“I love Ringo,” Bob Dylan once said, “He’s not a bad singer, and he’s a great musician. If I’d had him as a drummer, I would’ve been the Beatles, too.” He then tentatively adds “maybe” to the end of the response as if pondering the notion just as we are. Bob Dylan and The Beatles are two artists who exist on a God-like plane. Throughout the 1960s, strings of influence or association routinely tied them together, for better or for worse. But if Bob Dylan had been in a band of his own, whether Ringo was the drummer or not, would they have sounded like the Beatles?
At first, it feels like a preposterous notion. For major Dylan fans, he moves in his own lane with a talent so singular that it couldn’t be categorised by genre or likened to anyone else. As his style evolved through his various eras and albums, from pure folk and political poetry into his electric era and now with his expansive odes, it’s tough to imagine Dylan within a band setting because it’s tough to imagine any group growing and changing at the rate he did. It feels certain that had the musician broken through in a band set up like the Fab Four, they probably would have quickly parted ways.
Or perhaps they would have followed exactly the path that the Liverpool lot did, starting out as a tight and motivated unit pioneering something new and slowly evolving into an ever-experimenting force. Just like on The White Album and in the tumultuous history of the group’s later years, perhaps a Bob Dylan band would have found their undoing in their constant development, eventually leading to a collapse.
But all that could only happen in an imagined world where Dylan’s known ego doesn’t exist. It’s clear that the folk star doesn’t like to share the limelight. This selfish streak coloured so many of his friendships and even relationships, and he once cast off his romance with Joan Baez because of the fact. After he married Sara Lownds instead, behind Baez’s back, he allegedly admitted to his tour manager that he’d made the decision because “Sara will be home when I want her to be home, she’ll be there when I want her to be there, she’ll do it when I want her to do it. Joan won’t be there when I want her. She won’t do it when I want to do it.”
It’s also evident in his relationship with his actual on-stage support, The Band. When Dylan went electric in the mid-1960s and decided he needed a backing band around him, he called in the supremely talented Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm and the rest of the group that was then called Levon and the Hawks. Once adopted by the musician, they were credited as merely ‘Bob Dylan and The Band’, hence the name change. Yet despite having some of the most talented musicians of the time surrounding him, Dylan rarely made use of them when it came to actually making music. They tried time and time again to record together, but the results were never quite good enough, with Dylan not seeming too keen on bringing them into his process or sharing that side of his creativity with others.
It’s clear that, like most successful musicians, Dylan likes to be the centre of attention, or at least likes space for his own creativity and talent to be the only spark in the room. So the idea that he could have functioned in a band setting let alone one like The Beatles, where all four members were incredibly skilled and took turns stepping up to the mic, feels like a pipedream.
Maybe, then, his inclusion in The Traveling Wilburys was a sign of growth. In the 1980s, Dylan was quite literally in a band with the Beatles as he and George Harrison joined up with Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty for a supergroup. However, the key seems to be that when they formed in 1988, Dylan was in a period of commercial failure as a series of misguided musical adventures, like his attempt at rap on ‘Street Rock’, pushed him further into irrelevancy. Perhaps by then, he didn’t have the ego he once had or was looking for comfort in the company of other older rockstars, so he was more willing to share the stage. Hitting play on their tunes now with the consideration of this question, it could definitely be argued that The Traveling Wilburys, with Dylan and Harrison in tow, do have a slight Beatles edge to their easy rock.
To talk purely in terms of sound, it would be a fair assumption that, at least for a while, a Bob Dylan band probably would have sounded a little like the Beatles simply because he once hit out at the Fab Four for that reason. When the two musical forces met in 1964, the experience seemed to change things for the band, and not just because he got them high for the first time. “He was our idol. It was a great honour to meet him,” the Beatles said after the fact. Then, when their 1965 record, Rubber Soul, came out, their sound had shifted in a more hazy folk direction. In Dylan’s mind, it had shifted in his direction.
“What is this? It’s me, Bob. [John’s] doing me!” Dylan cried when he heard the record. So if Dylan saw the Beatles as a copy of him, perhaps if he’d had a band set up, he would have sounded just like them as their sound crossed over in the mid-60s.
There’s also the fact that, while Dylan liked to play it cool about the band or even try to forge a kind of bitter rivalry, he was actually a big fan. “I just kept it to myself that I really dug them,” Dylan told biographer Anthony Scaduto, admitting they were “doing things no one else was doing.”
He said, “I knew they were pointing the direction that music had to go,” so perhaps their arrow would have been one he would’ve followed if he was in a band, too.
It’s all a big game of “what ifs”. On the one hand, perhaps a band would have ironed out some of Dylan’s obscurities and attitude to turn him into an anthem-making machine like Lennon and McCartney were. Maybe within a band setting, his evolution would have followed the same path as the Fab Four. For a moment in the 1960s, maybe a Bob Dylan band would have sounded just like ‘Norwegian Wood’ or ‘Drive My Car’. But given the fact that Dylan not only had a band but had The Band and still marched off in his own direction without having the teamwork skills to make it work, it doesn’t feel likely that any similarities would’ve lasted longer than a song or two.
