Egads! Blimey! Bloody Hell! Is it humanely possible that there could be more new books on the Beatles? Hasn’t every facet of their lives and music been covered over and over and over again? I mean, this is a band whose chauffeur driver even wrote a memoir!
Well…yes. It is possible. But in 2026, any new Beatle Book needs to have a new or different angle. Two currently fill a niche.
The Beatles and Bob Dylan always had personal admiration, but professional rivalry for each other. And since their early ‘60s ascendancies, they’ve been in and out of each other’s orbits creatively and personally up to today. That’s the topic of Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other—and the World (400 pp., $30, Scribner) by New York Times Features Editor Jim Windolf.
The serious, protest-era Dylan actually liked the Beatles’ early tunes, and it helped influence his transition from folk to rock. When the five actually met for the first time on August 28, 1964, at the Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan (brokered by music journalist Al Aronowitz), Dylan and acolyte Bob Neuwirth came with marijuana.
Dylan was shocked when he found out that none of the Beatles had ever smoked (so they somewhat falsely claimed) pot. He famously mistook the “I can’t hide, I can’t hide” chorus from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as “I get high, I get high.” And John Lennon—despite his reputation for adventure—demurred the first toke, having it passed to Ringo instead as his “royal taster.”
John Lennon mostly wrote and sang “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” as a sort of homage to Dylan, turning his songwriting inward. Dylan, in turn, famously mocked it with the sing-songy “Fourth Time Around.” Years later, Lennon would savage Dylan’s Christian-era “Gotta Serve Somebody” with the much-tinkered with but never released “Serve Yourself.” Still, Beatles and Bob would often name check each other in tunes.
Nevertheless, Dylan would appear right there on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band among the band’s heroes and influences. Lennon’s “Nowhere Man” and “Norwegian Wood” also showed a Dylan influence, while the Bard of Hibbing rocked things up a bit more with “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?”
What’s most surprising about the book is just how many times the Beatles and Dylan found themselves in each other’s physical company—often at hotel rooms, restaurants, and backstage areas after one of them had played a concert.
One time that Lennon and Dylan were together, though, was disappointing to both—not to mention fans. As seen in the rare D.A. Pennebaker documentary about Dylan’s 1966 English tour, Eat the Document, there’s scene with Lennon and Dylan in the back of a limo, both high as hell and talking gibberish. It ends with Dylan vomiting in their taxicab.
Over the years and in various combinations, they would hang out together, show up at each other’s concerts, even mention each other in interviews. Windolf notes that, of the 150 hours of recorded that have surfaced from the Beatles’ Get Back sessions, they spent a lot of time playing covers and other people’s tunes. In the lead? Bob Dylan with 15, even more than band hero Chuck Berry.
We tend to think of the Beatles as a self-contained unit of four. But throughout the roughly 11-year time span of their existence, they were aided, abetted, comforted, advocated for, and done dirty by scores of others. Often names who merit only a footnote or a handful of paragraphs in most general Beatle bios.
An even 100 of those folks are featured in music journalist/presenter Stuart Manconie’s With a Little Help From Their Friends: The Beatles and the People Who Made Them (368 pp., $30, Harry N. Abrams).
The bite-sized chapters, running mostly 2-4 pages each, give a short bio of these players on the stage, along with their connection—however strong or tenuous—to the band during their lifespan. They include bold-faced names who have been the subjects of their own books like Brian Epstein, Cynthia Lennon, Yoko Ono, Pattie Boyd, Pete Best, Linda McCartney and Allan Williams.
But the fun of the book is with its minor players. Like Raymond Jones (who asked Epstein for a copy of a Beatles record his music store didn’t carry); Lord Woodbine (a calypso singer who shared concert bills with the young group); Ivor Arbiter (who designed the still-used band logo on a piece of scrap paper); Dougie Millings (who made the famous collarless stage suits); and Melanie Coe (the teenage runaway and subject of a newspaper article who inspired Paul’s “She’s Leaving Home”). Amazingly, Coe had met him years earlier winning a contest he judged.
Then there’s Jimmie Nichol, the drummer plucked from obscurity to fill in for Ringo Starr for eight dates during their 1964 Australasian tour when Starr was down with tonsillitis. For just shy of two weeks he lived the life of a world-famous rock star, but just as quickly afterward faded into obscurity and later bankruptcy depression.
Still, one of his phrases lived on to be used in a Beatles tune years later: When he was asked by Lennon and McCartney how he was getting on with the pressure, Nicol replied “it’s getting better.”
For more modern Beatles fans, some wondered who the red-headed teenager was seen in the Peter Jackson movie Get Back in the studio and on the Apple rooftop for their final concert. Maconie tells us its Kevin Harrington…who also carried up most of the band’s musical equipment there himself, traveling five or six flights of stairs each way.
Only one person, though, secures an entry prior to the band’s era, but he may be the most important of all: Ivan Vaughan. It was he, a schoolmate of John Lennon and bandmate with his Quarrymen who first introduced a 16-year-old Lennon to another friend, 15-year-old Paul McCartney. It all went down on July 6, 1957 at the Woolton Village Fete.
A slightly drunk Lennon was impressed with the younger kid’s guitar playing (which, being left-handed, McCartney flipped Lennon’s guitar). It’s surprising that the sky’s didn’t open above England at this momentous meeting.
More Beatles books are surely on the way. And the anticipation for director Sam Mendes’ four individual bio movies, scheduled for an April 2028 simultaneous release, will likely incite another wave of Beatlemania. And author proposals.
