There’s a reason many people regard the 1960s as the best decade for music—with figures like Bob Dylan and bands like The Beatles reigning supreme, it’s difficult to find another era with an insurmountably high standard of innovation. Their impact almost renders any suspected feuding obsolete, but with sourness comes another deep-rooted quality many musicians feel reluctant to admit: admiration.
Most of the time, it’s The Beatles’ adoration of Dylan that is most noteworthy, especially considering they became enamoured with the cynical troubadour’s craft from the moment they crossed paths in the early 1960s. The two entities would embark on years-long competitiveness, likely on account of their parallel lines, but Dylan influenced the work of the band more than anyone else, especially when it came to the Lennon-McCartney writing partnership.
You can’t ignore the fact that McCartney once referred to Dylan as the band’s “hero”, nor can you dismiss the countless times you can practically hear the singer’s voice coming through on several Fab Four songs like a ghostwriter always lurking on the sidelines. “I could feel myself climbing a spiral walkway as I was talking to Dylan,” Paul McCartney once said. “I felt like I was figuring it all out, the meaning of life.”
The most prominent example of this crossover is the band’s 1965 effort Rubber Soul, which saw them dabbling in more folk-rock influences, reflecting many of the genre’s forward-thinking characteristics already established by Dylan and works like The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited. One song in particular, ‘Norweigan Wood’, carried almost the exact same Dylan-esque finger-picking and melodic charm, with John Lennon leaning into the art of storytelling more than ever before.
It was always assumed that the band utilised Dylan’s qualities for ‘Norweigan Wood’ and Rubber Soul in a broader sense, and McCartney even once said that the song was “John doing Dylan.” At the time, both he and Lennon were listening to a lot of Dylan’s material, which captivated their attention and significantly altered how they approached their own music. Dylan, of course, noticed the similarities, later writing ‘4th Time Around’ as a direct parody of their earlier effort, which made some of the members feel uneasy.
According to George Harrison, however, ‘Norweigan Wood’ was a direct play on many of Dylan’s tropes, and all he wanted to present with ‘4th Time Around’ was proof that music always came full circle. As he explained to Guitar World: “To my mind, ‘4th Time Around’ was about how John and Paul, from listening to Bob’s early stuff, had written ‘Norwegian Wood’.” He added: “Judging from the title, it seemed as though Bob had listened to that and wrote the same basic song again, calling it ‘4th Time Around’. The title suggests that the same basic tune kept bouncing around over and over again.”
Dylan later presented the song to Lennon directly, which likely indicated two things about his decision to address the similarities—firstly, that his flavour of humour meant he could never sit out an opportunity to extend his playfulness, especially if it made the members of The Beatles squirm with paranoia. And secondly, he didn’t mind being a significant influence, especially not on the biggest band in the world—he revelled in it, enjoying the band’s efforts as much as they did his.
