Bob Dylan loves to turn the Beatles on...

The Nobel Prize in Literature given to Bob Dylan places him in the ranks of laureates Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Albert Camus, William Faulkner and W.B. Yeats, among others.
Although it is not true that Dylan is the only songwriter to win the prize — Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, painter and musician, was the first in 1913 — it is a well-deserved honor as Dylan is a major musical force and influence to generations of songwriters, musicians and performers including the Beatles, specifically John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Reintroducing marijuana, which made the Beatles more receptive to mind expansion, Dylan provided them with templates to plagiarize that brought them to a higher level of creativity. The greater influence was with Lennon. He did not only write songs a la Dylan, but imitated his drawl and started to hide his eyes behind dark glasses. He adopted Dylan after Elvis Presley as his new guru for the father figure he never had.
Dylan’s influence on Beatles songs was particularly apparent in the songs “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yellow Submarine.”
“Eleanor Rigby” took its form and content from Dylan’s “The Ballad of a Thin Man,” and it is a superb distillation. Both songs moan about desolation and the futility of human action. That of the Beatles dwells on the physical (“Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been”), while Dylan’s deals with the psychological (“You try so hard, but you don’t understand!”).
The two songs have the same verse construction: beginning with a narrative and ending with a question. Dylan: “But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?”
The Beatles: “Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door/Who is it for?”
The line “Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door,” refers to makeup and is a modification of the Dylan metaphor, “You put your eyes in your pocket...” which refers to a pair of eyeglasses.
The Beatles translated “The Ballad of a Thin Man’s catchy ending verse construction into the refrain (“All the lonely people / Where do they all belong?”).
The fourth verse of Dylan’s song starts with “Aaah, you’ve been with the professors and they’ve all liked your looks.” The chorus of The Beatles song is “Aaah, look at all the lonely people” repeated twice.
While Dylan’s song remains an exposition of Mr. Jones’ pathetic situation, the Beatles’ song expands it into a narrative of two characters, Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie, and how their respective desolation intertwines their fates and seals it to make the Beatles’ song more poignant.
The Beatles distilled “Yellow Submarine” from two sources: Dylan’s riotous song “Rainy Day Woman #12 and #35” and Paul Anka’s “The Longest Day,” the theme song of the war epic of the same title released in 1962. By combining the two songs, McCartney largely diffused their essence. While it resembled specific passages of the model songs, “Yellow Submarine” refined the treatment of the intro’s march song features, the brass accompaniment, and the jocular ribbing that refined the influence of Anka’s song.
Its mid-to-end sections were given the boisterous treatment of a Dylan song. It re-created the ambiance that gave Dylan’s song its uniqueness and appeal. It even imitated the “who-aah!” scream. This first instance in ambiance creation through the use of sound effects would later develop into the Beatles song concept known as the “sound picture.”

DUMPING DYLAN. Asked in a Q interview if he saw Dylan as a primary influence in his songwriting, Lennon said: “No, no. I see him as another poet, you know, or as competition. Just read my books which were written before I’ve heard Dylan or read Dylan or even heard anybody. It’s the same, you know. I didn’t come after Elvis and Dylan, I’ve been around always. But I see or meet a great artist, I love ‘em, you know. I just love ‘em. I go fanatical about them — for a short period. And then I get over it! And if they wear green socks, I’m liable to wear green socks for a period, you know.”
Lennon gave a mixed-up answer. He stated that as far as songwriting was concerned, he was an original since he was capable of introspection even before he met Dylan as evidenced by his two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. But as competition, he stated that whatever Dylan did, he could also do.
Lennon was a glib talker. What he did not say in his claim as being co-equal to these artists was that he competed with them by imitating their creative output. He did this individually or collectively with McCartney by being a White Negro. He rehashed partially or sometimes even in their entirety the works of these artists and other artists their art of selection, and having done this, their works became those of the Beatles.
McCartney was more circumspect. “He (Lennon) loved Dylan so much...John was like that. John liked gurus. John was always looking for a guru,” he said. He recalled that Lennon would introduce to him a person he would call “my new guru.”
He had to accept whoever this new guru offered, knowing that it might not last. He correctly surmised that this need for a guru was out of Lennon’s psychological need for a father figure. He explained, “You know, to understand John you have to look at his past. The father leaving home when he was three; being brought up by his aunt. And his mother, you know. It’s extraordinary he made it to the age he made it to.”
For McCartney himself, Dylan served as an inspiration. “Maybe he (Dylan) allowed us to go further. He allowed the Stones to go further, then we did ‘Pepper’ and we allowed everyone else to go further. It was like boot walking...we’d take a step, Dylan’s taking a step, Stone’s take a step, all of us have from time to time,” he said.
Of course, he also conveniently forgot that the first step of a thousand miles happened when they started their art of rehashing.
Perhaps the best assessment of Dylan’s influence on Lennon, McCartney, and the rest of the Beatles came from Harrison. He stated: “You know the famous Beatles story: we cleaned up our act a bit. Because (business manager) Brian Epstein could get us more work if we had suits. By the time Bob came along, it was like, yeah, we all want to be more funky again, and please put a little more balls into the lyric of the song. There’s a funny thing that I don’t think anybody else has noticed and that is when John wrote ‘Norwegian Wood.’ It was obviously a Bob Dylan song, and right after that Bob’s album out and it had a song called ‘4th Time Around.’ You want to check out the tune of that — it’s the same song going around and around.”
What Harrison implied was: Dylan copied the Beatles as much as the Beatles copied Dylan. It is a truism in rock’s code of imitation.
As far as Lennon was concerned, however, Dylan had served his time. So he could move on as the perpetually evolving artist he pictured himself to be, Lennon rejected Dylan with the rest of the Beatles, Epstein and record producer George Martin.