Bob Dylan’s Tour Manager Recalled the Crass ‘Words of Wisdom’ John Lennon Shared

TL;DR:

• Bob Dylan met The Beatles at their hotel in New York.
• John Lennon offered Bob Dylan’s tour manager some crude wisdom.
• John Lennon said he and Bob Dylan were always uptight around each other.

Bob Dylan and his tour manager, Victor Maymudes, met The Beatles in 1964. They hadn’t been sure what to expect, but Maymudes said the band was warm and welcoming to them. They thoroughly enjoyed their time together, and Maymudes even walked away from it with some wisdom from John Lennon. He said that Lennon’s advice consistently made him laugh over the years. 

The two musical acts met in 1964

In 1964, Dylan and Maymudes fought through a crowd of Beatles fans outside New York’s Delmonico Hotel. When they arrived at the band’s suite, Maymudes thought they had little in common. The Beatles were far more clean-cut than Dylan and, at first, the conversation was sluggish.

“At first Bob said very little,” Maymudes wrote in his book Another Side of Bob Dylan: A Personal History on the Road and Off the Tracks. “He cannot talk to a group of people except from the stage, and that’s hardly a conversation. It’s a monologue. John Lennon was the same way, both wordsmiths who got tongue-tied speaking to small groups.”

Soon, though, they warmed to each other.

“But Bob turned his smile on them, and the Beatles answered with their own happy charisma, the five of them eyeing each other like bashful kids at a dance,” Maymudes explained. “Bob made an effort to talk to them, answering their questions. We talked about guitars and about music, but only superficially. Their banter was very funny as they talked about people at the party down the hall and exchanged cryptic lines about New York.”

Bob Dylan’s tour received words of wisdom from John Lennon

Dylan saw The Beatles several times that week, and Maymudes began to form a friendship with Lennon. After a dinner one night, Lennon offered Maymudes some “words of wisdom.”

“After we ate we were packing back into the two limousines we had: Albert, Brian and Al were in one; Bob, John, Paul, George, Ringo and I were in the other,” Maymudes wrote. “I opened the car door and they all jumped in, then I got in and closed the door. Well … somebody farted … I instantly thought it was Bob. But John looked right at me, like I did it, and said in that brilliant British accent, ‘The secret is to jump up and down before getting in the car to shake the farts out.'”

Maymudes said Lennon’s words made him laugh for years after that.

“I thought that was hilarious — words of wisdom from one of the world’s greatest songwriters,” he wrote. “I still laugh about that to this day.”

John Lennon said he and Bob Dylan were uptight around each other

Maymudes and Lennon had an easygoing relationship, but Lennon and Dylan were a bit more tense around each other. It took them some time to warm to one another.

“I’ve grown up enough to communicate with him,” Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1968. “Both of us were always uptight, you know, and of course I wouldn’t know whether he was uptight, because I was so uptight, and then when he wasn’t uptight, I was — all that bit. But we just sat it out because we just liked being together.”