The Night the Beatles Met Bob Dylan: A Smoky Room at the Delmonico

U I Team
May 1
4 min read

A group of people stand on a city street at night. A man in focus wears a suit. A vintage car is parked nearby. Mood is candid and lively. — Dylan and his entougrage across the street from the Delmonico Hotel, on Park Ave. and 59th Street, where the Beatles were staying when they came to New York City in 1964. From left to right the people are: Victor Maymudes (obscured, Dylan's personal assistant), Neil Aspinall (close, front; the Beatle's road manager), Al Aronowitz (a New York CIty journalist and friend of Dylan's) and Bob Dylan, with cigarette in hand. (photo by Henry Grossman / Daily Mirror via Getty Images)

On Friday 28 August 1964, in a plush hotel room high above Park Avenue and 59th Street in New York City, four lads from Liverpool finally met America’s scruffy poet laureate. The place was the Delmonico Hotel, the man pulling the strings behind the scenes was journalist and professional self-promoter Al Aronowitz, and the story that would spill out of that room has been retold so many times it has become part of rock’s founding folklore.

By late summer 1964, the Beatles were everywhere: in the charts, on TV, in the screaming dreams of teenagers across continents. Bob Dylan, meanwhile, was doing something rather different. While John, Paul, George and Ringo were singing about holding hands and wanting to be loved, Dylan was penning sharp, literate songs about injustice and heartache, delivered through a haze of cigarette smoke and cryptic mutterings. The Beatles admired Dylan’s words; Dylan was fascinated by the sheer hysteria they caused wherever they went. They were bound to collide eventually.

Lighting Up: Ringo’s Big Puff

So they all squeezed into that hotel room one Friday evening. There was wine, laughter, guitars resting in corners—and then Dylan, very casually, produced some marijuana. It is one of those lovely little ironies of pop history that while the Beatles had the image of wild young men, they were actually rather green about weed. Dylan had assumed they were already seasoned stoners because he thought he’d heard them singing “I get high” in I Want to Hold Your Hand. In fact, they were singing “I can’t hide”.

Dylan rolled a joint and passed it to Ringo Starr first. Poor Ringo didn’t know the unspoken rules of the puff-puff-pass. Instead, he smoked the whole thing himself, like a docker demolishing his first fag after a long shift. Within minutes, he was reportedly sprawled out on the floor, giggling uncontrollably.

One by one, the others followed suit. Brian Epstein, their polished and usually unflappable manager, got so stoned he squeaked, “I’m so high I’m up on the ceiling!” Paul McCartney, ever the romantic philosopher, believed he’d stumbled upon the deepest truths of existence and made their loyal road manager Mal Evans follow him around, scribbling down every revelation. What did Paul say that night? Nobody knows for sure, Mal’s notebook was never found.

Dylan himself seemed delighted and faintly amused by how quickly the Beatles were undone by the smoke. He picked up the hotel phone at one point and, instead of politely answering, barked down the line, “This is Beatlemania here!” It was, by all accounts, chaos of the happiest sort.

More Than Just a Laugh

Looking back, people like to say that everything changed that night: pop got deeper, lyrics got cleverer, and rock grew up. It is true that after that evening, the Beatles began writing songs that poked around inside their own heads rather than just begging for love. You can draw a straight-ish line from that room at the Delmonico to Rubber Soul, Revolver and the mind-bending adventures of Sgt. Pepper.

Dylan too was shifting gears. Within months he plugged in his guitar and turned folk on its ear with a loud electric band. Some folk purists booed and hissed, but the rest of the world followed him. By the time he got to Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, he was a rock star in all but name.

Legends Grow in the Telling

Of course, it is tempting to make more of this night than it really was. Pop historians love a neat story, and this one is irresistible: the moment America’s wordsmith and Britain’s Fab Four swapped secrets, got baked and pointed music down a new road. But as Mark Ellen, co-founder of Mojo and Q magazines, once pointed out, they were already halfway there. The Beatles were getting bored of being a boy band; Dylan was already inching towards the big, brash rock world. They just happened to pass each other at the perfect moment—each a bit envious of what the other had.

What no one can deny is that for one night in New York, rock’s biggest players locked themselves away from screaming fans and press cameras, opened a bottle (or three), passed a joint and laughed themselves silly. And afterwards, they didn’t just get up the next day and do the same old thing. They went away and changed music forever—though maybe not quite as instantly or dramatically as baby boomers like to claim.

Even so, it is a fine story to tell: a room in the Delmonico, a haze of smoke, four wide-eyed Beatles, a sly Dylan, and the birth (give or take a few poetic exaggerations) of pop’s age of enlightenment.

Sources