The Valuable Life Lesson George Harrison Learned From Bob Dylan’s ‘Blonde on Blonde’

George Harrison was an avid admirer of Bob Dylan. His introspective songwriting style influenced Harrison, and the “Quiet Beatle” was fortunate enough to collaborate with Dylan several times. One Dylan album that Harrison loved was Blonde on Blonde, which Harrison picked up a valuable lesson from. 

George Harrison clung to a piece of wisdom Bob Dylan shared in ‘Blonde on Blonde’

The Beatles first met Bob Dylan in 1964, when they had an existential crisis after Dylan introduced them to pot. Shortly after their initial meeting, Harrison and Dylan struck up a beautiful friendship. They collaborated on a few songs together and even formed the supergroup, the Traveling Wilburys.

In 1966, Dylan was recording music near Woodstock, New York, when he was involved in a near-fatal motorcycle accident. Details weren’t clear about how bad his injuries were, and many speculated that Dylan exaggerated his injuries to take time off. In his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan admitted he had recovered but wanted to escape the “rat race.”

‘I had been in a motorcycle accident, and I’d been hurt, but I recovered,” Dylan wrote. “Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me, and I was seeing everything through different glasses.”

Harrison visited him in Woodstock and said Dylan had “no confidence.” However, Harrison remembered Dylan’s lesson in the song “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” from Blonde on Blonde. The lesson for Harrison was there is always a way out, but there is a heavy price to pay. 

“I’d felt very strongly about Bob when I’d been in India years before – the only record I took with me along with all my Indian records was Blonde On Blonde,” Harrison told Crawdaddy Magazine. “I felt somehow very close to him or something, you know because he was so great, so heavy and so observant about everything. And yet, to find him later very nervous and with no confidence. But the thing that he said on Blonde On Blonde about what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice—‘Oh mama, can this really be the end.’ So I was thinking, ‘There is a way out of it all, really, in the end.’”

Harrison wrote a song with Dylan during his visit to Woodstock

While George Harrison said Bob Dylan was “nervous” and not confident during his visit to Woodstock, Dylan still had music in his mind. The “Here Comes the Sun” singer said Dylan introduced an early draft of a song to him. Harrison enjoyed the track, and it eventually became “I’d Have You Anytime”.

“He’d gone through his broken neck period and was being very quiet, and he didn’t have much confidence anyhow—that’s the feeling I got with him in Woodstock,” Harrison explained. “He hardly said a word for a couple of days. It was really a nice time with all his kids around, and we were just playing. It was near Thanksgiving. He sang me that song and he was, like, very nervous and shy, and he said, ‘What do you think about this song?’”

Harrison later recorded and released the song on All Things Must Pass, his first solo album after leaving The Beatles that hit No. 1 on the charts.