Posted by Alumni from The Atlantic
May 12, 2026
One afternoon during my teenage years, I was listening to Neil Young at high volume when my mother burst into my room to tell me to turn it down. This was a running subject of contention between us: the loud music that she insisted (correctly, as it happened) would damage my hearing. Neil Young, I protested, was a genius; to play him at low volume would be disrespectful. My mother was having none of it. I couldn't help recalling that interaction as I read Jim Windolf's Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other'And the World, a chatty, new popular history that seeks to tell the story of how rock and roll morphed from disposable entertainment into art. One key to this process, in Windolf's view, is the influence his subjects had on one another, but equally essential, I'd suggest, is time. 'We thought, at best, the Beatles would last a couple of years,' Paul McCartney admitted in 2009. And yet, 64 years after Dylan and the Beatles released their first... learn more