8 Paul McCartney Quotes About Bob Dylan

1- “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. 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.” -Paul McCartney

2- “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.” -Paul McCartney

3- “I know 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.” -Paul McCartney

4- “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.” -Paul McCartney

5- “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 inflected. ‘Hide Your Love Away’ is virtually a Dylan Impression.” -Paul McCartney

6- “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 was going ‘I’ve got it!’ and wrote down the key to it all on this piece of paper. I told [Beatles roadie Mal Evans] ‘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…” -Paul McCartney

7- “He was our idol… It was a great honor to meet him. We had a crazy party the night we met.” -Paul McCartney

8- “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.” -Paul McCartney