Paul McCartney fears only one man: Bob Dylan
The music legend revealed to BBC2 that his famously thorny contemporary still makes him “nervous.”
Photos by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
Paul McCartney, titan of the music industry that he is, has met and worked with the most famous artists alive and dead: Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Dave Grohl, and Elvis Costello come to mind. But only one, he revealed in a BBC Radio 2 interview yesterday, still truly flusters him: Bob Dylan. McCartney and Dylan have long been mutual admirers; the two first met in 1964, when Dylan showed up at the Beatles’ hotel with marijuana and gave the Fab Four the high they needed to make albums like Rubber Soul.
But Dylan was never a close friend of McCartney’s, the singer reminded listeners on the Tracks of My Years show. “I’m a fan,” he told host Vernon Kay, holding the largest yellow foam microphone anyone’s ever held, “But I don’t know him well enough. George [Harrison] knew him very well, because they were in the Traveling Wilburys together.” The Traveling Wilburys were an Eighties supergroup that saw Harrison and Dylan join Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne, and Jim Keltner. Harrison picked Dylan up at an artistic low point; Dylan returned the favor by calling him a “great, great soul.”
McCartney, though, never shared an intimate connection like that with Dylan. In fact, Macca told Day he’s still “a little bit nervous to approach” the Bard. He recalled seeing Dylan at 2016’s Desert Trip, a six-day music festival—cheekily dubbed “Oldchella”—featuring The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Dylan, McCartney, The Who, and Roger Waters: “I came in to see him, and it was like, ‘Wow.’ He was very complimentary. It’s funny, because it was kind of a little bit embarrassing. He said, ‘You’re a star.’ I thought, what do you say to that? ‘Thank you, Bob, I love what you do.’”
McCartney thinks the same of Dylan. He’s seen the artist multiple times in concert over the years, but he does have one issue with Dylan’s performance style. The last time he saw the folk star, he “couldn’t tell what song he was doing.” McCartney’s favorite Dylan tune is “Mr. Tambourine Man”—it’s part of the “soundtrack of his life,” hence the Tracks of My Years discussion—but recent performances of it haven’t sounded like the 1965 recording he fell in love. “He doesn’t care whether you want to really hear the tune,” McCartney noted, before doing his own impression of the capricious live performer. “I understand if he doesn’t want to do ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,” McCartney said in a different interview. “Maybe he’s fed up with it.” But, he rejoindered, “I would like to hear it… and I paid!”
McCartney’s forthcoming album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, is out this Friday, May 29.
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