Sir Paul McCartney has said he sometimes wishes he could “be more like Bob Dylan”.
The acclaimed Beatles musician said the American singer-songwriter’s latest album, Rough And Rowdy Ways, is “really good”.
The 78-year-old told Uncut magazine: “I always like what he does. Sometimes I wish I was a bit more like Bob. He’s legendary … and doesn’t give a shit! But I’m not like that.
1976
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Paul McCartney recalls that the first time he tried weed was with Bob Dylan
“I remember it pretty well. We were staying in that hotel, and I think we were on tour. So we were all together in the hotel suite; we were having a drink, and then Bob arrived. We said ‘hi,’ and he vanished into a back room, one of the rooms off the suite. So we just carried on … but Ringo went back to see him.”
Ringo returned a few minutes later, “looking a little bit dazed and confused,” he continued. “We said, ‘What’s up?’ He said, ‘Oh, Bob’s smoking pot back there.’ We’d never had it. So we said, ‘What’s it like?’ Ringo said, ‘Well, the ceiling feels like it’s coming down a bit.’ We go, ‘Whoa!’ And we all just dashed in the back room to partake of the evil substance. That was quite an evening. It was crazy. It was great fun.”
When McCartney was asked the question “Which Dylan track would he cover” this was his answer:
“That’s a very difficult question to answer, as there are so many great songs. ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ comes to mind because it’s something you could cover.” He continued, “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.”
McCartney was inspired by the speed at which Dylan recorded “New Morning” in 1970, which was recorded over a five day period:
“Dylan inspired Wild Life, because we heard he had been in the studio and done an album 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.”
