Paul McCartney would like to work with Bob Dylan but accepts it’s unlikely to happen, he said a wide-ranging conversation on Good Hang with Amy Poehler. The Beatles and Dylan famously met in New York in 1964, when the American introduced the English quartet to marijuana and influenced their musical direction – but there was never an actual collaboration.
Asked by Poehler if there was anyone he’d like to write with but hadn’t, McCartney said: “I get asked this question and I always think ‘Bob Dylan.’ But I’m too nervous to ring him up.” He mimicked the idea of how the conversation might go: “‘Bob? It’s Paul. Em…’” He went on to agree with Poehler that Dylan probably didn’t use phones, and was likely holed up “somewhere in a bush, in a sleeping bag,” finding inspiration of his own.
Turning to another celebrity interaction, McCartney said he’d always enjoyed meeting the late Queen Elizabeth II. “And that’s an autograph you’re not going to get!” he joked. “She was great. She was crowned when I was 11 – and she was a babe! She was like 23 or something. We all used to think, ‘Wow!’ We kinda liked her in ways we shouldn’t have liked her…”
He continued: “So meeting her was special. My wife said, ‘She fancied you!’ Now, there’s no knowing if there’s any truth to that [but] I like to think it’s true.”
Thinking back to the Beatles’ early days, McCartney reflected on how they made decisions based on their teenage experiences. “When we couldn’t figure out the answer we’d say, ‘What would we have thought when we were 17? What would that guy have said?’’” he explained. “‘We’re not doing it because that guy would’t have let us do it.’
“And as we grow up we kinda go, ‘Oh, okay, we’ll do it.’ But it was better to listen to the 17-year-old – he was more sensible and less jaded by the world.”
One example of being less jaded was when he made the decision to leave his factory job as a coil-winder and pursue success with the Beatles. “The idea was they were going to take me through all the [factory] things and I was going to be manager,” he said. “One day John and George showed up and they said, ‘We’ve got a gig – we’ve got a gig at the Cavern.’ I said, ‘I don’t know; let me think about it.’
“I looked at the coils, I looked at the pay packet – seven pounds 15 a week [£7.75 or about £18] – gosh! I can’t believe I actually questioned it, but I did! I [told them], ‘I’ll get back to you!’ And I did. I gave up a career in coil-winding management.”
In addition he admitted to feeling an amount of embarrassment over recent documentary movie Man on the Run, exploring the years following the Beatles’ split. “I didn’t realise the farm we lived on was so run-down,” he said. “It was a tip! We were in love and we had a new baby; it was all great and I was like, ‘I can fix it up! I’ll make a table!’
“But when you see it in the film it’s like, ‘You lived there?’ And you had some money? You chose to live in that?’ So that was a little bit embarrassing.”
