Elton John, Bob Dylan and a terrible game of charades: “he was so hopeless”
When you read the memoir of an artist like Elton John, you can expect some pretty wild stories. Anyone who knows anything about John knows that the flamboyant rock star has had plenty of highs and lows in his lively life. Some of those stories are funny, and some are terribly sad, but there’s one thing you know for sure: John is going to tell it to you straight.
Take, for instance, John’s multiple run-ins with fellow rock icon Bob Dylan. It’s hard to think of two artists who are more different from each other than John and Dylan: one is an extroverted glam rock legend who inspired the wild opulence of Rocketman, and the other is a famously reserved folk troubadour. It seems almost obvious that the two would have some strange meet-ups, and it’s appropriate that the two crossed paths in the drug-heavy haze of the 1980s.
“Towards the end of the eighties, I held an insane party in LA and invited everyone I knew,” John wrote. “By mid-evening, I was flying, absolutely out of my mind, when a scruffy-looking guy I didn’t recognise wandered into the lit-up garden”. John initially assumed that the dishevelled individual was a worker.
“Who the hell was he? Must be one of the staff, a gardener. I loudly demanded to know what the gardener was doing helping himself to a drink,” John continued. “There was a moment’s shocked silence, broken by my PA saying, ‘Elton, that’s not the gardener. It’s Bob Dylan.'”
“Coked out of my brain and keen to make amends, I rushed over, grabbed him and started steering him towards the house,” John said. “‘Bob! Bob! We can’t have you in those terrible clothes, darling. Come upstairs, and I’ll fit you out with some of mine at once. Come on, dear!'”
Already off on the wrong foot, John could sense that Dylan was “horrified” at the idea of getting a makeover from Elton John. “His expression suggested he was trying hard to think of something he wanted to do less than get dressed up like Elton John and drawing a blank,” John added.
One would think that Dylan would have run to the hills after that experience, but when John extended another party invitation his way, Dylan accepted. “Another time, I invited Dylan to dinner with Simon and Garfunkel, and afterwards, we played charades,” John wrote. This experience went about as well as the first one.
“He couldn’t get the hang of the ‘How many syllables?’ thing at all. He couldn’t do ‘sounds like’ either, come to think of it,” John wrote. “One of the best lyricists in the world, the greatest man of letters in the history of rock music, and he couldn’t seem to tell you whether a word had one syllable or two syllables or what it rhymed with! He was so hopeless, I started throwing oranges at him. Or so I was informed the next morning by a friend.”
While you’re being entertained by the mental image of Elton John pelting Bob Dylan with oranges, here’s John talking to Howard Stern about the night of charades.
