Bob Dylan’s opinion on Elton John

As the years passed, Bob Dylan gradually stopped giving many interviews and became a more reclusive artist, what gave people the notion he was more focused on his career and the music that influenced him in the past. However, to this day, the legendary songwriter still pays a lot of attention to the music scene and was quite aware of the incredible artists who appeared during the past decades.

He had the chance to meet and see many of those musicians playing and tell them what was his opinion on their music. One of them was the British singer and pianist Elton John, who wrote some of the most famous songs of all time with the lyricist Bernie Taupin.

What is Bob Dylan’s opinion on Elton John

Bob Dylan is a fan of Elton John and knows his discography quite well, having praised some of his lesser known songs and asked interesting questions about his songwriting. Asked by Rolling Stone in 2011 which some unforgettable moments of his life, Elton recalled when Bob Dylan approached him and lyricist Bernie Taupin at the Fillmore East to say he liked the song “Ballad of a Well Known Gun. “When I met Bob Dylan at the Fillmore East. He was standing on the staircase and he tells Bernie, ‘Oh, I really like the lyrics to ‘Ballad of a Well-Known Gun,’ and Bernie goes (fakes heart attack). There’s nothing like when your heroes rubber-stamp what you’re doing,” he said. In his autobiography “Me”, Elton tells the same story but says the track praised by Dylan was “My Father’s Gun”. Both songs are from his 1970 album “Tumbleweed Connection”.

Another Elton song that Dylan likes is “Candle In the Wind”. He mentioned the track in his book “Chronicles Vol.1” to explain his admiration for Judy Garland, famous actress and singer. “Judy Garland was from Grand Rapids, Minnesota, a town about twenty miles away from where I came from. Listening to Judy was like listening to the girl next door. She was way before my time, and like the Elton John song says, ‘I would have liked to have known you, but I was just a kid,'” he said.

Elton and Bob had the chance to record together in 1990, when the American musician invited him to be part of the album “Under the Red Sky”. He played the piano in the track “2 × 2”, which also featured David Crosby on backing vocals.

When Elton mistook Bob Dylan for the gardener and threw oranges at him during a charades game

They became good friends over the years and Bob went to see Elton playing a couple of times. “I went to an Elton John show; there must have been at least three generations of people there. But they were all the same. Even the little kids. They looked just like their grandparents. It was strange. People make a fuss about how many generations follow a certain type of performer. But what does it matter if all the generations are the same?” he told AARP in 2015.

After you become good friends with someone, you might sometimes cross the line without noticing and that happened to Elton John. As he recalled in his autobiography Me (2019), he once threw oranges at Bob Dylan. That happened when the songwriter was not very good at the charades game they were playing together against Paul Simon. “Simon and Garfunkel had dinner one night, then played charades. At least, they tried to play charades. They were terrible at it. The best thing I can say about them is that they were better than Bob Dylan. 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.”

Elton John continued:

“One of the best lyricists in the world, the greatest man of letters in the history of rock music, and he can’t seem to tell you whether a word’s got one syllable or two syllables or what it rhymes with! He was so hopeless, I started throwing oranges at him. Or so I was informed the next morning, by a cackling Tony King. 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,” Elton John said.

The musician also recalled another moment with Bob Dylan that was funny but also a little sad. Back in the 80s, when Elton was still struggling with addiction, there was a party at his house where he was intoxicated and he mistook Bob for the gardener. After realizing it was actually Dylan, he even tried to give him some clothes to change into.

He said:

“(It was) an insane party I’d held at a house I was renting in LA. I’d had the garden strung with lights, got Bob Halley to fire up the barbecue. (I) invited everyone I knew that was in town. By the middle of the evening, I was flying, absolutely out of my mind, when a scruffy-looking guy I didn’t recognize wandered into the party. Who the hell was he? It must be one of the staff, a gardener. I loudly demanded to know what the gardener was doing helping himself to a drink. There was a moment’s shocked silence, broken by the sound of Bob Halley’s voice: ‘Elton, that’s not the fucking gardener. It’s Bob Dylan.’”

“Coked out of my brain and keen to make amends, I rushed over and grabbed him. (Then) 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!’ Bob stared at me, horrified. 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.”

Elton John continued:

“This was the late eighties, and one of my recent looks had involved teaming a pink suit and a straw boater with a scale model of the Eiffel Tower on top of it. So you couldn’t really blame him. But full of cokey confidence, I wasn’t deterred. As I continued propelling him out of the garden, I heard the unmistakable sound of George’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.’ Bob somehow managed to talk his way out of being dressed in my clothes. But it didn’t change the fact that one of The Beatles was publicly telling me to do something about my cocaine habit. I just laughed it off,” Elton John said in his autobiography.

Back in 2019, The Guardian requested Bob Dylan to ask a question to Elton John for a special article. His choice was: “In the song Tiny Dancer, did you work your way up to the cathartic chorus gradually, spontaneously? Or did you have it thought out from the start?” The British musician answered saying it was a really good question. Then explained that: “Tiny Dancer has a really long lyric, a very cinematic, California-in-the-early-70s lyric. So it had two verses and a middle eight before it even gets to the chorus. It lent itself to a long buildup.”

When Dylan played at his home an unreleased record to Elton

Although Elton is not a lyricist like Dylan, he is the one who brings Bernie Taupin’s ideas to life by adding the right kind of music to them. Dylan has a great deal of respect for Elton’s compositions and likes to show him the music he is working on. As Elton told The Telegraph in 2021, when Bob was preparing to release his album “Fallen Angels”, he played a test-pressing version for him.

They were at Bob’s house in Malibu, where “he was there in his tracksuit and hoodie and roll up cigarettes, with his beautiful wife who was done up in a beautiful outfit, nails and jewellery and Louis Vuitton.” Elton didn’t reveal who the mysterious Dylan wife was but said she took his husband David Furnish for a walk to see all the “art and the paintings” Bob owns. Meanwhile, the American musician played to Elton a test pressing of his new album. He’s always been very sweet to me. He just has an ability to do what he wants, to write what he wants. Not to worry about what anyone else thinks. He’s been a template for me. I think he’s a template for most artists,” Elton said.

Curiously there is an unreleased Elton John song about Dylan. Decades ago Bernie Taupin wrote a song called “The Day Bobby Went Electric”. It was inspired by when Dylan decided to adopt the electric guitar in his compositions. The singer and pianist usually don’t get writers block but he was with the lyrics for 20 years and couldn’t finish the song. However, there is an available demo on Youtube which was not officially released.