It goes without saying that Bob Dylan is one of the most influential musicians in history, as anyone with a passing familiarity of rock history knows. But the folk-rock icon’s impact on his peers goes beyond chord structure and lyrical composition, as one particularly entertaining anecdote from the annals of rock history involving the Beatles proves.
In August of 1964, the Beatles were staying at the Delmonico Hotel near Manhattan’s Central Park, according to the Beatles Bible, digging into a room service dinner, when Dylan showed up for a visit.
After being introduced to the band by a mutual friend, the writer Al Aronowitz, Dylan was offered some champagne…but apparently, he preferred “cheap wine” instead. Since there wasn’t any budget booze on hand, Dylan suggested they “smoke grass” instead. When the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, admitted that the band didn’t have much experience with marijuana, Dylan was shocked…all because he apparently misheard the lyrics to one of their biggest hits.
As Peter Brown wrote in The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles, Dylan “looked disbelievingly from face to face” following Epstein’s admission.
“’But what about your song?’ he asked. ‘The one about getting high?'”
Brown continued: “The Beatles were stupefied. ‘Which song?’ John managed to ask. Dylan said, ‘You know…’ and then he sang, ‘and when I touch you I get high, I get high…'”
Of course, those aren’t really the words to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (the actual lyric is “I can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide”), but plenty of other listeners have made the same mistake. And the Beatles apparently weren’t completely new to weed at the time, as George Harrison explained in Anthology, but their first experience with the substance was underwhelming.
“We first got marijuana from an older drummer with another group in Liverpool. We didn’t actually try it until after we’d been to Hamburg,” Harrison explained. “I remember we smoked it in the band room in a gig in Southport and we all learnt to do the Twist that night, which was popular at the time. We were all seeing if we could do it. Everybody was saying, ‘This stuff isn’t doing anything.’ It was like that old joke where a party is going on and two hippies are up floating on the ceiling, and one is saying to the other, ‘This stuff doesn’t work, man.’”
Bob Dylan and the Beatles shared a ‘surreal’ evening
Smoking with Dylan, however, proved to be a more enjoyable experience.
“I don’t remember much what we talked about,” recalled John Lennon in Anthology. “We were smoking dope, drinking wine and generally being rock ’n’ rollers and having a laugh, you know, and surrealism. It was party time.”
Paul McCartney shared similarly hilarious memories of the evening in Many Years From Now by Barry Miles.
“I remember asking Mal, our road manager, for what seemed like years and years, ‘Have you got a pencil?’ But of course everyone was so stoned they couldn’t produce a pencil, let alone a combination of pencil and paper,” McCartney said.
“I’d been going through this thing of levels, during the evening,” he continued. “And at each level I’d meet all these people again. ‘Hahaha! It’s you!’ And then I’d metamorphose on to another level. Anyway, Mal gave me this little slip of paper in the morning, and written on it was, ‘There are seven levels!’ Actually it wasn’t bad. Not bad for an amateur. And we pissed ourselves laughing. I mean, ‘What the f—k’s that? What the f—k are the seven levels?’ But looking back, it’s actually a pretty succinct comment; it ties in with a lot of major religions but I didn’t know that then.”
Whatever happened that night, it’s safe to say that millions of fans would have given just about anything to see it all go down firsthand.
This story was originally reported by Parade on Oct 18, 2025, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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