What Paul McCartney really thinks about Bob Dylan

I could feel myself climbing a spiral walkway as I was talking to Dylan. I felt like I was figuring it all out, the meaning of life.

May 27, 2026

Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney aboard the Queen Mary. Venus and Mars release party, 1975.

We were great admirers of Dylan. We loved him and had done since his first album which I’d had in Liverpool. John had listened to his stuff and been very influenced. ‘Hide Your Love Away’ is virtually a Dylan Impression. He was our idol… It was a great honor to meet him.

We had a crazy party the night we met. It developed into a bit of a party. We all went back out into the lounge and drank and whatever but I don’t think anyone needed much more pot after that. That was it! We were sitting there with our Scotch and cokes, and Dylan had just given Ringo a puff of pot. Ringo came back in and we said, ‘How is it?’ He said, “The ceiling’s coming down on me.’ And we went, Wow! Leaped up, ‘God! Got to do this! So we ran into the back room - first John, then me and George, then Brian. We all had a puff and for about five minutes we went, “This isn’t doing anything,’ so we kept having more. “Sssshhhh! This isn’t doing anything. Are you feeling ... ggggzzzzz!” and we started giggling uncontrollably. And it was very very funny. The Beatles were about humour, we had a great humour between us. There was an ‘in’ side to the track of humour that we would use as a protective thing, so with this on top of it, things were really hilarious.

I remember walking round the suite, trying to get away from it all, closing the door behind me without realising George Harrison had walked step by step with me, so I thought I’d lost him, turned around, and he’s in the room with me. ‘Ohhh! This is hilarious. I can’t handle it!’ It was like the funniest bloody dream going. That first time I took it I got very high indeed. It was quite a breakthrough, it was something different.

George Harrison, John and I were sitting in the main room of the suite, the lounge, drinking, and Brian, this little group. Everyone would go in in twos. We were looking at Brian Epstein, who had a little butt, the tiniest little butt, so he looked like a tramp smoking a dog-end,’ which we had only ever done when we were poor before ….. And this, compared to Brian’s image ... and we were going, ‘Awwwww!’ Fucking screaming laughing at him.

I remember Brian looking at himself in the mirror and getting the whole joke of all this. We were all in hysterics. Brian was pointing at himself and going, Jew!’ And it was hilarious! We couldn’t believe this was so funny. I mean, that would be the first time Brian would point at himself and say Jew’. It may not seem the least bit significant to anyone else, but in our circle, it was very liberating.

I could feel myself climbing a spiral walkway as I was talking to Dylan. I felt like I was figuring it all out, the meaning of life…I spent the whole evening running around trying to find a pencil and paper because when I went back in the bedroom later, I discovered the Meaning of Life. And I suddenly felt like a reporter, on behalf of my local newspaper in Liverpool. I wanted to tell my people what it was. I was the great discoverer, on this sea of pot, in New York. I was sailing this sea and I had discovered it.

I remember asking Mal Evans, our road manager, for what seemed like years and years, ‘Have you got a pencil?’ But of course everyone was so stoned they couldn’t produce a pencil, let alone a combination of a paper and pencil, so it was I either had the pencil but I didn’t have the paper….I was going ‘I’ve got it!’ and eventually I found it and I wrote it down, the key to it all on this piece of paper and gave it to Mal for safekeeping. I told Mal ‘You keep this piece of paper, make sure you don’t lose it because the meaning of life is on there. Mal gave me the piece of paper the next day, and on it was written ‘There are seven levels.’ Well, there you go, the meaning of life… I’d been going through this thing of levels, during the evening. And at each level I’d meet all these people again. ‘Hahaha! It’s you!’ And then I’d metamorphose on to another level. Anyway, Mal gave me this little slip of paper in the morning, and written on it was, “There are seven levels!’ Actually it wasn’t bad. Not bad for an amateur. And we pissed ourselves laughing, I mean, what the fuck’s that? What the fuck are the seven levels? But looking back, it’s actually a pretty succinct comment; it ties in with a lot of major religions but I didn’t know that then. We know that now because we’ve looked into a lot of that since, but that was the first thing.

We were kind of proud to have been introduced to pot by Dylan, that was rather a coup. It was like being introduced to meditation and given your mantra by Maharishi. There was a certain status to it. It opened a different kind of sensibility really; more like jazz musicians. The nearest we’d ever heard of this was like the old joke about the cleaner in the Hammersmith Odeon saying, “That Ray Charles, he’s a tight bastard. You know, he must pay his musicians nothing. There were two of them sharing a cigarette in the toilet last night” it was somehow plugging into that sensibility. There was a sort of naughtiness about it and yet I knew I’d have to keep my shit very well together because I knew there was a very naughty end to it. Devastation and heroin and the real serious stuff was around the corner. But this was the mild end of it and for quite a number of years there, everyone was at the mild end of it. Instead of Scotch and Coke and ciggies it became pot and wine.

Pot had a tremendous influence on the music of the Beatles, people were getting high. It was the shift from drink to pot. It wasn’t much more serious than that. There’d always been pills on the fringe of it all. So it became more of a beatnik scene, like jazz. But Dylan really was the big influence on that. He was coming out of New York poetry, and we were crossing over into each other.

I remember going to see Dylan when he was at the Mayfair Hotel. He’d be in the back room, there’d be me, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, a couple of guys in the next room. I remember going in, after about an hour or so. It would be your turn to see him, like a homage visit. But Dylan, when I got in, I played him a bit of the Sgt. Peppers album. He said, ‘Oh I get it, you don’t want to be cute any more. And that kind of summed it up. The cute period had ended. We’d been artists with a cute edge, because that was what was required. We’d really preferred to not do the cute thing. But it was a radical departure to say to Top of the Pops, ‘No, we’re gonna wear something really tough. We’re gonna shake your house down! We didn’t want to do that just yet. It started to be art, that was what happened. Dylan brought poetry into the lyrics, so you found John doing “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”. We were highly influenced by him and he was quite influenced by us. He’d heard “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” because it was number one in the States. After the middle eight it said, ‘I can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide’ and he thought it was, ‘I get high, I get high, I get high. He said, ‘I love that one, man? He was well into that. I had to say, ‘No, actually, it’s I can’t hide. We were cross-pollinating each other. He’d bring out a long record, so we knew it’d be OK to do ‘Hey Jude’ long. What d’you mean, man? “Like a Rolling Stone” is six minutes thirty, why can’t we have one seven minutes? You started breaking boundaries, questioning previous values.

So it went across the board, the “We go to the pub and have a Scotch” became, you didn’t go to the pub, you stayed in and maybe had dinner with people, and wine. A more gentle, civilised scene. It changed from showbiz to art and became very exciting with the cross-fertilisation. You’d get in with gallery owners. It was a great, exciting period for me.

We’d met people like Dylan and we got into pot, like a lot of people from our generation. And I suppose in our way we thought this was a little more grown-up. What makes people smoke cigarettes when they’re fourteen? It’s peer pressure. It makes them feel older, it makes them feel a bit groovier and that’s quite valuable, at that age, to feel a bit groovier. And I suppose it was the same kind of thing in our case. So once pot was established as part of the curriculum you started to get a bit more surreal material coming from us, a bit more abstract stuff.

It was just the first time I’d been exposed to all these new influences and had the time and inclination to bother with them all. I always have to give marijuana credit for that.

Dylan had a big influence on John… I’m not sure if he was a great influence on me but I loved him a lot. I respected him and still do. Certainly, he gave us the freedom to start writing stuff that was a bit more ambitious.

There are so many great songs. ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ comes to mind because it’s something you could cover. Singing Dylan songs can be difficult because something like ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, it’s so Dylan that it would be hard to get the spirit that he puts on it. ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ is another good one, you know. I’d put that on a list as well.

Dylan is a fantastic composer. At first, I didn’t understand. I used to lose his songs in the middle but then I realized it didn’t matter. You can get hung up on just two words of a Dylan lyric. ‘Jealous monk‘ or ‘magic swirling ship‘ are examples of the fantastic word combinations he uses. I could never write like that and I envy him. He is a poet.

I’m interested [in reinventing the old songs] I’m ambivalent about whether the audience wants me to do it. Dylan reinvents them every night, and it probably keeps him interested. I tend to do them like the record. The Beatles always tried to do them like the record, assuming that people would say, “I love that one, but they did it funny’ I try to please the average punter. But I’ve got a fancy for ‘Hello, Goodbye’, it’s got a modern beat. “Coming Up’ could be updated.

I don’t have to do the same numbers every night. But I do get set in a pattern because I look to see what goes down well. I’m the opposite of Dylan. I heard that one night Dylan was told by some guy, ‘Oh, “Mr Tambourine Man” went down great tonight And Dylan said, Right, we’ll cut it tomorrow night. I love the courage of that, but it’s not me. I tend to go, “Right, keep it in.”

Dylan’s Woody Guthrie period was very nice and I liked him then, but then he had a second wave of popularity when he became more psychedelic and more associated with drugs and at that time John particularly became very enamoured of him because of his poetry. All those songs were great lyrically. Masses of cluttered lyrics like John had written in his books. So Dylan’s gobbledegook and his cluttered poetry was very appealing, it hit a chord in John, it was as if John felt, “that should have been me.” And to that end, John on this one track did a Dylan impression. I think it was 100 per cent John’s song. I might have helped him on it, I have a vague recollection of helping to fill out some verses for him.

I was always very keen not to repeat other people’s tunes, because it’s very easy to do when you write. Ringo’s got a funny story of the most brilliant song he ever wrote. He spent three hours writing a very famous Bob Dylan song. We all fell about and laughed. That can happen. You say, “This is so great,’ and someone says, ‘Yeah, it’s number one at the moment.’ ‘Ah. That’s where I’ve heard it.’

In songwriting I’ve got similar tricks. In the earliest days we were pre-tending to be Buddy Holly. Then we were writing like Motown. Then we were writing like Bob Dylan. A lot of songwriters draw merely on their day-to-day autobiographical thoughts, but I like to take flights of fancy. That’s one of the great things about being an artist of any kind. Like songs and poetry that take off in unexpected ways. It’s probably one of the reasons I admire Bob Dylan so much. You never know what he’s going to do next.

When you’re sitting around with an acoustic guitar, often the natural thing to do is to get a bit folky. I was doing a bit of a spoof on records I’d heard, kind of talking blues songs. Bob Dylan was doing that kind of thing, so I just started imagining the Black Hills in South Dakota. I knew of an old song, ‘The Black Hills of Dakota’, which begins, “Take me back to the black hilis / The black hills of Dakota. That was Doris Day in Calamity Jane. So, we were doing this rap, and I just dreamt up a character called Rocky Rac-coon, because of Davy Crockett and his raccoon cap. I’d watched Davy Crockett on telly, starring Fess Parker, when I was a kid. I saw the TV show, but my main thing was the song: “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier’.

Paul McCartney during the sessions for RAM: During a session on October 27, 1970, Bob Dylan dropped by the studio to see Paul.

Linda and I met Dylan once when we came to New York and we were together awhile. Linda took photos of him and Sara and Jesse. He came to one of my sessions when I was doing Ram in New York.

Dylan inspired Wild Life because we heard he had been in the studio and done [New Morning] in just a week. So we thought of doing it like that, putting down the spontaneous stuff and not being too careful. So it came out a bit like that. We wrote the tracks in the summer, Linda and I, we wrote them in Scotland in the summer while the lambs were gambolling. We spent two weeks on the Wild Life album all together.

At that time, it was just when I had rung Denny Laine up a few days before and he came up to where we were to rehearse for one or two days. I must say you have to like me to like the record. I mean, if it’s just taken cold...it wasn’t that brilliant as a recording. We did it in about two weeks, the whole thing. And it had been done on that kind of a buzz. We’d been hearing about how Dylan had come in and done everything in one take. I think in fact that we never gave the engineer a chance to even set up the balance.

There’s one or two people who I would be quite nervous about. Bob Dylan would make me go, ‘Oh my God, what am I gonna say?’ I did see him, we did Coachella… I got to talk to Bob there and he was really nice.

Bob Dylan with Stella McCartney, backstage at Coachella/Desert Strip Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, October 2016

I don’t know why I would’ve been nervous, but you get that with some people. It is a funny thing actually when you think about it — ‘what do you have to do to get secure in yourself.’ I would have thought that I would have done enough now to just go, ‘I’m cool, I don’t need to be nervous about anyone.’ It’s a human condition, I think.

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