There have been numerous books written over the years about The Beatles. I’d thought that nearly every topic covering the years of their incredible creativity and popularity had been written already. However, author Jim Windolf has done a great job with a book that shows how The Beatles and Bob Dylan actually managed to feed off of each other and increase both of their popularity.

Dylan was already recording when The Beatles came along. His initial reaction was to dismiss them as a teeny-bopper fad. That soon changed as he met the group and got to know them better. There seemed to be a serious songwriting rivalry between Dylan and John Lennon for a time. It was George Harrison who ended up gravitating more toward Dylan’s style, especially once The Beatles broke up.

At the same time, The Beatles’ popularity rubbed off on Dylan. He began to see a way to honor his folk music artistry and create records that would sell.

The press at the time seemed as if it couldn’t get enough of the connection between The Beatles and Bob Dylan and also fed into the idea of a rivalry between the two. There might have been some antagonism between John Lennon and Bob Dylan, but for the most part, reports of a rivalry were way overblown by the press.

Windolf has poured through old interviews and various books to draw out this material. In particular, it seems as if Cynthia Lennon’s memoir helped out quite a bit. He referred back to it enough that I added it to my reading list. The effort has paid off, as the details of how the time they spent together during Beatlemania and after worked to better both musical acts. I could see how Dylan influenced The Beatles and vice-versa, even though they were contemporaries. Windolf doesn’t just stop after The Beatles broke up, either. He takes it into the present day, which means there’s a lot of insight into The Traveling Wilburys as well.

In fact, there’s a lot here about George Harrison post-Beatles that was new to me. If nothing else, Where the Music Had To Go reveals a lot about Harrison post-Beatles. Sure, I knew a lot of the music he’d made and had several of his albums, but how he came out of the shadows of John Lennon and Paul McCartney to make a name for himself was quite revealing. One of the reasons The Beatles broke up was because he was so frustrated that none of his compositions were being chosen for recording. As we’ve seen over the years, he had just as much to offer as the others.

I have not read any of the Dylan biographies out there, so all of his information was new to me. I have a deeper appreciation of the man and why he is considered such a legendary rocker. His life is quite tragic in many ways, but he doesn’t seem to play that up as an excuse for anything, which I admire. Like so many people who came out of his time, he struggled quite a bit with not fitting into the world and embraced the changes the 60s brought, albeit maybe a bit too much.

Gibson Frazier narrates the audiobook and does a great job. I laughed a little at how he tried to make his voice sound like The Beatles, but it made it easy to distinguish what perspective I was getting at various times while listening to it. He’s not a Scouser by any stretch of the imagination. Once I just accepted that this was what he was going to do, I did enjoy his reading.

Where the Music Had To Go is a great biography of these musicians, showing how they influenced each other more than they rivaled each other. I came away with a much deeper appreciation for how music took the directions it did in the 1960s and for both The Beatles and Bob Dylan.

Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Scribner Books, and author Jim Windolf for the advance reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.