When Elton John mistook Bob Dylan for a gardener during a drug-fuelled party
After his kerosine launch to superstardom, Rocketman Elton John moved to the States to join the rock star elite of the 1970s. When he wasn’t cutting shapes at Studio 54 on the East Coast, you could find John raising the roof at his swanky pad in Los Angeles.
As is now heavily documented, thanks to the 2019 biopic Rocketman, John sadly endured a few decades of death-defying drug and alcohol addiction. What started as a path of least resistance, allowing him to banish anxiety, relax and enjoy himself at social events, ended up a true living nightmare.
By the 1980s, Elton’s substance abuse had taken over, and the life of the party had become increasingly withdrawn. “This is how bleak it was: I’d stay up, I’d smoke joints, I’d drink a bottle of Johnnie Walker, and then I’d stay up for three days and then I’d go to sleep for a day and half, get up, and because I was so hungry because I hadn’t eaten anything, I’d binge and have like three bacon sandwiches, a pot of ice cream and then I’d throw it up, because I became bulimic and then go and do the whole thing all over again,” John said in a 2010 TV interview with Piers Morgan.
Adding: “And I’m not being flippant when I say that, when I look back, I shudder at the behaviour and what I was doing to myself.”
When asked how close a shave he had with death, John replied: “Very close. I mean, I would have an epileptic seizure and turn blue, and people would find me on the floor and put me to bed, and then 40 minutes later, I’d be snorting another line.”
Thankfully, John sought help after a wake-up call in the late 1980s and has been sober since 1990. “I still dream, twice a week at least, that I’ve taken cocaine, and I have it up my nose,” the performer told NPR in 2012. “And it’s very vivid, and it’s very upsetting, but at least it’s a wake-up call.”
While the party lifestyle was the ultimate cause of John’s embarrassment, distress and drastic action, he naturally has a series of hilarious anecdotes up his sleeve to show for it. One of John’s most hilarious and embarrassing moments while rubbing shoulders with fellow A-listers came in the 1980s, not long before he opted for sobriety.
“Towards the end of the Eighties, I held an insane party in LA, and invited everyone I knew,” John wrote in his memoir Me. “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. 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.’”
He continued: “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!’”
Understandably, Dylan was a little bewildered to have been mistaken for a gardener, had his clothes insulted and then presented with the prospect of being dressed up by 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.
“As I continued propelling him out of the garden, I heard the unmistakable sound of George [Harrison]’s mordant, Scouse-accented voice calling out to me. ‘Elton,’ he said. ‘I really think you need to go steady on the old marching powder’.”
Somehow, after the gardener incident and subsequent make-over, Dylan and John maintained their friendship. Elsewhere in the memoir, John recalled an evening he invited Dylan, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel over. During the soirée, Dylan surprisingly turned out to be less than competent in a game of charades.
“Another time, I invited Dylan to dinner with Simon and Garfunkel, and afterwards we played charades. At least, they tried to play charades. They were terrible at it. The best thing I can say about Simon and Garfunkel is that they were better than Dylan,” he explained. “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!”
Adding: “He was so hopeless, I started throwing oranges at him. Or so I was informed the next morning by a friend. That’s not really a phone call you want to receive when you’re struggling with a hangover. ‘Morning, darling — do you remember throwing oranges at Bob Dylan last night?’ Oh God.”
It’s hard to imagine the pair of musicians finding a close bond given their disparate styles both musically and other, but for Dylan to stick around after being pelted with oranges, mistaken for a grubby gardener and attacked with flamboyant clothing, John must’ve been highly entertaining company.
Watch footage of Elton John partying hard at Studio 54 in New York with Grace Jones, Olivia Newton-John, and Frankie Valli at the Grease opening party in 1978 below.
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