Why Elton John called Bob Dylan “scruffy”
Elton John has lived a truly glamorous life, considering he is one of the most commercially successful musicians of all time. John used to host numerous wild parties at his house in Los Angeles, opening up his doors for the great and good of the entertainment industry. However, when writing in his memoir, the musician revealed a time when he was explicitly rude to legendary Bob Dylan during one of his high-profile shindigs.
John wrote: “Towards the end of the Eighties, I held an insane party in LA and invited everyone I knew. 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.”
“Who the hell was he? Must be one of the staff, a gardener,” John continued. “I loudly demanded to know what the gardener was doing helping himself to a drink. There was a moment’s shocked silence, broken by my PA saying, ‘Elton, that’s not the gardener. It’s Bob Dylan.'” How embarrassing for John. Yet he was keen to correct his rudeness to Dylan.
John went on: “Coked out of my brain and keen to make amends, I rushed over, grabbed him and started steering him towards the house. ‘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!’ His expression suggested he was trying hard to think of something he wanted to do less than get dressed up like Elton John and draw a blank.”
These comments are evidently rude, with John calling Dylan’s clothes “terrible”. By the 1980s, Dylan had done more than enough to earn the respect of his contemporaries, so his reaction to John’s wanting to doll him up a la Elton is more than understandable. John also detailed a separate occasion on which Dylan seemed either unhappy with or unable to join in a game of charades.
“Another time, I invited Dylan to dinner with Simon and Garfunkel, and afterwards, we played charades,” John wrote. “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. 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.”
It’s hard to believe that a man of Dylan’s literary talents was unable to tell how many syllables a word had or whether or not something rhymed. What’s more likely is that Dylan felt out of place at John’s glamour-ridden party, had wanted to keep something of a low profile, and simply did not have time for John’s silly games.
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