When Bob Dylan went unnoticed on a regular John Lennon sightseeing tour in Liverpool

Imagine being in Liverpool, the hometown of The Beatles and going on a regular sightseeing tour that includes a visit to the house where John Lennon grew up. Who could imagine that a legendary musician like Bob Dylan, who had the chance to meet Lennon for the first time back in the ’60s, would be among the tourists and nobody would notice him? Well, that really happened.

When Bob Dylan went unnoticed on a regular John Lennon sightseeing tour in Liverpool

When touring the United Kingdom in 2009, Bob Dylan decided one day to get on a minibus packed with regular tourists and visit John Lennon’s childhood home. As the BBC reported at the time, he paid £16 like everyone else for the public tour of the 1940s house in Woolton, Liverpool. A National Trust spokeswoman talked about Dylan’s presence on the tour at the time, saying he: “appeared to enjoy himself (during the visit). He took one of our general minibus tours. People on the minibus did not recognize him apparently. He could have booked a private tour but he was happy to go on the bus with everyone else,” she said.

During the sightseeing tour, he was among 14 other tourists and had the chance to see photos and documents inside the house where he grew up with his aunt Mimi and uncle George. That visit might have inspired a song the American songwriter released three years later. “Roll on John”, which was part of his 2012 album “Tempest”. During a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, he revealed that it was during the sightseeing tour that he learned Strawberry Fields was just behind Lennon’s house.

He said:

“Strawberry Field is right in back of his house. Didn’t know that. Evidently, he grew up with his aunt. He’d be out there in the Strawberry Field, a park behind his house that was fenced off. Being in Britain, there’s all this hanging history, chopping off heads. I mean, you grow up with that, if you’re a Brit. I didn’t quite understand the line about getting hung – ‘Nothing to get hung about’ – well, time had moved on, it was like ‘hung up,’ nothing to be hung up about. But he was speaking literally: ‘What are you doing out there, John?’ ‘Don’t worry, Mum, nothing they’re going to hang me about, nothing to get hung about.’ I found that kind of interesting,” he said

Bob Dylan was a big fan of John Lennon also as a singer

Although George Harrison was the Beatle Dylan was closest to, with whom he collaborated many times and was also a bandmate in the Traveling Wilburys, Dylan has also praised Lennon and McCartney a lot. Besides admiring them as songwriters, he also loved their voices and the way they sang.

“Yeah (there was a competition between us). Only to a certain extent, but not really. Him and McCartney both, really, they were fantastic singers. Lennon, to this day, it’s hard to find a better singer than Lennon was, or than McCartney was and still is. I’m in awe of McCartney. He’s about the only one that I am in awe of. He can do it all. And he’s never let up. He’s got the gift for melody, he’s got the rhythm, he can play any instrument.”

“He can scream and shout as good as anybody, and he can sing a ballad as good as anybody. Also his melodies are effortless, that’s what you have to be in awe of. He’s just so damn effortless. I just wish he’d quit (laughs). Everything that comes out of his mouth is just framed in melody,” Dylan said about Lennon and McCartney. When the Beatle was still alive, in 1978, Bob praised him, saying he believed he was overlooked.

He said:

“I’ve always lived the way George Harrison plays guitar—restrained and good. As for Lennon, well, I was encouraged by his book (In His Own Write). Or the publishers were encouraged, because they asked me to write a book and that’s how Tarantula came about. John has taken poetics pretty far in popular music.”

“So a lot of his work is overlooked. But if you examine it, you’ll find key expressions that have never been said before to push across his point of view. So things that are symbolic of some inner reality and probably will never be said again,” he said in an interview with Playboy magazine back in 1978.

Dylan felt that he and Lennon grew up in similar places

During the same conversation with Rolling Stone, Dylan said that one thing he felt he and Lennon had in common was the places where they were born and grew up. Although they were separated by the Atlantic Ocean, he felt that their hometowns were somewhat similar. “I think we covered peers a while back, did we not? John came from the northern regions of Britain. The hinterlands. Just like I did in America, so we had some kind of environmental things in common.”

“Both places were pretty isolated. Though mine was more landlocked than his. But everything is stacked against you when you come from that. You have to have the talent to overcome everything. That was something I had in common with him. We were all about the same age and heard the same exact things growing up. Our paths crossed at a certain time, and we both had faced a lot of adversity. We even had that in common. I wish that he was still here because we could talk about a lot of things now,” Bob Dylan said.