead’s lyrics: this songwriting “is not only a search for the liminal zones that allow for social reconfiguration, but also a means to subjective redefinition” (53).

Chapter 2 offers masterful discussions of songs like “Dire Wolf,” “Friend of the Devil,” and others to display how the Dead adopted Gothic horror’s critiques of society and the human subject. This chapter analyzes allusions to multiple texts in the larger gothic tradition, including Shelley’s Frankenstein, (“Just like Mary Shelley, Just like Frankenstein” from “Ramble on Rose”); Goethe’s Faust (demonic dogs and the “devil’s bargain” concept in “Friend of the Devil”); and Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (Hunter documented its impact, in movie form, on “Dire Wolf”). This chapter also notes individual members’ fascination with fantasy, sci-fi, and horror literature as a background explanation for less musical aspects of the band’s history, such as their lightning bolt logo, their powerful but unstable sound system, and their soundman’s lab-like production of LSD.

The third chapter culls from multiple Shakespearean sources, and it is here that Coffman first connects Dylan to the Dead’s imaginary literary reservoir. The band’s most explicit references to Shakespeare occur in two of the Dylan songs they covered, “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” and “Desolation Row.” The Shakespearean reference in “Desolation Row,” is of course, Ophelia (“Now Ophelia, she’s ‘neath the window / For her I feel so afraid”). Dylan’s Ophelia is set at Romeo and Juliet’s balcony, and instead of meeting a tragic end as in Hamlet, she is tormented by her own curiosity for the abject. Coffman’s comments on the song are worth quoting at length, because they speak to the fragment as central to the interpretation of lyrics:

While [Dylan’s] adaptations honor the literary sources that are their intertextual forebears, the adaptations proceed in a highly selective manner. The verse of “Desolation Row” in which Dylan offers his vignette of Ophelia, for example, approaches the language, images, and performative dynamics of Shakespeare’s works as portions of a common fund on which he may draw in service of his own compositions. These several fragments of image, dialogue, and dramatic attitude claimed from Shakespeare’s oeuvre here serve the individual work that is “Desolation Row,” but they are by no means merely backward-facing allusions. They are, instead, reaching in all directions at once, taking shape not only in relation to the predecessor texts that undergird them, but also interacting even more immediately with the maelstrom of other fragments of narratives and lyrics that “Desolation Row” presents. In employing such an approach, Dylan’s intertextual uses of Shakespeare’s language and dramatic action—both in their simple factuality and in their exploration of terms for engagement with the earlier poet’s corpus—take shape in relation to the other fragments among which they are presented, highlighting the process of fragmentation itself and paying tribute to the fundamental productive energy described by the aesthetics of the Romantic fragment. (100)

“Desolation Row” is thus a surface-level example of how the Romantic fragment works, all the more important because of the Dead’s interest in the song and because, as Coffman substantiates later in the chapter, the Dead conversed with Shakespeare in more complex ways. After explaining songs that recall King Lear, The Tempest, King John, and Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott,” Coffman spends about ten pages of Chapter 3 on the Dead’s “Althea.” Already complicated through Shakespeare’s use of the classical myth in 2 Henry VI and 2 Henry IV, Hunter’s Althea synthesizes her literary history into a complex new figure. Hunter puts her into a modern conversation with the song’s “I,” its presumably male subject. She references Hamlet’s soliloquy as well as the graveyard scene’s gravediggers, complicated by Hunter as “clown[s] in the burying ground,” an allusion to the near ubiquity of the fool in Shakespeare’s plays. The ambiguities here serve a purpose: “the songwriter, in allowing the characters of Hamlet, Ophelia, and Althea’s interlocutor to bleed into one another, as does Dylan with Romeo and Ophelia in ‘Desolation Row,’ clearly employs Shakespearean material to stage advice that will spur the song’s first speaker from dreamlike hesitation into action” (112).

The lyrics of a song like “Althea” confirm that Dead songs interacted with English literature in a complex way, yet the song also exposes the limits of literary criticism when applied to popular music. As with many Dead recordings, Garcia’s vocal was mixed to be “back” in the mix. Combined with Garcia’s relaxed vocal delivery, this produced a vocal whose words are occasionally indecipherable, or at best, in competition with other sounds on the recording, thus downplaying lexical meaning for the listener. Coffman mines meanings that don’t present as apparent because the lyrics themselves aren’t clearly communicated. Musical style thus gains more leverage in a listener’s impression even more than if all the words were easy to perceive. In the case of “Althea,” the musical style pushes against Coffman’s interpretation that “Hunter . . . follows Shakespeare in interweaving intimations of wisdom uncovered in unexpected places with a sense of urgency and dread” (111). The first studio recording of the song (from 1980) features a twangy, clean, electric guitar line in imitation of a pedal steel guitar. The chirpy sound of the electric lead, moderate tempo, and stripped-down arrangement evoke outlaw country, specifically the 1970s recordings of Waylon Jennings. Some of the guitar techniques (specifically the hammer-on) mirror country guitar playing in general and country-inflected 70s rock like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” from 1974. The music has a laidback feel, not a “sense of urgency and dread.” This is an unexpected backdrop for a song about asking advice from a composite Althea.

Read through the lens of country or southern rock, lines like “now cool down, boy / Settle back easy, Jim” and “Ain’t nobody messin’ with you but you” connote either white working-class speech or African American speech (both of which show up in roots styles also loved by the Dead.) Furthermore, we might look for country lyrical tropes such as rambling, which “Althea” references directly. The “I” tells Althea that “he’s a “roving sign” who’s “born to be a bachelor.” Unable to stay put in one place, a rambler naturally would be “feeling lost” and “lacking in some direction,” or running away from trouble (“I told Althea that treachery / Was tearing me limb from limb”). Althea herself then plays the part of the “good woman” who offers comfort (“You’re gonna want a bed to lay your head / And a little sympathy”) without complaining about his lack of commitment to her. Yet all of this is too much for the rambler, who, right before reminding her that he’s a “roving sign” muses upon her words (“The time has come to weigh those things”) and discerns that he needs to move on (“This space is getting hot”). The song recalls the rambler themes in hits from the late 1960s through the 1970s (John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind,” made famous by Glen Campbell in 1967; the Allman Brothers’s “Ramblin’ Man” from 1973; and 1979’s “Goodbye Stranger” by Supertramp). Other Dead songs feature rambling prominently (“Friend of the Devil,” “Truckin’,” and “Black-Throated Wind”) as do songs they covered (“Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” “El Paso,” and “Me and Bobby McGee”). Rambling in Grateful Dead lyrics probably has at least two sources, the folk, blues, and country songbook as well as Kerouac’s On the Road, certainly known by Hunter and the rest of the band.

Chapter 4 is where Coffman addresses the multilayered relationship between the Dead and Dylan. To this point having demonstrated the robust literary qualities of the Dead, Coffman here positions them level with Dylan. Titled, “On the Heels of Rimbaud: Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and the Nature of the Literary,” the chapter summarizes the artists’ interactions and direct consequences on each other. Dylan admired the Dead and shared billings with them (or individual members) from the 1970s through the 1990s. These moments of official interaction illuminate how the Dead “left its mark on Dylan, and in a manner that reshaped his attitudes toward touring and songwriting, activities that for him were rooted in his feelings about his own music” (128). Coffman’s take on Dylan’s mid-80s period is that aside from lower album sales and concert attendance, Dylan was discouraged about his relationship to artistic production. This was partially a crisis of subjectivity, where Dylan felt alienated from his own music and from the folk and blues he had always loved. He was also burnt out on touring, having borne the expectations of an entire generation for several decades. Dylan found kindred spirits in the Dead, especially in Jerry Garcia, who carried a similar burden (Garcia was seen by many as the leader of countercultural music). Jamming with the Dead resurrected Dylan’s first loves of folk and blues, musically bringing him back home. Critics and fans have long recognized—and celebrated—the Dylan-Dead kinship; statistics are easily available on how and when the artists collaborated and covered each other’s songs, but Coffman’s fifteen-page discussion of the relationship collects the key facts in one place. Coffman credits the Dead for reviving Dylan’s career, an argument that he supports through historical accounts, quotes from Dylan, and Dylan’s embrace of touring in his late career. In a metacritical move, Coffman also examines Dylan’s commentary on “Truckin’” in The Philosophy of Modern Song, offering more proof of the Dead’s multi-faceted clout.

Having convinced the reader of the Dead’s significance for Dylan’s return to himself, the Dylan chapter turns to French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. Coffman’s contention is that the Dead’s lyrics interact with Rimbaldian sensibilities much like Dylan’s do, and that the Romantic fragment is the method. The Dead’s lyricists consumed Rimbaud’s ideas directly (Hunter was highly conscious of Rimbaud’s work and his philosophy of sensory disorientation) and indirectly through their knowledge of Dylan’s lyrics. Coffman’s objectives here are more exploratory and less refined into precise reasoning, though it’s clear that in comparing the Dead to Dylan along Rimbaldian lines, he’s bolstering his claims about their seriousness as artists. The chapter opens with quotes from Hunter and Garcia praising Dylan for legitimizing rock through “respectability,” “authority,” and “being literate in music” (121). In this second half of the chapter, Coffman analyzes songs of both artists along three Rimbaldian lines. All three ways relate to the concept of the Romantic fragment.

First is Rimbaud’s “derangement of the senses,” the belief that to be a poet, one must consciously disrupt, dysregulate, and disorder sensory experience. Such surrender generates a new freedom of creativity. Coffman quotes a verse from “Mr. Tambourine Man” as an example of Dylan’s Rimbaldian rite of passage (“Take me for a trip upon your magic swirling ship / My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip”). The subject has lost grounding literally—he’s on a ship not under his control and perhaps not controlled by anyone as it swirls. His senses don’t provide any useful knowledge. Furthermore, he’s not afraid of disorientation, but seeks it out as he “promises to go under [a spell].” As in Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat,” the experience of disorientation happens through an encounter with art (poetry for Rimbaud, music for “Mr. Tambourine Man”). Coffman then presents two Dead songs (“The Music Never Stopped” and “Franklin’s Tower”) as equally concerned with overwhelming sensory experience, in this case, experiences of sound. In a section ostensibly about how both artists were interested in Rimbaldian disorientation, Coffman writes, “the Grateful Dead join Dylan in recognizing that experience beyond the pale is tied to the power of art, and that the artists—whether figured as a boat, the Tambourine Man, or a musician in ‘a band out on the highway’—both profits from extraordinary conditions and encourages others to share them” (142). In other words, the work of the poet is to enter liminal spaces bravely with the purpose of inviting others to do so. Coffman also identifies that it’s music that does the work, an argument that needs further exploration.

Indeed, several other Dead songs, not specified by Coffman, do this work of inviting the listener into a sensory experience. The most literal of these is “Uncle John’s Band,” where the singer asks us to “come with” to “hear Uncle John’s band,” a band whose audience is nature (“the tide”). The lyrics “beg” the listener to request a song to be played on the violin, yet the musician doesn’t know how to play the song (“how does the song go?”). Furthermore, the song promises a resolution at the end of the concert (“he’s come to take his children home”), yet the music at the end of the original recording challenges a resolution. After spending most of its time using the basic chords of G major, C major, and D major (with occasional minor chords in A minor and E minor), the band adds an outro that almost sounds like a different song. While hovering on D minor (an unexpected shift given the song’s solid grounding in the chords previously mentioned), the singers end the song on nonsense syllables like “da” and “dee.” The song aligns with Rimbaud’s ideals in both words and music. Analyzing such a song would demonstrate Coffman’s link between Rimbaud and the fragment: “adoption of a mode of seeing and being that prioritizes the intense, revelatory moment . . . is eminently amenable to the Romantic notion that the fragment nestles traditional assumptions and perceptions in a matter that opens the way to the emergence of beauty and truth” (138).

After aligning the Dead’s lyrics with Rimbaud’s “disorder of the senses,” Coffman progresses to Rimbaud’s critique of authenticity, that the self must be broken down, fragmented, to become visionary. As Coffman explains,

Rimbaud’s declaration that the self has become foreign coincides with the Romantic view that the poetic fragment is not only an entrance into the space of literary productivity, but also an opening to the interplay between the dissolution of the former self and the recognition of possible selves. This limen is the point at which exchanges transpire between creation and death, and it is the point from which the subject creates itself. To recognize that the self emerges from these exchanges between destruction and creative power allows one to register the internal and external constraints to self-realization. This perspective can be that which affords the grounds for critique, whether of others or oneself. (142)

Coffman highlights songs that betray the voice as divided against itself in Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Visions of Johanna,” and the Dead’s “Cream Puff War,” “Truckin’,” “Wharf Rat,” and “Black-Throated Wind.” In all of these, songwriters challenge the self as whole, sturdy, or stable. As Coffman argues about “Black-Throated Wind,” risking dissolution is the first step in rebuilding the Rimbaldian self and providing a space for creative works to emerge. It’s in this section that Coffman engages Timothy Hampton’s discussion of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” but only to cite Dylan’s switch from external to internal questioning. He does not credit Hampton for applying Rimbaud’s self-undoing to the act of creation.

Coffman’s last point about Rimbaud is that both Dylan and the Dead adopted his experiments with language. Shifts in perspective of the speaker, confusing turns of phrase, and stark images juxtaposed against each other are all present in the work of all three artists. Coffman focuses on the seeming incoherence of vibrant juxtaposed images, manifest in Dylan’s “Desolation Row” and the Dead’s “Dark Star” (“Reason tatters / the forces tear loose / from the axis”), “What’s Become of the Baby,” and “China Cat Sunflower.” (Other Dylan songs that come to mind are “My Back Pages,” “Chimes of Freedom,” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”) The connection to Rimbaud is in the way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The accumulation of symbolist imagery builds a picture of a fragmented subject, coherent as a montage. In this way, poets can create a disordered subject, but through the use of language. This last application of Rimbaldian fragmentation perhaps has the most potential for Dylan studies.

A few oversights need to be noted regarding Chapter 4. The first is in Coffman’s explanation of how Dylan first encountered Rimbaud. He relies on Robert Shelton, who claims that he suggested Rimbaud to Dylan on several occasions only to discover that Dylan had likely known Rimbaud the whole time. How and when poets encounter important texts is rarely certain, but this anecdote further mystifies Dylan, while Dylan’s own recollection, whether true or not, seems clear. In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan credits Suze Rotolo, and he even cites Rimbaud’s “I is someone else” letter, the touchstone of symbolist poetry. A second oversight is the cadre of literary studies on Dylan. Coffman does discuss Hampton, but only a little, and doesn’t mention work by any other Dylan scholar besides Anne-Marie Mai.

In Chapter 5 (“Like an Angel: James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Robert Hunter’s Modernist Influence”), Coffman shifts to literary modernism. He accentuates two ways the Dead intersected with authors like James Joyce and Rainer Maria Rilke: 1) Joyce’s modernism shaped Dead lyrics (in particular the 1973 album Wake of the Flood); and 2) Hunter’s non-Dead work can be explained through Rainer Maria Rilke’s preoccupations with the place of the muse, the poet’s troubled relationship to transcendence, and poetry’s ability to enact transformation. Both efforts move Coffman’s overall argument forward, as he broadens the literary world of the Dead through his analysis. The effect of this chapter is to submit Robert Hunter as deserving of literary attention along the lines of Dylan studies. Dylan himself did that work, of course, in his numerous songwriting collaborations with Hunter, starting in the 80s.

The book’s conclusion suggests new lines of inquiry that, if realized, would produce a diverse and disparate field of Dead studies. Coffman identifies five lines of inquiry: 1) the literary influences of Ken Kesey and Kurt Vonnegut on Dead lyrics; 2) anonymous sources that fuel the Dead’s and Dylan’s songs (the Bible, nursery, rhymes, and folk songs); 3) the Beats poets; 4) the work of other artists in the Dead’s community not reviewed in the book; and 5) the poetry of Hunter, Barlow, and Peterson not treated in Coffman’s study. Coffman then reverses the reasoning of the book to show how the Dead affected contemporary writers. This thesis is mentioned at the beginning of the book but only takes hold at the end. The band was, of course, the subject of texts like Thomas Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and a synecdochical stand-in for the counterculture in writing by Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, and others, but more to the core of Coffman’s work are the authors that structured their texts around the idea of the fragment as a way of opening new imaginary worlds. Here he includes authors like George R.R. Martin, Richard Brautigan, and Douglas Copeland, the last of which he underscores in a discussion of Polaroids From the Dead. He describes how the character Columbia receives fragmentary memories of her mother’s life, and how these stories suggest other, still incomplete stories that will carry into the future. At the end of the Conclusion, Coffman lands on the idea that ties the book together: what the Dead have done, through Hunter (mainly), is not simply receive guidance from the literary canon, but contribute to it by singing about the complexities of the poetic act itself, all while living the lives of Rimbaldian sensory disorientation. It’s an implicit appeal to apply the forces of Dylan studies to the Dead.

Clowns in the Burying Ground sparks new questions about creativity for Bob Dylan’s work. The most tangible avenue of investigation is Dylan’s songwriting output with Robert Hunter. This body of work comprises most of an album (eight of ten tracks on 2009’s Together Through Life) plus three songs (“Silvio” and “Ugliest Girl in the World” from 1988’s Down in the Groove and “Duquesne Whistle” from 2012’s Tempest). This total of eleven recorded songs may be the most prolific of Dylan’s lyrical songwriting collaborations. Such scrutiny could be broadened to all Dylan’s post-1987 songs due to the Dead’s potential impact, approaching his recent poetry through the lens of the Dead’s version of the Romantic literary fragment. The Dead were also interested in juxtapositions, incoherence, disorder, exposing inauthenticity, and conversation with English literature, if not with the bite of some of Dylan’s most famous work.

Lastly, Coffman’s study prompts a shift in our view of Dylan’s process and inspiration. The default is to bill Dylan as a soloist who only dabbled in collaboration. If the Dead catalyzed Dylan’s reorientation, we are forced to reconsider the solitary poet. What if, as a thought experiment, we center his partnerships, whether in songwriting, the recording studio, and on stage? This might balance the magnetic pull of his singular figure as heroic, original, and independent, enabling us to see another side of his (collaborative) creativity.

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 4^th 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.