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What They Heard: How The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan Listened to Each Other and Changed Music Forever
They were the artists who revolutionised popular music and took it to new levels of originality and influence. But they didn’t do it in a bubble.
In fact, The Beatles, Beach Boys and Bob Dylan remade modern music by listening to each other, and using what they heard to drive and enhance their own creativity.
Using timelines derived from release dates, studio sessions and personal encounters, Luke Meddings reveals the paths of influence across an astonishing 4-year period between 1963 and 1967, in which these iconic artists cross-pollinated like crazy - via recordings, rivalry, rumours, artistic envy and quite a few drugs.
Teeming with original, astute and often funny insights, What They Heard will change the way you listen to this music forever.
In fact, The Beatles, Beach Boys and Bob Dylan remade modern music by listening to each other, and using what they heard to drive and enhance their own creativity.
Using timelines derived from release dates, studio sessions and personal encounters, Luke Meddings reveals the paths of influence across an astonishing 4-year period between 1963 and 1967, in which these iconic artists cross-pollinated like crazy - via recordings, rivalry, rumours, artistic envy and quite a few drugs.
Teeming with original, astute and often funny insights, What They Heard will change the way you listen to this music forever.
- GenresMusicNonfiction
280 pages, Paperback
Published September 16, 2021
7 people are currently reading
75 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 24, 2025
Only geeks who worship at the shrine of 60s pop music should have any truck with this one. As I so worship, I was all in.
The idea here is that the various strands of popular music (blues, country, folk, tin pan alley &c) were woven together by the beginning of the 60s into a golden skein of dominant melodic art-pop-rock (he calls it “The Singularity”) which was radicalised and perfected by its three greatest practitioners, who all began with the letter B – Bob, Brian, Beatles. (And there are walk-on parts for The Byrds too. But not Beefheart.)
And the very tip top crest of this Everest was, you know, Blonde on Blonde, Revolver, Sgt Pepper, Pet Sounds. No surprise. This is conventional pop history, much frowned upon by lovers of black music, Motown, Stax, Atlantic, reggae &c. They will have to wait till right at the end of the book for their frowns to turn upside down, because on page 225 Luke says that this 60s energy wasn’t sustained and the one clear shining moment refracted back into its several genres, and it was black creators like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Isaac Hayes who plucked the baton of progress from the ten disintegrated guys at the heart of the 60s who had, by 1970, ran out of inspiration.
MISSION VERY POSSIBLE
Given this, Luke’s mission, should he accept it, is to find all the connections between the Three Bs – which single influenced which album, who borrowed which from who, as the decade spooled out from month to month. People don’t usually get this detailed about music. I like it when they do.
He has some nice one-liners. Talking about a track called Hushabye he calls it “one of many Beach Boys songs set in bedrooms, mainly bedrooms with only one person in them”. He says Dylan was “wilfully uninterested in melody even when it lay in plain sight”. He says Dylan’s backup band was “digging into the end of each verse as if hauling trees from the earth” – what a great phrase.
And this eyecatching observation – he quotes from a nice BBs song “Girl Don’t Tell Me” :
Your hair's getting longer and your shorts
Mm, they sure fit you fine
and he says
The mere mention of shorts makes the lyric more overtly sexual than any in the Beatles catalogue to date
So true – for all the teenage hysteria the Beatles created wherever they went, their stage performances were polite, jolly, family friendly, with absolutely no hip swiveling, and their lyrics were really rather conventional and dull in the early years*. But then, you wouldn’t be thinking of the Beach Boys or Bob as sex symbols either.
1968
This upward and onward blissful experimenting got too much for all concerned by 1968 – Bob was hiding, no tours or records; the BBs were trying to carry on without the incapacitated Brian; the Beatles were off to India having found a guru, and began to break up on their return. Timothy Leary’s mantra perfectly sums up the whole decade – tune in, turn on, drop out.
This book has such a laser-focused audience in mind. They will all love it. Everyone else will eyeroll and say Oh those music critics, still poring over the same old stuff as if it’s The Code of the Hammurabi or the Book of Kells.
*Please Please Me and Ticket to Ride are possible exceptions
The idea here is that the various strands of popular music (blues, country, folk, tin pan alley &c) were woven together by the beginning of the 60s into a golden skein of dominant melodic art-pop-rock (he calls it “The Singularity”) which was radicalised and perfected by its three greatest practitioners, who all began with the letter B – Bob, Brian, Beatles. (And there are walk-on parts for The Byrds too. But not Beefheart.)
And the very tip top crest of this Everest was, you know, Blonde on Blonde, Revolver, Sgt Pepper, Pet Sounds. No surprise. This is conventional pop history, much frowned upon by lovers of black music, Motown, Stax, Atlantic, reggae &c. They will have to wait till right at the end of the book for their frowns to turn upside down, because on page 225 Luke says that this 60s energy wasn’t sustained and the one clear shining moment refracted back into its several genres, and it was black creators like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Isaac Hayes who plucked the baton of progress from the ten disintegrated guys at the heart of the 60s who had, by 1970, ran out of inspiration.
MISSION VERY POSSIBLE
Given this, Luke’s mission, should he accept it, is to find all the connections between the Three Bs – which single influenced which album, who borrowed which from who, as the decade spooled out from month to month. People don’t usually get this detailed about music. I like it when they do.
He has some nice one-liners. Talking about a track called Hushabye he calls it “one of many Beach Boys songs set in bedrooms, mainly bedrooms with only one person in them”. He says Dylan was “wilfully uninterested in melody even when it lay in plain sight”. He says Dylan’s backup band was “digging into the end of each verse as if hauling trees from the earth” – what a great phrase.
And this eyecatching observation – he quotes from a nice BBs song “Girl Don’t Tell Me” :
Your hair's getting longer and your shorts
Mm, they sure fit you fine
and he says
The mere mention of shorts makes the lyric more overtly sexual than any in the Beatles catalogue to date
So true – for all the teenage hysteria the Beatles created wherever they went, their stage performances were polite, jolly, family friendly, with absolutely no hip swiveling, and their lyrics were really rather conventional and dull in the early years*. But then, you wouldn’t be thinking of the Beach Boys or Bob as sex symbols either.
1968
This upward and onward blissful experimenting got too much for all concerned by 1968 – Bob was hiding, no tours or records; the BBs were trying to carry on without the incapacitated Brian; the Beatles were off to India having found a guru, and began to break up on their return. Timothy Leary’s mantra perfectly sums up the whole decade – tune in, turn on, drop out.
This book has such a laser-focused audience in mind. They will all love it. Everyone else will eyeroll and say Oh those music critics, still poring over the same old stuff as if it’s The Code of the Hammurabi or the Book of Kells.
*Please Please Me and Ticket to Ride are possible exceptions
October 15, 2021
I'm Pickin' Up Good Vibrations
Review of the original Weatherglass paperback edition (September 2021)
It is impossible for me to be unbiased about an excellent book such as What They Heard, which examines the music of my formative years in the 1960s. There was both the enjoyment and pleasure of vicariously revisiting that era and the fascination of reading the various anecdotal trivia and connections that were unknown to me at the time.
My first ever LP purchase, as best as I can remember, was Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (1965). I was totally mystified by its stream of consciousness liner notes: "On the slow train time does not interfere & at the Arabian crossing waits White Heap... , probably my first exposure to experimental writing. I spent the summer of 1967 with friends at the cottage attempting to interpret and decipher the lyrics of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Another early LP purchase was The Byrds' Greatest Hits (1967) (The Byrds also feature heavily in What They Heard) etc.
True Confession: I did not really get into The Beach Boys at the time, as they seemed uncool. They were more of a radio singles, summer pop music type band, not intriguing enough for the investment of the price of an LP.
Luke Meddings has assembled here a terrific combination of historical overview, analysis, sessionography and just good old fandom enjoyment of mainly the 1963 to 1967 singles and albums of the title groups. There is a prologue section of the beginnings of rock and roll and an epilogue that briefly visits the late 60s with The Beatles The White Album and Abbey Road, but it is the mid 1960s that is the heart of the book.
Meddings himself was only just born around this time and did not discover this music until about 20 years later, so it is even more terrific that a late blooming fan would take the trouble to research and document the various trivia, connections, rivalries, borrowings and inspirations that cross-pollinated this era of popular music. As a bonus, it makes for a great lead-in to the upcoming documentary The Beatles Get Back (2021) dir. Peter Jackson's 3-part-mini-TV series expected in late November.
I read What They Heard as the 3rd issue of an ongoing subscription to new independent publisher Weatherglass Books. Both of their previous releases, Cold New Climate and The Angels of L19 were 5 star reads for me as well.
Trivia and Links
Author Luke Meddings is interviewed on the Word in Your Ear BookTube/MusicTube channel on September 15, 2021 which you can watch here.
Author Luke Meddings is interviewed on the September 16, 2021 episode of the Beatles Books podcast here (link opens to Apple podcasts).
Author Luke Meddings has selected a playlist of 21 Golden Greats out of the 100s of songs discussed in What They Heard which you can hear at Spotify.
Review of the original Weatherglass paperback edition (September 2021)
It is impossible for me to be unbiased about an excellent book such as What They Heard, which examines the music of my formative years in the 1960s. There was both the enjoyment and pleasure of vicariously revisiting that era and the fascination of reading the various anecdotal trivia and connections that were unknown to me at the time.
My first ever LP purchase, as best as I can remember, was Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (1965). I was totally mystified by its stream of consciousness liner notes: "On the slow train time does not interfere & at the Arabian crossing waits White Heap... , probably my first exposure to experimental writing. I spent the summer of 1967 with friends at the cottage attempting to interpret and decipher the lyrics of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Another early LP purchase was The Byrds' Greatest Hits (1967) (The Byrds also feature heavily in What They Heard) etc.
True Confession: I did not really get into The Beach Boys at the time, as they seemed uncool. They were more of a radio singles, summer pop music type band, not intriguing enough for the investment of the price of an LP.
Luke Meddings has assembled here a terrific combination of historical overview, analysis, sessionography and just good old fandom enjoyment of mainly the 1963 to 1967 singles and albums of the title groups. There is a prologue section of the beginnings of rock and roll and an epilogue that briefly visits the late 60s with The Beatles The White Album and Abbey Road, but it is the mid 1960s that is the heart of the book.
Meddings himself was only just born around this time and did not discover this music until about 20 years later, so it is even more terrific that a late blooming fan would take the trouble to research and document the various trivia, connections, rivalries, borrowings and inspirations that cross-pollinated this era of popular music. As a bonus, it makes for a great lead-in to the upcoming documentary The Beatles Get Back (2021) dir. Peter Jackson's 3-part-mini-TV series expected in late November.
I read What They Heard as the 3rd issue of an ongoing subscription to new independent publisher Weatherglass Books. Both of their previous releases, Cold New Climate and The Angels of L19 were 5 star reads for me as well.
Trivia and Links
Author Luke Meddings is interviewed on the Word in Your Ear BookTube/MusicTube channel on September 15, 2021 which you can watch here.
Author Luke Meddings is interviewed on the September 16, 2021 episode of the Beatles Books podcast here (link opens to Apple podcasts).
Author Luke Meddings has selected a playlist of 21 Golden Greats out of the 100s of songs discussed in What They Heard which you can hear at Spotify.
August 23, 2022
What an interesting book this is. It takes a common idea: that of cross pollination between the three biggest and most influential songwriters of three different styles who conducted pop music through the early to mid sixties and contributed massively to mainstream acceptance of an enlargement of the possibilities of pop, rock and folk musics.
Sure, they weren’t the first to do most of their innovations, but it’s hard to think of how, in just 5 years, The Beatles went from From Me to You to Revolution #9 and took their audience with them every step of the way, not losing any popularity.
And this book does a wonderful deep tightly focused dive into this idea and does it remarkably.
A sign of just how good this is, is that it took me back to Sgt Pepper, which I had long put aside as a hoary old over familiar chestnut, and see it again with fresh eyes as the cohesive, ground breaking and life affirming work of genius it is. So thank you for that.
I did find one “fact” I thought was incorrect, which perhaps leads me to be less believing of everything the author cites - he says that the 1969 recreation of the Please Please Me cover photo (later used on the front of the Blue second compilation album) was taken for Abbey Road, when it was actually taken for the aborted Get Back album (which later, after Abbey Road was released, was unearthed and turned into Let It Be). But it’s a small quibble from a highly recommended book.
Sure, they weren’t the first to do most of their innovations, but it’s hard to think of how, in just 5 years, The Beatles went from From Me to You to Revolution #9 and took their audience with them every step of the way, not losing any popularity.
And this book does a wonderful deep tightly focused dive into this idea and does it remarkably.
A sign of just how good this is, is that it took me back to Sgt Pepper, which I had long put aside as a hoary old over familiar chestnut, and see it again with fresh eyes as the cohesive, ground breaking and life affirming work of genius it is. So thank you for that.
I did find one “fact” I thought was incorrect, which perhaps leads me to be less believing of everything the author cites - he says that the 1969 recreation of the Please Please Me cover photo (later used on the front of the Blue second compilation album) was taken for Abbey Road, when it was actually taken for the aborted Get Back album (which later, after Abbey Road was released, was unearthed and turned into Let It Be). But it’s a small quibble from a highly recommended book.
February 16, 2022
A book that needed to be written and Meddings does a fine job. This is an intelligently written book, with acute observations and applied music theory. The writing is fresh and, for the most part, he uses entertaining and imaginative similes. This was so close to being a 5 star review if it wasn’t for a couple of missteps. The first half of the book is the strongest and builds his argument well. But things unravel with Revolver, clearly his favourite record, in which every song gets its own paragraph and overdoes the metaphor (falling rain is used twice). Dylan seems to fall off the radar in terms of releases after 1966, but he was incredibly productive in ‘67, and the humour and surrealism of the Basement Tapes resemblance to Smile but this is completely missed. Indeed the interaction between Dylan and the Beach boys is minimal but this is conveniently ignored. Also the Byrds seem have as great a role in influencing each other but they don’t get the same standing. Still, I would highly recommend the book and it is fun to listen to the records as you go along.
December 26, 2023
Superb writing and very loving and concise exploration of how The Beatles, Beach Boys and Bob Dylan drew on each other for inspiration and motivation particularly in 1965-1968.
Well done Luke on writing with so much passion about the music and managing to avoid cliches for 250 pages. Thank you.
Well done Luke on writing with so much passion about the music and managing to avoid cliches for 250 pages. Thank you.
September 5, 2025
All my autistic interests combined into one book
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews