In the '70s, We Came Close To The Greatest Rock Collaboration of All Time Until Paul McCartney Shut It Down

In the history of rock, the greatest stories aren’t always about remembering the legendary events that happened. Sometimes they’re about reminiscing over what nearly was. For a short moment in the late 1960s, three legendary artists were on the verge of recording a shared album that still feels too fantastical to even be a possibility today. But Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones were in talks to begin recording a collaborative album, driven by the producer that the bands shared and Dylan admired, Glyn Johns. What could have been rock’s greatest moment could have also been its most explosive, and so it was shut down by Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger. But here’s to imagining the tantalizing trio in action.

The Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones Album That Never Happened

Glyn Johns is a legendary sound engineer and music producer who first gained notoriety in the rock and roll scene with his early work with The Rolling Stones. Johns was actually the housemate of Stones founder, Ian Stewart, which is how he found his way in. He was initially dropped from working on their first album by the band’s new manager and subsequent producer, Andrew Loog-Oldham, taking the lead. However, Johns overcame any bad blood and collaborated with the band for over ten years. At that time, Johns was totally in demand, also working with The Who, The Kinks, The Clash, and Led Zeppelin. Most crucially to this story, Johns also recorded the bulk of The Beatles’ Get Back sessions in 1969, later released as Let It Be.

In the late 1960s, the rock scene was undeniably dominated by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan in the folk scene. The three acts were influencing each other in the musical landscape already, with The Beatles admiring and taking inspiration from Dylan’s personal lyrics, and The Rolling Stones following The Beatles’ lead of bands writing their own material—a revolutionary move for the time. One of these was particularly eager to see if their similarities could result in something more than mutual admiration, with eyes on recording an entire record.

Johns recalled the conversation he had that sparked one of the greatest ideas in rock history: “Bob Dylan and I were on a flight and we ended up chatting. He was very complimentary about my work with the Stones and had heard I’d been working with The Beatles, and told me he had this idea… It would have been an astonishing episode if it had come off but the likelihood of it working was slim to none… I went back home and I asked each member of the bands what they thought separately… Keith [Richards] and George [Harrison] were up for it, but the only two who were dead against it were Jagger and McCartney, and to be honest, I think that they were completely right.”

Although this proposed collaboration never came to fruition, Dylan, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones did collaborate on separate occasions. Paul McCartney and John Lennon gifted “I Wanna Be Your Man” to the Stones to guarantee they secured a hit, and they also sang backing vocals on “We Love You.” And there’s more: Keith Richards and Lennon actually played together in the one-off supergroup The Dirty Mac in 1968. Maybe Dylan just wanted in on the action, but he got a taste of the band experience when he joined the Stones on stage in 1998 to perform “Like A Rolling Stone.”

A ‘60s Collaboration On This Scale Would Never Have Worked

Reflecting on the missed opportunity, Johns told the Daily Record that “I think it would have been a train wreck to be honest. It was an astonishing idea that came completely out of the blue.” It feels rather like when you make ambitious plans with that old group of friends that you all already know won’t make it out of the group chat. But we all know that a bottomless brunch sure would have been a lot of fun.

Many logistical issues would have made the endeavor a "train wreck," but the overwhelming consideration is that the three acts were just too strong in their own musical identities to have blended successfully. Each of them belonged to a similar musical genre, but there was enough distinction between the Stones' heaviness, The Beatles' psychedelic charm, and Bob Dylan's free-spirited isolation to make a seamless collaboration unlikely.

Dylan’s proposal also came at a bad time. In the late 1960s, The Beatles were famously struggling to keep tensions at bay between themselves, let alone with additional cooks in the kitchen. If the Fab Four could barely keep it together as a unit, then a further stretch at a collaborative effort was, at best, unlikely to be successful. With this in mind, McCartney's refusal then makes much more sense. If anyone in the band was going to argue in favor of prudence, it was going to be him.

Ultimately, the supergroup album that never existed is less of a tragedy and more of a grand myth. The forces that made Dylan, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones musical legends are the very ones that could have torn a collaborative project apart. Rock history is perhaps at its most enticing when we appreciate the what-ifs that were, perhaps, wise enough to be left alone.