Paul McCartney says Bob Dylan concerts can be so loose he “couldn’t tell what song he was doing”

Paul McCartney has once again turned Bob Dylan into a useful measure of what a great live show can, and maybe should, get away with. In a new interview on The Rest Is Entertainment, while discussing his solo album The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, McCartney said that even as a committed Dylan fan, he has sat through concerts where he “couldn’t tell what song he was doing.”

The remark lands somewhere between admiration and exasperation, which is usually how McCartney talks about the tensions built into fame. What he seems to respect most about Dylan is the refusal to perform by committee, the sense that the American songwriter answers only to his own instincts. That freedom, though, is not how McCartney imagines his own role onstage. For him, the contract with an audience still has an old-fashioned shape.

“I think we could do songs [most people] don’t know and have a lot of ‘black holes’… But they’ve paid a lot of money,” he said, recalling the kind of shows he used to save up for as a kid. He remembered going to see Bill Haley after months of scrimping, a paper round and all the rest, and said he wanted the hits. “If he got all clever on me, I would be like, ‘oh, OK.’ I’d let him indulge himself.”

That difference is what he pointed to when Dylan came up. McCartney said he has seen “a couple of Bob’s shows,” but admitted bluntly, “honestly, I couldn’t tell what song he was doing. Now, that’s a bit much, because I know his stuff!” He added that he understands if Dylan “doesn’t want to do ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ – maybe he’s fed up with it,” but as a fan, “I would like to hear it. And I paid!”

McCartney also made the case for the greatest hits set as a public service of sorts, especially in a fractured political moment. “Particularly these days – you do something like ‘Hey Jude’ and you see the whole audience singing together,” he said. “In Trump’s America, where Republicans and Democrats are at each other’s throats – when we do that song, they’re not. They’re all loving it.” For him, the point is not nostalgia as business strategy but a rare kind of temporary truce. “Suddenly, this room has forgotten all of that. We’re not going to argue; we’re just going to sing together. Those kinds of things, I think, are valuable.”

The Dylan-McCartney relationship stretches back to the mid 1960s, and the mutual respect has been on record for decades. In 2007, Dylan dismissed any notion of rivalry, praising McCartney and John Lennon in particularly glowing terms: “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,” he said. “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 just so damn effortless.”

McCartney returned the compliment in 2020, telling Sean Ono Lennon on BBC Radio 2 that Dylan’s influence ran deep through The Beatles’ more inward, reflective writing. “We certainly got a lot from Dylan and I know I had one of his first LPs at home before The Beatles,” he said. “I used to play that quite a lot so I was steeped in him and I think your dad was too, but that was just one of the influences.”

Paul McCartney new album cover, ‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’. Credit: Press

That same year, he said he sometimes wished he “could be a bit more like” Dylan, especially in the way he seemed unconcerned with outside opinion. “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,” McCartney said.

He went further in 2021, recalling both the moment The Beatles first got stoned with Dylan in his hotel room in 1964 and an earlier conversation that left him momentarily convinced he had decoded existence itself. “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,” he said, adding that he asked Beatles roadie Mal Evans to find paper so he could write it down. What he wrote, he later discovered, was “There are seven levels.” “Well, there you go, the meaning of life…” he said.

The Boys Of Dungeon Lane is out on May 29, and includes a duet with former Beatles bandmate Ringo Starr on “Home To Us,” a song framed around Liverpool and notable as their first ever vocal collaboration. The album also features Texas’ Sharleen Spiteri and The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde. pre-order here

McCartney has also been looking back at Beatles history in recent interviews. Speaking to NME in 2021, he reflected on the relationship with Lennon that shaped so much of the group’s mythology, stressing that the sharp edges of that partnership have often overshadowed the rest of it. “Working with John was great. Those are the kinds of things you remember,” he said. “In a film, you remember that bit where the guy says ‘Hasta la vista, baby’ or whatever, and John definitely did have those withering putdowns, you know, but it was two per cent of who he was and it’s the two per cent people remember. Most of the time he was very generous, very loving, very easy to work with.”

He also spoke about going back to Liverpool after global fame had already recast him as a public figure, saying the city makes “all these things come flooding back,” especially when he sees the Cavern. “It makes you play better, I think, being back in a little club like that, inches from your audience,” he said. “It reminds you of how it was.”