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New book details the long and winding road trod by the Beatles and Bob Dylan
Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other — and the World
by Jim Windolf
Simon and Schuster, 400 pages, $30
I ran into a neighbor the other day and we got to talking and he asked me what I was working on at the moment. I told him I was reviewing a new book about the Beatles and Bob Dylan – the first full-length treatment exploring the relationships between the Fab Four and the bard from northern Minnesota and their influence upon each other. My neighbor replied, “I would never have thought to put Dylan and the Beatles together. It seems like they existed in wholly different universes.”
That’s when I realized the full extent and significance of Jim Windolf’s Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other – and the World. “Well then this book is for you – and for people like you who never made the connections between them,” I told him.
For some fans, the links between Dylan and the Beatles are and have always been readily apparent. From a young age, they all got bitten by the rock ‘n’ roll bug, particularly in the form of Little Richard. In his high school yearbook, Dylan wrote that his ambition was “to join Little Richard.” For the Beatles – and especially for Paul McCartney – Little Richard’s sound served as a template, powering “She Loves You” to the top of the UK pop charts via Paul’s version of what Windolf called Little Richard’s “vocal trademark, the rough falsetto whooooo.” When the Beatles played their final full concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco in 1966, their last song was Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” Windolf informs us that in the 1970s, Richard’s “Lucille” was the song Paul launched into while auditioning musicians. And in 1988, when the Beatles were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, George Harrison said in his acceptance speech on behalf of the group, “Thank you very much, especially all the rock ‘n’ rollers – especially Little Richard. It’s all his fault, really.”
Windolf – an editor at The New York Times who has published articles, reviews, essays and humor pieces in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, New York magazine, Rolling Stone and other publications – digs deep into the archives to come up with some new and surprising biographical facts about his subjects, as well as offering some surprising interpretations of how Dylan and the Beatles addressed each other indirectly – and sometimes quite directly – in song.
By early 1964, the Beatles had worn out the grooves on Dylan’s first two albums by listening to them repeatedly while in Paris doing a concert residency. “We all went potty on Dylan,” Lennon later said. Three years hence, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, whose cover collage was chock-full of portrayals of artists, actors, thinkers, sports figures, comedians, gurus and other pop culture notables. As Windolf notes, standing tall above all others in the topmost row was a relatively diminutive figure in real life – Bob Dylan.
Dylan could not help but hear (and enjoy) the Beatles on his car radio while driving cross-country with friends. And the years following their introduction to each other’s music saw Dylan and the Beatles meet on a number of occasions, first brought together by their mutual acquaintance, journalist Al Aronowitz, who was also responsible for supplying the marijuana that turned a summit meeting into a riotous party. Windolf quotes Aronowitz saying that he was “a proud and happy shadchen, a Jewish matchmaker, dancing at the princely wedding I’d arranged.” (Yiddish also peppered Dylan’s vocabulary. Speaking of his “Ballad in Plain D,” a nasty song about a girlfriend’s sister, Dylan said years later, “That one, I look back at and I say, ‘I must have been a real schmuck to write that.’”)
The Beatles went on to attend two Dylan concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, and Lennon began writing songs that showed the lyrical and sonic influence of Dylan, including “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” and “Norwegian Wood.”
Windolf makes a strong case that “Nowhere Man,” written by Lennon, was the first Beatles song having nothing to do with romance. “In this regard, he was catching up with Dylan, who had written and recorded dozens of songs on subjects other than love.” Windolf goes on to compare the title character of “Nowhere Man” to that of Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” the latter’s clueless “Mr. Jones” sensing that “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.”
This dynamic of exchange, with the Beatles responding to Dylan’s work, continued through the their final album, 1969’s Abbey Road, whose penultimate track, written by Lennon, was “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” whose key phrase, “I want you / I want you so bad…” was lifted right from Dylan’s 1966 hit, “I Want You,” in which the refrain is, “I want you, I want you, I want you so bad.”
Dylan returned the favor, alluding to the Beatles in several songs. In his 1965 song, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” he sang, “I ran right outside and I hopped inside a cab / I went out the other door, this Englishman said, ‘Fab.’” And Dylan wrote another playful answer song called “Fourth Time Around” to the Beatles’ very Dylanesque song “Norwegian Wood” in 1966. In 2004, in concert in North Carolina, Dylan sang new lyrics to his song “Tears of Rage,” including the lines: “I’ve never been to Strawberry Fields / I’ve never been to Penny Lane,” mentioning two Beatles songs.
The relationship was not, however, perfect, and after years of seemingly drawing creative inspiration from Dylan, Lennon seemingly grew tired of or frustrated with him. In several early songs from his post-Beatles solo career, Lennon’s tone changed from respectful to dismissive. In the anti-war anthem, “Give Peace a Chance,” he referenced “Bobby Dylan” — slyly infantilizing him — in a litany of names of counterculture figures including Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. In his song “God,” he announced that he “didn’t believe’ in “Zimmerman,” using Dylan’s birth name — a possible instance of Lennon’s lifelong case of generalized antisemitism rearing its ugly head.
Lennon explained the move thusly: “Because Dylan is bullshit. Zimmerman is his name.” (To be fair, Lennon also sang that he didn’t believe in “Beatles.”) But the possible antisemitism continued with Lennon’s response to Dylan’s gospel-era hit “Gotta Serve Somebody,” a nasty answer song called “Serve Yourself,” saying “there’s somethin’ missing in this God Almighty stew, and it’s your goddamn mother you dirty little git.”
(The greatest victim of Lennon’s antisemitism, however, was Beatles manager Brian Epstein, whom Lennon teased mercilessly for being gay and Jewish. Yet somehow, when it came time to hire a new business manager after Epstein’s death by accidental drug overdose, Lennon’s candidate was Allen Klein, who graduated from Weequahic High School in New Jersey in 1950, alongside his classmate Philip Roth.)
Despite the apparent rancor, during the lengthy January 1969 rehearsal sessions portrayed in the Peter Jackson documentary film, Get Back, the Beatles jammed on parts of many songs by other artists, none more so than the 15 by Dylan. By this time, the Dylan-Beatles center of gravity had shifted to George Harrison, who had spent the previous Thanksgiving holiday hanging out with Dylan and members of The Band in Woodstock, N.Y., where he started out co-writing songs with Dylan. (Windolf mentions an attempt by Dylan and Lennon to write a song together, but no tape or manuscript has ever surfaced.) When Harrison’s first solo album, All Things Must Pass, was released in 1971, the opening track was a Dylan-Harrison co-write, “I’d Have You Anytime.” And the album also included an early version of Dylan’s “If Not for You.”
At a press conference on the Isle of Wight, where he was to perform in August 1969, Dylan claimed that the Beatles asked him to work with them. “I love the Beatles and I think it would be a good idea to do a jam session,” he said.
While such a jam session never took place, Dylan did invite George Harrison to join him in the studio several times throughout the years. In 2021, Columbia Records released 1970, a three-disc archival set including the complete recording session from May 1, 1970, when Harrison joined Dylan at Columbia’s Studio B in New York. Dylan also famously came out of relative seclusion to take part in Harrison’s benefit concerts for Bangladesh in August 1971. And Dylan realized his lifelong dream of submersing himself in a band when he took part in the 1998-1990 recording sessions of the Traveling Wilburys, a supergroup consisting of Dylan, Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne. (Tom Petty once said, “George quoted Bob like people quote scripture.”)
Windolf’s book is slightly marred by a few errors and interpretative attempts that needlessly call his analytical credibility into question. He refers to the electric backing band that Dylan toured the world with in 1965-66 as a “four-piece band,” but it was, in fact, always a five-piece band, almost entirely composed of musicians who would morph into the proto-Americana group The Band. He also writes that Dylan’s song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” was “based on the true story of a Black housemaid who was killed in 1963 by her rich white employer, William Zanzinger.” In fact, the real-life guilty party was named William Zantzinger. Dylan used his poetic license to change the name to Zanziger in the lyrics for better poetic assonance (and possibly for legal reasons).
Windolf also claims that Dylan “preferred that the people he encountered not see him as a Jew, and the Dylan name helped him skirt the issue of ethnicity at a time when antisemitism was all too common.” That’s a common take, but one contradicted by the fact that one of the very first original songs Dylan sang in coffeehouses was “Talkin’ Hava Negilah Blues.” Why would someone trying to build a wall between his Jewish heritage and a made-up all-American identity choose to write and play such a song publicly? Plus, Dylan wrote several early songs that refer to Biblical stories (“When the Ship Comes In”) and the Shoah (“Masters of War”).
While changing one’s name in show business had at one time been an attempt to assimilate, simplifying an ethnic name or simply shortening it or making it catchier was a common show-business practice (and still is today). Even one of the Beatles chose to “jazz” up his name: Richard Starkey became Ringo Starr. And Richard Penniman wasn’t trying to fool anyone about being Black by calling himself Little Richard.
Nevertheless, Windolf makes a convincing case that Dylan and the Beatles played off each other in many ways, in and out of their music, such that their achievements overlapped in real time and continued to impact their lives and songs for decades to come. And, along with that, to shape and mold the very essence of popular culture for the last 60-plus years.
The post New book details the long and winding road trod by the Beatles and Bob Dylan appeared first on The Forward.
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This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway
(JTA) — Earlier this year Nadav Lapid, the award-winning Israeli dissident filmmaker, traveled with his son to Marseille for a screening of his latest film. He fell in love.
“This city reminded me of Tel Aviv, in a way, with the beach and everything,” he recounted Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — referring to the city he no longer lives in, having built a career with movies that take sharp aim at what he calls the “moral abyss” of Israeli society. When a Marseille film festival then invited him to serve on its jury for its upcoming installment in July, he readily accepted.
Then the boycotts started. Last month around a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the upcoming Marseille International Film Festival over Lapid’s planned participation because, they said, he had accepted funding from the Israeli government to support his work. (Lapid’s movies, including his latest, have received funding from Israel’s film fund.) Following this, according to the accounts of both Lapid and the festival’s director, the festival had second thoughts about him serving on the jury.
While the festival offered him the opportunity to participate in a public master class instead, Lapid said, the protesters hadn’t relented: “It’s not enough for these people.”
Frustrated, the director earlier this week decided to pull out of the festival altogether. He’s not happy about it.
“To make people like myself the enemy when the actual state of things is so terrible, it’s insanity. It’s stupidity,” he told JTA. “For them, the highest triumph of the Palestinian cause is if they will cancel my master class in Marseille? I think it’s pathetic.”
Lapid has received a groundswell of support this week: Natalie Portman and hundreds of other film-industry figures have signed open letters criticizing the boycotts against him. While he’s uncomfortable with being in the spotlight for reasons unrelated to his films, Lapid said he’s pleased with this outcome.
“You could have composed an unbelievable cinematic program from only the filmmakers that texted me during the last hour,” he said.
Even so, the filmmaker says, he’s now unsure if he is still welcome in France as a dissident Israeli.
“I asked myself whether they would like me to stop doing movies, or to leave France,” he told JTA. Elsewhere, he’s described himself as “homeless.”
It’s the latest unspooling of painful dynamics around artistic boycotts of artists and institutions seen by the left as normalizing Israel. Last month another French cultural figure, the Jewish comics artist Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”), faced calls to boycott his presence at a literary festival, also in Marseille. In its justification, a pro-Palestinian artist collective, pushing an Instagram post reading “Zionists out of our city,” cited Sfar’s signing of an open letter last year that argued a Palestinian state should not be recognized unless Hamas could be disarmed and Gaza’s Israeli hostages freed.
In recent months, in addition to broader boycotts of the Israeli film and TV industry, several leading cultural critics of Israel — both Jewish and not — have been targeted as well. Those include bestselling author Sally Rooney for publishing a Hebrew-language translation of her novel with a left-wing Israeli publisher (some prominent activists accused her of exploiting a “loophole” in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel); Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart for speaking at Tel Aviv University; and Jewish author Joshua Leifer for associating with a “Zionist” rabbi at a book event.
In Lapid’s case, the group organizing against him, La Palestine Sauvera Le Cinéma, argued that “Nadav Lapid is not being targeted because of his Israeli nationality.”
Instead, the collective asserted, their objection was due to Lapid having accepted funding from Israel to complete his latest film, “Yes!”; the fact that the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as an Israeli co-production and competed for Israel’s highest film awards; and Lapid’s past participation in an Israeli film festival in Paris.
“The cultural boycott does not target artists because of their nationality or personal opinions,” the filmmakers wrote, in French, in a blog post. “What is at issue here is the reality of their integration into the institutional and political structures of the Israeli state.”
For Lapid, whose new movie follows Israeli musicians hired to write an openly genocidal post-Oct. 7 anthem for their nation, this argument doesn’t hold water. Lapid has long been critical of cultural boycotts, including BDS. Such measures, he told JTA, are a form of “dogmatic Stalinism” and don’t “move one piece of sand” in Israel.
“I became a test case of purity,” he mused.
Others agree. More than 350 entertainment industry figures signed the first of two open letters in the French newspaper Le Monde backing him, which was published Sunday.
“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” the letter reads, in French, decrying a “campaign of intimidation” against Lapid while also noting what the signatories said was the “genocidal logic” of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Among this letter’s signatories were Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, the Oscar-winning team behind “Anatomy of a Fall”; Harari is Jewish and a critic of Israel himself. Arnaud Desplechin, a French filmmaker who often features Jewish characters in his work, also signed. Other signers include acclaimed directors Claire Denis, Mati Diop, and Kleber Mendonça Filho; Romanian director Radu Jude, whose films have explored his country’s complicity in the Holocaust; and Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar.
A second open letter, published on Monday, calls the campaign against Lapid an “intellectual failure” and states, “No matter what crimes a state may commit, no one should be reduced to a passport.” It was signed by a smaller cohort of 10 names, including Portman; French-Jewish director Rebecca Zlotowski; and Oscar-winning filmmakers Jacques Audiard and Michel Hazanavicius.
Like Lapid, Portman — an Israeli-American actress who is one of the most prominent Jews in Hollywood — is a longtime critic of the Israeli government and opponent of the BDS movement.
Creative Community For Peace, a pro-Israel entertainment group, said Wednesday its members also oppose the boycott of Lapid, adding that Israel “funds, screens, and honors films that challenge its leaders, criticize its society, and engage openly with its most difficult debates.”
Unusually, the Marseille festival’s own director, Tsveta Dobreva, also signed one of the open letters in support of Lapid after she appeared to acquiesce to the earlier demands to pull him from the jury.
In an email, Dobreva told JTA her festival “fully supports Nadav Lapid,” saying that she had removed him from the jury out of concern he would be targeted at the event. She did not believe she had “agreed to the boycotters’ demands,” she said.
“Few festivals or cultural institutions in our days have the courage to extend invitations that may provoke controversy, and we stand with Nadav in believing that this form of self-censorship must be resisted, as it only contributes to the problem,” Dobreva wrote.
Lapid intends his next movie to be a follow-up to “Synonyms,” his 2019 film about an Israeli expat in Paris that won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The Marseille festival is scheduled for July, but he says now he has no intention of going: “I’ll find other beaches.”
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Trump is imagining an Israel after Netanyahu. So are many Israelis. Netanyahu isn’t biting.
(JTA) — The party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected speculation that he might not run in Israel’s election this fall, following an offhand comment by U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl tweeted that Trump had told him he was unsure if Netanyahu wanted to press forward in the elections.
“He’s had an amazing career,” Trump said, according to Karl. “Does he want to continue? Because, you know, he’s a wartime prime minister. We will very shortly win the war one way or the other, and you know he’s a wartime prime minister.”
Netanyahu has been prime minister for more than 15 of the last 17 years, losing power only briefly in 2021 and 2022. Israel’s current wars began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering regional conflict that has grown to include a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump’s reported comments left some wondering whether he knew something they did not, amid polling suggesting that Netanyahu will struggle to secure enough votes to put together a governing coalition after elections this fall. Could Trump know that Netanyahu is considering suspending his already-active campaign? Or could Trump, who this week told the BBC that Netanyahu does anything the U.S. president tells him to, be planning to order his Israeli counterpart to stand down amid growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States?
Netanyahu’s Likud party soon demolished the idea. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will run in the upcoming elections — and with God’s help, he will win,” the party posted Wednesday on X.
Only a minority of Israelis were primed to appreciate the declaration, according to a poll released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute. It found that 61% of Israelis, including 27% of Likud members, do not want to see Netanyahu run again this fall. The same proportion said they want to see Israel adopt a two-term limit for prime ministers in the future.
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Spain reports 86% rise in antisemitic incidents, as interior minister takes aim at ‘xenophobia’
(JTA) — Antisemitic offenses in Spain rose 86% last year amid the country’s highest total hate incidents on record, according to a report from the Spanish government.
Jews were targeted in 69 hate crimes and incidents in 2025, up from 37 in 2024, according to a report released last week by Spain’s Interior Ministry. Islamophobic attacks also increased from 15 to 35 incidents.
Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said in a video posted on Facebook that his office documented 2,417 total hate incidents last year, the highest figure since it began recording in 2014. Spain is home to about 70,000 Jews, according to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain.
The ministry defined antisemitism as any act of hatred, violence or discrimination directed against Jews or “nationals of the State of Israel.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has become one of Europe’s sharpest critics of Israel and its military action in Gaza, which he says constitutes genocide. Spain imposed a total arms embargo on Israel in 2025 and permanently withdrew its ambassador in March, following Israel’s withdrawal of its ambassador to Spain in 2024.
The Interior Ministry said hate crimes motivated by racism and xenophobia accounted for the largest number of offenses at 934. Grande-Marlaska called out “public officials” for rhetoric and policies that he said inflamed xenophobic sentiment.
Grande-Marlaska released his report as Spain’s far-right, anti-immigration Vox party advocates for a “national priority” policy that favors Spaniards over others in access to public aid and benefits, such as subsidized housing and healthcare. Vox recently struck deals with the conservative People’s Party to insert the “national priority” clause into coalition agreements in the regions of Extremadura, Aragón and Castile and León.
“The national priority is xenophobia,” Grande-Marlaska said. “It is institutionalized xenophobia, protected and promoted by public officials who legitimize and amplify hate speech that, in the past, would have been condemned when it entered the public sphere.”
Vox is strongly supportive of Israel, whose government has allied with the party despite a history of neo-Nazis in its ranks. Vox leader Santiago Abascal visited Israel in 2024 to show his support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Sánchez recognized a Palestinian state.
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