Bob Dylan Tribute to John Lennon, “Roll On, John,” and the Undercover Tour That Inspired It

Countless musicians have offered sonic memorials to the late great John Lennon, and in 2012, Bob Dylan threw his hat in the ring with his own tribute to the former Beatle, “Roll On, John.” Before Lennon’s tragic assassination on December 8, 1980, he and Dylan were contemporaries. Dylan famously introduced the Fab Four to marijuana. Then, Lennon name-dropped the American folk-rock hero in “God” off his first solo album post-Beatles.

Around three decades after Lennon’s death, Dylan toured the Liverpudlian’s childhood home. With the physical effects of age and his quiet demeanor serving as Dylan’s “undercover” disguise, the songwriter went virtually unnoticed as he toured the ex-Beatle’s old stomping grounds, planting the seeds for his eight-verse tribute to Lennon.

Bob Dylan Penned John Lennon Tribute After Touring His Home

In 2009, Bob Dylan was touring Europe when he decided to use one of his off days to tour the childhood home of John Lennon in Woolton, Liverpool. Dylan and 13 other tourists visited the home, which the National Trust refurbished to its 1940s appearance and outfitted with early Lennon memorabilia. “He took one of our general minibus tours,” a National Trust spokeswoman told the BBC. “People on the minibus did not recognize him, apparently.”

“He could have booked a private tour but was happy to go on the bus with everyone else,” the spokeswoman continued, saying that Dylan appeared to “enjoy himself.” And indeed, Dylan said as much years later in a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone. After all, by the time Dylan and Lennon crossed paths, the British rocker was far from his days in Liverpool. Despite being musical contemporaries, Dylan never knew this side of Lennon as well, including his childhood home’s proximity to Strawberry Fields.

“He’d be out there in the Strawberry Field, a park behind his house. Being in Britain, there’s all this hanging history, chopping off heads,” Dylan said. “I mean, you grow up with that if you’re a Brit. I didn’t quite understand the line [in “Strawberry Fields Forever”] about getting hung, Nothing to get hung about. Well, time had moved on. It was like ‘hung up,’ nothing to be hung up about. But he was speaking literally. What are you doing out there, John? “Don’t worry, Mum, nothing they’re going to hang me about, nothing to get hung about.” I found that kind of interesting.”

The American Folk Legend Sensed A Kindred Spirit In The Beatle

With both Bob Dylan’s and the Beatles’ careers skyrocketing in the mid-to-late 1960s, there was undoubtedly an element of competition between the artists as they vied for top chart positions across the globe. Yet, Dylan always sensed a kindred connection to John Lennon. “John came from the northern regions of Britain, the hinterlands, just like I did in America,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 2012. “We had some kind of environmental things in common.”

“Everything is stacked against you when you come from that,” he continued. “You have to have the talent to overcome everything. That was something I had in common with him. We were all about the same age and heard the same exact things growing up. Our paths crossed at a certain time, and we both had faced a lot of adversity. We even had that in common. I wish that he was still here because we could talk about a lot of things now.”

Dylan’s tribute to Lennon outlines the latter musician’s journey from cutting his teeth in Liverpool to his final years in Manhattan. The song cleverly weaves in Lennon’s lyrics, like, come together right now over me from “Come Together,” and, I heard the news today, oh boy, from “A Day in the Life.” “There’s so much you can say about any person’s life,” Dylan said. “It’s endless, really. I just picked out stuff that I thought that I was close enough to, to understand.”

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