During his recent interview with Kenny Aronoff, producer Don Was recalled his time with Bob Dylan and George Harrison and how the two put him on the spot. While chatting about his works with rockers, the producer mentioned his collaboration with Dylan and the Beatle in the 90s. He started telling the story by mentioning the one thing Harrison told Was about Dylan:
“So, here’s one of the Beatles coming in, [George] says, ‘Don’t let Bob [Dylan] do what he did the last time,’ which is to roll the tape and keep my first tape, that and he wouldn’t let me do a second. I said, ‘Alright, don’t worry.’ But Bob heard that.”
After hearing about the conversation, Dylan caught Harrison off guard and challenged him to play a song to see how good he was. The producer tells:
“So Bob made Ed Cherney get up out of the engineer seat, he sat down at the auto locator, and he didn’t play the song for George, he fast-forwarded it. He said, ‘Okay, play,’ and tell him he never heard the song, didn’t tell him what key it was in, and George hadn’t tuned his guitar, and George was like, just scrambling to make something. All things considered, it was pretty decent, it was out of tune and stuff.”
Was revealed what Harrison asked him that made him freeze in the moment:
“Bob said, ‘Okay, that’s great, thank you, man.’ George was flabbergasted, he knew he wasn’t gonna let Bob Dylan bite him twice. So he said, he turns to me, and says, ‘Well, what do you think, Don?’ Then Bob Dylan goes, ‘Yeah, what do you think?’ And time kind of froze. It slowed down, and their voices dissolved. When I flashed on the time, I was gonna sell my car, so I could go to ‘The Concert For Bangla Desh’ in Madison Square Garden.”
Despite his worries, the producer shared his real thoughts with the two. He explained what led him to not lie about the song and what happened after:
“Now, these two guys, as close as you are, asking me what I think. I was terrified, and then a voice went off in my head, and the voice said, ‘He’s not paying you to be a fan.’ So I snapped out of it. It was only for a second, but it felt like I was sitting there for 20 minutes, freaking out. I said, ‘Well, it was good, George, but I mean, let’s tune up and see if you beat it.’ And George said, ‘Thank you,’ [he] gave the chair back to Ed.”
Although the Beatle became Dylan’s not only friend but bandmate as well, Harrison shared that during their first days of working together, Dylan seemed awkward and uncomfortable. Still, as time passed, the two developed a lasting communion in terms of friendship and work until the passing away of the former Beatle in 2001.
See the interview below.
