Penelope Fitzgerald identified the social message Evelyn Waugh wished to convey as: I am bored; you are frightened.
The same might be said of Bob Dylan. Though unlike Waugh in most other respects, his presence can be intimidating, his disdain curbed only by indifference.
This was never more true than in the summer of 1964. Dylan had recently established himself as the most hip, most gritty, most forceful performer on the planet. Yet the title of most popular belonged elsewhere.
Like most people in America, Dylan first heard the Beatles in January 1964. They had soon become unavoidable. ‘We were driving through Colorado, we had the radio on, and eight of the top 10 songs were Beatles songs … “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”, all those early ones,’ he recalled.
Dylan immediately recognised that they were not purely a commercial phenomenon, bound up with screaming girls: ‘They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid … I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.’
The meeting between these two musical superpowers was brokered by a journalist called Al Aronowitz. While the Beatles were staying at the Delmonico, Dylan was at home in Woodstock, in upstate New York. Aronowitz took a call from John Lennon, with whom he had become chummy.
‘Where is he?’
‘Who?’
‘Dylan.’
‘Oh, he’s up in Woodstock, but I can get him to come down.’
‘Do it!’
That evening, Dylan and Aronowitz dutifully pushed their way through the fans outside the hotel, accompanied by Dylan’s tour manager Victor Maymudes, who doubled as his dope-carrier. In the hospitality suite on the Beatles’ floor, Derek Taylor was busy entertaining some lesser celebrities, including the disc jockey Murray ‘The K’ Kaufman, the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary, but Dylan and his entourage were a cut above, so they were ushered into the Beatles’ suite without further ado.
They had just finished their room-service dinner when Dylan arrived. Brian Epstein acted as greeter: ‘I’m afraid we can only offer champagne.’ Dylan said he’d prefer cheap wine, but having established his no-nonsense credentials, gruffly agreed to make do with champagne.
The introductions were tentative. ‘Bob and the Beatles all needed room to swashbuckle,’ Aronowitz recalled, ‘but nobody wanted to step on anybody else’s ego.’
At once, the talk turned to drugs. The Beatles offered Purple Hearts, but Dylan declined, suggesting marijuana.
‘We’ve never smoked marijuana before,’ confessed Epstein.
‘But what about your song? The one about getting high?’ said Dylan.
‘Which song?’ asked John.
‘You know – “I get high! I get high!”’
John was driven to correct him, pointing out that the chorus to ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ is not ‘I get high’, but ‘I can’t hide’. How, John wondered, would marijuana make them feel?
‘Good,’ said Dylan. He began to roll a joint, but was unexpectedly cack-handed.
Aronowitz looked on in despair. ‘Bob hovered unsteadily over the bowl as he stood at the table while he tried to lift the grass from the baggie with the fingertips of one hand so he could crush it into the leaf of rolling paper which he held in his other hand. In addition to the fact that Bob was a sloppy roller to begin with, what Bob had started drinking had already gotten to him.’
There were roughly twenty policemen stationed in the corridor outside, while waiters kept popping in and out. Dylan, Aronowitz and Maymudes felt that somewhere more discreet was required, so everyone crammed into one of the bedrooms.
Dylan lit the first joint, and passed it to John, who, always more cautious than he liked to appear, passed it on – ‘You try it!’ – to Ringo. It was, Aronowitz noted, an act that ‘instantly revealed the Beatles’ pecking order. Obviously Ringo was the low man on the totem pole.’
‘He’s my royal taster,’ explained John, confirming Aronowitz’s suspicions.
Ringo was unsure what to do, so Aronowitz talked him through the correct procedure: inhale deeply, hold it in your lungs for as long as possible, exhale. But he failed to add, ‘then pass it on’. As it became clear that Ringo considered the joint his to keep, Maymudes got down to rolling some more. Within minutes they had one each, and everybody was puffing away.
Paul was underwhelmed. ‘For about five minutes we went, “This isn’t doing anything,” so we kept having more.’ Suddenly, Ringo started giggling. It proved infectious. ‘His laughing looked so funny that the rest of us started laughing hysterically at the way Ringo was laughing hysterically. Soon, Ringo pointed at the way Brian Epstein was laughing, and we all started laughing hysterically at the way Brian was laughing.’
Aronowitz remembered Epstein saying, ‘I’m so high I’m on the ceiling,’ over and over again. Then he started looking at himself in the mirror, saying ‘Jew, Jew …’ It was, thought Paul, ‘as if he was finally sort of talking about the fact – “Oh, I’m Jewish. I forgot.”’
Later that evening, the British journalist Chris Hutchins returned from an evening out with Neil Aspinall. He was unlocking the door to his bedroom when Aspinall whispered, ‘Come and look at this.’
The two of them crept into the Beatles’ suite. ‘Seated on five chairs arranged in a line were the Fab Four and their manager Brian Epstein, all stoned. Every now and again, a man standing at one end of the line would push the closest Beatle off his chair and, in domino effect, each would knock the next one off, ending with Brian, who would collapse to the floor laughing helplessly, setting the others off. It was a surreal scene, made more bizarre by the fact that the man doing the pushing was Bob Dylan.’
Presently, Paul convinced himself that he had discovered the meaning of life, and started bustling around the suite looking for a pencil and paper to jot it down before he forgot. ‘I suddenly felt like a reporter, on behalf of my local newspaper in Liverpool. I wanted to tell people what it was.’ He instructed Mal Evans to follow him around the suite with a notebook, to inscribe his words of wisdom. Whenever the telephone rang, Dylan would answer it with the words, ‘This is Beatlemania here.’
The Beatles rang through to Derek Taylor in the suite next door, telling him to join them. Taylor found Epstein ‘reeling around, holding a flower’, telling him that ‘I MUST try it, this wonderful stuff that made everything seem to float upwards’.
‘We’ve been turned on,’ explained George. For the next quarter of an hour Taylor encountered ‘a smoky, murky muddle of unfamiliar expressions’ – ‘turned on’, ‘stoned’, ‘way out’ – peppered with the more commonplace ‘incredible’, ‘wow’, ‘man’, ‘fab’ and ‘gear’. It was clear to him that Bob Dylan was top dog, ‘thin and beaked, with the beady-eyed gaze of a little bird’.
The effect of Dylan’s visit on the Beatles was deep and long-lasting. Two months later they recorded ‘She’s a Woman’, which included John’s line ‘Turn me on when I get lonely’. By the time they came to film Help! in February 1965 they were, according to John, ‘smoking marijuana for breakfast … it was all glazed eyes and giggling all the time’. The following June they recorded ‘It’s Only Love’, which included the very words Dylan had misheard: ‘I get high’.
From then on, drugs references in their songs kept tumbling out – ‘riding so high’, ‘find me in my field of grass’, ‘because the wind is high, it blows my mind’. Most of them passed unnoticed at the time: only years later did Paul confess that his jaunty, upbeat ‘Got to Get You Into My Life’, with its tender, loving lyrics ‘I need you every single day of my life’ and ‘When I’m with you I want to stay there’, was in fact an ode to pot. By the time they came to record Sgt. Pepper, tracks free of drugs references were thin on the ground.
Like so many fans, John took steps to turn into his hero. His voice grew more rasping, his attitude more sarky, his lyrics more opaque. Years later, he told the photographer David Bailey about these replicant instincts. ‘He said to me, “Y’know, when I’ve discovered someone new, I tend to become that person. I want to soak myself in their stuff to such an extent that I have to be them.” When he first found Dylan, he said, he would dress like Dylan and only play his kind of music, till he kind of understood how it worked.’ During one recording session, George Martin had to ask John if he could try to sound less like Bob Dylan. ‘He wasn’t doing it deliberately. It was subconscious more than anything.’
Dylan seems to have enjoyed the Beatles’ company. Their friendship blossomed in a haze of dope. But there was never any question as to who was the master, and who the servants. Marianne Faithfull witnessed the Beatles greeting Dylan after they watched him perform at the Royal Albert Hall on 27 May 1966.
‘Dylan went into the room where the Beatles were sitting all scrunched up on the couch, all of them fantastically nervous. Lennon, Ringo, George and Paul, Lennon’s wife Cynthia and one or two roadies. Nobody said anything. They were waiting for the oracle to speak. But Dylan just sat down and looked at them as if they were all total strangers at a railway station. They were frozen in each other’s company. It wasn’t so much a matter of them being so cool as the fact that they were too young to be genuinely cool. Like teenagers, they were afraid of what others might think.’
Their subservience surprised her. ‘I thought, Jesus, how could anyone ever have thought these scared little boys were gods?’